Mark Crispin Miller Connects the Dots on Election Problems

Part 2

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

That refusal to confront the evidence, and to concede that Bush & Co. were not elected, is certainly not based on reason. It’s based, rather, on deep denial and fearful ideology. It’s based on the absurd conviction that it can’t happen here. But ... our whole system of government is based on the assumption that it can happen anywhere, at any time—that it can happen here, and surely will unless we keep this system going with all its checks and balances. The Framers studied history, and saw “it” happening repeatedly, wherever power was concentrated in one person or one body or one mob. That’s why they designed the system as they did.

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Mark Crispin Miller, professor of culture and communication at New York University, is an expert in propaganda and mass persuasion. Having scrutinized the election of 2004, he concludes that team Bush wants to permanently disenfranchise the majority. In his "J'accuse" book on the 2004 election, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Miller documents how the Republicans likely stole a second presidential election, just in a more complicated way than they did in 2000.

To those who dismiss such claims as "over the top," BuzzFlash responds, if the Republicans stole the presidency in 2000 by hot-wiring the Supreme Court of the United States, why wouldn't they do it again? They would -- and they probably did. If we could transplant Mark Crispin Miller's passion and stamina into the backbones of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, we wouldn't have a silent coup taking place now in the United States. In this, Part 2 of a two-part interview, Miller looks at the voting machines, and at our collective refusal to see and acknowledge what has happened to our democracy. (Part 1 is here.)

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BuzzFlash: Let’s talk about a major problem that the press refuses to discuss: the privatization of the voting process. That’s really what the spread of computerized voting machines is all about. Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia—the three largest manufacturers of such machines—are private vendors. They keep their programming codes secret as “proprietary information,” and, worse, all three are extremely close to the Republican Party. There is no way to determine whether these machines are accurate. Using them is tantamount to having secret vote counts.

Diebold in particular has been in the news. Some months before Election Day, 2004, Wally O’Dell, Diebold’s CEO, sent a Bush/Cheney fundraising letter out to other rich Ohio Republicans, promising to do everything he could to “deliver Ohio’s electoral vote to the President.” In December, he suddenly resigned. What’s going on?

Mark Crispin Miller: O’Dell quit in the face of a class-action suit, brought by Diebold shareholders, over securities fraud and other crimes. Diebold is in big trouble, both legally and financially—just at the moment that they’re pushing hard to get their DRE [direct recording electronic] machines into virgin territory. Diebold is not the only company that’s doing this. All three of the top private vendors—Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia—have been in collusion with corrupt state officials nationwide to get the DRE machines set up in states that haven’t used them, or more extensively established in those states that have been using them. This drive has been ongoing for the last few months, because of the Help America Vote Act [HAVA] deadline of Jan. 1, 2006 for all states to commit themselves to a particular voting system.

It’s been a major struggle nationwide, with lots of grass-roots resistance to the spread or imposition of the DRE machines. In some states, the movements have successfully challenged the deadline, arguing correctly that the voting process is far too important for the people to be hustled into making any binding choices by some arbitrary date. In Connecticut, the secretary of state recently put off the purchase of any new machines for a whole year, and there’s a fierce campaign to do the same in Pennsylvania. Bush’s “Justice Department” now intends to sue New York for noncompliance with HAVA, because New Yorkers won’t be hurried into the machines. The Busheviks have always rushed the process, so as to buffalo us all into submission. That’s not only how they forced the passage of the Patriot Act and dragged us into war. It’s also how they got themselves “elected.” Remember how they kept on bellowing for an immediate surrender by Al Gore throughout the post-election stand-off in 2000?

By insisting on the HAVA deadline as if it were God’s law, they’re doing the same thing.
It’s a giant hustle. BushCo has to push us into using these machines, as no well-informed believer in democracy would ever do voluntarily. According to a recent Zogby poll commissioned by Op-Ed News, over 80% of the American people want to return to paper ballots.

Where election officials have done their civic duty, subjecting the machines to careful scrutiny, the defects in those corporate wares have been made clear to all. There was an explosive case not long ago in Leon County, Florida, when the insecurity of Diebold’s systems was demonstrated publicly by an efficient hacker. [The demonstration had been organized by Earl Katz and Sarah Teale for "Votergate," their upcoming documentary on election fraud.] The demonstration was so powerful that Ion Sancho, supervisor of the Leon County Board of Elections, declared a ban on Diebold’s goods in future races. Volusia County then did likewise. The blow was so dramatic that Jeb Bush himself came out deploring Diebold’s shoddy merchandise. This was not exactly staggering, since Florida deploys ES&S machines instead of Diebold’s, but it was still significant.

As there is no good reason to use DRE machines, and as a huge American majority does not support our using them, the Bush Republicans have had to bend or break the law to get them forced down our collective throats. In North Carolina, for example, Diebold filed suit to be absolved from the requirement that all vendors seeking to do business in the state put their programming codes in escrow. A judge refused. Diebold announced that they were going pull out of North Carolina. And then, almost at once, the Board of Elections approved Diebold’s doing business there despite the judge’s ruling.

To say the fix was in would be a whopping understatement. To oversee the machine selection process, the board had hired Keith Long, who had helped Diebold get 22,000 DRE machines into Georgia in 2002. (The whole sordid history is available online at ncvoter.net.) North Carolina, let me add, is basically a Democratic state—John Edwards’ state. I’ve sent him a copy of Fooled Again, and also have been forwarding his office all the news I get about the situation in his state. Since he wants to run for president, I’m hoping that he’ll seize the issue.

These battles are raging nationwide, and everything’s at stake, and yet the press won’t deal with it. It’s unbelievable.

BuzzFlash: These private vendors essentially count our votes in secret. They withhold their programming codes; they refuse to provide a paper trail; and they’re in tight with the Republican Party. How can the world’s greatest democracy allow it?

Mark Crispin Miller: It’s staggering. If you tell a Canadian about this, you’ll see a jaw drop nearly to the floor. It tells us quite a lot about the civic atmosphere today in the United States. We are long since estranged from our own revolutionary heritage, and all those principles on which this republic was first founded. If democracy had any meaning for us—if it weren’t just a catchword flung about by quasi-fascist propagandists—we’d know that mere elections in themselves aren’t necessarily democratic. Even Saddam Hussein held elections. What makes elections democratic is their absolute transparency and popular control. Where the people have to fight pitched battles nationwide to get the sort of voting system they prefer, there cannot be what anybody rational would call “democracy.”

BuzzFlash: Let’s talk about Fooled Again. There have been some negative reviews, and what’s surprising is that they appeared in progressive outlets. In both Salon and Mother Jones, the criticisms turned on fairly trivial matters, and you answered those attacks. But something perplexes me about the general refusal of the media to talk about your book. The book’s called Fooled AGAIN. It raises the essential issue, which seems to me to be a hard one to deny: that the 2000 election was stolen, and that the Bush regime was illegitimate to start with.

That first theft was ignored completely by the media. After 9/11, a consortium of major news outlets released their long-awaited study of the vote in Florida, downplaying the inconvenient fact that Gore would have won Florida if all the votes were counted there. And the Democrats just shrugged. Even Al Gore refused to recognize the Congressional Black Caucus’ protests. All that crime went unacknowledged. A mob of party goons used violence to halt the vote count in Miami. They did it right on camera. They were all party operatives sent down from Washington by Tom DeLay. We know exactly who they are. Thugs openly stole the election in 2000, and yet not one charge was ever filed.

Mark Crispin Miller: Don’t remind me.

BuzzFlash: Yet now the media suggests that it’s absurd even to wonder whether the 2004 election was legitimate. But, hey—“fooled again.” In other words, didn’t this also happen four years ago?

Mark Crispin Miller: I’d say that, given such a history—and also given the extreme statistical improbability of Bush’s second victory—the burden of proof should not be on those with qualms about that win, but on those who claim that this disastrous president was really re-elected.

Just after Fooled Again came out, I debated with Mark Hertsgaard, author of the Mother Jones piece, on “Democracy Now!” He said then, and claims also in the piece, that he does not doubt that Bush/Cheney stole the first election.

I’m sure he does believe that, but it was really a rhetorical maneuver, meant to augment his authority as a debunker of the “theory” that Bush/Cheney stole the last election, too. (His piece in Mother Jones was an attack not just on Fooled Again, but also on The Conyers Report and big book on Ohio compiled by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman.) “I believe Bush/Cheney stole the first one,” Mark was saying, “so what I’m saying now about the second race should be authoritative.”

