The book follows the money. 6th century: Indulgences created to raise money. Full absolution granted to Crusaders; partial to Crusader helpers. You could even pay to have your relatives placed on the fast track out of Purgatory. And donations made The Rosary more powerful. 16th Century: Leo the X sells indulgences for sins not yet committed (the sin futures market) 19th Century, Gregory XVI needs more money so he borrows from the Rothschilds, who are Jewish in the extreme. Pius IX tears down the Jewish Ghetto walls in Rome to appease the money lenders. It did not matter much, Jews were forbidden to move anyway. Pius then sold Vatican bonds, freed himself of the Rothschilds and rebuilt the ghetto walls. In 1858, a housekeeper secretly Baptized a Jewish kid. Pius found out and kidnapped the kid and raised him Catholic! Early 20th Century. Leo speaks out AGAINST separation of church and state; freedom of the press, and religious tolerance. 1929: Pius XII signs Lateran Accords with Mussolini (an atheist). The church was suddenly tax exempt on just about everything, even property taxes. Nogara is tasked to manage Vatican money and everything changes. Money begets money. The Curia expands rapidly. To raise more money, they occasionally declared a year to be "Holy", and begged for more dough. The church indulges in arbitrage. 1935: The Vatican has its fingers in every aspect of the Italian economy. Only the government owned more property. But lending money at interest is still naughty! 1930: The Reichskonkordat deal with the Nazis is signed. 1/3 of Germans were Catholic. Money from them for the Church money was deducted was deducted at source. The Vatican was rich! The War: Despite tangible evidence of the Holocaust, the Pope refuses to speak out about anything! At the core… money. The Pope found his voice after the war ended. One Father (Juricev) said during the war that it was not a sin to kill a Jew or a Serb… as long as they were older than 7! Too many sins to enumerate here. The Vatican did business with blacklisted countries during the war. They learned how to launder money. 1942: Nogara creates the Opere di Religeone (the IOR, aka the Vatican Bank). The only bank with its own country (and vice verse), unrestrained by borders or pesky audits. 1943: The Vatican is heavily into the Insurance business. Jewish policy holders were rarely paid out. The Rat Line refers to the Vatican underground railroad for Nazis after the war. The Germans (1/3 of them Catholic) used the Vatican Bank to store stolen loot. The Vatican provided shelter, documents, and money for fleeing Nazis. The Pope even asked for clemency for a leader of the infamous Einsatsgroupen killing squads. Vatican refugees were a laundry list of the worst monsters of the 20th century, including Clause Barbi and Adolph Eichmann. The Vatican was so afraid of the commies they would do anything. For them: Catholic + Nazi == Fine, possibly misguided, fellow; Catholic + Commie === Excommunicated bastard 1960: The church owns 120 million square feet of property (tax free). The only sovereign state with more territory outside its borders than in. Enter the Mafia with Sindona. Sindona was hired to help manage Vatican money. Sindona met Gelli, a business man and Masonic Lodge (called P2) Leader. The Vatican hates Freemasons, because they are anti-religious and partly commie. Catholic + Freemason == excommunication. And yet, many Vatican priests and insiders were Masons. 1967: The Italians finally tax the Vatican just a little. By now Vatican holdings are a maze of holding companies, nearly impossible to untangle. But the Vatican did have money in munitions firms, pharmaceuticals (that made birth control pills), and printing companies that made porn. Marcinkus ran the IOC. He and Sindona were as bent as they come. Enter Calvi (who would ultimately be found swinging from Blackfriar's Bridge), a banker. Also bent. Marcinkus sat on the board of many banks, many of which were off-shore tax havens. Sindona had 48 such companies. Sindona bought Franklin Bank in the US (18th largest), which would eventually go down as the biggest bank failure in US history. Meanwhile, Sindona spent 5.4 million on the Nixon campaign in '73. Marcinkus and Sindona would play pat-a-cake with Italian and US justice for years. Sindona was given a Man of the Year Award by the US Ambassador to Italy. The IOR had 175 million in Calvi backed off shore companies. Sindona blackmailed Calvi into helping him. In 78, a Pope dies; A new Pope (John Paul I) is elected who promises change, including firing Marcinkus; That Pope is (almost certainly) murdered; The Pope's murder was covered up; And a new Pope (Is the Pope Polish?) John Paul II came in. The Pauline Monks affair breaks. Monks stole millions; and spent it on the usual (fast cars, loose women, etc). Their guilt was beyond question. The Pope issued a decree to stop the Vatican investigation. Another cover up Sindona, Calvi (Blackfriar's Bridge) and Marcinkus were the top of a rouges gallery of criminal assholes. Sindona was a mob connection; Marcinkus ran the IOR; and Calvi was mob and off-shore bank connection. The collapse of Franklin Bank had many repercussions. Judges and prosecutors killed. Sindona; faked his own abduction went on the run; got caught; got tried; and then was poisoned in prison. Meanwhile Calvi was in financial trouble. He tired every source he could, but his fate was sealed. More facts about P2 (the Masonic Lodge) came out. Lots of members all over the Vatican, police and government. The Vatican was in bed with an investment bank called Ambrosian's, run by Calvi. The Vatican denied this, but proved to the banks biggest debtor. When this bank collapsed, the Vatican told the Italians to shove their material witness requests. The rest of the sordid tale is low-lighted with the Vatican's reply to the world when accessed of crimes. They ranged from: (silence), "It is the nasty media", and "How dare you. This the church." to "Fuck off… we are a sovereign country and we answer to nobody." That is, they claimed diplomatic immunity. In one instance, the Vatican sang and danced when they were serves with papers. Two years later, investigation ongoing, the Vatican said it ignored the papers because they did not come in a diplomatic pouch. Marcinkus was teflon. He out-lasted many Popes. He was under indictment for a long time and could not leave the Vatican. He was due to be fired by John Paul I, but the Pope was murdered (and the murder covered up) just before it was to happen, Whew… that was close. He ended up at some shitty little parish in Arkansas or some such. John Paul II was useless. Benedict (Ratzinger) was senile. He ducked every issue (and there were shitloads of them) until the report about gays in the Vatican came out. He could not take it and quit. Among other sins, he refused to sanction a priest who diddled 200 deaf boys! Pope Francis has made huge strides in cleaning up the IOR. He has made controversial statements about gays and rape victims. This is all to his credit, all of which was cancelled out when he refused to cough up the names of defrocked pedophile priests from the UN Child Protection branch. The church even allowed some convicted priests to return to duty! The Vatican has spent 4.5 billion on abuse settlements, 1.5 billion of which was lawyer's fees. Meanwhile, the Vatican owns gobs of real estate and has tons of money (some of it Nazi gold) all raked off of money laundering.
