Friedrich Hayek said history would look back at the 20th century as an age of superstition, a time when man thought he knew more than he did, that in doing away with what it considered superstitions the Enlightenment created new superstitions. His examples include the notions that one can have freedom without responsibility, that political solutions exist for most problems and that a government can and will manage a society for the benefit of all.

Richard Weaver added two things to this discussion. He stated our troubles began when thinkers abandoned belief in Universals (universal laws) and he added that the essence of a society (its soul) shows up in everything it does, its art, its architecture, the food it eats, and the way people relate to one another. In attempting to understand why supposedly civilized man fought two brutal world wars he concluded we were sentimental and barbaric and had an obscene news media.

Eric Voegelin defined science as a search for truth in all the realms of being, and said we have erred in calling unscientific any discipline that does not use the empiricism that works so well for the hard sciences. Properly defined, the scientific method should be whatever works for the subject being investigated, whatever provides clarification. The proper methodology for political science, which was his field, must consider the spiritual as well as the material. History shows all societies establishing their rules and laws through religion, and understanding themselves, knowing their essence by their consideration of both the spiritual and material worlds. All have failed in the past and always the first step was abandoning their religion or adopting a false one, which essentially left their people not knowing who they were.

In his book, The Theme Is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans argues that political freedom developed in the West because in Christendom, unlike other cultures, rulers were no longer the word of God, but had to obey God like everybody else. While still powerful, they remained responsible to God and the Law. Our idea of constitutional government, that is government restrained by a fixed set of rules, evolved from this.

Robert Nisbet said u201Cthe quest for community springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature — needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.” These needs have been satisfied throughout history by communities like the family, church, neighborhood, and local fraternal, ethnic, and voluntary associations. For two centuries the state has attempted to displace and absorb these “intermediate associations,” and so far as it has been successful they have been destroyed and a cult of individualism developed. This individualism has ” . . .come to mean only isolation, loneliness, disconnectedness, alienation and despair . . .” and people vulnerable because they believe an all-powerful state can provide the community they are seeking.

If there is any merit to these ideas, that we are superstitious, sentimental and barbaric, think it unnecessary to consider the spiritual world, have forgotten the origin of our freedoms, and are seeking community in an omnicompetent state, all the while being incredibly skilled at building machines, some of them destructive, our problems today, our wars and our family breakdown are easy to understand. They can be seen as the consequence of adopting secular belief based on materialistic assumptions, and giving up our "intermediate institutions." The more this is done, the less consideration will be given to the spirit of the individual and the spirit of society, and since both are necessary for a society to survive, the more likely it will be to fail.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

He understands that the earth is living within an Ice Age, (1—2 million years) in which it experiences Global Cooling Events every 1,000 to 1,500 years. Ice cores have demonstrated this. The theory refers to these events as "extinction boundaries," periods in which cosmic rays from supernova produce short intense periods of radiation at the planet’s surface followed by long, less intense periods (hundreds of years). After it passes this phase our Earth will experience a long period of calm (maybe 80 million years) in which life will flourish better than it has in the past. Then as our solar system passes through a spiral arm of the Milky Way we will experience another "extinction boundary." This theory is accepted by astronomers and is the basis for his discussion.

He suggests that modern Global Warming theory is only a few decades old, that billions have been spent without turning up a strong support for it and evidence has been building up to reject it. It has been taken over by antihuman ideologists and politicians and made into a fear-based religious belief. In true science, evidence is found that supports theories; this one is no longer scientific at all. The Earth is presently experiencing a warming trend caused by a supernova, and we are coming out of the Little Ice Age that began in the early 1300′s.

The theory states that mankind has caused carbon dioxide levels to rise, which raises global temperatures uncontrollably. The increase in carbon dioxide is true but the fact that water evaporates, rising above the carbon dioxide and releasing heat into space is ignored.

Carl Sagan theorized that the elevated temperature of Venus (850 degrees) was brought about by a runaway global warming process and suggested this is happening here. He assumed that the sunlight on Venus was trapped by the atmosphere of the planet and ignored the fact that the energy heating that planet’s atmosphere includes radiated thermal energy released from the planetu2018s interior. The elevated temperature on Venus is not due solely to solar radiation but also to magma-released heat. The carbon dioxide level on Venus is 96.5%. On Earth it has risen from 0.028% to 0.036%. It is a real stretch to compare the Earth with Venus.

Another element focuses on the destruction of forests and pollution from factories and automobiles. To understand this one must realize that forest acreage has been expanding and pollution levels have been declining, particularly in North America. And much of carbon dioxide action takes place in the oceans.

385 million years ago Earth had an atmosphere with 10 times the present carbon dioxide levels. Those elevated levels did not produce runaway global warming then; there is no reason to assume they would do so today. Plant life thrives under enriched carbon dioxide levels and is responding to this increase.

To summarize, a strong link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures has not been established, the idea of runaway warming is not supported, comparing us to the planet Venus is inappropriate, the impact of the oceans has not been investigated adequately, forests are growing and pollution is coming under control. Global warming (climate change) is natural, is not caused by man, and is something to be lived with.

Note: the Auburn-Opelika News fired me as a columnist for expressing such politically incorrect views. But I have just a slightly larger readership on the worldwide LRC.

George
Crispin [send him mail] is a retired
businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

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Crispin Archives

Nevertheless there are several things wrong with his critique. I was trying to present an accurate picture of our energy situation. There is no doubt that energy is a problem, oil in particular, but it is one that can be managed. It is obvious that the world has ample oil and there would be no problem where it not for the dishonesty and incompetence of the corporate world that specializes in petroleum, the genuinely outstanding dishonesty and incompetence of governments everywhere, and the truly remarkable behavior of environmentalists desperate to create difficult problems or problems for which there is no solution. There are good odds we face a dismal future so long as we acquiesce in government interference in markets; oil being a striking example. There are even stronger odds that we will exacerbate this dismal picture so long as foreign policy decisions, including those of energy, are resolved by sending fleets and armies around the world and bombing civilians indiscriminately.

If U.S. oil production continues its 30-year decline there is nothing wrong with importing more oil. In a trading world it is foolish to attempt to be self-sufficient, and not buy goods where they are the cheapest. But the forecast of a decline is not necessarily true.