But I don’t think Mark really does believe that it was stolen in 2000; or rather, I don’t think that he’s accepted the appalling truth. Because if he really grasped the implications of that theft, he would not be bending over backwards trying to poke holes in the case that there was vast election fraud committed by the Bush Republicans in 2004.

Let me note that I think very highly of Mark Hertsgaard’s work, and he’s an old friend of mine. But I think it’s an illuminating episode. Here’s a very smart and gifted journalist, and a staunch progressive. On Bended Knee, about the US press’ capitulation in the Reagan years, is a terrific book. The first time we had lunch together, it was on the birthday of James Madison, and we drank a toast in honor of that great American. And yet Mark’s piece on the election of 2004 was both sloppy and reactionary. It was embarrassing, full of half-truths and slanted quotations. At one point he quoted Sherole Eaton, a whistle-blower in Ohio, to make the argument that she’s not really sure that any fraud occurred in Hocking County, where she’d blown the whistle. She fired off a sharp email to Mother Jones, saying that he had quoted her out of context, although she had asked him not to do it, and also asking why they hadn’t had someone unbiased write such a piece about Ohio.

Why would Mark, of all people, make such crude mistakes? And why would Salon repeat those shaky claims as if they were authoritative?

The Salon piece was also weird. It was pretty vicious, calling Fooled Again “a fraud” and “pseudo-journalism.” That was quite a judgment coming from Farhad Manjoo—whom I thank in the book’s acknowledgements, because I learned so much from his reporting prior to Election Day. Before Election Day, he did some great reporting on the fraud committed by the GOP—and then, after Election Day, he started writing pieces jeering at the notion that the GOP committed fraud. He seems to feel compelled to distance himself now from what he had himself reported. What’s going on here?

Let me tell another story that may shed some light on such denial—because I think that’s what we’re dealing with. At the end of my book tour in late November, I was taking a night train back to New York from Washington, and saw Rep. Jerry Nadler in the club car. He’s my congressman, and a genuine progressive, and, as it happens, one of the few folks in Congress who clearly recognizes the problem of election fraud. He’s one of the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, and so took part in the investigation that resulted in the Conyers Report. I introduced myself to him, and gave him a copy of Fooled Again.

We chatted about the election, and the need for election reform. “Where’s the issue now?” I asked him. His answer floored me. He said that it was going nowhere, since the fraud committed in Ohio, he suggested, wasn’t so extensive as to have given Bush his victory. He said: “Bush won by, what?—400,000 votes?” In fact, Bush allegedly won Ohio by just 118,000 votes; and the GOP’s malfeasance there, from the numerous constraints on Democratic voter registration to the statewide under-supply of voting machines in Democratic areas, and the systematic flipping of Kerry votes into Bush votes, and that bogus “terrorist alert” in Warren County, and the subversion of the recount, among many other dirty tricks—all that monkey business certainly gave Bush his victory margin, and then some. And yet here was Jerry Nadler—one of the good guys, and, as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, surely well-informed about Ohio—coming up with this enormously inflated figure, as if to justify, in his own mind, not going any further.

All these cases illustrate the vast repressive impact of denial. Somewhere deep inside (or maybe not so deep), Hertsgaard and Manjoo and Nadler all know better. But they don’t want to know. And it seems to me that that disinclination on the part of reasonable people is more dangerous than all the fervor of the Christo-fascist right. I hate to say it, but this is also how Nazism prevailed in Germany. Anyone who doubts this ought to check out Martin Mayer’s "They Thought They Were Free," which was published in 1955. To read it here and now is an uncanny experience.


BuzzFlash: Some day, if we’re lucky, we’ll look back at all of this and wonder how so many clever people could have been so blind to what was happening all around them. We’ll all agree that Bush v. Gore was an outright stroke of anti-democratic activism. Certainly it made no logical or legal sense: Justice Scalia halts the counting of the vote in Florida, because the vote count might do damage to the reputation of the presumptive winner, George W. Bush, when Bush could be the winner only through completion of that very count. In other words, Scalia and his cohorts were presuming that George W. Bush would be the winner—and so Bush “won.” You can’t put in a bigger fix than that.

That was only the beginning of the Busheviks’ subversion of democracy. They’ve been at it whole hog ever since, from the spread of Diebold and ES&S machines throughout the nation, to the gratuitous gerrymandering of Texas, and the recall of Gray Davis (a venture masterminded by the White House). Repeatedly they’ve tried to quash democracy not just in the United States but all over the world, as in Haiti, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Iraq.

Yet when you fully document the Busheviks’ subversion of the 2004 election, you get all this static from the left..

Mark Crispin Miller: Yes. The liberals and progressives who reject the “theory” of Republican election fraud have tended to deploy the same rhetorical technique. We can’t call it a counter-argument because it’s really not an argument at all, but mere ad hominem attack: “Anyone who says this is insane.”

What’s especially disturbing about that reaction is that it repeats the primary talking point of the Bush Republicans, who from the start have changed the subject by smearing those who try to talk about it.

The Bush Republicans relied entirely on ad hominem attack in their highly organized response to The Conyers Report on Jan. 6, 2005. That was the day the Congress formally recorded each state’s electoral votes, and there was a Democratic challenge to Ohio’s numbers, thanks to Barbara Boxer. Following that challenge, each house retired to debate the challenge—which meant debating the abundant evidence compiled by Conyers and his Democratic colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee. It was a remarkable debate, although it wasn’t really a debate, since there was no exchange about the evidence. The Democrats kept trying to focus on the evidence in the report, while the Republicans would just deny that there was any evidence in the report, and heap abuse on those who had the gall to note the evidence. As I point out in Fooled Again, the House “debate” was very tightly scripted, with the same incendiary phrases popping out of different speakers’ mouths, to make the point that anyone who tried to talk about the evidence was a “conspiracy theorist,” “paranoid,” “sore loser,” etc. To all the evidence in the report the Bush Republicans replied by shouting that there wasn’t any, and that whoever said there was, should be on medication in a padded cell.

I want to point out here that I’ve been an Independent for a long time, so I don’t have any partisan intentions. I see the Bush administration as profoundly un-American and deeply dangerous, but my motivation is not partisan. It’s civic, and it’s moral. I am frankly staggered by the fact that Democrats like Donna Brazile, and Hillary Clinton, and Christopher Dodd, and Al Franken, and progressives like Mark Hertsgaard, and reporters like Manjoo, have all responded to the evidence of vast electoral fraud exactly as the perpetrators have themselves responded to it.

BuzzFlash: Their position on election fraud is similar to the Democrats’ position on the war. Those who oppose it don’t dare come out and say so—even though our presence in Iraq has badly jeopardized our national security.

It’s much the same with the integrity of our elections. I’m sure that most of the Democrats would like to see the last election thoroughly investigated, and would support electoral reform as soon as possible. But God forbid they should come out and say so. "Profiles in Courage" this is definitely not. In fact, that stance only enables the Republicans to do their thing. If you’re an eyewitness to a mugging, and you only tell your friends about it and refuse to go to the police with what you know, you’re an accessory after the fact. You could conceivably be prosecuted.

That’s the story with John Kerry, for example. He told you privately, and has told others privately, that he believes the race was stolen, then lets his staff deny he ever said so. He likewise told a Democratic gathering that Bush should be impeached, and then his office took it back. It isn’t leadership to make such statements privately and then deny them publicly.


Mark Crispin Miller: When I briefly met with Kerry on Oct. 28, I tried to tell him, very tactfully, that there was only one way that he might win back the millions who were turned off by his quick concession on Nov. 3, and that would be to openly discuss the danger of election fraud, and push hard for electoral reform. I told him that, if he would take the time to study all the evidence, he would be able to say, quite sincerely, “At the time I conceded, I believed that there was no chance we could win. But I’ve been studying that election very carefully since then, and I have had to come, regretfully, to the conclusion that the race was not legitimate. This is not about me, or my political future. It’s about the American republic, which will not stand unless its citizens can vote, and every vote is counted.”

