[Nettime-bold] yea here it is

This website is a distillation of nearly 30 years of experience, research and various writing efforts. Like all tales, it grew with the telling. Also, it is not a complete rendering of my themes, as there are major aspects of the tale not being told here. I am respecting certain individuals' right to privacy. I need to get their permission to publish what I will, not for legal, but for ethical reasons. One person would rather stay anonymous because of perceived threats to her life. Others have other reasons for wanting to stay anonymous or play minor roles in my story for now. Significant participants in my story are not covered, and I am still researching my work.

With that stated, here is what I have come up with, so far. It is part personal odyssey, part scholarly research, and part visionary speculation. I have narrowed my scope of focus significantly, in order to avoid a shallow rendering of the material. So far, I have had little financial assistance in my writing, other than my wife's selfless efforts in supporting me while I have worked on it, and some assistance from Dennis Lee for a short time several years ago. I have also had the benefit of many friends in cyberspace and elsewhere who have contributed mightily by providing learned criticism, new information, editorial observations and shoulders to lean on. They know who they are. All works like this are due to the contributions of many. Nevertheless, all the writings are mine, and a one-man show cannot become "expert" in all the areas that I would like to deal with. There have been areas where I have gotten in over my head, and realized that it would take years of study to properly assess the issues (catastrophic planetary theory, for instance, which was championed in the 1950s by the maligned psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky, and is becoming scientifically respectable these days). I have pulled in my horns a little, and am writing only in areas where I feel competent.

This essay is designed to introduce my work. It summarizes my thesis, in enumeration and narration, deals with critical comments toward my work, and the paradigms that dominate our thinking in the West. It links to my other essays, which explore the topics in greater depth. I hope you find the reading experience worthwhile.

Though I am purposely seeking a low public profile for now and have not promoted my site, I have been involved in numerous email exchanges and discussions of my work over the years. I am grateful for constructive criticism, as well as coherent criticism from those who disagree with my material and its thrust.

After receiving such a wide array of responses, I believe I need to state my thesis as plainly and succinctly as possible.

Right or wrong, that is my thesis. If critics want to assail my work, their only credible effort will be to attack my thesis head on, not nibble at its ankles, ignore it or misrepresent it. Many of my critics have ignored the substance of my work and instead have tried to discredit minor aspects of it, while utterly misrepresenting the material as a whole. It is my hope that they will acknowledge that this work is largely based on my experiences, and to therefore address it straightforwardly and honestly.

Here is a brief narrative regarding my thesis. It can be seen as a summary of my web site.

Regarding the destruction of planet earth, the evidence is overwhelming of either ecological calamities happening today or incipient disasters of unprecedented proportion. This past autumn, the World Conservation Union published its Year 2000 Red List of Threatened Species. Over 11,000 species risk extinction today. That list is only composed of those species that have been identified. Over 14 million species of life are estimated to live on earth, and less than two million have been identified. Countless species have been driven to extinction before being catalogued. One fourth of earth's mammal species and one eighth of earth's bird species are in immediate danger of extinction. Numerous fish species also face human-caused extinction, something that orthodox theory previously held was impossible. We are currently on the brink of one of the few major extinction episodes in earth's multi-billion-year history. This one is entirely human-caused.

I can hardly pick up the local newspapers (Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Seattle Times) these days without reading about a new environmental calamity or an impending one. One day it is an article remarking on the declining Orca (killer whale) population in Puget Sound, with over-fishing and pollution being the two main culprits. Another day I read about how the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union will be bone dry soon, due to the waters diversion for irrigation projects. In America, the vast Ogallala aquifer has been getting sucked dry, and thousands of square miles of irrigated farmland have already been abandoned due to the falling water table in lands above the Ogallala. The situation will become much worse in the near future.

I recently read about the "dead zones" in the Baltic and Black Seas and the Gulf of Mexico, due to pollution and other man-made problems. Most of the world’s fisheries are depleted or destroyed. The tropical rain forests are disappearing at unprecedented rates.

Most Americans believe that the future will be very challenging. Just as the millennium was ending, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (page 5, October 25, 1999) reported the results of a recent poll that shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans fear a "terrorist" attack on America, a major energy crisis, and overwhelming environmental problems in this new century. A third of all Americans expect that the United States will be in a nuclear war. More than half of all Americans believe that overpopulation will cause global strain, and an epidemic worse than AIDS will appear. Yet, Americans are optimistic about the coming century, apparently because the U.S. economy keeps barreling along. It is a strange dichotomy.

The prevailing theories agree that the world's oil deposits, laid down tens of millions of years ago, are going to be burned up in far less than one millennium. There is now undoubtedly global warming, with the decline in the Antarctic ice pack and the decline in all the Northern Hemisphere's glaciers, while Alaska and Siberia have greatly warmed, and the polar bear may be extinct in the wild in twenty years. Global warming and other human impacts are now killing the world's coral reefs, home to the world's most diverse ecosystems. At this rate, by the 22^ndcentury there may not be any more coral reefs.

The permafrost in the arctic is melting, which will initially kill off the northern forests as the arctic becomes a swamp. The permafrost’s melting will also create more global warming as trapped methane gas is released into the environment. Everybody knows about the hole in the ozone layer. It keeps getting larger. Those dramatic changes not only will spell the extinction of perhaps millions of species, but humankind will experience disasters such as massive crop failures, desertification, "superstorms" (we are already seeing those) and climate changes that can make huge areas uninhabitable. Those changes could spell the deaths of billions of humans.

In the scientific community today, the vast majority of scientists admit there is global warming. Organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of thousands of the world's most qualified climatologists, make their findings clear and unequivocal: rapid, human-induced climate change will create many changes and stresses that humanity will be challenged to deal with. There is still a "debate" in the mainstream media today over global warming, but it is a charade. The "debate" pits most of the world's scientists against a handful of scientific "skeptics" whose work has been largely bankrolled by the energy companies and notorious anti-environmental, corporate-funded organizations like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.[2]

Man's raping of the planet has also destabilized the weather systems. In the tropics, weather was predictable and rarely catastrophic. Now, with newly denuded landscapes in places like Indonesia and Cambodia, the rains come fiercer (forests affect and somewhat temper the weather), with mudslides, catastrophic erosion and other disasters. Natural disasters have been increasing at a rate of about six-percent per year for the past generation. Environmental refugees make up the largest class of refugee in the world today, and the number is growing. Polluted air and water are the two biggest killers of children worldwide. The ozone layer is in bad shape.