He makes a serious charge when he claims that "inorganic energy sources are considered to be "fringe" science. This ignores that using this "fringe" science Russia has gone from being nearly out of oil 50 years ago to producing on a par with Saudi Arabia and ourselves today. They call it the modern Russian-Ukrainian abyssal theory and see basement rock below the earth’s crust as the source of petroleum. The Russians have long since shown that the conventional wisdom, in this case the belief that oil is produced from the detritus of plants and microscopic animals, is questionable if not actually wrong. His "fringe" science comment makes him sound very much like someone stuck on a Kuhnian paradigm, unable to accept new ideas.

It works for the Russians; they claim it will work anywhere. The trick is to not to be too concerned about sedimentary rock and to seek out drill sites where the earth’s crust is thinnest. It is expensive and since our oil companies have ample reserves today, they are reluctant to spend money now for future benefit, and so long as they remain hung up on the false theory of biotic oil they see no point to it.

Our government, in collaboration with big oil (it keeps the price up) and attempting to please environmentalists, appears to be sitting on vast oil fields in the Beaufort Sea. The Gull Island field alone is estimated to contain resources as large as those of Saudi Arabia, probably of abiotic oil that has already migrated upward (upwelling is the expression oil people use), but no one is permitted to explore it, to find out.

It is clear that if we accept the abiotic (inorganic) theory, stick to free market principles and establish the unhampered market as best we can, energy sufficiency can be established worldwide. The oil is there. All it needs is technology and the will to use it.

George
Crispin [send him mail] is a retired
businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

George
Crispin Archives

My education on the subject of crude oil continues, but not without difficulty. Academic writers, who are notorious for making papers hard to follow, have nothing on what writers in the oil industry routinely turn out.

Many years ago I recall my company getting a successful cost information program functional, only to discover that the last thing management wanted was to know what things were costing. Their thinking went something like this. If we have accurate reporting on this job, which is going to be quite profitable (and it was), there is no telling who will learn about it, to our detriment. Whatever you think of this management technique, that particular organization (it was a joint venture) succeeded in losing in a few years most of the profit it had made since it began.

Something similar goes on in the business of producing and marketing petroleum. Many people do not want the world to know the facts; there are too many secrets to be kept, axes to be ground, reputations to be maintained, and bureaucracies, government and corporate, to be pacified. Then there is the propensity of so many to actually look forward to the disaster they imagine will occur when the world "runs out of oil." And one must suspect that the oil companies believe convincing people we have a problem is a great way to persuade them to accept high gasoline prices.

One particular feeble discussion suggests that the deep drilling required to tap abiotic oil fields, as the Russians are doing, is too expensive. The only solution is for us to take whatever oil fields we feel the need for. Those making this argument appear to assume that making war, supporting fleets at sea and in the air and killing people is done at no cost. Their thinking must be that if we keep the populace in a state of nervousness over the possibility of running out, if we can forecast food shortages and starvation, we have a great opportunity to establish big governments with armies and lots of cushy government jobs, as we resolve the problems of the world, real or imagined, all caused by a lack of that oil. There is now ample evidence that oil exists or is being produced in the earth’s mantle to migrate up to the crust where we can get at it. There is ample evidence that crude oil does not originate from biologic life and is not a fossil fuel like coal. And there is ample evidence that there is lot of it.

The earth’s crust averages some 9 miles in thickness; under the oceans it is much thinner averaging about 3 miles. Where the upward movement is too slow to satisfy us, deep drilling is the answer and Russia has become one of the world’s top producers using this technology. In 1951 Russian scientists formalized the Russian Ukrainian deep abiotic theory of the origin of oil. It suggests that crude oil either consists of primordial compounds or evolves from primordial elements located below the crust of the earth. Having been debated fiercely for 20 years in peer-reviewed papers (all in Russian of course) by Russian scientists it is not longer a theory. Using it Russian drillers have located deep oil, developed deep wells and are marketing abiotic oil to the world today, from a seemingly limitless supply.

The refusal of the oil industry in the West to abandon their scientifically unproven theory of a biologic origin for oil for one that continues to find oil is a serious mistake. Let’s hope the industry wakes up.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

George Crispin Archives

My education on the subject of crude oil continues, but not without difficulty. Academic writers, who are notorious for making papers hard to follow, have nothing on what writers in the oil industry routinely turn out.

Many years ago I recall my company getting a successful cost information program functional, only to discover that the last thing management wanted was to know what things were costing. Their thinking went something like this. If we have accurate reporting on this job, which is going to be quite profitable (and it was), there is no telling who will learn about it, to our detriment. Whatever you think of this management technique, that particular organization (it was a joint venture) succeeded in losing in a few years most of the profit it had made since it began.

Something similar goes on in the business of producing and marketing petroleum. Many people do not want the world to know the facts; there are too many secrets to be kept, axes to be ground, reputations to be maintained, and bureaucracies, government and corporate, to be pacified. Then there is the propensity of so many to actually look forward to the disaster they imagine will occur when the world "runs out of oil." And one must suspect that the oil companies believe convincing people we have a problem is a great way to persuade them to accept high gasoline prices.

One particular feeble discussion suggests that that the deep drilling required to tap abiotic oil fields, as the Russians are doing, is too expensive. The only solution is for us to take whatever oil fields we feel the need for. Those making this argument appear to assume that making war, supporting fleets at sea and in the air and killing people is done at no cost. Their thinking must be that if we an keep the populace in a state of nervousness over the possibility of running out, if we can forecast food shortages and starvation, we have a great opportunity to establish big governments with armies and lots of cushy government jobs, as we resolve the problems of the world, real or imagined, all caused by a lack of that oil. There is now ample evidence that oil exists or is being produced in the earth's mantle to migrate up to the crust where we can get at it. There is ample evidence that crude oil does not originate from biologic life and is not a fossil fuel like coal. And there is ample evidence that there is lot of it.

The earth's crust averages some 9 miles in thickness; under the oceans it is much thinner averaging about 3 miles. Where the upward movement is too slow to satisfy us, deep drilling is the answer and Russia has become one of the world's top producers using this technology. In 1951 Russian scientists formalized the Russian Ukrainian deep abiotic theory of the origin of oil. It suggests that crude oil either consists of primordial compounds or evolves from primordial elements located below the crust of the earth. Having been debated fiercely for 20 years in peer reviewed papers (all in Russian of course) by Russian scientists it is not longer a theory. Using it Russian drillers have located deep oil, developed deep wells and are marketing abiotic oil to the world today, from a seemingly limitless supply.