But he is too intimidated to take so bold a step. I’d suggest that what John Kerry fears is not the people’s disapproval, but the odium of the political establishment—the national parties and the press, and their corporate paymasters. If he wants to talk about election fraud, he hasn’t anything to fear from the grass roots. I sampled plenty of grass-roots opinion on my book tour. I went all over the country, and the crowds showed fierce enthusiasm for some truth about the last election, and for blunt talk of the need for thorough electoral reform. These were very mainstream crowds.

The issue is far more important than John Kerry’s political career, or the future prospects for any other over-cautious Democrat. It has everything to do with the enormous crisis now confronting this—I was going to call it a “democracy,” but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The US isn’t a democracy. It’s something else. Today, both parties and the press comprise a single entity that’s floating miles above the surface of the earth, where all the rest of us are trying to get by. It represents an absolute perversion of the system as envisioned by the Framers.

The press, which is supposed to function as a check on governmental power, and thereby help to keep the people free, now protects the government against the people; and in this enterprise they are allied with both national parties, which run not on the energy and discipline of their grass-roots constituents but on a great flood-tide of corporate contributions, and other, shadier disbursements. Add to this the factor of dominionist fanaticism—which, again, the Democratic party and the press will not acknowledge or discuss—and you have the system that we’re struggling with today: a system of “soft” fascism, hurtling toward theocracy.

It’s those insiders who are most invested in this system—the party operatives and media people—who will roll their eyes and snicker when they hear the slightest peep about election fraud. It’s not the people who react like that. I believe that there’s a deep commitment to democracy at the grass roots. That’s why I wrote the book: to make it clear that, if you sensed that there was something badly wrong with that election, you were not being paranoid but rational. You weren’t hallucinating when you saw democracy get mugged.

BuzzFlash: We saw it. We saw it happen in 2000, and again in 2004. It happened in broad daylight. You’d have to have been fast asleep, or blind, or crazy, not to notice it. It’s all meticulously documented in your book, but anybody who was paying attention at the time would have to see that something very bad was happening.

Let me repeat my earlier question: If they could get away with stealing their “election” in the first place, from Al Gore, why would they not do everything they could to steal their “re-election” in 2004? Did they have a change of heart or something?

Mark Crispin Miller: This idea that Bush/Cheney surely never would protract their rule through fraud—talk about a faith-based notion! Look at what we now agree they’ve done! We concede that they lied us into a losing war. We concede that they did nothing after many warnings prior to 9/11. They didn’t even quietly arrange the reinforcement of the cockpit doors on US airliners. We concede that they did not nothing to prevent the devastation of New Orleans by Katrina, and that they then did nothing after the deluge. We concede that they plotted to expose a secret agent who was working to protect the USA from terrorist attacks. We concede that they insist on torturing anyone they like. We concede that they have countless numbers of us under surveillance, and that it’s illegal, and that Bush thinks he can do it anyway. We concede that they are packing the Supreme Court with far-right extremists who would give this president the powers of an emperor.

We concede all this—but not that they would commit election fraud (again)! “My goodness, no, they’d never do that!” Where does such self-delusion come from? Subverting our democracy is not just one more of this administration’s many crimes; it’s their essential crime. It’s what they’re all about. It’s how they got themselves positioned to commit their countless other crimes. And it’s not just what they did to place themselves in power, it’s what they’re now continuing to do, so that they never lose that power again.

That refusal to confront the evidence, and to concede that Bush & Co. were not elected, is certainly not based on reason. It’s based, rather, on deep denial and fearful ideology. It’s based on the absurd conviction that it can’t happen here. But anyone who tells himself that it can’t happen here has failed to grasp the meaning of this great republican experiment. Our whole system of government is based on the assumption that it can happen anywhere, at any time—that it can happen here, and surely will unless we keep this system going with all its checks and balances. The Framers studied history, and saw “it” happening repeatedly, wherever power was concentrated in one person or one body or one mob. That’s why they designed the system as they did. And that’s why BushCo’s slow destruction of that system is so very dangerous, and why we must fight back in every way we can. But we can’t accomplish anything until we face the facts.

BuzzFlash: Which both parties and the media have suppressed. Meanwhile, they out-shout us. They have more media outlets, and they lie relentlessly.

Mark Crispin Miller: They have to, because they can’t take power honestly. They’re trying to impose an alien agenda on the people of this country. A movement that attempts to win legitimately, by building mass consensus, does not need to buy the media, does not need to stun the nation with big lies, does not need to neutralize its critics and dissenters with outrageous smears, does not need to gerrymander states, and does not need to win elections through the systematic use of dirty tricks.

There is no other way for these Republicans to win, because they don’t appeal to anyone but billionaires and theocratic lunatics. The current situation may be bleak, but it would be a whole lot bleaker if this regime had the popular support that it pretends to have, and that the Democrats and press imagine that it has. As Fooled Again makes clear, the people of this country did not vote to re-elect this president, any more than they elected him four years before. I think that’s damned good news.

BuzzFlash: Let me mention just one disorienting double standard that permits this madness to continue. In Ukraine’s election, the exit polls were used as solid evidence of vast election fraud by the regime. We had no qualms about those exit polls, as we whole-heartedly embraced the seeming losers there. Here, on the other hand, the exit polls suggest that Kerry won the presidential race—but we dismiss those exit polls and somehow accept that the official numbers were correct. Why are exit polls reliable in Ukraine but defective here?

Mark Crispin Miller: Well, why are DRE machines okay to use in the United States, but not okay in Venezuela? Hugo Chavez’ government signed a contract with a company called Smartmatic (which lately bought Sequoia, the big touch-screen machine manufacturer that’s been used by the Republicans to steal votes here). Some of the conservative parties down there chose to boycott the election, because they were alarmed to see the government deploy those DRE machines. So, there, the shoe is on the other foot. Next time some apologist for Bush & Co. scoffs at anybody’s qualms about the paperless touch-screen machines, ask him what he thinks of Chavez using them.

Double standards of that sort have now become routine—because the Bushevik worldview is paranoid, and the press keeps echoing that worldview. It’s like the double standard that obtained throughout the Cold War, when only they were “terrorists,” only they did “propaganda,” whereas our terrorists were “freedom fighters,” and our propaganda purely “educational.” Under Bush & Co., self-contradiction is incessant and ubiquitous. As I note in Fooled Again (and demonstrate in Cruel and Unusual), that sort of warped perception comes from extreme paranoid projectivity: the tendency to rail at others for traits or longings that one hates and fears inside oneself.

It’s a pathological reflex, based on extreme repression and violent self-loathing. It underlies the Busheviks’ insane hostility toward Bill Clinton, whose every misdemeanor, real or imaginary, roused a toxic rage in people who actually had done and were doing (and still are doing) far more evil things themselves. The Bushevik response to the Islamist enemy is pretty much the same, with Bush consistently attacking them for crimes that his own regime has committed, or is planning to commit, and for repressive tendencies that mark his own government. Again, the source of that pathology isn’t simply economic, but psycho-sexual.

We can catalogue the double standards till the cows come home, but it won’t make any difference whatsoever. Because such rational argument is only that—and the movement we’re fighting isn’t rational. This is something that a lot of savvy people can’t or won’t perceive.

By and large, people who live in the “reality-based community” are often blind to the irrationality of their opponents. They think that merely pointing out a lie, or a double standard, or a contradiction, is enough to get all parties nodding in agreement. But it doesn’t work that way. We’re dealing with a movement that is anti-rational. It’s faith-based. To paraphrase Bush, it’s a movement that believes what it believes, and it believes what it believes is right.

BuzzFlash: It’s elitist.

Mark Crispin Miller: Profoundly so. It believes what it wants to believe. If it hears contrary evidence, it comes up with evidence of its own. That is what the Busheviks have done across the board—in foreign policy, in environmental policy, in education, in (or against) science. They’re going to believe it, come what may, because they think that God is with them, God has blessed their enterprise, God supports their propaganda.

There’s a stubborn myth throughout the left that all Bush/Cheney’s theocratic noises are pure humbug, intended just to fool the pious masses of the right so that the super-rich can keep on stealing all the nation’s wealth. Well, certainly the super-rich are making out like bandits, siphoning the national wealth into their bank accounts, and there’s no doubt at all that the cartels are busily exploiting the far right’s religiosity. But this idea that all the theocratic hubbub is mere window-dressing, cleverly exploited by a tight cabal of rational manipulators somewhere at the top, is simply wrong.