We are now seeing "cascading" natural disasters that defy the neat models our scientists develop. For instance, the decline in perch and herring populations off the Alaskan coast depressed the populations of seals and sea lions, which were killer whale prey. The killer whales ate otters in the absence of their usual prey, which collapsed the otter population, which in turn caused a population explosion in one of the otter's favorite foods - sea urchins. The sea urchin population explosion in turn devastated the kelp beds on which they feed. The disappearance of the kelp beds in turn threatens the existence of numerous species that depend on them, including fish, birds, marine mammals and numerous other creatures.

Not only is the environment being pushed past the brink all over the world, it is as violent as ever, and the United States is leading the way. Not only did we bomb four nations recently, nations that did us no harm, but recently our politicians stood alone on the world stage and refused to ratify a treaty to end the explosion of nuclear weapons, and completely against world opinion is pushing to create orbiting space platforms for “defense,” but the rest of the world knows that using them for offensive purposes is not far behind. The fears that Americans have regarding "terrorist" attack are really about the feelings of vengeance that many nations understandably have toward our nation. We have bludgeoned nearly fifty nations in one way or another since World War II, for a bloody tally unmatched in world history, and it is only getting worse, with most Americans cheering each bomb we drop.

Not only is the planet and humanity being devastated, but Americans have incredibly poor health, especially when compared to our unprecedented wealth. Americans are the fattest and most sedentary people in history. Two-thirds of us die of easily preventable degenerative disease, almost completely caused by the harmful substances that we put into our bodies and call "food" and "comfort" (alcohol and tobacco, to name two such deadly comforts). We should all live to be over a hundred, and every day should be a happy one. Instead, we lead lives like sleepwalkers and zombies, either glued to the tube or punching the clock. Of course, some of us have "made it." There are rich people in America, quite a few. They are the winners. Yet, the list of losers is orders of magnitude larger than the list of winners. Bill Gates’ net worth is equivalent to the combined net worth of the poorest hundred million Americans. The richest 1% of Americans has more wealth than the poorest 95%, and the disparity is even greater on a global basis.

When Europeans learned to sail the oceans, the native humans on four continents were devastated. It was the greatest catastrophe in human history. They were nearly driven to extinction in North America, with an over 90% extermination rate in South America. Australia’s natives fared similarly, with a lesser devastation in Africa, mainly because Africans had experience with the European-introduced diseases that the natives of those other continents did not enjoy. While disease deserved most of the credit, the Europeans were also uniformly genocidal in intent concerning the native peoples.[3]

Europe's genocidal attitudes toward their own species were mild when compared to the exterminatory attitudes that Europeans held toward the world's plants and animals. It derived from a general fear of nature[4], but was also driven by sheer greed. The Europeans did not care much that they exterminated entire species, or brought them to the brink of extinction. Early examples of that attitude can be seen in the complete extermination of the great auk, which lived on the Atlantic islands off North America. They were the northern hemisphere’s equivalent of the penguin, and they lived in immense flocks. The Europeans quickly killed them off. The great auk became extinct by 1850. The extermination of the great auk was a minor sideshow to the whaling frenzy that gripped Europe. Europeans invented commercial whaling, and whaling was quite an industry…while the whales lasted. By the time Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, whaling expeditions lasted about three years, as the ships scoured the world's corners, looking for the last whales to kill. Industrialization in the late 1800s created vastly more effective whale killing methods, and all the great whales except one (the sperm whale) were driven to the brink of extinction. Commercial whaling stopped a generation ago, largely because there were few whales left.[5] Killing vast numbers of walruses and other arctic animals accompanied early arctic whaling.

On land, the Europeans were even worse. England, already largely deforested itself, invaded Ireland and quickly chopped down its forests, beginning in the 1500’s. Ireland’s timber literally built England’s fleets of boats that eventually ruled the high seas. Ireland’s forests have yet to recover from that rape. The entire Mediterranean region was once forested, before humankind deforested it. On the brink of "discovering" the New World, Europe was largely deforested, was nearly devoid of fur-bearing animals, and its nearby seas (Mediterranean, Baltic) were over-fished. Europe descended quickly on the rich fishing grounds off North America, and fisheries like the Grand Banks helped feed Europe for centuries. Over the past generation, Canadian factory trawlers destroyed the Grand Banks fishery. It may take centuries to recover, if ever.

Europeans encountered a relatively pristine environment in the New World. North America had the world's largest temperate forest. The Europeans, and later the Americans, could not chop down the forests fast enough. Eastern North America was the home of the passenger pigeon, which flew in the greatest flocks the world has probably ever seen, where day became night as they migrated in flocks that numbered up to a billion birds. Americans completely exterminated the passenger pigeon in less than a century of "hunting" them. West of the great forest lived the bison, which lived in earth's greatest herds. The bison also lived in the Eastern American woodlands, but those woodland bison were extinct by 1800. Not coincidentally, the native humans that lived in those same woodlands were nearly extinct by 1800. Then the white invaders began exterminating both the natives of the North American plains and the bison that sustained them. >From a pre-invasion population of perhaps 60 million animals, the bison was reduced to fewer than 1,000 creatures by 1900. There were only 23 “wild” bison left when the carnage stopped.

Those were early instances of the dynamic of "progress" that now threatens one quarter of earth's mammals with extinction. About 20% of earth's forests have disappeared in the past 300 years.[6] Places like eastern North America experienced nearly 95% deforestation, while the native humans, passenger pigeons, bison, fur-bearing animals and others were nearly or entirely exterminated. The current environmental devastation of the forests and animals across the planet are intimately related to the dynamics of European and American colonialism and neocolonialism.

The planet bears those costs and many others these days. That is part of the price of humankind's "progress." As far as I have seen, very little is being done about this suicidal situation. If we woke up as a species, these would all be easily resolvable issues. While the unprecedented disaster looms, capitalistic organizations like oil and car companies have bought up a few scientists to publicly display their "skepticism" that the environmental problems are as bad as 99% of the world's climate scientists (for instance) say. Industry front groups like the Global Climate Coalition do their best to undermine attempts to stop the coming disaster (to protect their profits and power), but even they are having a hard time holding the party line.