The refusal of the oil industry in the West to abandon their scientifically unproven theory of a biologic origin for oil for one that continues to find oil is a serious mistake. Let's hope the industry wakes up.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

George Crispin Archives

Wells, a holder of two Ph.D.s, one from Berkeley and one from Yale, is a ranking member of the Intelligent Design movement, the scientific attempt to find evidence that Universe was planned without asserting either the identity or the intent of the planner. Darwinism is his longstanding interest. With each chapter of the book, Darwinian evolution looks less like science and more like myth or, at the least, a paradigm in need of improvement.

Marxism has been proven a mistake. Freud’s psychoanalysis didn’t work. Now there is an argument that the speed of light is not a constant. Science changes positions all the time but Darwinism doesn’t budge. Anyone questioning it is instantly classified as a nut case, or if a scientist, one who can forget about establishment funding. Why is this? The system normally works well and, and except for Darwinism, science has accommodated much. Maybe it is because the "Darwinian high priesthood" stands to lose too much that they are allowed to get away with it. Then again, maybe they enjoy browbeating Christians (which is foolish, plenty of Christians have accommodated Darwinian beliefs) and they have hung in for a long time.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the expression paradigm to scientific discussion. He claims to regret using the word, but in any case he helps resolve our problem with his emphasis on the reluctance of scientists to be critical of an existing paradigm. He describes scientists as concentrating on verifying and improving the existing paradigm, until finally enough anomalies and contradictions accumulate that it breaks down to be replaced, hence a paradigm shift. This is nothing new; it is what we have all been taught. What matters is his pointing out that rather than critically examining existing paradigms, which is what they ought to be doing, many scientists seek to justify them. This may explain how Darwinist dogma remains respectable.

If it were true that we are nothing but accidental creatures, mere animals, endowed with neither purpose nor rights, then anything would be OK. There would be no standards, and therefore no way to judge. But it is not true. Man, animal or not, has a soul, consciousness if you like, and cannot live successfully without spirituality. It is what leads us to notions of dignity, purpose and rights. Materialism’s official creed, “If it isn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,” is not acceptable, and also explains our murderous past century. Without the restraints of the spiritual world we find people corrupted, behaving in accordance with Acton’s aphorism, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Now the superstitious scientist because of his superior knowledge in his own discipline refuses to accept restraints and dogmatically defends Darwin. More than the rest of us, scientists, with their recognized ability to rationalize and redefine, need the guidance of the spiritual world. They need to recognize the materialist conclusions of Darwinian evolution as the superstitions that they are and search for a paradigm that recognizes a place for the spiritual.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

Nevertheless, its benefits are obvious. Since science is always learning and changing, it doesn’t insist its conclusions are final, even thought they work remarkably well. But even if not obtaining absolute truth, it can lay claim to improving our knowledge, and in so doing, give us ever better approximations of the truth, a tightening grasp of physical reality. It is nonsense to claim, as has been done, that the insights of the scientist are a social construction. Of course social factors operate, scientists are human, but conclusions are real. “Science is socially influenced but is not socially constructed.” After the scientific community has thrashed through countless theories and finds agreement, something about reality is known. It is the agreement that counts.

From Newton’s laws (mass, distance and time are constant) to those of Einstein (C, the speed of light is the only constant) seems like a big jump. From Newton (things can be determined) to Heisenberg (things can only be determined probably) also seems like a big jump. This is why Thomas Kuhn says paradigms differ so much they are incommensurable. He would say Newton and Einstein couldn’t talk to one another. But this is simply not true. Einstein’s laws successfully annexed Newton’s laws. Both were talking about inertia, the resistance of a body to having its state of motion changed. As scientists learn, they are not asserting the final truth, only an improvement on the truth they had. More importantly they are emphasizing the “astonishing fruitfulness” of basic scientific theories.

Newtonian physics was not abandoned when the planet Uranus did not travel as predicted; eventually with better telescopes, the planet Neptune was found and this accounted for the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus. Newton’s laws suggested an extra planet to cope with the orbit of Mercury, but there was none; it took General Relativity theory to explain Mercury’s orbit.

Michael Polanyi pointed out that "objective impersonal" physical science is carried out by people, and only by people. Its knowledge is personal and is based on acts of personal judgment; its pursuit requires commitment to a personal point of view. We all know “more than we can tell." Because of this character of personal knowledge there cannot be one definition of the scientific method. Yet scientific conclusions can be reached because a community of scientists has a universal intent.

Physical science begins by telling us to respect the nature of whatever we are investigating, that what is suitable for one discipline may not be suitable for another. It is our personal knowledge that enables us to decide what is right. This is critical because it recognizes the ultimate "unspecifiability of the scientific method," and it means that physical science is only mildly different from other forms of rational inquiry. It requires intellectual daring, a willingness to stand corrected, and unspecified acts of judgment. Its superiority lies in the openness and objectivity of its testing and ease of repetitive checking. Its best explanations are marked by empirical adequacy, accordance with general principles, economy, elegance, long-lasting fruitfulness, and openness to change.

It should be a part of everyone’s worldview, but its methods can only lead to error when applied to other disciplines. Then it becomes scientism.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

The learned experience of a society changes things much faster than natural selection.

The notion that animals have the same rights as humans is nonsense.

Everyone is owed a fair share. This might work if everyone saw fairness the same way. The free market, where one is rewarded according to what one contributes, as judged by one’s fellows, does it best. Best doesn’t mean equal.

It is a mistake to believe natural resources will ever run out. Doomsayers always compare current consumption with proven reserves. In any market a shortage of a good leads to a price rise, which leads to three things, consumption falling, substitutes being used, and improved technology (increased reserves). And yes, our earth is finite but our sun will be a red giant before we use up the natural resources of the earth, most of which, with the possible exception of fossil fuels, are recyclable. And if our fuels are not fossil, but were formed with the earth they will undoubtedly last until our world approaches the red giant stage.

Man is blamed for endangering the ecological system and bio-diversity. It is true that in the short run we have made some messes, but wealthy societies clean them up. It is hubristic to believe man can upset ecological stability in the long run; or maintain complete biodiversity in any run.

It is unnecessarily cruel the way we raise chickens and fatten hogs and cattle.

It is wrong to see global warming as a danger. There is probably nothing to do except cope with it when and if it arrives. We cannot guess whether its impact will be good or bad.