There is a powerful apocalyptic streak in Bush’s government, which wants to “bring it on”—to use up all the earth’s resources, to let the super-hurricanes and AIDS kill off as many evil-doers as possible, to touch off World War III at Armageddon. That suicidal impetus is not a pretense, nor, clearly, does it serve the interests of Capital. It is an even greater threat to world peace, US national security and planetary welfare than the whole Islamist movement, which only wants a global caliphate, whereas the Christianists would like to see the world go up in flames, because then Jesus will return, to give them permanent dominion and deep-fry their enemies.

So this is not a movement that the rational can ever shame into surrendering by merely demonstrating its illogic to its followers. The movement can’t be shamed, because it’s shameless; and it can’t be cowed by clear analyses of its unreasonable views, because it’s proudly wedded to unreason.

What we must do is recognize this movement as the latest resurgence of that atavistic paranoia that has, throughout our history as a species, always posed the gravest danger to democracy. Republics and democracy have always foundered on the rocks of paranoia: thus it was in Athens, and in Rome, and wherever else a rational community has given way to the demand for war and empire. Democracy depends on reason, on a reasonable sense of mutuality and common enterprise, and therefore on the possibility of trusting others not to trash the rules or otherwise subvert the general good. Paranoia, on the other hand, is based on fear, and therefore on a kind of “logic” that’s impervious to evidence and quite incapable of learning from experience.

Unless we face the fact that this is what we’re up against, we’ll be no more successful at defeating it than Bush will ever be at trying to wipe out Islamism.

Paranoia cannot be wiped out, any more than “terrorism” could be ended through a greater use of terror. Paranoia is an atavism, deep within us all, and so the only way to end it would be to annihilate the human race. Paranoia can, however, be contained; and a functional democracy is one in which the paranoid component is suppressed, restricted to the woodwork, by the workings of a governmental system maintained by the rational majority.

Only in times of extreme terror and anxiety—times of general paranoia—do majorities become irrational; and that lasts only for a while. It’s what happened after 9/11. That national mood has long since passed; and now it’s time to face the facts, marshal all the evidence of what is really going down, and fight it as we must.

This means that the political establishment must face the facts. It means we should tell people the truth instead of trying to spin them, trying to figure out what they would like to hear so we can feed it to them. We should just face reality, and speak out publicly. If our fellow-citizens are grown-ups, worthy of democracy, then they can handle it. If not, then there’s no point in even trying.

We have to say, “This is what’s happened. This is why it happened, and this is what we must do to get through it.” We have to be uncompromising in our commitment to reason, to democracy, to pluralism, compromise, deliberation. We must get back to a system based on checks and balances, the separation of church and state, the Bill of Rights and the pursuit of happiness. And in order to do that we have to re-embrace our revolutionary heritage. And that means saying no to ignorance and superstition.

I know that sounds old-fashioned. I mean, here we are just after the long twilight struggle between capitalism and socialism, which we mistakenly believed to be “the end of history.” Now it turns out that the Enlightenment was not a done deal after all. We’re right back where we started in the 18th century, fighting all those old battles once again—and this time without slavery and patriarchy (but with the burden of gigantic corporations). We have to win those battles once again.

The Framers understood that all free people have to fight and win those battles endlessly. This is what we’re doing now, and what we have to keep on doing; and to do it, we must have the courage of our convictions. It’s finally up to us, just as it was in 1776. The Democrats won’t do it, and the press won’t help, so it’s up to us. And I think the people largely understand that it is in their own best interests to be rational and face reality at last. I think it’s possible. I think it’s necessary. That’s why I wrote the book.

Interview Conducted by BuzzFlash Editor Mark Karlin.

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RESOURCES:

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), by Mark Crispin Miller (A BuzzFlash Premium).

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), a BuzzFlash Review.

A Conversation With Mark Crispin Miller 12/13


Mark Crispin Miller Talks About the Last Stolen Election, the One in 2004 11/5

Mark Crispin Miller Examines Mainstream Media's Blind Eye Towards the Gannongate Sex Scandal - February 23, 2005

NYU's Mark Crispin Miller biography http://education.nyu.edu/education/...

http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/

The above interview originally appeared here. It is a good example of how paranoids can sound almost rational

Political Correctness

Below is an essay handed in by a college English student as part of her coursework. She was inspired by what she read on Tongue Tied. I am delighted that she sent me a copy as it is some evidence that the mind-control attempted by the Left-dominated U.S. educational system will never completely succeed.

We live in a world today where our every day lives are dictated by political correctness. People-on the job, at school, on the streets, and sometimes even in their own home-have to be concerned with every word they say; it could be misconstrued by someone as being offensive or discriminatory. When typing an email at work, it is necessary to meticulously review it for its content. If this isn't done, one risks the chance of corrective action by their employers, termination or possibly a lawsuit for discrimination. In fact, I am certain that some of you reading this will find its content offensive, merely because I am presumptuous enough to question the subject.

It is a requirement of today's society for one to be politically correct in their words and actions. This has become a difficult task as the standards of political correctness have become more complex. Words which were considered to be correct only a few years ago are now considered to be unacceptable. It was only eight years ago that Time magazine featured Ellen DeGeneres with the unforgettable line, "Yep, I'm Gay!" across the cover. Now the word gay relates strictly to men. Using it to describe a lesbian is considered improper. Since lesbians are their own distinct community, it is important to designate that, of course. Homosexual is another term that is now politically incorrect. People feel it surrounds the idea of sex, rather than a relationship, and is thought of as a negative stereotype (Norvell). Retarded was once just a factual term to describe someone we recently would refer to as mentally handicapped. However, "mentally handicapped" and "the disabled" have recently been deemed distasteful and are now to be replaced with "learning disabilities" or "people with disabilities" (Norvell, 2). Why is it that the connotations of these words change so often? How is it that calling a woman gay is an insult when just a few years back a woman would proudly say she was gay?

The terminology in regards to race and ethnicity has always been puzzling to me. Every February, America celebrates Black History Month. But wait. I though it was politically incorrect to use the word black to describe someone? We now need to say, "African-American." Most every school has a Black Student Union, but use the word black in school and you will quickly be corrected. If African-American is used, why wouldn't a person of Chinese descent but born in America be referred to as Chinese-American? Or if someone's parents were from England, could they not be an English-American? If one has "white" skin, regardless of what country their family was from, a person is simply "Caucasian" when filling out any type of paperwork.

Here in New Mexico around 40% of the population is Hispanic. A fairly common decoration for cars is writing, typically in old English lettering, on the back window stating "Brown Pride." Not Mexican pride or Hispanic pride, but brown pride. Or a popular term is to be "down with the brown." I am a Caucasian female in college, and can only imagine the reaction if I called someone who is Hispanic, "brown." I would most certainly be confronted. Or dare I even suggest we reverse the situation. Imagine if I were to drive my car around the city with lettering on the back window reading "White Pride." The public reaction would be fierce. I would expect to have people screaming at me on every street corner, calling me a racist, a white supremacist, a Nazi. I would have to fear being physically hurt, or worse. So, is it politically correct to use the terms black, brown, and white or not? Apparently the answer depends on who is saying it, whom it is being said to, and of course, it depends on the situation.

A local restaurant chain uses the slogan "Help stamp out gringo food," which is displayed on their shirts and throughout the store. Customers can even buy all types of memorabilia sporting the slogan. Almost any Mexican restaurant has a dish on the menu called the "gringo breakfast." According to Dictionary.com, gringo is defined as "a Latin American (disparaging) term for foreigners (especially Americans and Englishmen)" (Lexico Publishing Group). Wouldn't this, then, be considered politically incorrect? This place of business is allowed to advertise using this slogan without concern or reprimand by society and the government.

It is probably necessary for me to disclose that the next few sentences contain words that are considered to be extremely racially offensive. Therefore, read further at your own discretion. Dictionary.com states that spic is "used as a disparaging term for a Hispanic person," and nigger is "used as a disparaging term for a Black person" (Lexico Publishing Group, 2,3). When discussing this topic with someone recently, I mentioned this issue and what a public outcry it would be if someone were to open a restaurant using the slogan "Help stamp out spic food," or "Help stamp out nigger food;" equal comparisons according to the dictionary. Their response was that the gringo slogan is just a joke. So society can look at a disparaging term for a Caucasian person as a joke, but use a disparaging term towards another ethnicity and it's a horrible offense. I personally have never been offended by the gringo slogan. Though, after seriously contemplating all of this information, it makes me wonder if I should be. I certainly feel that the words spic and nigger are reprehensible and would never use either in conversation.