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I was watching a documentary on earthquakes about 9 days ago, based in part on this book. I ordered the book and started reading two days later. I thought myself fairly knowledgeable on earthquakes, but I was wrong. Mostly because most of what we know we have found out in the last decade or two. The book is written as a sort of detective novel, leading up to its big conclusion. Many people of my age probably think that we are in a largely earthquake free zone. Geologists thought so too, but wondered why the Cascadia had not had a large quake when every other part of the ring of fire did. They rationalized that our rocks are slippery so stresses can be relieved regularly. After Sumatra and the 250,000 dead there, interest picked up in Cascadia. Could a Magnitude 9 quake be in our future too? In the olden days, lo, several decades ago in the sixties, plate tectonics was only just gaining acceptance. In the eighties, lasers were used to measure distances between points to see if the earth was moving. This was expensive and difficult. Then GPS came along. Geologists were not interested in GPS coordinates per se, they were interested in how far apart two rock-fixed points were. This was cheap and easy. Soon tons of data was pouring in and computer simulation started taking off. The other thing they did was to look for evidence of past quakes in multiple different ways. They found it. Spoiler alert… We are due. The Juan De Fuca Plate is now called the Cascadia Subduction Zone Fault and it has let rip every 400 years or so with a massive quake. The last was 400 years ago. If you live in the interior, you are laughing. If you live on the coast of Vancouver Island, you are fucked. Depending on the nature of the shaking, many buildings in Vancouver (esp brick and mortar "medium-rises") will collapse. In the worst case scenario, the entire west coast of North America from LA to Alaska may be hit hard. The expected tsunami would hit Crescent City like a hammer, and would probably do significant damage in Japan. It is a good story. The evidence of the turbidite cores, tree rings, oral histories, ghost forests etc all come together nicely. The upshot is that we should be spending more on earthquake preparedness and building reinforcement. One nice sub-story came from a ten year old British girl in Phuket who had been taught what to look for. She spotted the signs of an incoming tsunami. She convinced her parents and saved her family. Cascadia is Sumatra. The death toll will be lower, but the damage worse. The good news is that while earthquake prediction is still a dark art, predicting what tsunamis will do is becoming relatively easy. For example, next time, we will be able to tell the Sri Lankans to bug up (not out) even if they are on the lee side of the island… which actually got hit worse than the weather side did. You will have to read the book to find out why. Just about everyone who is aware of the depths of Nazi evil have asked themselves this question: How could a modern, civilized nation sink into barbarity and, if I were there then, would I be shooting Jews in the back of the head too? This book is about the latter half of that question. Its conclusions are drawn from trial transcripts, modern testimony, Nazi records and psychology experiments (specifically the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's faked electric shocks experiment). Putting aside the notion of souls, this is basically a nature/nurture argument. One thing is certain, if we are just talking statistics, the answer to the question would seem to be "Yes. Being generous, three out of four of us would be pulling the trigger". The Order Police 101 Battalion consisted of about 500 men. All but a few officers were born in the first decade of the 20th century. The average age was 39. In other words, old enough to know better. Virtually all were conscripted. Many were cops before the war. During the war, they shot 38,000 men, women, and children, and rounded up and deported 45,000 to the Treblinka gas chambers. Some men were set aside for labor. The standing order, SOP if you will, was to shoot children, women, and the infirmed where they stood. The bodies were left for other Jews or town folk to clean up. Others were marched out to nearby forests, forced to dig their own graves and then were shot in the back of the head at a range of inches. The descriptions are very grisly and graphic. One interesting fact about all the participants in the Final Solution: There is no evidence that any one was censured for refusing to kill unarmed people, despite claimed fears to the contrary by many of the perpetrators at trial. Most of the Battalions work was done as the Germans transitioned from the psychologically damaging shooting of Jews to the easier, out-of-sight, out-of-mind deportation to the gas chambers. Killing 1,000 Jews in a single town was a typical one day action. In the first such action, the commanding officer asked if any of the 500 men would not want to participate. A dozen stepped forward. Others would find ways to avoid the work. None were punished for avoiding this work. The actual shooting was often fobbed off to blood-thirsty, anti-Semitic Hiwis, volunteers from Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and elsewhere. But 80% (a number that correlates well with the Stanford Prison Experiment) did pull the trigger. Liberal amounts of vodka were distributed to the men to ease their guilt. There are many reasons why they did what they did. Almost all are rationalizations. Projecting the blame onto the ones who give the orders; thinking of what they did as merciful; blaming the Jews for passivity; concern for future employment as a reason not to shoot; antisemitism; and so on. But the biggest reason was peer pressure. This is not really what I expected. Like most, I assumed the killers were young, stupid, brainwashed Hitler youth. Not so. Perhaps this