Pesticides are dangerous. This is wrong. Today most are biodegradable, and we cannot get along without them.

The earth is becoming crowded with people. This is nonsense. Count the people you meet driving from Albany to Buffalo NY. Population growth is a problem. More nonsense. The growth rate is falling today and world population will stabilize at about 11 billion, better clothed and fed than ever. Scientists share the blame for us not having a rational debate about this. Science must be involved but scientists must recognize that they cannot be ethically neutral, and ought to be very careful about being trapped in a politically correct paradigm.

It is wrong to claim that in a free society many of the most effective political levers are fiscal. In a free society decisions are made or discovered in the market. In any case, thanks to the influence of our intellectuals, the West no longer has a free society. To think that “scientific” solutions existed for political problems, was unrealistic, more correctly, hopelessly unrealistic, then it was further mistaken to believe that a society could be managed from the top for the benefit of all or even managed from the top at all. This has been a superstitious era. It has brought us great material advancement, a murderous century and alienated and disconnected people.

The good news is that societies can turn around. Chance, providence, or individual strong wills may alter their direction. If we recognize free market competition as the co-operative system that it is, then cooperate in competing, do not become pushovers, never initiate aggression, do not expect the worst, but do not be surprised by it, the success of our societies can be assured. Otherwise . . . .

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

The current generally accepted physical theory tells us the universe is still expanding from the force of the Big Bang, as the force of gravity tries to pull it together. If gravity wins, the Big Bang will end with the Big Crunch. If expansion prevails, galaxies will continue to fly apart, as individually they collapse into Black Holes. The time period is tens of billions of years. Our sun has been steady for 5 billion years and can be expected to last another 5 billion. Then with its hydrogen gone, it will expand into a red giant, larger than our orbit, before collapsing into a white dwarf.

So what is going to happen to us? He says “it is time to consider the possibility that it is to God alone that the ultimate care of life belongs.” As a believing Christian, he accepts that we matter to God forever, that the soul is the information-bearing pattern of the body, which will be dissolved at death when the body decays, to be remembered by God and recreated by Him in his ultimate act of resurrection. Because God cares for the universe it too, will have its resurrection. In fact the two resurrections are one. "It is a wonderful, deeply mysterious and exciting vision of hope."

Since empirical science is restricted to being a quantitative account of matter and motion, it excludes questions of value and meaning. This is sound investigative strategy and it does not imply that value and meaning do not exist; it does mean that reality as a whole is not being examined. But while value is absent in the scientific report, it exists in the scientific method. Successful theories are always characterized by their being expressible in terms of "beautiful" mathematical equations. Therefore, beauty exists in empirical science because it has taught us so much, because it has led us to the conviction that these equations describe a true aspect of reality, and because it provides the experience of wonder at the deeply satisfying framework of what we learn.

Science can describe vibrations and neural responses but not the "mysterious reality of music." It cannot tell us what we get from a painting or other work of art. Beauty remains mysterious but is very real. The physical world that scientists discover may just exist, may just be there, but it is in the understanding of it by man that its meaning, value and beauty lie. Something real is seen, an insight into the way things are.

The same holds for our ethical intuitions. No matter what the cultural background or what the relativists claim, love is better than hate, truth is better than falsehood, and torturing children is wrong. Religious persecution of any kind is wrong. These are insights into the way things are. Questioning the belief that God exacts infinite punishment for finite sins is a moral advance.

Any account of reality must see the real world as one of universal laws of physics, beauty and ethics. Value and beauty are everywhere. Behind the scientific order is the mind of the Creator; behind the beauty we see the Creator’s joy in creation; behind our intuitions of morality is the discernment of the good and perfect will of the Creator. Polkinghorne answers many questions with his closing statement, I believe that the grandest unified theory, to use the scientist’s slang, the GUT, is provided by belief in God.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

What should matter also is the fact that no post-war Russian government has adequately acknowledged these dreadful murders; Russians themselves don’t seem to be aware of them; there are those who would like a Stalin back; President Putin appears to be just another thug like his predecessors, and our news media doesn’t see this as a problem. The "sainted" Gorbachev, much admired by the Nobel Prize committee, managed to carry on the killing tradition in the Baltics before he lost his job; now Putin continues it in Chechnya. So successful is the propaganda of the Russians and our left-wing media that few seem aware of this or of the nearly 7 million that were killed in the camps after the Stalin era.

Senator Moynihan said, "The world is a dangerous place." This is very true and the attitudes of our intellectuals add to the danger. Professor Steve Cullenberg of the University of California at Riverside was able to claim, "I think it is an exciting time to be a Marxist." One wonders where these academics park their brains. They are the people who teach our young and advise our governments. What may be more important, and a real worry is the way they continue their dislike of free markets (the ethical system) and worship of Socialism (the system based on envy and greed). Until we and the world learn to recognize what a murderous system the Marxist-Leninist form of Socialism was, the strong likelihood that any socialist system will become the same (read Hayek’s Why The Worst Get On Top) and the horrendous risks any society runs when a government is inadequately restrained, we can look forward to a miserable time in the future.

R. J. Rummel coined the word democide to describe a government killing its own citizens just because they were there, not executing them as punishment for a crime, but just killing them. He defined it as the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. The last century was big on this, Socialist governments in particular, but no government came even close to killing as many as the Russians, who epitomized the Marxist-Leninist form of Socialism. The low estimate of the numbers of their people killed by the Russian government during the Soviet era is 24 million; the high estimate is 127 million. Rummel settled for 62 million. Even the low estimate is way above the 15 million Russian battle deaths that occurred during the war.

Like any large organization a government occasionally gets things right, inadvertently or not, and Bush’s speech in Riga was no exception. He was correct to own up to our obvious blunders at Yalta, and he was correct to remind Putin of the need for Russia to own up to its Soviet past and regularize its relations with its immediate neighbors. Of course he didn’t do it to Putin’s face. It was much easier done, if a bit cowardly, while he was in the Baltics since they, like Chechnya, have suffered much from the Russian government, and have little reason to respect it.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

Since I had taken some of my information from Thomas Gold and his book The Deep Hot Biosphere, I thought to defend myself with a brief history of his theory that most petroleum or the material from which it is formed was primordial, that is it was created deep inside the earth when the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Then I discovered that the theory might not have originated with him. He was one of the few Western scientists who could read Russian. And he discovered that Soviet scientists were familiar with theory and were using it to develop wells. It was actually quite old, but had been totally ignored by Western scientists until Gold showed some interest. Many peer reviewed papers and discussions of the theory by scientists of several disciplines were available but all in Russian. Gold was the only man in the West with the necessary scientific background who could read them.