This issue of political correctness is starting to take all of the fun out of the world. In the UK a local council is working to cancel all grants for use of Christmas lights because they are concerned these grants do not support equality (Norvell, 3). For as long as some can remember at the University of Arizona, students have honored the tradition of throwing tortillas at graduation. Students participating in this activity are now looked down on because it is offensive to Mexican-Americans (Norvell, 5). I wonder if any weddings are looked down on because people had a tradition of throwing rice-a common dish to those of Oriental descent. Celebrating Halloween is not even acceptable in some schools. A five-year old child in Tulsa, Oklahoma was forced to spend the whole day at school in nothing but his underwear because he wore a costume, which the school didn't permit (R6). What is a world where you can't wear Halloween costumes to school, marvel at the city Christmas lights, or throw food in celebration? Not the world I grew up in, that's for sure.

I have determined it is nearly an impossible task to be completely politically correct. I imagine that with the rapid changes in acceptable terminology, before we know it schools will be required to hold classes on political correctness. People dislike social labels, but also want to be correctly labeled. People want to be distinct individuals and distinctly grouped with others. The boundaries of political correctness are hard to determine. It only takes one person's perception of an action or statement for it to be construed as offensive. I would hope that a person in this world could relax, have fun, don't worry and be happy. But one can't relax when having to be concerned with political correctness and its consequences every time they act, speak and with every word they write.

DISABLED VETERAN STRIPPED OF A BASIC RIGHT

An email from a reader about an arrogant bureaucracy:

The U.S. Postal Service has just stripped away my right to receive U.S. Mail. That right is given in US Code 39. (39USC403c). The reason for mail denial is based on reprisal. The U.S. Postal Service falsely informed U.S. Senator Jon Kyl that I had not produced two forms of required ID for my mail Service in Show Low Arizona. Here are a couple of facts that may be of interest to you.

1. Two forms of ID (Arkansas Driver's license, plus military ID) were presented and recorded on PS Form 1093 upon my application for mail service in March of 2002.

2. I have obtained a copy of the PS Form 1093 through the Freedom of Information Act, which clearly shows the recording and acceptance of my Driver's license and military ID.

3. The purpose of the reprisal is because I challenged an unlawful policy by the Show Low Arizona Postmaster. Now I am paying a price for the freedom that I, and my military family, has fought for in nearly every war the U.S. has ever fought.

While convicted murderers and rapist get their mail in prison, I am denied mail because I challenged an unlawful policy. While convicted murderers and rapist get their medications, my medication, which is critical for my disease, as a result of combat, is being refused for delivery by the mail service.

I'm not black, and I'm not Muslim, I'm not a law breaker, but I am a law abiding, tax paying disabled American Veteran, who continued to work for 35 years despite my enabling disabilities.

The source of the conflict

The Postmaster instructed his clerks to inform the patrons that if their mail boxes overflowed three times within the rental period (normally 6 months) then they could take adverse action against the patron.

I knew this was not right, so I researched the U.S. Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual, (Postal Law) which states in paragraph 4.4.4 (Overflow), under 508 Recipient Services, “When mail for a customer's post office box(es) exceeds the capacity of the box(es) on 12 of any 20 consecutive business days (excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and national holidays), the customer must use caller service, change to a larger box, or use one or more additional boxes (subject to availability) to which mail will be addressed”.

I challenged the Postmaster's illegal 3 day overflow policy. I even quoted the Postal Law verbatim in writing, and asked that he provide me the authority that permitted him to deviate, alter, or make up his own law, (which no postmaster can do)

Well, he refused to respond, so then I attempted to contact the Postmaster General in Washington D.C. with an official complaint. Three letters to the Postmaster General went unanswered. I wrote a letter to the Postal Advocate in Washington D.C.. It went unanswered. I wrote a letter to the Phoenix AZ Postal Consumer Affairs. It went unanswered.

Finally I wrote U.S. Senator Kyl and requested assistance in obtaining an answer from the Postmaster General. That's when the Postal Service intentionally provided the Senator with false information and eventually refused mail service.

I had no problems during the nearly four years of mail service at my P.O. Box. I was never asked to resubmit any ID during the entire time. Although my valid ID had been produced to postal clerks on a number of occasions, including after the Postal Service informed the Senator of their plans to discontinue my mail service.

Sincerely,

Barry Connell (pambarryconnell@direcway.com)

HUMAN EVOLUTION

An email from a reader in response to my recent comment on the Brace craniofacial findings:

Thank you for linking to the Brace et al article -- in the normal course of events I would never have seen it. In general, it confirms my own prejudices, so naturally I agree.

There are at present, and have been for some time, two competing models of human evolutionary history: the replacement model and the evolution in place model.

1) The replacement model postulates that hominids arose in Africa and spread throughout the world, in successive waves. Homo habilis _may_ have gotten outside of Africa (but probably didn't.) Homo erectus did and spread as far as China in the east and France and Spain in the north.

Neanderthals in this scenario are a purely European dead end, the result of Erectus being trapped in Europe during the ice ages and having to adapt.
There was then another radiation from Africa, that of anatomically modern Human beings, who replaced the Neandertals in Europe and the Erectines in Asia, gradually evolving into modern human populations. Thus we are all descended from the African Homo erectines who evolved into modern human beings. "Out of Africa." "Eve." etc. Stringer is one of the major proponents.

2) the Evolution in place model argues that early humans (probably Erectines) spread out of Africa into Europe and Asia, adapted to their environments, and proceeded to evolove gradually into modern human types. In this model, Europeans are descended from the Homo erectus forms that settled in Europe 500,000 years ago, evolved into Neandertals, and then into Cro-Magnons, und so weiter. Peking man's descendants live in Peking. The descendants of African Homo erectus live in Africa. Milford Wolpoff is the most prominent proponent of this view (and I thought that Brace was on the other side. Maybe he changed his mind.)

Viewpoint #1 assumes that successor and predecessor populations cannot exchange genes (either because they are too different culturally or because of physical intersterility. This assumes there was no gene flow between europe and the middle east for more than 100,000 years. This is highly unlikely. Also, there are some African remains from the right time period which _look_ Neanderthal, or would if they were in Europe, and stone tools which look like the ones Neanderthal's made.

The European Neandertals were clearly physically adapted to their environment, ice age Europe. The long face provides protection for the brain against the cold coming in throuigh the nasal passages (and the occipital bun ballances the rest of the head while running.) The arms and legs were put under so much stress by their muscles that the bones bent like bows (Ahnold was clearly a girly-man compared to Ug.) The heavy brow ridges provided support for the rest of the face (biological spandrels.)

When Europe's climate changed, so did they. It is probable they were non-sapient and adapted physically to their environment over time (and the 200,000 year long existence of the Mousterian tool 'culture' certainly argues that this is the case)

Now, what would Neandertals in Euope look like. Well, skin without high concentrations of melanin has been shown to survive frostbite better than with high concentrations of melanin (the work was one by the US air force in the 50s when they discovered that black American airmen in Greenland and other northern bases had higher rates of frostbite than their white fellow soldiers, despite the same training and equipment.) while fair hair and blue eyes are another likely adapation, although not a necessary one Remember North Asians have fair skin (which is where vitimin D is produced.). That is, they must have looked like the present day population of the Scandinavian countries. Except they were built bigger than Schwartenegger.