is the reason the only group I have been a part of was a group that hated groups. Do not think that the Germans were unique in their behavior, Think My Lai or ISIS. I had one small nit with one supposition of the book. The author argues that there was no real self-selection bias in the battalion. I would argue that cops in general are predisposed to hierarchies, the exercising of power and deference to authority, Any many of the Order Police were cops before and after the war. This book is hard to read. Just as the killers got inured to killing, the reader gets inured to reading about the killing. But it is important that we have a good understanding of the ugly side of human nature. It is relevant today. Consider ISIS; the drug war in Mexico where beheadings have become common place; the cult of personality in North Korea; Iran and Saudi Arabia and sharia law; the killing fields of Cambodia, etc. I strongly recommend this book if you have any interest in the subject matter at all. In 1880, William Herschel tripped over an astounding discovery. He asked a simple question. Sunlight warmed the skin. Do the different colors of the rainbow carry different amounts of heat? He set up a prism to cast a large rainbow on a wall (this is tricky because the angles must be right and the pesky Earth just keeps on rotating). He placed a thermometer in several different bands of color, and a control thermometer just off from the red end of the spectrum where no light fell at all. To his amazement, the control thermometer recorded a rising temperature and the others nothing. He had discovered infrared light and that the rainbow is not just what meets the eye. This opened the door to the entire electromagnetic radiation (EMR) spectrum. By WWII, they had a full theory of light from Maxwell, and radio was all the rage. The book begins in the 1930's. Radio was not the concern, impending war was, and the first crude radar units were built. Radar is the invention of the title. Radar saved Briton. It is said that the A-Bomb ended the war, but radar won it. As dry as this book might sound, it is quite engrossing. I must admit I went rapidly through the last 120 pages or so that covered the cold war and other events leading up to our modern world because I am already reasonably familiar with them (it is mostly computer related). My interest in this subject dovetails nicely with my interests in technology, WWII, and the history of science. Science and war go back a long way, and there is nothing like a good war to accelerate both basic science and technology. A primer is perhaps useful. Light is an ambiguous term. We use it to mean the light that we can see, and any form of light whether it can be seen or not. The broad forms of light are: Radio; Cell Phone; Microwave; Infrared; Visible; Ultraviolet; X-Rays; and Gamma rays. In wave lengths, these go from miles in the radio spectrum to femtometers and shorter (smaller than the nucleus of an atom). Frequencies are the inverse of wavelength and energy is proportional to frequency. So radio waves are very low frequency, low energy, very long wave length light. Gamma rays are very high frequency, high energy, short wave length light. Radar focused primarily in the microwave band, around the same frequencies used by your microwave oven, with a wavelength of around 2 centimeters. Sort of in the middle. Generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the lower the wavelength; and the better you can see. To use radar to see an enemy airplane, centimeter wavelengths were the key. One problem is that different materials interact with EMR in different ways at different frequencies. For example, rain plays havoc with 1 cm radars because water absorbs the energy (which is why your microwave works). In 1940, a group of Brits went to the US to trade secrets. This was known as the Tizzard mission. The US needed the British technology, although they did not know it at the time, and the Brits needed the US's manufacturing capabilities. The Brits brought their super-secret Resonant Cavity Magnetron. This device could create strong emissions of microwave energy at just the right wave lengths. Radar won the war, the magnetron made radar work. The Americans were gob-smacked. The RadLab was created and it produced radars at a dramatically increased pace. Radar was used to detect incoming threats, count them, and get there altitude (all different applications), aim guns, monitor traffic in harbors, guide plans to a safe landing (today we call this ILS for Instrument Landing System), FoF (Friend or Foe) systems and lots more. Aside: Some FoFs worked by detecting small changes in a planes returns caused by distinctive engine vibrations. Amazingly, analog computers of the day could sniff this out. Cool. More than a few famous names worked at the RadLab, including Nobel winner I. I. Rabi, Robert Watson Watt (he is related), William Shockley and ploy-math Luis Alvarez. Alvarez would move on to the Manhattan Project, and later in his career he would be known for the asteroid/dinosaur extinction theory. The development of the bomb took most of the Nobel winners out of the market. This lead to the following amusing conversation: S1: The bomb guys get all the breaks! They snatch up all the Nobel winners first. S2: Well, Rabi just won, so we have one too now. S1: Yeah, but we have only had ours for 3 weeks! It soon became apparent to the higher-ups, especially Vannevar Bush, that basic science was important, And so scientists suddenly found themselves considerably higher up in the food chain, leading to this: A scientist found himself being frustrated by a military pencil pusher. He (sorry, they are all he's) turned to his tormentor and asked "Who do I see about getting you fired?" Meanwhile, the Germans were working on their radars in a kind of intellectual, evolutionary game of leapfrog. One project was code named Freya. Freya, Odin's wife in Norse mythology, and the source of Friday (Freya's Day), had a magic necklace that allowed her to see for hundreds of miles in every direction. Only the Nazis would be arrogant enough to use her name on a radar project. This book is long and full of a lot of detail. It has a good index, lots of notes, and a list of acronyms used. Very helpful. Radar systems were the start of high frequency electronics. Modern computers were a direct result of all that. Radar technology combined with computing power opened up the rest of the EM universe to us. The computer power came from the transistor, invented by Shockley. Early analog computers would contain hundreds of tubes, each tube being a bit. Today, millions of transistors can fit on the head of a pin. The largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere is located in Parks Australia in the middle of a sheep paddock. It was built by RadLab alums after the war. If you enjoy reading about WWII, EMR technology, applied physics and its impact on our lives, this is a book I would recommend. Another, longer, similar book does the same for nuclear physics: The Making of The Atomic Bomb. It has been suggested that radar advanced applied solid state physics by two decades. The PC, cell phones, the internet, HD TV, smart phones, astronomy, planetary research, NMR machines… a near endless list of things we have already started to take for granted. All delayed by twenty years. You would recognize this world because in people terms, it is practically yesterday. A recent puff (read: stupid) question for politicians is "If you could, would you go back and kill Hitler as a youth?" Well, if you did, you would have to give up quite a lot today. I continue my research into religion. News flash: it is still stupid! If you want to find out more about Islam, this book is a good place to start. In my youth, I read a lot of science fiction. Many plots would feature a radical religious sect not unlike Islam as the main "bad guy". I have always been conscious of religion trying to tell me what to do. Now I see this SF plot unfolding on a global scale. What really bugs me is the hypocrisy of the piously religious who brush off the terrors of Islam with moral relativism. You have probably seen Ali on TV. She is hard to miss. She was born a typical rabid kill-the-infidel Muslim. She escaped an arranged marriage and made it to the Netherlands. There she as elected to the Dutch parliament. Now she is an atheist, a lecturer at Harvard, and advocate for Islam reform. I say she is hard to miss because she is thin, pretty and about 6 feet tall. She has written the other books which I have note read: Infidel; Nomad; and The Caged Virgin. If you thought Islam was barbaric, rest assured you are correct. Where she grew up, every Friday was marred by stonings, beheadings and limb removal by sword. At that is the tip of the iceberg, She is an excellent writer, despite English not being her native tongue. Basically, she argues that Islam is still a barbaric religion. Christianity was born inside the Roman Empire. They had to go along to get along. Their book was written by men, and therefore subject to debate, but it is still holy. Christianity and politics do not mix. Islam also has two other thorny problems. Unlike Christianity, it lacks any kind of hierarchy. That is, the is no pope to sanction or condemn an imam. The second is that the Koran is literally the last word of god. Mohammed wrote the Koran as a direct instrument of god. The Bible was written by men. The Koran, as the literal last word from god, is absolute, The Bible is haggled over all the time. Believers in the literal last word of god are, for obvious reasons, hard to reason with. Once a Muslim accepts this one point, everything else follows from it and that Muslim becomes the equivalent of a blood thirsty fundamentalist Christian. For these people, their goal is simply to take over the world. In a sense, you can argue that Islam is religion as it would have itself: An absolute belief system with answers for everything, that is enmeshed in politics, has laws for everything, and any deviance is crushed, usually to death. In their world, you can die for asking a single innocent question, such as "Why pray five times and day, and not four?" In the US, an irrational battle of labels is waging. Remember Ben Affleck blowing a gasket when someone even mentioned Radical Islam, shouting "racist" and "Islamaphobe"? Obama wont utter the phrase. And yet it is accurate and neutral in tone. Ali argues that moderate Muslims (she calls them Mecca Muslims) must take a stand, reform Islam, ban jihad, and bend to "western" values. Period. Moral relativism be damned, this is an evil religion. If someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" while killing an innocent, that person is a Muslim, regardless of protestations to the contrary. And it is other Muslims who must recognize this and stop them. Actions speak loudly, and in this case, we must define our groups by their actions. We cannot tell what they think. Ali goes over her history quickly as it is covered in her other books. She is risking her life and is a remarkable woman. My list admirable women includes Vashti McCollum, Elizabeth Warren, and others, and now Ali. "The wandering bands of Sapiens storytellers were the most important and destructive force the animal kingdom ever produced." This phrase appears early in book. It is another book about the rise of human kind on this Earth. It is similar to Guns, Germs and Steel and A Brief History of Everything. I read it mostly for the early history: the invention of languages, stories, religions, gods and kings and such. In that respect it delivered. One myth the book explodes is the idea of primitive cultures as being more in touch with and more cooperative with nature. It is not true. Every human group, everywhere, wasted no time in bending the environment to its one uses, and grabbing all the low hanging fruit as fast as they could, lest the other guy get it. Think the death of the North American mega fauna and the hands of the native populations. It takes on what the author calls "romantic consumerism"… the general idea that you life is best served by jetting all over the world and getting exposed to as many cultures as possible. It also attacks cultural relativism for the evil that it is. The author made an interesting observation about religions in general. They can be broken down into three gross categories: Many gods (polytheism); Two gods (dualism); And one god (monotheism). Polytheism is marked by a laid back attitude. If you meet someone who believes in another god, no problem. You just add it to the list. Dualism is marked by conflict: Creator versus destroyer; good versus evil; heaven versus hell. Monotheism (i.e.: the big three) is awash in the blood of the non-believers. Roman Catholicism is kind of an odd-man-out. They believe in one god with three faces (father son and holy ghost). They embrace dualism with God versus Satan. And they are also polytheistic in that they have hundreds of saints, and each saint has its followers. Practically speaking, "saint" is just another word for demigod. The author uses the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" incorrectly and more than once. Truth be told, few people know how cliché is intended to work. It has some interesting observations about money and credit. The author argues that the British obtained global imperialist domination over France because they paid