In 1946 Stalin, one of the leading killers of all time but no fool, recognized that Soviet Russia was short of oil, particularly if he was going to successfully wage war on the world. At that time the Baku fields in Russia were running dry and most Soviet territory appeared to not contain oil. His assignment to his scientific community was to learn all that was possible about petroleum and its origins. "By 1951, what has been called the modern Russian — Ukrainian Theory Of Deep Abiotic Petroleum Origins" was born (maybe born again would be more accurate), and debated, studied and peer reviewed for twenty years, all in Russian of course, and completely ignored by the West.

It has long since been much more than a theory and for twenty years Russian drillers have successfully brought in super deep wells using it. The deepest exploratory hole went to 40,000 feet. Russia, once regarded as having little potential, is now, along with ourselves and Saudi Arabia one of the top three oil producers in the world. There are more than 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district, all producing from crystalline basement rock. 90 petroleum fields have been developed in western Siberia. "11 major and one giant field have been developed in the Dnieper-Donets basin;" there are 20 wells in Viet Nam producing at 17,000 feet in areas that Western experts considered not worth exploring.

This might seem of little import, were it not for the fact that many people insist that much of the world will shortly be out of oil (a true irresponsible fairy tale), which will make it necessary for countries to seize oil fields. The world is not running out of oil and typically anyone owning an oil field is interested in finding a market for its product.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

He begins by stating the popular view of our environmental situation, what he calls the Litany. We all know it. The environment is in poor shape — our resources are running out — the population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat — the air and water are becoming more polluted — the planet’s species are becoming extinct in large numbers, we kill off more than 40,000 each year — the forests are disappearing — fish stocks are collapsing — and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, and we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world’s eco- system is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.

He was surprised to discover the available evidence does not back up this "Litany," and to realize that he had accepted it. He concluded there must be a doomsday vision anchored in our thinking that can easily lead us into error. What we need is a clear description of the whole world, including the bad and the good, the successes and the failures, and for this we need global statistics. The small part of the world that we see cannot show a balanced picture.

His key idea is that we ought not to let the environmental organizations, business lobbyists and the media be alone in presenting positions. It is important that we do our best to know the real state of the world, most particularly because of the strange and powerful status of environmentalism. The Litany has been so much accepted as the gospel that anyone who disagrees with it is immediately damned. Hence Lomborg, a member of the Left, has been accused of being a messenger for the Right, when all he wants is to present the best possible knowledge. In so doing it is possible he leans a bit far in his arguments. This is not justified by the routine dishonesty of environmentalists, but it is something we need to know.

He suggests that those who give us the negative news are researchers, organizations and the media, and since they are unlikely to change we should take their information with a grain of salt. The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote "that the humor of blaming the present and admiring the past is strongly rooted in human nature." Sal Baron wrote in his history of the Jews that prophets who made optimistic predictions were automatically considered false prophets. Overcoming this built-in bias requires an effort that all of us are obliged to make.

The rapid growth in population began around 1950 and will end about 2050. "It is not that people suddenly started breeding like rabbits; it is that they stopped dying like flies." The rate of population growth peaked in the 90′s and is dropping now. Food production per acre is increasing. Natural resources, probably including oil, cannot be used up. Air and water are becoming less polluted. Man does not cause much of global warming; best guess is it is the result of solar activity. In 1950 the average woman in the developing countries had 6 children; now she has less than three.

Life and health on this planet have vastly improved, and there is every reason to believe this can continue.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

Bill Baird, who is eminently more qualified than myself to comment on things scientific, saw fit to condescend to Thomas Gold (yes, he is an astronomer, not a geologist) whose writings provided some of what Bill called the "irresponsible fairy tales" of my column on the increasing availability of petroleum. I thought to defend my position by identifying Gold and quoting comments others have made about him and his book The Deep Hot Biosphere.

Thomas Gold is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an Emeritus Professor of Physics at Cornell University. Regarded as one of the most creative and wide-ranging scientists of his generation, he has taught at Cambridge University and Harvard, and for 20 years was the Director of the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research.

His book sets forth some truly wild and far out theories. First, it proposes that Earth supports a subterranean organic domain of natural gas and petroleum that is larger than the biosphere that we occupy on the surface, then it suggests that this domain is full of heat loving bacteria that live on the natural gas and petroleum. And thirdly and most importantly for us it puts forth the idea the idea that most hydrocarbons on Earth are not "fossil fuels" but part of the primordial "stuff" from which Earth itself was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. The Deep Hot Biosphere may seem far out and hard to accept when first read, but a growing body of evidence based on the indisputable stature and seriousness of Thomas Gold as a scientist supports its theories. In this book he comes across as a brilliant and boldly original thinker, increasingly a rarity in modern science, as he develops revolutionary conclusions about the fundamental workings of our planet, the origins of life on Earth, the nature of earthquakes, and even the likelihood of life on other planets.

The Times of London called him one of the world’s most original minds. Hans Bethe, Nobel Laureate, said, "You have given many very good arguments, and I am convinced." USA Today suggested that Gold might have grown tired of tilting at windmills long ago had he not destroyed so many. Nature magazine said "You have to appreciate his fresh and comprehensive approach. . . . [This book] demonstrates that scientific debate is alive and well." Stephen Jay Gould referred to him as one of America’s most iconoclastic scientists.

Stephen Howlett says this [book] puts the oil shortage scam on short notice. Jerald R Lovell adds "This book is more than a mere milestone. If approached with an open mind, it will revolutionize much traditional thinking in the areas of energy, seismology, and the life sciences. Professor Gold is an astrophysicist of high repute, who applies his excellent, freethinking mind and impeccable logic to disciplines outside his chosen field with astonishing success." This disturbs traditionalists and adherents of scientific orthodoxy no end, especially when Dr. Gold, more often than not, has been proven correct. Gold has always taken the position that a critical attitude is clearly required of every seeker of truth, and that one must criticize both old ideas and new ones.