If one investigates the problems of nuclear and toxic waste disposal, global warming, deforestation, soil erosion, chemical pollution, genetic "engineering," species extinction and the like, it becomes highly evident that a disaster is taking place, while a much greater one threatens, and hacks in the employ of the organizations responsible for the lion's share of the devastation (like the late Julian Simon) make careers for themselves in concocting "scholarly" denials of what is so obvious. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are in their saddles and ready to ride, and people have made well-paid careers of denying that they may be coming.

It is bad enough that oil and automobile corporations disseminate their fraudulent propaganda. The corporate-owned media all-too-often give them a respectable hearing, as if six industry-employed scientists (who by definition have a conflict of interest) have equal weight in the "debate" as do the thousands of scientists that make up the IPCC, for instance. Those corporate activities also threaten life on earth. Probably the greatest indicator of a scientist's credibility is who pays his/her salary. Corporate America knows that game, and there exists an entire profession of corporate scientist/hacks who receive their pay through "third party" organizations to produce "independent" science that invariably toes the corporate line. A fine example of that kind of money laundering and scientific prostitution is the American Council on Science and Health.[7]

When studying those types of science being practiced, including the "science" of fluoridation, it becomes evident that at least some of the players are lying willfully and outright. They know what they are doing, and likely see the larger picture and the nature of their participation. I consider them people on the dark spiritual path. The others have adopted an impressive array of bogus rationales and other mental tactics that allow them to engage in their prostitution with a clear conscience. I have seen that mental game-playing taking place in most professions and industries that I have studied. Only extremely rare persons like a Ralph McGehee have the honesty and courage to figure out the game, realize they were lied to, and go public with their revelations.

I have not only witnessed those mental games of denial being played in the professions, but most people I know suffer from similar delusions. That could be because many of my friends and acquaintances are white men, the system's winners, who have the most to gain from believing such lies, but I have also seen it in many others. It is awe-inspiring to watch them flee behind their conventional beliefs of how the world works, and respond with some of the most thoughtless things I have ever heard or read.

The biggest delusion I have seen regarding the violence we inflict on other nations is that we are heroes. In my "The Business of War" essay I exhaustively examine the U.S.' involvement in the last "good war," World War II, and I can find very little for Americans to cheer about. That was the "best" war. Virtually all other instances of U.S. foreign-inflicted violence were obviously self-serving. We did not care at all about the people we killed. They were purely imperial actions, but with rhetoric that mainly fooled the American people, because they ultimately authorized the violence. The United States is the world's largest arms dealer, by far, arming the world to the teeth. When Germany invaded the Sudetenland, Italy invaded Ethiopia and Japan invaded Manchuria before World War II, they all justified their invasions with the excuse that their invasions were humanitarian in nature.[8] We do the same thing today, whether it is invading Panama, bombing Yugoslavia or Iraq, etc. Every invader and inflictor of violence always invokes lofty rationales to justify it. Whether it is putting prisoners to death, beating one's wife, robbing convenience stores or invading nations, it is the same story. There may not be one humanitarian military intervention in world history. My essay on Iraq deals at length with those ideas. Nobody has even tried to refute my work in that essay.

The lies come fast and furiously if one is raised in America. It took me thirty years to begin realizing how much of what was presented to me as science, education, the news and history were lies as big as those Hitler liked telling. I woke up partly because of my harrowing experiences in trying to bring energy-saving innovations into the marketplace.

Many times I have encountered educated American professionals, even highly intelligent friends, who deny my thesis while dismissing the work of people like Noam Chomsky. One dear friend told me that Chomsky thinks that every crime that happens abroad is our fault, and that it was a ridiculous notion. To my knowledge, Chomsky has never said anything like that. His work, instead, has been to show instances where our nation has something to do with the pain felt in the world, a participation that we can do something about. Chomsky makes his case very clearly, many times in his work. As Chomsky says, it is a simple ethical issue: we are responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions.

I regularly see people faced with situations like bombing Yugoslavia or receiving chemotherapy where they lament, “What choice do I/we have?” The poignant irony is their path to that point was the result of many choices being made, as they gave away their responsibility and power with each decision. When somebody says, "What choice do I have?" it is because they already have given their choices away, often in subtle fashion. Even then, they still have choices, but pretend they do not. Almost always, the choice they are avoiding is accepting their responsibility, either for what "happens" to them, or what they do to others. They prefer playing the victim game. We are masters at playing the victim.

Other friends of mine have cheered events like bombing Iraq and Yugoslavia, parroting the rationales the media fed them. Some have realized they were lied to about earlier wars, but have uncritically swallowed the media propaganda for every bombing over the past ten years. I have come to believe that their affliction does not reside between their ears, but in their hearts. I believe that it is a disease of the heart, not the brain.

If our nation starves out Iraq, and we simultaneously import a great deal of their oil at a cheap price, that is a situation that we are responsible for. The blood of those Iraqi children is on our hands (while it also is on the hands of others, but that does not relieve us of our responsibility). As my friend stood there denying my thesis and Chomsky's work, he was wearing clothing made in sweatshop conditions in Asia; his house was standing on recently stolen land and made from razed forests; he had cheap imported gasoline in his car's tank; his refrigerator was filled with food raised and harvested by poor Mexicans and Guatemalans. In his mind, he had nothing to do with the exploitation that obtained for him his cheap shoes, clothes, gasoline, land, food, coffee and so on. He was merely a beneficiary of it. Such providence! He said that the sweatshops in Indonesia, where cheap shoes and clothes for Americans are made in horrific conditions, where the people make literally pennies per hour and are threatened with violence if they fail to work like slaves, are our noble attempts to get Indonesia some capital. People who religiously read the Wall Street Journal can come to believe such fairy tales. Orwell knew what he was writing about. The poverty of the “underdeveloped” world is directly related to our wealth. A more honest assessment of the situation would call it theft and slavery, practiced on a global scale, the system’s beneficiaries readily believing the lies told to justify such a system.

Capitalism is an ideology based on greed and fear, with its "law of supply and demand," and its "invisible hand of competition." The capitalist ideology is largely sustained by many myths, lies and secrecy. One of capitalism's ideological descendants is “neoliberalism.” One of neoliberalism's central tenets is that free markets can solve nearly all of our problems. Interesting theory, but I have never seen a free market. Free markets are about buyers and sellers coming together freely. The capitalistic game is rigged to allow the buyer relatively free choice, but their menu is limited to two or three items at most (and sometimes even one item, e.g., electric utility monopolies). Wiping out the competition is the essence of capitalism, something that even Adam Smith remarked on.[9] In the capitalistic game I have witnessed, the buyer is captive. Limited wages for workers and unlimited profit potential for the owners is wage slavery. The worker is captive in such a system. When today's system works as intended, it is the most exploitative.