The conflict between the two has grand religious elements. Back in the 50s #2 was proposed by Carleton Coon, the leading physical anthropologist and archaeologist of his day. He had limited paleontological data to go on, but there are strong correspondences between the teeth of Peking Man and modern Chinese (shovel shaped incisors.) Also, the European face _looks_ a lot like the Neandertal face, compared to those of Africans and Asians (our Asians, not yours; yours are of Neandertal ancestry in this view as well.) Alas, his arguments were taken up by the KKK to proclaim that whites evolved to sentience first, and Coon was tarred as a racist (which he was not.) A biography of Coon recounts the arguments and details and hints at international intrigue by the Israelis (Coon was doing major archaeological work in Yemen.) We will skip the religion ad the politics and concentrate on the evidence, which is scanty, and some interesting theoretical models.

a) Farming did very clearly originate in the middle east -- there is no reasonable argument against it -- the closest wild relatives we have to modern grains are found in Iran. In terms of archaeological dating Farming settlements move from east to west in Europe over time, with the settlers taking a two pronged attack on the continent, with one group moving up the rivers inland from the Black Sea, while others move along the coast. Thus John Rhys-Davies and I both share ancestors who moved closer and closer to Britain over time.

b) Early farming communities were small and isolated, and usually had to move ever few years because they used swidden (slash and burn) agriculture, so their numbers get overestimated. Also, not all soils are good for early farming technology (parts of Poland could not be farmed until the Middle Ages!) The local hunter gatherers would hardly have viewed them as a threat, more as a source of trade goods. As an Australian you are inclined to think of settlers as displacing the 'natives,' which is also a very American view. And, at the same time, you are thinking of 'hunters' as 'warriors.' Neither is the case. The basic technolgies of both groups would have been comparable: stone implements. The farming villiages I've seen mapped out indicate just what we would call extended families. Only later do we get the massive earthwork defended villages that preceed the Indo-European invasions (I am doing all this from memory so I cannot cite sources. Check out Gimbutas's early farming in Europe book. You are thinking in terms of Maori tribes or Zulus, who had far better developed agriclture. Early neolithic farmers had to do a lot of hunting on the side as well.)

c) Hunter gatherers generally cannot organize themselves into armies. The British Empire faced threats from the Zulus, who were settled agriculturists and pastoralists who had dense populations and an elaborate social organization. Australian aboriginies certainly had elaborate social organizations, but how much of a threat did they ever pose?

The usual way HG groups deal with each other is through marriage. You give your sister or daughter away to someone in another group with a different territory so you can have claims on that group's resources in times of environmental stress. The locals would outnumber the newcommers, and the locals would swamp the newcomer's genes in the future population.

There are two good historical analogies. Bulgarians and Turks. At one time both these groups were Central Asian. The Bulgarians made the unpardonable error of losing their women to an enemy attack, and when they reached Eastern Europe they had to ally themselves with the local Slavs to obtain access to women and a posterity, leaving behind, over time, their language, their physical appearance, everything but their name. The Turks on the other hand had a passion for Circassian women, and sold off their own daughters to obtain them. That, and the fact that they never exterminated the native Anatolian population, gives us the modern day Turkish population. Their name and language survived.

There is also Newfoundland. I probably have Beothuk ancestors, but wave after wave of British, French, German, Portugese, etc. fishermen swamped them over
the years from 1586 to 1820 when the last pure blood Beothuk woman died.

Now, the reason Turks and Bulgarians look the way they do is because they did _not_ wipe out the native inhabitants, who were too numerous anyway.

If you look at a wide enough subset of modern day Europeans you will see most of the features posessed by the Neandertals, but almost never together on the same individual.

Then again, look at the small sample sizes Brace et al had to work with. 1,284 individuals from 52 seprate groups over thousands of years. I would make that my principal criticism of the argument. I would argue that we need far more work done in the field to prodcure more samples. More work for archaeologists!

SOME SKEPTICAL COMMENTS ON THE NEW ORLEANS FIASCO

An email from a reader:

What I'm writing here will involve some speculation, and some well known facts.

At the time of the hurricane I was in a hospital with pneumonia. One of the nurses looked at the TV just below the ceiling (in American Hospitals TVs are placed so they can be watched by people layiing down) and said: "How could such a thing happen to an American city?" My nurse was born in Haiti, and I felt too sick at the time to tell her that NOLA was not an "American" city -- it was Port au Prince North, but with a lot more money. Port au Prince as if the French had never left (or had their thorats cut, actually.)

New Orleans was always an economic backwater. It lived off tourism, much like my neighboring city of Salem, MA, which still lives off the notorious 17th century witchcraft trials. Part of it is economically important for traffic on the Mississippi, but for the most part it is bypassed.

At the same time, since the 1960s, NOLA's black population was shunted into welfare dependency, black families encouraged to break up, and black children (as usual, as they are the property of the democratic party's teacher unions) given piss-poor educations. In terms of public safety, NOLA would have to reduce its murder rate by 80% to match New York's.

In terms of political corruption, well, the public boards that control the funding of the levees have been investing heavilly in casinos and hotels.

Come Katrina, and the vast majority of those people found themselves displaced to Houston, Dallas, and other economically booming areas. Their kids have been placed in far better schools, some have found work (and others are living off of welfare) and, for the most part, they do not have homes to return to in NOLA. The homes, if owned, now need to be demolished. If rented, they still need to be demolished (NOLA is below sea level mostly, and the flood made much of the housing stock unliviable. In fact, entire areas of the city should just be closed down and bulldozed -- the areas stretching along the lake to the east and some to the south, which are flooded if it mists.) It really does not make any sense for someone who wants a future for their children to move back there.

The NOLA police force was supposed to have numbered some 1700 members (for a city of half a million!) before the hurricane. In fact, some 700 of those men were phantoms created to get Federal Aid. They were always paid ridiculously low rates because it was assumed they would make up for it with extortion and bribes. We'll just casually mention the 50 NOLA cops who have been arrested (and some put on death row) over the last twenty years, etc.

My ***speculation*** is that a large number of those 'missing' people may, like the 700 non-existent cops, be phantoms as well, created for political and economic purposes by the city government.

If those people cannot be induced 'somehow' to return to NOLA, the 2006 and 2008 elections are going to produce drastically different results from the last ones. The surrounding areas are republican. The people in NOLA's flooded areas were voted by Nagin and other democrats. The State of Louisianna has very peculiar election laws, which are designed to produce a 3 way governor's race between a democrat and two republicans. The democrat will certainly get less than 50% of the vote, but there is no run-off. Plurality wins. That is how the current idiot became Governor. The same for House and Senate.

Gradually, the real reasons for the flooding have come out in the papers -- the levees did not burst, there was no over-topping along lake Ponchatrain, rather the flood walls that line the canals that come into the city were poorly supported ***in sand***, were built that way only because of political machinations by the local politiciains, and the Army Corps of Engineers were ***told*** they would not survive by an engineering firm decades ago.

WHO IS HAVING THE KIDS?

In response to my recent posts about the U.S. birthrate a reader has emailed me as follows:

Not having any kids I'm hardly an 'in' source, but in general I'd have to agree with you, although not on the 'poor' angle. If you read the data again you can see that the biggest set of breeders were Hispanics of all races, that is Hispanic surnamed people who are white, indian, mexican, cuban, and black (although not necesssarily directly from Spain -- there are Hernandezes in Louisiana and Arkansas who have been there since Colonial times who are intermarried with Yankees and French etc -- since 'Spaniards' are 'european' rather than 'hispanic' or 'chicano' or....)

In general the people who breed least are college educated women. This goes back to the first women's colleges where someone noted that it took three to four graduating classes from Bryn Mawr to produce another graduating class. The people I hang out with most are university educated, mostly SF fans, and they do not have all that many children. Some have one. Fewer have two. This tends to be normal for academics as well. Kathryn Cramer, a publishing professional, was complaining recently on her blog (www.kathryncramer.com) about the problems of going to a con with small children in tow, and the even greater expense of leaving them at home (leaving your dog at a kennel would be cheaper, I'd say.) Most conventions have day long baby sitting facilities now, I believe it began when the people at the New England Science Fiction Society that runs Boskones and Noreascon worldcons in Boston found themselves facing their 'breed now or not at all!' time periods.

The people I work with are another story. They are not academics (I now work in retail) and they have children, and very often use extended family relationships to allow both parents to work. Grandmother lives in the house and looks after the kids. My cousin (an executive secretary) and her husband (a fork-lift operator) have two sons; my aunt babysat for both. One co-worker's daughter has twins, and my co-worker is delighted to baby-sit at the odd times her daughter and son-in-law go out to a movie.