In seeking to understand Bill’s disagreements with my positions, I wonder if, like many in the scientific world, he may be trapped in what Thomas Kuhn refers to as the current paradigm, where contrary to taking a critical attitude, which is what scientists should do, they develop a tendency to discard whatever does not fit currently accepted theory, especially politically correct currently accepted theory.

George Crispin [send him mail] is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative in Auburn, Alabama.

This
really interested some scientists. Thomas Gold, astronomer and professor
emeritus of Cornell held for years that oil is actually renewable
primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultra
hot conditions and tremendous pressures. This substance migrates
upward picking up bacteria that attack it making it appear to have
an organic origin, i.e., come from dinosaurs and vegetation. As
best I have found so far Russian scientists support his position,
at least that petroleum is of primordial origin. There is now plenty
of evidence around proving the presence of methane in our universe.
It is easy to see it as a part of the formation of the earth. Under
the right conditions of temperature and pressure, it converts to
more complex hydrocarbons.

Roger
Andersen, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia's
Energy Research Center proposed studying the behavior of this reservoir.
The underwater landscape around Eugene Island is weird, cut with
faults and fissures that belch gas and oil. The field is operated
by PennzEnergy Co. Andersen proposed to study the action of the
sea bottom around the mountain and the field at its top and persuaded
the U S Dept of Energy to ante up ten million which was matched
by a consortium of oil giants including Chevron, Exxon, and Tex
Corp. This work began about the time 3-D seismic technology was
introduced to oil exploration. Anderson was able to stack 3D images
resulting in a 4D image that showed the reservoir in 3 spatial dimensions
and enabled researchers to track the movement of oil. Their most
stunning find was a deep fault at a bottom corner of the computer
scan that showed oil literally gushing in. "We could see the
stream,” says Andersen. "It wasn't even debated that it was
happening."

Work
continued for five years until funds ran out and they were unable
to continue. With the world having 40 years of proven reserves in
hand it is difficult to interest the major oil producers in much
exploration, let alone something done merely for research, and so
far from the current accepted theory of a fossil origin for oil.

Similar
occurrences have been seen at other Gulf Of Mexico fields, at the
Cook Inlet oil field, at oil fields in Uzbekistan, and it is possible
this accounts for the longevity of the Saudi Arabian fields where
few new finds have been made, yet reserves have doubled while the
fields have been exploited mercilessly for 50 years.

Not
only can the doom and gloomers not show us running out of the natural
resources we recycle, but now there appears to be good odds of a
limitless supply of petroleum working its way up to where we can
capture it.

A
caveat: Gold's theory is not yet accepted by all scientists, probably
all the more reason to trust it.

April
6, 2005

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

This
is considerably at odds with the ideas of our founders. The full
title of the book is The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham
Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War.

As
DiLorenzo documents, the war was not fought to end slavery; if it
was, one wonders why a war was necessary? More than a dozen countries,
including the territorial possessions of the British, French, Portuguese,
and Spanish, ended slavery peacefully during the nineteenth century.

Abraham
Lincoln's direct statements indicated his support for slavery; He
defended slave owners' right to own their property, saying that
“when they remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves],
I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would
give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives” (in
indicating support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850). He also
admitted in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: “The
original emancipation proclamation has no legal justification, except
as a military measure.” Secretary of State William Seward acknowledged
that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states
in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states
not in rebellion.

The
true costs of the war were not only the 620,000 battlefield-related
deaths (and 50,000 civilian deaths) out of a national population
of 30 million. The true costs included a change in the character
of our government into one where states lost most of their sovereignty
to the central government. This had been the fear of Jefferson,
Madison, Monroe, and Calhoun and many reasonable men.

Today
most Americans believe that states do not have a right to secede.
DiLorenzo marshals numerous proofs that from the founding of our
nation that the right of secession was seen as a natural one. The
Virginia delegates affirmed “that the powers granted under the Constitution
[] may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted
to injury or oppression.” Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy
in America, “The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement
of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their
nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one
and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from
the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing
so . . . .” The New England states debated the idea of secession
during the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815.

This
was certainly settled in the war, and settled by force. A forced
solution, like any forced solution, is, in the long run, no solution.
Indeed, we have become the world's rogue state.

Lincoln's
vision for our nation has now been accomplished beyond anything
he could have dreamed. The Real Lincoln contains irrefutable
evidence that the most appropriate title for Abraham Lincoln is
the Great Centralizer, not the Great Emancipator.

March
2, 2005

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

Cardinal
Pacelli served as Pius XII from 1939 to 1958. He recognized Hitler
as a threat to German culture and as early as 1921 was criticizing
the Nazis. Professor Ronald Rychlak documents that between 1917
and 1929, 40 public speeches made on German soil by Pacelli before
he was Pope contained attacks on National Socialism. As Pope he
pressed hard for peace, declaring that "Nothing is lost by
peace but everything may be lost by war." He devoted his first
six years in office to bringing relief to the suffering plus bringing
as many Jews as possible to freedom. Thousands of Jews were housed
in Church buildings in Rome – even after the Nazis occupied the
city in 1943.

These
were only a few of the hundreds of thousands that the Church saved
from Nazi killers. In 1967 Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide estimated
that Pope Pius XII was "instrumental in saving at least 700,00
possibly as many as 860,000 Jews from death at Nazi hands."
To put these numbers in perspective consider that the Nazis had
8,300,000 Jews under their control; 6,000,000 were killed leaving
2,300,000 survivors. If we take Lapide's lowest figure, the Pope
was instrumental in saving 30% of the Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Catholics
too, were targets of the Nazi killing machine. At Auschwitz, 3,000,000
Polish Catholics were murdered, including thousands of priests,
20% of Poland's clerical class (“priest swine,” as the Nazis called
them). It needs to be added that papal diplomacy and underground
assistance were more effective in saving Jewish lives from the Nazis
than they were at saving Catholic lives from the Communists in Soviet
Russia.