In the final analysis, capitalism has succeeded as the world's prevailing economic ideology due to brute force and massive violence. The same (relatively small) crowd that owns the capital also owns institutions such as the mainstream media, and is highly influential to non-capitalistic institutions like governments and educational institutions. That is partly because the system has been designed by the rich to serve the rich, so political elected office is nearly impossible to attain without amassing huge sums of money, which in turn makes the winners beholden to (essentially owned by) the rich. Our political-economic system is a plutocracy, which means that the rich run it and the politicians are captive. Many defend this system of slavery if they are bribed enough, officially or unofficially, such as politicians, American consumers receiving cheap imported commodities, and the relatively ambitious who climb corporate ladders, and the system chugs along on the backs of the less fortunate captives. The world's most powerful military is an integral part of the system. The American military has been used in Korea, Southeast Asia, Central America, Iraq and Yugoslavia over the past fifty years.

The educated and ruling classes in America seem to believe that this system only oppresses those unfortunate enough to be at the food chain's bottom, such as minorities, people laboring on tropical export-crop plantations, dying Iraqi children, etc. Little do they suspect that they too suffer greatly from our rapacious system in ways that they often do not suspect.[10]

A common response to my work, mainly by white men, is that life here (in the West, the United States in particular) is good, so what am I complaining about? Life is "good" if you are one of the winners, and white, educated American men are the biggest winners in history. My point is not about how good the winners have it, but how the losers are suffering. Below is a sampling of the losers that my critics usually ignore or minimize.

The winners, though, get cheap oil, land, bananas, software, running shoes, luxury cruises, tin, sex, wood, cars, hamburgers and the like. Yes, for the few winners in such a system, life is good. Most of the system's participants are losers, though, and not too willing. The situations I listed above are only a sampling of the awesome cost that humanity and the planet is paying in order for those white, educated Americans to live the good life.

I do not feel good about that state of affairs, especially as I am a beneficiary of much of it. I have dedicated my life to changing it. My web site shows how to eliminate all those situations and many others, and what it takes is beginning to care for one another. If we do that, solving our problems is easy. If we do not, we may very well destroy the planet we live on. Though our mass media likes hiding the reality of the losers from the winners' eyes, or inverting the reality better than Orwell ever could, the situations nevertheless exist. I have found that those who gloss over the fates of the losers are usually lacking in the conscience department. We need to develop a collective conscience soon, or we will lead humanity to its destruction. The choice is ours.

The cost of acquiescing to this system (or even celebrating it, which the educated and rich classes generally do) is far greater than most people can imagine. Not only are these activities destroying the planet and causing the needless suffering of billions of people, they provide about zero benefit to society. Most industries and professions in the United States have degenerated into rackets, which many readers may regard as the most radical thesis in my work. I found that the larger and more powerful an industry or profession, the likelier it became a racket long ago, providing little or no useful benefit to society but making its members plenty of money. I estimate that more than half of the United States economy is worthless, which is a monumental waste of time and effort for over half of the workforce.

Capitalism, an offspring of colonialism, might be the most inefficient system, in the end. It likely destroys far more wealth than it creates.

Long ago, Carl Sauer, one of the greatest scholars that America has produced, clearly saw the true nature of the West’s progress:

“We have accustomed ourselves to think of ever expanding productive capacity, of ever fresh spaces of the world to be filled with people, of ever new discoveries of kinds and sources of raw materials, of continuous technical progress operating indefinitely to solve problems of supply. We have lived so long in what we have regarded as an expanding world, that we reject in our contemporary theories of economics and of population the realities that contradict such views. Yet our modern expansion has been effected in large measure at the cost of an actual and permanent impoverishment of the world.”[11]

Most American economic activities are the equivalent of digging holes in the ground and filling them back up. It is also far worse than that, because the energy industry, for instance, probably does not even deserve to exist, but millions have been murdered and millions more live miserable lives so oil companies can have the oil their land sits on. In addition, our energy production methods are earth's single greatest source of environmental devastation. There is little “wealth” in a world that cannot support life. An old Indian saying stated that when the white man had chopped down the last tree and killed the last fish, he would realize that he could not eat money.

For an example of even the “winners” being losers, fluoride is a deadly poison and industrial waste. Virtually all of the pioneers of artificial fluoridation either worked directly for fluoride polluters or were influenced by them. There is no credible evidence that fluoride prevents cavities in children, and overwhelming, indisputable evidence that fluoride is a deadly poison, which contributes to or causes, among other maladies, the disintegration of the teeth, brain damage, skeletal disintegration, cancer and birth defects. In great irony, an industrial waste received an image makeover from deadly poison to a tooth's best friend. The rich and educated classes also ingest that fluorine, though the politicians in Washington D.C. generally drink non-fluoridated bottled water, brought in at taxpayer expense. Most Americans drink fluoridated water, and nearly all brush their teeth with fluoride. If a child ate a tube of toothpaste, he would likely die of fluoride poisoning.

In American medicine for instance, the legal cancer treatments actually kill off the patients faster than not treating them at all, create an awesome amount of suffering, and make trillions for the medical racket. The many cancer treatments that work, on the other hand, nearly all have the distinction of being harmless, cheap, effective…and outlawed. The cancer racket is arguably the most evil one on earth today, and the conspiratorial aspects of it are minor. The situation is mainly due to people not accepting responsibility for their health. They believe in the prevailing paradigm, which is founded upon the victim principle. They have given their responsibility away to the medical establishment, and that establishment has created a holocaust that rivals what the Nazis did to Eastern Europe. Though the rich are more likely to go abroad to seek cancer treatments that are outlawed in the United States, they too die by the many thousands each year, sacrificed on our capitalistic system's dark altar. In medicine, there is an entirely new paradigm waiting to be adopted. Today's male-oriented medical paradigm is death-oriented, with all of its violent "medicine." There is a life-oriented paradigm, which has been embraced at various times in our history. The life-oriented paradigm was feminine-based paradigm, and was mainly embraced by women. In each instance, men wiped it out. Examples of such life-giving medicine are: prevention (like nutrition), gentle remedies like herbs, and treatments that restore the body's defenses instead of attacking the body. With fluoridation, mainstream cancer treatment and other areas of our health, nearly every American is a loser.