their bills and were a good credit risk. Credit at the time was a new concept that the French failed to appreciate. The last few chapters get into philosophy, happiness, and extrapolating the modern world out into the future, a most dangerous game. An easy read, with the occasional bit of humor. Another very enjoyable book from Christie Blatchford. I have always liked reading her columns in the NP. Her earthy style of writing is restrained in newsprint, but not so in her books. It is a worthy successor to Helpless, the story of the OPP and the feds turning their backs on the small town of Caledonia, ON. Truth be told, the sins of the system as described in Life Sentence do not hold a candle to the system allowing politics and ambition to trump even the most basic tenets of the rule of law in Caledonia. A nice type size and good leading means a fairly quick read. The book is broken into broken into several large chunks consisting of an anecdotal review of her career; then four long chapters on the big cases: R v. : Abreha, Elliott, Bernardo; and Ghomeshi. In the opening chapter, she recounts some fun moments, like when the Special Investigative Unit that investigates police shootings hired a hot homicide detective only to discover that he was a fraud; or the when the government hired a race relations specialist who told lawyers that the Holocaust was not racist because no black people were involved. She notes as well, after years of legal wrangling, Duffy is back in the Senate sucking on the same teat as before. And more importantly, she asks why judges do not get the same scrutiny as senators. She points out that judges work for us, and that it is within our rights to criticize them, and they have a duty to disclose expenses just like everybody else. In Abreha, Christie rails against the condescending treatment of jurors. In fact, we just had the Oland case pitched due to an issue of jury instruction. Jurors seem to be unable to get even the most trivial of research sources themselves, like having access to a dictionary. It is assumed that jurors are incapable of, for example, separating past misdeeds from current misdeeds, but it is inherently assumed that lawyers and judges are capable of such feats, as well as many others that mere mortals can only aspire to. Blatchford quotes one juror who said: "The arrogance of the judicial system doling out just enough information to keep us pure 'intolerable'. " I agree. In some cases, judges have actually lied to jurors. Actually, they all lie to the jurors, because they all say the same thing at the end of the trial… "You have now heard all the evidence.", and that is almost always a lie. If you say that is not right, you will get a lecture on "probative value versus prejudicial effect". IMHO: If we are going to have juries, they should have all the facts. The Elliott case focused on a judge Cosgrove who went right off the rails during the trial. To make a long weird tale short, Cosgrove was incompetent. He threw his weight around illegally, and, at the end of the day, still did not acknowledge his misdeeds. Cosgrove was a patronage appointment. The Canadian Judicial Council was involved and actually debated whether "incompetence" should be tolerated in judges, so untouchable as they are once appointed. Camp is another judge recently in the news who actually used "ignorance of the law" as an excuse for his errors as a judge!. The appointment process is totally screwed up in Canada, but the good news is that it is getting better. Reading about Bernardo again is hard. The facts of the case are stomach-turning. The Bernardo trial was totally screwed up by the prosecution. Innocent lawyers were trashed by the system. Politics, optics and expediency ruled the court's decision making processes. The crown made a deal with the devil (Homolka) when they definitely should not have. But worse for the legal system, victims were granted de facto status in the court, with their own attorney, who the crown then tasked to do things that were clearly in conflict. This mess resulted in some really dumb stuff. The press was not allowed to see the Homolka tapes (due to the victim's weight in the court), but could hear them. But the sound was bad, so the crown provided a transcript that they could not read, but the cops could read it to them. So the reporters had to scribble the text from the readings of the cops while listening to a tape, which they could not understand, of a video they were not allowed to see. The Bernardo case saw the legal system turn on itself, and it was ugly. This rise of the victim does not bode well, and we are seeing the impacts today. The victim should have no say in the evidence presented at trial, but in Bernardo, they ruled the roost. The state even went after reporters for breaching court orders WRT banned information, information that they had made public earlier. In one instance, the OPP fabricated evidence to get at a lawyer who had crossed the Province's AG, who was hip deep in conflict issues. Finally, the Ghomeshi trial is discussed, and it too was a fiasco. Once again, the victims rose up, screwed up everything, and disappeared. The details of the Ghomeshi trial are still fresh in most peoples mind, but if you want more, read the book. This was a good read. The system is not broken. I am sure 95% of convictions are routine and well handled. But it seems the bigger the trial, the more it seems like the lunatics are running the asylum. We recently had a literal show trial and it showed us that the judge was a screw-up. I finally got around to reading this book. It has been on my to-read list for quite some time. Part of the reason I put it off is that I felt I knew the science and the scientific philosophy fairly well (I did) but the book looks at many other aspects of the battle, including: religious perspectives, the media, politics, education and so on. The font is small, the leading tight, and the pages large, so this is a longer read than you might expect. Part of the reason for its length is that major portions consist of chunks of pro-creationism texts, followed by contrary science positions. Ironically, one of the concerns about creationism is that it survives on the "balance" argument. That is, you are not "balanced" if you do not present "scientific creationism" along side the science of evolution with equal weight in the classroom or the media. And yet, this book goes to some lengths to show the other side. Of course, doing so is necessary in an analysis such as this. However, I often found myself reading something I thought was wrong, only to realize it was the opinion of a creationist, not the author, and is rebutted in the following section. I read this book