After
the war Soviet Communists began the disinformation campaign against
the Church. Pope Pius was the leading anti-communist leader in the
world. Hating him and the Church was as much a part of Soviet Communism
as hating Jews was part of Nazism. But as Rabbi David G. Dalin notes
in his authoritative article in the Weekly Standard, "Pope
Pius XII and the Jews," this communist big lie was appropriated
by "lapsed or angry" Catholic writers as "simply
the biggest club available for modernists to use against traditionalist
Catholics." He continues:

But Jews,
whatever their feeling about the Catholic Church, have a duty
to reject any attempt to usurp the Holocaust and use it for partisan
purposes in such a debate – particularly when the attempt
disparages the testimony of Holocaust survivors and spreads to
inappropriate figures the condemnation that belongs to Hitler
and the Nazis…. “The Talmud teaches that whosoever preserves
one life, it is accounted to him by scripture as if he had preserved
the whole world." More than any other twentieth century leader,
Pius fulfilled the Talmudic dictum when the fate of European Jewry
was at stake. No other pope has been so widely praised by Jews
– and they were not mistaken. Their gratitude, as well as
that of the entire generation of the Holocaust survivors, testifies
that Pius XII was genuinely and profoundly a righteous gentile.

Further
testament to Pius' moral stature is the fact that the Chief Rabbi
of Rome chose to convert to Catholicism after the war. Obviously
conversion involves more than the example of one man. Nevertheless
the example of a good man can have an impact, and the example was
there.

February
9, 2005

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

As
we should realize, illegal use of firearms has little to do with
legal possession of firearms. The Centre for Defence Studies in
London, showed that criminal use of handguns increased by 40% in
the two years immediately after their 1997 ban on handguns. It is
now believed there are over 300,000 firearms in Britain, which are
readily accessible to anyone with murder on their minds. When Anne
Pearston, a leader in the anti-gun campaign was presented with these
figures, she dismissed them with, "But this completely misses
the point of what we were trying to do. We never thought that there
would be any effect on illegal gun crime, because this is a totally
separate issue. What we were campaigning for was to make sure that
a civilian could not be legally trained to use a handgun."
It makes one wonder.

In
his Past
Imperfect, Peter Charles Hoffer, Professor of History at
the University of Georgia, documents that Michael Bellesiles, tenured
professor at Emory, fabricated his anti-gun data to support his
arguments in his Arming America, a book that delighted and was favorably
reviewed by academia and the politically correct press. He also
documented the ongoing plagiarisms of Doris Kerns Goodwin and Stephen
Ambrose, and wound up with a discussion of Professor Joseph Ellis'
fabrication of a Viet Nam past for himself. Fuller is an interesting
historian, who pulls no punches, while being to my mind overly sympathetic
to the transgressors. His book deserves a good read, if only for
the history leading up to this era of cheating, but what is most
interesting is his discussion of Bellesiles and his patently fraudulent
work, whose lies have to have set back the cause of the gun control
crowd.

Michael
Bellesiles was a young tenured professor at Emory who had sponsored
the Institute on the Study of Violence in America and taken on the
National Rifle Association. He strongly felt that individual gun
ownership ought to be tightly controlled if not illegal. Here, Fuller
gives himself away with "If the target of the historian was
big enough and bad enough, and if the potential reward for bagging
that target was great enough, even the best trained and most honorable
of historians might be tempted to fudge research findings here and
there . . ." That may be true but an honest man wouldn't be
tempted. We are left with the implication that academics, who consider
themselves an elite, are, if not dishonest, easily led astray.

The
critical fuss was about his "documentation" of guns listed
in probate records of early America. If his numbers were right and
gun ownership rare, the second amendment could be read not as providing
individuals the right to own guns unless they were to be used for
military service. It turned out scholars were unable to verify his
numbers; they simply did not exist. The fuss ended with Bellesiles’
career in tatters, his resignation from Emory, his Bancroft Prize
withdrawn, and his contract with his publisher terminated.

Although
historians have cleared up this particularly flagrant case, the
general reader is left with doubts, suspecting academics bend the
truth when it suits them and their peers are too easy on them when
this happens.

January
18, 2005

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

Webster’s
(1983) defines inflation as an increase in the amount of currency
in circulation, resulting in a relatively sharp and sudden fall
in its value and rise in prices: it may be caused by an increase
in the volume of paper money issued or of gold mined. It is not
defined as the increase in prices but as the increase in the supply
of money that causes the increase in prices.

Consider
what inflation does. The government issues new money, i.e., raises
funds without taxing or borrowing. To the government, this is pure
gain. As the new money works its way through the economy, prices
rise. The first receivers of the new money gain at the expense of
the later receivers. "Inflation, then, confers no general,
social benefit; instead it redistributes the wealth in favor of
first comers . . ." Those stuck with the loss include fixed
income groups, ministers, teachers, people on salaries, those on
fixed money contracts made before the price rise, life insurance
beneficiaries, retirees, landlords with long term leases, bond holders
and other creditors, and those holding cash.

Business
calculation becomes more difficult. Prices do not change uniformly
or at the same speed; it becomes harder to separate the lasting
from the transitional, to guess the demands of consumers. Business
accounting may seriously overstate profits, "may even consume
capital while presumably increasing investment."

The
seeming sellers market leads to a declining quality of goods and
services, since consumers resist price increases less when they
are concealed by less quality. Quality of work declines as people
go for "get rich quick" schemes and scorn sober effort.
Thrift is penalized and debt encouraged, since debt is paid off
in lower valued money.

"Inflation
then, lowers the general standard of living (think of that 57 cent
dollar) as it creates an atmosphere of prosperity." More importantly,
over time it destroys the fabric of society. Thomas Mann's short
story Disorder and Early Sorrow describes an afternoon in the life
of a middle class German family that is failing due to collapsed
standards caused by the existing inflation. That family lived in
a society that evolved into Nazism. It is not hard to find a parallel
between it and our easy money, morally sloppy society.

Families
and communities continue to fail. The media emphasizes corporate
misdeeds over government corruption even though it is hard to find
any reason to trust politicians or government bureaucrats. At least
not all chief executive officers are crooked, something one cannot
be sure about in government. While Greenspan cannot be held responsible
for all this, a milieu has been created that he exemplifies, in
which he stands out. Although not as contemptible as the sharpshooter
who killed the woman with the baby in her arms at Ruby Ridge, he
is on a par with the authorities who found themselves unable to
discipline the sharpshooter, but felt obligated to honor him.

January
7, 2005

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

Misled
by the remarkable successes of Newtonian physics, thinkers came
to believe that the methodology of physics was the only truly scientific
method. What was worse was the tendency to go further and claim
that statements not verified empirically were not only unimportant,
but did not represent knowledge at all. This pushed scientists into
trying to make all studies fit the methodology that worked for physics.
Eric Voegelin emphasizes in his The
New Science of Politics, that this is wrong, that methods
may differ depending on what is being studied. What works brilliantly
for physics and chemistry will not necessarily work for other disciplines.