Similar to the energy racket, with which I had intimate involvement, most of those participating in the cancer racket are largely unconscious regarding its true nature, mainly because they prefer it that way. The patients have given their power away to the medical establishment and are slaughtered like sheep. The slaughterers (doctors, drug companies, biomedical companies, etc.) participate mainly for the money. American doctors compose the highest paid professional group on earth, and drug companies make up America's most profitable industry. They execute an anti-life paradigm, where only the violent, poisonous and lucrative treatments are legal, while cheap, gentle, age-old remedies are usually outlawed. Sometimes those cheap, gentle and effective treatments are taken over by the doctor/pharmaceutical racket, and doctors prescribe the treatments that the drug companies produce, at a greatly inflated price. Studying the history of medicine and the work of the power-seeking Louis Pasteur sheds a great deal of light on how today's medical dogmas became entrenched, where violence to the body (like with orthodox cancer treatment, vaccines, fluoride, vivisection, surgery, etc.) becomes "medicine." Hippocrates' dictum, "first, do no harm," is one of the most ignored sayings in existence.[12]

These situations are unacknowledged largely because of the lies being told from every direction, with everybody protecting their spheres of self-interest. The state of our news, our history, our science, our education and most of our ways of viewing our universe are largely the result of big lies being told, mainly to ourselves. If this juggernaut destroys all life on earth, or merely all human life, neither rich nor poor will avoid the consequences. This system will ultimately devour its own if left to its current trajectory. There is nothing wrong with rules (like the golden rule, rarely adhered to). The problem is hypocritically inflicting them on others[13], coercively denying people's free will with them, or accepting them for ourselves and not understanding why they were made, when they are useful and when they are not, and whose interests they serve. Dogma generally serves those who invent and enforce it, not those who follow it.

The only answer I know of, or would recommend, is for people to awaken their hearts, which will also open their minds and eyes.

In the end, our problems begin and end in the spirit, because the spirit is all there is, I believe. We are all divine children of the Creator, but we are nearly all in denial of that fact, in one way or another. It is our greatest act of denial. When we can truly realize our divinity, we will readily grant it to others.

One of my essays discusses my spiritual perspective and how I developed it. I have encountered many useful spiritual studies on my journey, the most useful (for me) being the teachings of Michael, Seth, Ra, Jesus, Buddha, Zoosh, Kryon, Barbara Marciniak's Pleiadians and some others. While they can be extremely useful in understanding current planetary dynamics, the danger, as always, is turning them into dogmas or religions. That is how the rackets are made. True spirituality (one's relationship with one's maker) has little to do with religion, and religion has often been spirituality's greatest enemy, especially Christianity. In my opinion, for those rare people with love in their hearts and who act on it, they do not need to study any teachings or join any religion or have the "right" beliefs. They will never advocate violence, they will be willing to see the deeper truth of matters, and they will play an important role in the upcoming healing of humanity and the earth. According to Neale Donald Walsch's god, we are a primitive culture that regards regression as progress (such as destroying the planet). In societies of highly evolved beings, there are no lawyers, accountants, soldiers, policemen, surgeons, etc. There are three basic principles that they orient themselves around:

I doubt that we will attain a healed humanity and planet using ideologies based on greed and fear (such as capitalism, or any ideology dogmatically adhered to), through theft (such as starving out nations so we can steal their oil), through exploitation (such as wage slavery and neocolonialism), through coercion (such as prisons and punitive laws), or through violence (like police and armies). Love is the essential ingredient, in my opinion. With it comes truth and joy.

It could very well be that my work is wrong, but as Noam Chomsky said, if we are to truly learn, we need to do the work. Nobody is going to open our skulls and pour in knowledge and truth. When somebody says that they will, what is delivered is often the opposite. It is up to each of us to find our own truths.

Although my work has often been described as depressing, I am an optimist, and I believe that humanity will make it through this transition to the Thousand Years of Peace, Paradise Restored, etc. My work is mainly about how we can heal ourselves and this planet, while also being aware of the obstacles, which are mainly ourselves. I present very practical answers to virtually all of our species-threatening problems, but they first require us to wake up and care. If we do not do that, the rest is virtually impossible. Waking up in today's world can be extremely frightening and painful, initially, but staying asleep likely means stampeding off the cliff that is not far ahead. I am still waking up myself, and if my work can help anyone heal themselves, each other, humanity and this planet, I will be grateful that I could contribute. We are all in this together.

I have had many critics of my work over the years. I am grateful for constructive criticism, as well as coherent criticism from those who disagree with my material and its thrust. However, much of the criticism I have received has contained serious errors of logic and other flaws. To forestall wasting my time and theirs, I will address the errors in logic contained in the various criticisms of my work; I hope these errors will be avoided in future criticisms. If my critics want to be taken seriously, they need to read this introductory essay before they register their complaints.

Perhaps the most common fallacy of logic directed toward my material is a false dichotomy, also known as false alternatives. It is the logical flaw that states that if something is not one thing, then it is another, when it is neither. For instance, I went to business school in college and fervently digested my indoctrination. I kept my eyes open after graduation, and eventually became acutely aware of how my indoctrination conflicted with post-graduate reality. I realized that I had been sold a set of lies, not only about capitalism, but about most aspects of my world. I was a capitalist who finally saw through the game, and I write at length about it. To some of my critics, that makes me a "Marxist." I have barely and only recently read any of Karl Marx's work. In addition, calling me a "Marxist" is an example of the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad hominem, or name-calling. In those critics' views, either I am a capitalist or a Marxist. That is a false dichotomy. There is no room in their minds for a capitalist who became disillusioned with capitalism. I am either in the capitalist camp or the communist camp. That same false dichotomy was handed to Americans for generations, as we had the continual Red Scare, with the fantasy of being invaded by communist armies and conquered by the international communist conspiracy. That might be the most untenable conspiracy theory ever concocted, but it was an officially sanctioned conspiracy theory (a la McCarthy, et al.). In addition, Stalinism had little to do with Marx's work.[15]