to hone my understanding of the arguments, especially the stupid arguments that one can expect from the "other side". I was especially interested in ID (Intelligent Design) arguments. The last BC skeptic's meeting was a debate between a creationist (Richard Peachy, a part-time science teacher) and an actual science teacher (Scott Goodman). The actual science teacher won. However the audience was absolutely stacked and packed with religion believers hocking tapes, books, and such, about how the Earth is only 6,000 years old. They probably saw the argument in a different light. And they got to flog their propaganda. We were used. The opening chapters of the book get into the basics of scientific philosophy and provide a primer on evolution. While not mentioned in the book, it is worth noting that the oft used tag line for evolution, "Survival of the Fittest", is a meaningless tautology. Add the word "offspring" and it works. Consider these four terms and rank them in importance: Facts, Laws, Theories, and Hypotheses. In fact, this order is the usual one assigned by lay people, with Facts most important, and Hypotheses least important. Scientists rank them from most to least important like this: Theories, Laws, Hypotheses and Facts. The next chapter is a primer on the history of religion and religion's perspectives on evolution. There are actually quite a lot of them, running from "God did it all in a trice" to " The science is true (e.g .: the Earth is 4.5ish billion years old) but god is always invisibly tinkering and setting things in motion". There are at least a half dozen different flavors of creationism and religious evolutionism. Trying to address them all is a cosmic game of Whack-A-Mole. And like the mythical Hydra, if you kill a mole, two slightly different moles pop up in its place. The US is unique in that it is one country with 50 different policies on science and evolution education. If you are educated in Kentucky, you might not get exposed to evolution at all until you reach college and decide to take an applicable course. And Kentucky is not unique. The BC skeptics once had an ex-cult-member and lawyer address the group. I chatted with him after the fact and was surprised to learn he heard of evolution for the very first time when he was 30! Chapter five digs into the fight to eliminate evolutionary teaching from science classrooms. Unbelievably, this battle continues to this day. The Scopes trial is well known from movies and plays. It was the trial of the century at the time. Scopes himself was actually a sacrificial volunteer, chosen because he had few ties to the community, and could thus bear excommunication from it. He was chosen by the ACLU to challenge anti-evolution laws. The Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately reversed the Scopes conviction, which also killed the ACLU's attempts to kill the law (no conviction means no avenue to appeal). The Monkey Trial only made things worse. States doubled down on the issue. New and more subtle attacks on evolution were devised. The language was twisted too. Think about the phrase "scientific creationism", an oxymoron if ever there was one. It was followed by "Intelligent Design (ID)". Most of these approaches failed, so creationists fell back on "equal time". That is, teach creationism along side evolution as an alternative. That failed (it violates the Constitution) and so they fell back on warning labels in text books, wrongly claiming the evolution is only a "theory". A word on a word: Theory. When Perry Mason has a theory, it means he thinks he might be able to convince a court that his view should prevail. Here, "theory" and "opinion/guess" mean the same thing. In science, a "theory" is a broad perspective that ties together many aspects of data, observation, branches of science, and, usually, mathematics. General Relativity, Newtonian Mechanics, and Evolution are such theories. And they are all true (with some caveats). Intelligent Design (ID) is the best that creationists have to offer at the moment, and the book goes into detail on it over a few chapters. Intelligent Design, and its hand-maiden Irreducible Complexity, are subtle arguments. In Darwin's day, the argument was: What use is half an eye? Even Darwin knew the answer to that: Any eye is better than none at all. The common example today of ID is the flagellum. This is the twirly thing at that back of some bacteria, making them mobile. But clever scientists have though of step-wise ways of getting to that too. Intelligent Design was tested in Kitzmiller versus Dover. Dover is a town in Pennsylvania. Dover lost and ID was deemed thinly veiled creationism. Creationism is still fighting and still losing. When all else fails, creationists fall back on "balance", or "equal time". This is fine in a political argument, but it is the kiss if intellectual death in a scientific one. Scientists, and people in general, must be able to discard discredited ideas, or we will be debating them forever. The book goes on with chapters on the legal, educational, public opinion, and scientific issues associated with creationism, using a collection of writings from various authors. They present creationist arguments followed by science's rebuttals. This is a very detailed book. It focuses to a degree on education since the author is the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education. If you want to understand creationism issues, you should have this book in your library. Most of the counter arguments to evolution come from the Discovery Institute. It claims that it is scientific in its criticisms, but they do no research, publish no papers, gather no evidence, and spend all their time trying to shoehorn biblical rubbish into the curriculum of US schools. One last word about Creationism and the Law. Judges are not well equipped to make decisions on issues of science. A group of judges asked Robert Park, a well respected physicist, to tell them the difference between BS science (pseudoscience) and real science. I have just acquired a copy of his book on the subject: Voodoo Science. I shall comment on it soon. Mr. Park wrote an article for Chronicle of Higher Education (2002) that listed seven signs, or "tells", of bogus science and gave it to them. This list was used, and still is, as an aid judges. I published a list of sixteen such warning signs in the BC Skeptics newsletter in 1989. My list has now worked its way into courseware curricula around the world. My list included all of those expressed in Mr. Parks list. NB: I am not suggesting he stole my list, only that I got there first by 13 years. More on "The List" to come. Regardless, I was chuffed to see that parts of "my list" have made