Reading
the writers of the early 20th century one is struck by their very
upbeat, yet hopelessly incorrect belief in man's ability to resolve
all his problems, to discover a science of political management.
Intellectuals are still trying to find rules – macro-economists
are frequently at fault here, that will enable political affairs
to be managed from the top. The ideas of Mises – recognized
as a leader in his early career, fell out of favor when he pointed
out the impossibility of this search. His understanding of economic
science led to his statement that Socialism was too important to
be ignored, but that its ideas had to be refuted if man was to avoid
returning to barbarism. Paul Samuelson saw things differently. His
understanding of economics saw Socialism as a workable system. He
argued for the possibility of the USSR to surpass the US in per
capita gross national product. The collapse of the USSR demonstrated
that Mises was right, something common sense had already told many.
Hayek had clinched the argument in his The
Road to Serfdom. His chapter Why the Worst Get On Top,
makes it horrifyingly clear why Communism was able to turn into
such a murderous business (100 million of their own citizens killed
by their own governments in Communist countries in the last century).

The
Austrian school recognizes economic science as a logical discipline.
All economic law can be deduced from the assumption that man is
an acting creature, making choices and seeking to improve his position
by trading. To function for the benefit of everyone a society requires
private property, a rule of law, and the freedom to make exchanges.
Since government typically monopolizes enforcement of laws that
it, itself, has enacted, this makes it dangerous. How it is restrained
matters a good deal more than how it is chosen. Austrians believe
that money matters, and that it matters very much. Hence they see
stable money as necessary, which is why, despite its apparent futility,
they continue to argue for a gold standard. They believe the market
should determine the value of money just as it determines the value
of all other goods. They see war, while sometimes necessary, as
always destructive, and the corporatism that has developed in Washington
as a threat to our freedoms.

This
column is written as a salute to Lew Rockwell and his crew. We owe
them a lot.

December
11, 2004

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

Arthur
Robinson, President of the Oregon Institute Of Science and Medicine
and Sallie Baliunis of the George C Marshall Institute and others
have presented a paper Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric
Carbon Dioxide. It confirms the increase of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere but questions its acceptance as a major cause of
global warming. Climate changes have been endemic throughout history.
The little ice age occurred in the 1600′s with temperatures nearly
2 degrees F below average. 900 years ago temperatures peaked at
more than 3 degrees F above average. A few thousand years ago the
continent was covered with ice.

The
paper emphasizes the benefits of CO2 to plant life. "Increased
carbon dioxide has . . . markedly increased plant growth rates.
Predictions of harmful climactic effects due to future increases
in minor greenhouse gases like CO2 are in error and do not conform
to current experimental knowledge . . . . . We are living in an
increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result
of the CO2 increase.

Dr.
Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, has this
to say:

"
. . . the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident
(1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius
higher than a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon
dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon
dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the
earth (one of many, most important being water vapor and
clouds). But — and I cannot stress this enough — we are
not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change
to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the
future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement
with these three basic statements tells us nothing relevant
to policy discussions."

Implementation
of the Kyoto Protocol, based as it is, on dishonest reporting, bad
assumptions and incomplete science would be a major mistake. It
could have a negative impact on the economies of developed countries
and place severe restraints on economic growth in the developing
world. And it would play right into the hands of the Leninist-Marxist
intellectuals and fellow travelers who supported the murdering socialist
regimes of the last century and had no care for the suffering and
number of deaths that were caused. This mixing of science and politics
to discuss environmentalism has given them new life. They have never
cared for or respected the proletariat they claimed to support;
they never really wanted anything but power and influence. Now,
having demonstrated that they are murderers and failures at politics
(read The
Black Book of Communism), they believe they have discovered
a new road to power and influence. Like their earlier fascist and
communist efforts it will fail if implemented, but only after causing
much suffering and death. The Kyoto Protocol must not be ratified.

November
24, 2004

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

A
British newspaper states that "America seems to have become
even more ambitious in its imperialist adventures as it becomes
less secure."

Gabriel
Kolko, in his book, Another
Century of War? takes a candid and critical look at America’s
“new wars.” He suggests that our views of modern warfare have been
redefined and this will inevitably lead to a dark future. He concludes
that the roots of terrorism lie in "America’s own cynical policies
in the Middle East and Afghanistan," where a half-century of
justifying crusades for oil and against Communism was foolish and
a waste of time. Oil is worthless to its owners unless they can
sell it somewhere, so this crusade, if it existed, was only to decide
who would get any profit. Defeating Communism didn't need a crusade;
it doomed itself.

Kolko
contends that "America reacts to the complexity of world affairs
with advanced technology and superior firepower, not with realistic
political response and negotiation." He believes that this
will offer little if any hope of attaining greater security for
ourselves and expects that if we do not change our ways our future
wars will only drag on, and we will have more of them. In his book
one finds "a mastery of military and political issues rare
among historians, combined with a humane and elemental acknowledgement
of the devastation of war and the hubris, [perhaps we should say
megalomania,] of national leaders who believe they can control it
for their own purposes."

Common
sense leads to nearly complete agreement with Kolko. The U S is
enormously strong in huge weaponry, which is useful only against
enemies with the same sort of weaponry. It is generally ineffective
against small and defenseless foes, who will undoubtedly remain
spiritually strong no matter how often they are clobbered by a power
they see as a bully.

The
fact that Republicans made a clean sweep of both deliberative bodies
as well as the administration does not bode well. Their win might
be of little account if it weren't for the risks we run as Bush
and his minions convince themselves that they possess superior wisdom
and are the only good people on earth. They need to be shown that
they did not win the election, that the Democrats threw it away,
that voters really did feel they were choosing the lesser of two
evils. Acton's aphorism regarding power and its tendency to corrupt
applies in every way to these less than brilliant, less than honest,
political leaders.

The
1900's were called America's century; and it was a murderous one.
Now that nuclear weapons are easy to make, this century is shaping
up to be worse. Let us pray that this does not happen, that our
leaders learn a little humility, that we learn that others must
be persuaded, not forced, that direct democracy is not a panacea,
and credit needs to be shared.

November
22, 2004

George
Crispin [send him mail]
is a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative
in Auburn, Alabama.

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