Similarly, I have written about the brutal police-state tactics used in the United States on non-violent protestors at the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, the 2000 Republican and Democratic conventions and the 2000 World Bank and IMF meetings. One critic responded that I should be glad that I do not live in China, because they use real bullets on the protestors there, not rubber ones. That is about the poorest argument that one can advance: that crimes our state commits are smaller than crimes that other states commit. That argument can be trotted out to justify any crime. It is using the crimes of others to justify our own. We can always dredge up the specter of Hitler and Stalin to justify our state's crimes, because ours were not as bad as Hitler's, Stalin's, or China's. What makes that fallacy of logic worse is that it is happening in my nation, not somebody else's. I can do something about the state-committed crimes in my nation. I can do far less about the Chinese government's crimes. Both the U.S. and Soviet governments used that kind of false argumentation throughout the Cold War to silence their internal critics. The establishment defenders would point the finger at the other superpower, saying, "At least we are not like them. Do you want to live under their rule?" If we can point the finger at somebody else who is worse than we are (in actuality or imagined), that somehow relieves us of the initially painful revelations that introspection would bring, so we can improve our behavior. It is one of the oldest tricks in the book, the same fallacy that Jesus remarked on when he said that we look for splinters in our neighbor's eyes while ignoring the logs in our own.

Another fallacy of reasoning directed my way is related to the false dichotomy, and is used as a way to misrepresent my work. I question Mr. Skeptic's judgment in classifying an activist group trying to prevent Mumia Abu Jamal's execution as a "hate group." It is an Orwellism to call people trying to prevent (state-sanctioned) murder a "hate group." It literally inverts the meaning of words, using them to mean the opposite of what they really mean. The group that Mr. Skeptic called a "hate group" is aggressive in their stance, I admit, but so were the WTO (World Trade Organization) protestors in Seattle, getting pepper spray in their eyes, plastic bullets in their faces, being kicked and receiving other violent treatment for laying in the streets. That does not mean that the protestors were violent or hateful. In most cases, it meant exactly the opposite. Was Gandhi "hateful," with his civil disobedience? Was Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Even if Mumia Abu Jamal was indeed guilty of the cold-blooded murder of a policeman, we are about the world's only "civilized" nation with a death penalty. Most of the "civilized" world does not agree with executing Abu Jamal, even if he were fully guilty. We are also the only nation on earth that executes people for crimes they committed as children.[16] In addition, there are major doubts about Abu Jamal's guilt, where kangaroo court has been a regular and well-documented feature of Philadelphia's judicial system, and those irregularities are glaringly evident in how Abu Jamal's trial was handled. For just one fact among many that makes the "cold-blooded murder" conclusion untenable, the dead policeman was in the process of administering a beating to Abu Jamal's brother when he was killed. The policeman quite possibly thought that he was beating Abu Jamal, as the police had openly threatened him, and the mayor (and ex-police chief) had publicly called for silencing him and his uncomfortable questions and observations. Recently (summer 2001), the federal courts performed an impressive feat of denying the testimony of Arnold Beverly, who has admitted that he shot the policeman that Abu Jamal was convicted of killing. Beverly’s testimony is being refused as evidence regarding Abu Jamal’s innocence, and the wheels of “justice” are now grinding to execute Abu Jamal. To millions of people, the impending execution of Abu Jamal has far more to do with silencing a critic of the powerful than it does any sense of justice.

To some of my critics, questioning Mr. Skeptic's judgment became a defense of the organizations that Abu Jamal was active with, including the Black Panthers and M.O.V.E. Questioning the judgment of calling a protest group a "hate group" has nothing to do with supporting the groups affiliated with a person the "hate group" is trying to save. If I protested the kangaroo court conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs in the 1950s, does that make me a Bolshevik Communist? That would be a slight of hand designed to misrepresent and misdirect my argument. It is also known as the straw man logical fallacy. The straw man fallacy is where somebody misrepresents another’s position, and then attacks the “straw man” they created. Their attack on the imaginary straw man is supposed to substitute for attacking the real thing, fooling observers who are gullible enough to fall for it.

That tactic has been used repeatedly against my work and the work of people like Noam Chomsky. For instance, Chomsky and Edward Herman wrote two books together over twenty years ago, titled The Political Economy of Human Rights (originally titled Counter-Revolutionary Violence). The Warner Communications conglomerate suppressed the work's publication.[17] Its academic book subsidiary, Warner Modular Publications, Inc., was printing ten thousand copies of the book when the president of Warner Modular's parent company (Warner Publishing) saw their ad for the book. Warner Publishing's president, William Sarnoff, whose uncle used to run RCA, then initiated the suppression. Sarnoff had the books destroyed, and even destroyed the catalog that had listed the book. He summoned the Warner Modular president to his office, then verbally attacked him in such a way that the Warner Modular president and his staff resigned. Warner Modular was soon sold and then went out of business. Sarnoff literally destroyed his own company to prevent a book's publication. Did the Nazi book burners ever go that far?

South End Press, located in Boston, eventually published the work. The Boston Globe has had a long-standing policy of never publishing a review of any book published by South End Press, one of the world's leading progressive publishing houses. The American establishment does its best to make sure that Herman and Chomsky's work never makes its way into mainstream awareness, as it does for any critic of our political-economic system. In The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II, the authors deal with the treatment of America's devastation of Southeast Asia. The book's largest section deals with the American establishment's treatment of the tragedy of Cambodia.[18] The book's focus was not the nature of Cambodian atrocities against their own people, but how the American press and academics dealt with them, including how America contributed to it. They could not be more explicit in what their work attempted. In their words,

"As in the other cases discussed, our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task."[19]

Poetically, the book's suppression is a case study that illustrates the book's thesis. In their work, the authors tellingly expose the establishment's blatant double standards of reporting, where ideology (e.g., we are the good guys, and our enemies and victims are the bad guys) takes precedence over reporting the facts, and extremely so.

The American media establishment’s propaganda stated that if the North Vietnamese “won” the war, Vietnam would be the site of a communist-instigated bloodbath, but one never happened. A peripheral nation to the Vietnam War, Cambodia was treated to a devastating bombing by America over several years, killing nearly 10% of the Cambodian population, with another 10% predicted to die in the bombing’s aftermath. What America did to Cambodia was one of the greatest acts of genocide in the 20^th century. Although the American media did not predict what happened in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge eventually became the violent communist overlords that the media predicted would rule Vietnam.