it into US jurisprudence. The final chapter deals with what people believe around the world. I am happy to report that Scandinavia (Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway) are four of the top seven countries that believe in evolution. Canada was not surveyed. Turkey beat out the USA for dead last. As I mentioned, this is a long a detailed read. Some of it is hard to read. I refer mostly to the cut-and-paste discussions from creationists. Their convoluted logic makes my brain hurt. It is also a must-have reference book if you want to take the subject seriously. David Frum is a Canuck, and the son of Barbara Frum the well known journalist. He is also now a US citizen, a conservative, a one time Republican, and the author of Trumpocracy. Trumpocracy was written in the first year of DJT's evil reign. This latest book was written over the intervening years. I read the first book because I wanted to read a conservative view point. Ditto this time around. Like all books about Trump, one is constantly reminded of his past sins… sins that tend to loose their identities in the avalanche of additional malfeasances. "The rooster that took credit for the sunrise was outraged to be blamed for the sunset." A nice pithy line. Fun Fact: One of the Trump success factors that Frum points to is the Sinclair Broadcasting Company. It is Trump friendly and owns 40 percent of the US TV market. This where many Americans get their news. They and the Trump acolytes praise the only president to never crack 50% approval in a reliable poll. Frum was critical of the Mueller report which never lived up to expectations. They made five errors that assured failure. One: Mueller was only interested in prosecutable crimes. This meant no investigation of Trump possible debts to Russia. Two: He seemed to feel ignorance of the law was an excuse (this saved DJT Jr in the Trump Tower meeting). Three: He narrowed his investigation to the 2015/2016 election cycle. Four: He looked at people near Trump, but not Trump himself who refused to testify. And five: He refused to promote evidence that Trump could not be prosecuted for and therefore could not respond to (because he was the president). The upshot was we learned very little about Trump and his entanglements. Frum spends some time discussing the Republicans tendency to cheat. Voter suppression, stack the courts, and gerrymandering being the primary means. The Republicans feel they are good and right, therefore whatever they do to maintain power is good and right too. Kavanaugh helped decide that the gerrymandering, an undemocratic and evil practice, was State business. Frum discusses the "deep state". Like many things Trump, it is the opposite of what it should be. In the old days, the "deep state" were those with secret power who used clandestine ways of thwarting the government. Under Trump, it means the opposite: the legitimate use of power to thwart Trump. As much as I hate to admit it, occasionally Trump is right. The only example I am aware of was the large numbers of asylum seekers at the US southern border. It is a fact that most of them were not legitimate asylum seekers under international law, and letting them onto US soil to apply for asylum would have many negative consequences. Frum is basically upbeat. Trump must go, and the US must react to this near disaster. He offers the following solutions: Publish tax returns; Kill the filibuster; Make DC a state; Adopt a modern voting rights act; Deter gerrymandering; and Depoliticize the cops. He argues that better immigration control can unite the nation. He also goes on to argue that the US must address climate change. His suggestions are worth reading, and are far more plausible than AOCs Green New Deal (AOC argues for more state ownership which puts the regulators and the regulated under the same roof). He also argues that China needs to be handled better. They have not been playing the game according to the rules. Fun Fact: The Grand Old Party (GOP… Republicans) is younger that the Democratic Party. In his final words, Frum argues that the GOP is so out of touch that it must reform or die. He makes no bones about Trump. He absolutely deserved impeachment. And he absolutely deserves to feel the full weight of the law when he leaves office. America can come out of all this a better nation. The first step is to remove Trump from office. Like most books of this type, this was a quick and easy read. It is insightful and hopeful at the same time as it is gloomy and reflective of the nation's exhaustion. 2,000 Years of Disbelief; James A. Haught; 1996; Prometheus Books; 324 pgs, bibliography, index18/7/2020 I have always enjoyed a good pithy observation about religion. For thousands of years, very brave men and women have stood up to the BS and said "I do not believe." This can get you killed, even today. Here is a sampling of the books contents: quotes from great thinkers and skeptics through the ages. A Prometheus book, of course! Euripides (400 BCE): He was a wise man who originated the idea of God. Plato (300 BCE): He was a wise man who invented God. Tacitus (100 CE): Christianity is a pestilent superstition. Lucretius (99-55 BCE): We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592): Men of simple understanding, little inquisitiveness and little instructed, make good Christians. Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The more contrary to reason the divine mystery, so much more it must be believed for the glory of God. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): Religions are like pills, that must be swallowed whole without chewing. Theology is the kingdom of darkness. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677): [Believers] are but triflers who, when they cannot explain a thing, run back to the will of God; this is, truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance. John Locke (1632-1704): Every sect , as far as reason will help them, makes use of it (religion) gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, "It is a matter of faith, and above reason." People who are born to orthodoxy imbibe the opinions of their country or party and never question their truth. Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755): If triangles made a god, they would give him three sides. Voltaire (1694-1778): Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one. Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense. Sect and error are synonymous. Most of the great men of this world live as if they were atheists. Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. But what shall we substitute in its place? you say. What? A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my relatives. I tell you to rid yourselves of this beast, and you ask me what you shall put in its place? If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated. David Hume (1711-1776): The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. If there is a soul, it is as mortal as the body. By priests I understand only the pretenders to power and dominion, and to a superior sanctity of character, distinct from virtue and good morals. Denis Diderot (1713-1784): Men will never be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest. Skepticism is the first step toward truth. Edward Gibbon (1737-1974): The various forms of worship that prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. Hitherto the weight of supernatural belief inclines against the Protestants; and many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God, than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant. William Blake (1757-1827): Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion. Claude Helvetius (1715-1771): A man who believes he eats his God we do not call mad; a man who says he is Jesus Christ we call mad. Baron d'Holbach (1723-1771): Ignorance of natural causes created the gods, and priestly imposters made them terrible. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Thomas Paine (1737-1809): All national institutions of churches, whether Christian, Jewish or Turkish, appear to me, no other than human inventions, setup to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. Priests and conjurors are of the same trade. The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing, it rests on no principles, it proceeds by no authorities, it has no data, it can demonstrate nothing. One good school master is of more use than a hundred priests. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): In every country, in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the depot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. James Madison (1751-1836): Religious shackles and debilitates the mind and it unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded purpose. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): I am surrounded by priests that repeat incessantly that their kingdom is not of this world, and yet they lay hands on everything they can get. Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822): If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced. The educated man ceases to be religious. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them. The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly present to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865): Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. Charles Darwin (1809-1882): For my part, I would as soon be descended from [a] baboon … as from a savage who delights in torturing his enemies … treats his wives like slaves … and is haunted by the grossest of superstitions. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902): I found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of women. I have been to many of the ancient cathedrals -- grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these alters to an unknown god. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895): I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity I can afford. The Bible account of the creation is a preposterous fable. The foundation of morality is to … give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): On may say with one's lips: "I believe that God is one, and also three" -- but no one can believe it, because the words have no sense. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899): Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once required to be an infidel, to brave the Church, her racks, her fagots, her dungeons, her tongues of fire--to defy and scorn her heaven and hell--her devil and he God. The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness. Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! The church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down. Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain …. Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Mark Twain (1835-1910): Faith is believing what you know ain't so. (Pudd'nhead Wilson) Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal, He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven. Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914): Christian: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with his life of sin. Clairvoyant: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to the patron -- namely that he is a blockhead. Religion: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): Jesus died too soon. He would have repudiated his doctrine if he had lived to my age. Pierre Laplace (1749-1827): Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis. (He was asked why his book Celestial Mechanics did not mention god.) Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870): Catholics and Protestants, while engaged in burning and murdering each other, could cooperate in enslaving their black brethren. Victor Hugo (1802-1885): There is in every village a torch: the schoolmaster-- and an extinguisher: the priest. Emile Zola (1840-1902): Civilization will not attain its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest. Elbert Hubbard (1815-1915): … All religions were made and formulated by men … What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. Clarence Darrow (1857-1938): Every man knows when his life began… If I did not exist in the past, why should I, or could I, exist in the future. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956): The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore. God is the immediate refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos. Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing. The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to effect that religious opinions should be respected. Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980): Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him. Isaac Asimov (1920-1992): I have never in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural. Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991): If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you; and you an go on with your life. It wasn't until I was beginning to do 'Star Trek' that the subject of religion arose again. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have to have a chaplain on board the Enterprise . I replied "No. I don't". |
AuthorLee Moller is a life-long skeptic and atheist and the author of The God Con. Archives
January 2024
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