I work in a garden shop selling trees, flowers, fertilizer, etc., during the summer, and christmas trees during the winter (and we had a great year this year! Much better than last year) and I get whole families coming through at christmas looking for trees, and the families tend to be large. Couples in their twenties with three kids in tow. A pregnant woman coming for her tree with a small boy in the car (the father is in Iraq.) A college educated woman with one son, aged about nine, who says "Dad has a van with a rack. You should have married him and we'd have that car." The vast majority of these people are white and working class, some are Asians (both your type of 'Asians' and ours), some are black, probably more are mixed couples (black and white, white and chinese or japanese) etc than just black (it's because of the local demographics, and the fact that we are on a highway where there is no bus service. Really poor people in the US do not have cars. That is how you tell if someone is poor.) Some are millionaires (one of my customers was a baseball player with the Boston Red Socks, something I only found out when I checked his credit card) but you don't have to go to college to become a baseball player, many go into farm teams out of high school -- he had three kids with him.

Now, the reasons for this are obvious and have less to do with income than with the extended childhood of the academic class. If you marry your high-school sweetheart she can start having children in her twenties. If the two of you meet in college both going for your doctorates... Consider the problems of a female doctoral archaeology student going down a ten foot pit to dig for her disseration project while pregnant. Academics with large families tend to have started where the wife worked while putting the husband through school and popped babies that her parents cared for ("Why did you marry this deadbeat? Couldn't you have found someone to support you?") and sometimes they get tossed out when their full professor husband finds a nuble grad student who thinks he's God (one such creep gave his own son 'an unsolicited disrecomendation' to a university that accepted him after the son sided with his mother during the divorce.)

The really poor and welfare dependent also have children. Lots of them. However, they are not so large a group, and the problem both for and with throw away kids is that they get thrown away. Years ago there was a nature program on female kangaroos in Australia on TV here and one of the females was simply unable to rear her young to the point of independent survival. She got careless. She couldn't find them in the tall grass. None survived. Generally, it's the throw-away-males who get 'discarded,' or sent off to the Crips and Bloods to go make their fortunes killing and selling dope, and if they survive, fine. If not, there are always more, and the daughters tend to stay at home.

The well-educated upper middle class families also have ways of reducing their children's long term survival prospects. Some parents cannot let go. They make the child dependent so they cannot leave, or give them so much money they never learn how to live in the real world. One of my best friends was kept in this position by his grandmother (the countess) and his mother until he was well over 40, with the kicker that when his mother died his annuity from the countess ended (and the one time I met his mother she constantly put him down to me in his presence!). My friend was of much tougher stuff than the females foresaw, however; he retrenched, married (into the Brazilian former nobility!) and gave both harpies an unwarranted and undeserved posterity.

Tookie Williams Is Executed

Convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, the Crips gang co-founder whose case stirred a national debate about capital punishment versus the possibility of redemption, was executed Tuesday morning.

Williams, 51, died at 12:35 a.m.

Officials at San Quentin State Prison seemed to have trouble injecting the lethal mixture into his muscular arm, apparently struggling to find a vein.

"It took them, it may have been 10 minutes to deal with that. Williams at one point grimaced, it looked almost at frustration at the difficulty there," media witness John Simerman of the Contra Costa Times told CBS Radio News.

"You doing that right?" it sounded as if he asked one of the men with a needle.

Five of his supporters witnessed his death.

"One witness pumped his fist in the air, a symbol of black power," said Crystal Carreon of the Sacramento Bee.

And three of Williams supporters shouted as they left the room after his death.

Barbara Becknell and the supporters said, "the State Of California just killed an innocent man," said Rita Cosby of MSNBC, another media witness.

Outside the prison, there was "utter silence for maybe 30, 45 seconds, no one moving. You could hear a pin drop. People letting it sink in that it had finally happened," reports Ron Kilgore of CBS radio station KNX-AM. Then Williams' supporters broke out again in song.

In the final hours before his execution, Williams refused to have the last meal traditionally offered to the condemned, and he told prison officials he didn't want to be visited by a spiritual advisor or the prison chaplain, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone. As he waited in a holding cell near the execution chamber he was given a bundle of letters sent to him from people across the country.

The case became the state's highest-profile execution in decades. Hollywood stars and capital punishment foes argued that Williams' sentence should be commuted to life in prison because he had made amends by writing children's books about the dangers of gangs and violence.

In the days leading up to the execution, state and federal courts refused to reopen his case. Monday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied Williams' request for clemency, suggesting that his supposed change of heart was not genuine because he had not shown any real remorse for the killings committed by the Crips.

"Is Williams' redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?" Schwarzenegger wrote. "Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption."

Williams was condemned in 1981 for gunning down convenience store clerk Albert Owens, 26, at a 7-Eleven in Whittier and killing Yen-I Yang, 76, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang, 63, and the couple's daughter Yu-Chin Yang Lin, 43, at the Los Angeles motel they owned. Williams claimed he was innocent.

Witnesses at the trial said he boasted about the killings, stating "You should have heard the way he sounded when I shot him." Williams then made a growling noise and laughed for five to six minutes, according to the transcript that the governor referenced in his denial of clemency.

About 1,000 death penalty opponents and a few death penalty supporters gathered outside the prison to await the execution. Singer Joan Baez, M*A*S*H actor Mike Farrell and the Rev. Jesse Jackson were among the celebrities who protested the execution.

"A wise man once said the death penalty is about three things: politics, politics and politics and what we have seen today is that Governor Schwarzenegger is another cowardly politician," said Farrell.

"Tonight is planned, efficient, calculated, antiseptic, cold-blooded murder and I think everyone who is here is here to try to enlist the morality and soul of this country," said Baez, who sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" on a small plywood stage set up just outside the gates.

A contingent of 40 people who had walked the approximately 25 miles from San Francisco held signs calling for an end to "state-sponsored murder." But others, including Debbie Lynch, 52, of Milpitas, said they wanted to honor the victims.

"If he admitted to it, the governor might have had a reason to spare his life," Lynch said.

Former Crips member Donald Archie, 51, was among those attending a candlelight vigil outside a federal building in Los Angeles. He said he would work to spread Williams' anti-gang message.

"The work ain't going to stop," said Archie, who said he was known as "Sweetback" as a young Crips member. "Tookie's body might lay down, but his spirit ain't going nowhere. I want everyone to know that, the spirit lives."

Among the celebrities who took up Williams' cause were Jamie Foxx, who played the gang leader in a cable movie about Williams; rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a former Crip; Sister Helen Prejean, the nun depicted in "Dead Man Walking"; and Bianca Jagger. During Williams' 24 years on death row, a Swiss legislator, college professors and others nominated him for the Nobel Prizes in peace and literature.

"There is no part of me that existed then that exists now," Williams said recently during an interview with The Associated Press.

"I haven't had a lot of joy in my life. But in here," he said, pointing to his heart, "I'm happy. I am peaceful in here. I am joyful in here."

Williams' statements did not sway some relatives of his victims, including Lora Owens, Albert Owens' stepmother. In the days before his death, she was among the outspoken advocates who argued the execution should go forward.

"(Williams) chose to shoot Albert in the back twice. He didn't do anything to deserve it. He begged for his life," she said during a recent interview. "He shot him not once, but twice in the back. ... I believe Williams needs to get the punishment he was given when he was tried and sentenced."

SOURCE

The Bonaparte legacy: The victory France forgot

Two hundred years ago, Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Austerlitz sealed his reputation as a military genius. Today, his country seems undecided as to whether he was a hero or a villain. John Lichfield reports from Paris

In period uniforms, and thermal underwear, military enthusiasts from all over the world will gather on Saturday to re-enact one of the greatest victories in French history. They will come from the United States, from Australia, from Canada, from Russia, from Britain, and even some from France. They will converge on an obscure village in the Czech Republic which was once called Austerlitz.

Two hundred years ago tomorrow, a valley and a plateau near the village were the scene of a bloody six-hour battle which, above all others, sealed the reputation of Napoleon Bonaparte as a military genius and brought the Emperor Napoleon to the apogee of his power. The part of the emperor in Saturday's re-enactment will be played by an American Napoleonophile, Mark Schneider from Virginia.

In Paris, tomorrow night, on the actual bicentenary of the battle, a discreet ceremony and son et lumiére will be organised by the French army in the Place de Vendôme. President Jacques Chirac will not be present. Neither will the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, (even though he has written poetically about Napoleon and, according to some of his colleagues, believes himself to be the direct, spiritual descendant of the Great Man).