The purpose of The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II was to analyze how the American propaganda machine dealt with the facts regarding Southeast Asia, not to debate the facts. The American media focused the false dichotomy, straw man and ad hominem logical fallacies toward its critics during those years. Anybody critical of the media’s handling of the events surrounding Cambodia became supporters of the Khmer Rouge; calling attention to media hypocrisy was dishonestly transformed into supporting the actions of the propaganda targets. While it was concocting a propaganda story, Time magazine tried baiting Chomsky into voicing his support for the Khmer Rouge regime.[20] Instead of a nod of approval for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky gave Time a list of American media fabrications regarding the situation.[21] Unable to lure a statement of support for the Khmer Rouge from Chomsky or anybody else, Time resorted to reporting that anonymous “political theorists” defend the “Cambodian tragedy.”

Chomsky and Herman took great pains to differentiate criticism of our propaganda system from supporting the actions of people like the Khmer Rouge. On page 256 of their book, they could not have been more explicit:

“It is a common error, as we have pointed out several times, to interpret opposition to U.S. intervention and aggression as support for the programs of its victims, a useful device for state propagandists but one that often has no basis in fact.”

The authors are being charitable in describing such an interpretation as an “error.” They thoroughly dealt with how the media tries making that bogus connection with its critics, and Time even unsuccessfully tried baiting Chomsky into that trap. Chomsky and Herman could not have been more explicit in their position, yet ever since the publication of The Political Economy of Human Rights, many of Chomsky's detractors have made the claim that he was defending or denying the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in that work. To this day, I read about people asking Chomsky “tough questions” about his active support for the Khmer Rouge. To Chomsky, it must feel like being asked the Russian classic, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

Even worse, the so-called "left" has contributed to that misrepresentation of Chomsky's work (while somehow Herman generally escaped any criticism).[22] I recently received an email from one of my critics that he ignored Chomsky's work (whose work I use significantly in my own) ever since he read Chomsky "defending the Khmer Rouge" atrocities.

My guess is option 1, which also makes option 3 true. He likely read one of the many attacks on Chomsky that fraudulently misrepresent his work, using the straw man fallacy.

In my work, I have dealt with the logical fallacy termed inappropriate appeal to authority. Dennis Lee's critic Mr. Skeptic practiced that fallacy when he cited a newspaper article about Dennis' "criminal" record, when Dennis himself reproduces the official documents on his "crimes," which demonstrate that the newspaper articles were lying, and Mr. Skeptic knew it. In Mr. Skeptic's case, it was a case of dishonesty as well as poor logic. Another of Dennis' critics followed Mr. Skeptic's lead (and publicly thanked Mr. Skeptic for his help) when he reproduced newspaper clippings on Dennis' "criminal" record, and he eventually retracted his libel after I repeatedly informed him of it.

On various occasions, I have received this observation: my work is a conspiracy theory. One critic called my essay on the cancer racket an unbelievable conspiracy theory, because the conspiring doctors would not send themselves to their deaths by using orthodox treatments that do not work. I doubt that he read one word of my essay before launching his "conspiracy theory" criticism. Any honest reading of that essay (a revised version of it will be posted one day soon) will eliminate the notion that it is a conspiracy theory. It is nearly the opposite. I think that there are surely wide-ranging conspiracies in the medical racket, like there are in the energy racket. Yet, perhaps the primary thrust of all my work is that we all have a hand in what happens in our world, and what the left calls "structural analysis" (or "institutional analysis") explains more of the dynamic than conspiracies do. I estimate that the state of affairs in the energy and medical industries are a few percent conspiratorial, at best, and well over 90% "unconscious," largely because people refuse to accept responsibility for what is happening. That was probably the main lesson on my journey. We all bear responsibility for what happens in our world, which also means that we can do something about it, which should be good news, I would think.

For those who prefer playing the victim game, however, my news is the worst imaginable, which I believe is why those who play the victim game are my harshest critics. For me, a profound paradox accompanied that realization. My harshest and most irrational critics are almost exclusively white men, who are the biggest "winners" in history. People would not readily identify educated white men as victims, but the victims and victimizers operate from the same premise: both feel that they are victims. If we attain a perspective of self-mastery and self-love, we will not feel the need to exploit others to attain our life's goals, to live the “good life,” etc. Those who feel that they are victims react by seeking situations to become victims, or seek situations where they can victimize others. They want to be winners, which in their fearful minds means that there have to be losers. It is a pathological symbiosis.

Whatever we do to others, we ultimately do to ourselves. Jesus spoke about reaping what we sow, and Eastern religions have their concepts of reincarnation and karma. Whatever we do to another will ultimately happen to ourselves, and bridges the paradox of why victims and victimizers are playing the same game. In the end, victimizers are their own greatest victims. It just takes awhile for what goes around to come around. As the Beatles said, the love we take is equal to the love we make. As we endlessly victimize each other, thinking that that is what it takes to be winners, we may reap the bitter harvest where we are all losers as we destroy our planet. Love is the only answer I know of. We can all be winners. There do not have to be any losers. With love, we can have it all.

One of the larger essays on my web site is "My Experiences in America Regarding Iraq." In it, I do more than just tell the story of America's latest exercise in genocide. I tell what it was like to be an American while those events have been happening. Iraq is our genocide, and one we are almost entirely responsible for. Iraq is not the site of America's first oil-control genocide, and unfortunately, it may not be the last. Arguably, the greatest force of evil in the world today is U.S. action (military, including arms sales, CIA, banking, corporate, etc.) beyond its shores.[23] According to those I talk to, it is not "realistic" to dismantle our war and spy machine, or at least bring it home and stop playing bully of the world, though we like to think we are the selfless cop, such are our delusions. The less "realistic" that dismantling our war machine is, the more "realistic" is the self-extermination of the human race. Which "realism" will we choose?

One site that published my original Iraq essays was Radio Islam, a decidedly anti-Semitic site that has published the work of many scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.[24] I have read plenty of anti-Semitic scholarship, partly from my general political studies, and partly because my war essay spends over a hundred pages on the Jewish journey through history, and focuses intensely on the Jewish holocaust of World War II. Nobody can honestly say that my work is anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, I have fielded the criticism on more than one occasion that because Radio Islam has published some of my work (which barely mentions Israel or Jews), I am an anti-Semite. That charge is barely worth responding to, yet is one more example of the flawed logic that some of my critics use. Those critics who assailed my integrity because Radio Islam has published some of my work never addressed my actual writings. They never made one substantive response to my work, but called me an anti-Semite.