As of yesterday, the French army could not say who would represent the French state at its Austerlitz party tomorrow. "We have been promised a minister but we don't yet know which one," a spokesman said, bravely.

Comparison is inevitable with the elaborate and joyful British commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, which began last summer and are still going on. So far the French press has been slow to make this comparison but a cannonade of media protests is expected today and tomorrow.

Of the two battles - fought within six weeks of one another - Napoleon was in no doubt which was the more important. The emperor dismissed Trafalgar as an "irrelevance".

Britain had been master of the seas; it remained master of the seas. So what? Austerlitz, Napoleon said, would change the map, and destiny, of the European continent for ever.

In truth, Austerlitz - now called Slavkov - changed the map of Europe for, at best, nine years. Its impact on the destiny of Europe was immense - but not in the way Napoleon had hoped.

British historians have always insisted that Trafalgar was the real turning point in the Napoleonic Wars. It is surprising to find the French state, seeming to agree with them, even 200 years later.

Paris has, after all, a railway station named after Austerlitz, as London has its Waterloo. The French capital is dotted with avenues named after Napoleonic victories and generals. Why the shyness about commemorating the bicentenary of the emperor's greatest victory?

Napoleonophiles believe that a decision was taken to downplay the bicentenary so as not to upset the "losers" of Austerlitz - Russia and Austria. They believe that the French government decided that an elaborate Austerlitz celebration would give the wrong impression of a France still obsessed with its past glories. (Tony Blair's Cool Britannia, it seems, has no similar hang-ups).

Thierry Lentz, director of the Fondation Napoleon, an academic think-tank devoted to the serious study of the period, said: "It is a little of many things. It is partly the fact that France has never made up its mind, officially, whether Napoleon was a great hero or a great villain.

"But it is, above all, a great failure of imagination, and a great admission of ignorance, on the part of our politicians. There is enormous, popular interest in history at present. Perhaps our politicians don't read but the French public does. Their greatest appetite is for books on history.

"A commemoration of Austerlitz did not have to be a jingoistic celebration. It could have been something intelligent which explored the history of the times and the many connections with the politics of Europe today. The wonderful exhibition on Nelson and Napoleon showing at present at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich is a model of how it should have been done."

A mammoth Austerlitz exhibition, drawing on historical scholarship from all over the world, had, in fact, been planned at the national army museum in the Invalides in Paris. Several years of work was put into the planning and research. Organisers cancelled the exhibition 18 months ago citing " lack of funds".

The core problem is that, in France, history is politics. Both the left and right sides of the French political classes remain divided on the key question of whether the emperor was "a Good Thing".

Was Napoleone di Buonaparte - a Corsican of Italian extraction who became emperor of the French and briefly the master of Europe - a wicked despot or a tragic hero? Was he an impostor who led hundreds of thousands to their deaths by charging down a historical cul-de-sac? Or was he the father of the modern French state? A genius? An insignificant nonentity? A monster and a butcher? Or a man of peace and a pan-European idealist?

Two centuries on, the French buy part of the myth but remain doubtful about the man. Paris may be littered with avenues and streets which commemorate Napoleon's generals, armies, victories and treaties but there is no grand avenue or square named after the emperor (only a street on the Left Bank, called the Rue Bonaparte).

Even this week a book has been published in France accusing Napoleon of being a genocidal racist and forerunner of Hitler. In Le Crime de Napoleon the historian Claude Ribbe recalls that the emperor brought back slavery in the French empire in 1802, a decade after it had been abolished by the Revolution. The decision led to brutal fighting in France's Caribbean colonies in which thousands died. Less well known, according to the book, is his imposition of racial laws in metropolitan France, which led to the internment of blacks and the forced break-up of inter-racial marriages.

Even Napoleon's military genius is doubted by some historians. Was Austerlitz won through a great stroke of tactical ingenuity? Or because fog blanketed the battlefield at an awkward moment, leaving the Austrian and Russian armies blundering around in the mist? Napoleon was certainly lucky on the battlefield of Austerlitz but the campaign leading there demonstrated all the brutal, decisive qualities which made him - for 15 years - the supreme figure in Europe.

Napoleon transformed late 18th-century warfare by abandoning the dilettant, aristocratic, almost sporting approach to battles which had gone before. He marched troops rapidly from one place to another over huge distances; he attacked enemies from the rear; he fought battles to destroy the strength of the enemy, not just to win the day.

Thus the Austerlitz campaign, which ended 60 miles east of Vienna in early December, began in Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the Channel in early August.

Napoleon was vaguely planning to invade Britain but could not do so while Nelson ruled the waves. As soon as Britain signed a three-way alliance with Austria and Russia against France, Napoleon ordered the 200,000 troops of the Grand Army to march east to make a pre-emptive attack on the Austrians. A little later, he ordered the French navy out of port in the Mediterranean, more as a diversion than anything else.

By turning his army east, he, in effect, abandoned his plans to invade Britain - hence his judgement that Trafalgar on 21 October, 1805 was an "irrelevance". (In truth, had Nelson lost the battle as well as his life, Britain would have been vulnerable to a post-Austerlitz invasion and 19th-century history would have been rather different).

After a number of skirmishes and smaller battles, Napoleon, with 70,000 men, took on 90,000 Russians and Austrians on the morning of 2 December, 1805.

Within six hours, although they held the best ground, the Russians and Austrians were not only defeated but crushed. More than 20,000 Russian and Austrian soldiers died; another 20,000 were captured. The French lost 9,000 men, killed and wounded.

Napoleon was one of the first masters of PR and propaganda. He wrote the history of the battle himself soon afterwards, insisting he had pre-planned every move.

In truth, the victory at Austerlitz was won partly through the fog of war - in this case, literal fog. Napoleon feinted to retreat, encouraging the Austrians to leave their high ground and try to cut off the French route to Vienna. Heavy mist descended. The Austrians poured down from the plateau they held and French troops poured on to it. By the time the mist lifted, the French dominated the battlefield and chopped up the enemy at will.

Napoleon fought a brilliant battle, adapting to events more rapidly than his enemies. But would his tactics have worked without the fog? His account fails to mention the weather.

The victory placed Napoleon in an utterly dominant position on the European continent. It also went to his head and hastened his end.

The positive, but intelligent, French view of Napoleon is that he turned into a brutal dictator but that the French Revolution, and its Napoleonic aftermath, were, at least, the Beginning of Modern Times.

British historians argue that the Revolution and Napoleon - far from speeding the "modernisation" of France - delayed for many decades the political, economic and industrial developments which were already starting under the ancien régime. The real "beginning of Modern Times" occurred, not at the Bastille or Austerlitz, but in the factories of Lancashire and the West Midlands.

The French see this as a smugly British view of history. By introducing basic property and legal rights - and by the very fact of being a meritocratic upstart, rather than an aristocrat - they say Napoleon hastened the end of feudalism all over Europe and laid the foundations for modern economics and politics.

There is also a suggestion - first made by Napoleon himself over a glass of wine, and possibly arsenic, in exile in Saint Helena - that the emperor was the first "European"; that his intention, all along, was to create a Europe without borders and without "civil wars". To do that he had to defeat Albion by imposing a single European market - "the continental system" - from which the incorrigible and un-European British would be excluded. This theory may be attractive to French romantics, and British Eurosceptics, but it makes little sense.

After Austerlitz, Napoleon was advised by his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to treat the Austrians magnanimously, encouraging a kind of exhausted peace in Europe in which France would be the dominant but not the overwhelming, imperial power. The British, without a serious army, would be powerless to intervene. Instead, Napoleon imposed humiliating conditions on Austria, consolidated his control of Italy and broke up what remained of the Holy Roman Empire.

In doing so he awakened national hatreds which brought about his downfall, nine - and then 10 - years later. He also, accidentally, helped to create the antagonistic, European nation states which dominated the next 150 years and generated two world wars. So much for Napoleon as the "father of the European dream".

None of these conflicting, and confusing, interpretations justify the failure of the French government to mark the battle of Austerlitz properly. As Thierry Lentz of the Fondation Napoleon points out: Austerlitz is not just French history, it is European history. It was not just a military event but a political one.

Commemorated sensibly, and intelligently, as on the whole Trafalgar has been, it could have been an occasion, not for flag-waving, but for contemplating the tangled roots of our common European past. And present.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-bonaparte-legacy-the-victory-france-forgot-517646.html