Well-meaning people have repeatedly informed me that my work will be continually assailed because Radio Islam has published some of it. If my past experience is any guide to the future, the critics who do so will never address my writings in anything resembling a reasoned critique. As in the past, some of those criticisms will be patently dishonest, while the rest will be filled with the logical fallacies that I am presenting here. If my critics want to argue against my work, that is their right, but a critique of my work has little to do with who published it, and I am now my own primary publisher. I do not cite Radio Islam as a publishing source to try making my work more credible. I only link to sites whose overall content I respect, and Radio Islam is not one of them. If I had used Radio Islam in an attempt to gain credibility, or if I endorsed the site, my critics' comments may hold water, but I do not. Plenty of people have linked to my sites over the years, many of whom I wished had not, but I never asked them to remove the link. Anyone who wants to can link to my site. It would be nice if they asked first, but I have never demanded it.

My Jewish writings firmly rebut most of the anti-Jewish writings on Radio Islam's site, and it is to Ahmed's credit that he publishes the work of somebody whose work counters his own. Ahmed may remove my work from his site one day (he will not correspond with me anymore), and it would give some of my critics less ammunition. Yet, I have found that those critics always seem to fail to comprehend my work, or even address it.

My critics have told me that allowing Radio Islam to publish my work has allowed them to judge me by the company I keep. For an example of truly keeping somebody’s company, I have kept company with Dennis Lee. Dennis is a literalist Christian. I am not a Christian, much less a Bible-banging one. Does “keeping company” with Dennis taint me? Does Dennis’ keeping company with me taint him in the eyes of his fellow Christians? Do I approve of Dennis’ attacks on feminists and homosexuals in his writings? No, and I have let him know it, more than once. If somebody wants to take me to task for “keeping company” with a homophobe, that is their right. If I stopped associating with right-wingers and Fundamentalist Christians, my circle of friends and associates would be much smaller than it is. America is filled with those kinds of people. What would I accomplish by refusing to associate with them? I truly have “kept company” with Dennis, and one of the great honors of my life is having been involved with him. I have never met Ahmed. If the KKK publishes my work, or links to it, am I “keeping company” with them? If I am, does that mean that I endorse their views?

I have no interest in debating the merits of what Dennis is doing these days, if he has free energy or not or is close to delivering it. Those who want to engage in those issues are invited to seek debating opponents elsewhere.

Another charge leveled against me is that I indulge in presentism. Presentism is judging the past by the standards of the present, but what I demonstrate is how the history I was taught is a pack of lies, though more the lies of omission than commission, like all good propaganda. That is a very different issue from presentism. In a sense, the presentism argument has been a method of attack on people who bring up the truth of the Columbus Myth and other lies we have been taught as "history."

Presentism would be judging Columbus a filthy man, when all fifteenth century Spaniards reveled in their filthiness. To say that fifteenth century Spaniards were a filthy people is not practicing presentism, for they were. They were much filthier than the Moors or Native Americans of the day, for instance, who bathed regularly. A Spaniard could go his/her whole life without bathing, except for being baptized. Spaniards who bathed in 1492 were often accused of being Moors, so filthiness was "proof" of their Christian nature, as the Spanish Inquisition hunted Moors and Jews, and bathing attracted the Spanish Inquisition's interest. One could smell a Spaniard from fifty yards away. The Aztecs put flowers to their noses and bathed the Spaniards in incense because their stench was so overpowering.

To say that Columbus engaged in mass murder is not engaging in presentism, because he did. Mass murder was a regular practice of the Spaniards of the day, so although Columbus was a mass murderer, he was not a "bad man," relative to his fellow Spaniards. Similarly, Columbus was dishonest, stealing the reward for first sighting land on the first voyage. Thievery is thievery, five hundred years ago or today. Similarly, kidnapping the natives, which Columbus did on the very day he "discovered" the New World, may have been a standard practice of the Portuguese slave runners (Columbus was a slave runner), but those he kidnapped almost all died within a few months of capture. Kidnapping them definitely violated them.

If somebody states that Columbus was a relatively typical Spaniard of the day, that is fine, and I say the same. However, kidnapping, the mass murder of innocent people, theft and the like were as horrible then as now, even if Columbus invoked God as he did it, especially for those who suffered at his hands. The Conquistadors' practice of feeding live native infants to their dogs shocked even the priests of the day. When would the practice of feeding live infants to dogs be in keeping with the mores of the day? Not in fifteenth century Spain, and certainly not today.

Columbus initiated the first and, to my knowledge, only complete genocide of millions of people (the Taino of the Caribbean). He led the effort, and one of his early programs was chopping off native hands that did not give him enough gold. He was brutal, self-pitying, greedy, dishonest, cruel and a hypocrite. He also had some virtues, like persistence, courage, and even some sense of honor, though it was sporadically evident. Even Hernando de Soto, Stalin and Hitler had a sense of honor, however infrequently it was evident. Yet, somehow, Columbus was transformed into a national hero, with an American national holiday in his name. My point is that we turned a greedy mass murderer into a national hero, and the American history profession participated in whitewashing his image. If we have a Columbus Day, then the Germans could have a Hitler Day and we would have no room to criticize them. Columbus was no monster, not for his day and place, but I find little evidence that justifies making him a hero, and far more that justifies monster status.

Ironically, the heroification of Columbus was a major act of presentism by American historians and others. Columbus was posthumously transformed into a hero when it came time to justify and glorify what Europeans did to the New World. One meaning of presentism is that history can be important to the present, to help us understand today better. In that regard, I am a presentist, guilty as charged.

Some of my critics blame me for making white people into monsters. White people are the most murderous people in history due to several factors, and being Christians may be one of the most important, as the Judeo-Christian ethic actively justified the violence that Europeans inflicted on the world. The primary reason Europe prevailed (and still does today - the U.S. population is mainly composed of the descendants of invading Europeans) was their mastery of violence. To the Native Americans in Columbus' day, for instance, the invaders were all white, European, Christian, and (not coincidentally) men.

The American history profession, like all the professions I know of, has prostituted itself to the prevailing winds of wealth and power, and has served up all manner of criminals and murderers as heroes and saints. I am a white man. I was taught white history. My adult investigations have shown me that most of what I was taught about my noble forefathers was a platter of fanciful lies, which crippled my sense of reality, and I am still recovering from it. A Chinese woman could likely study the history she was taught and find out that she was also taught lies. However, my work is about what I was taught, not what she was taught. I have had critics assume that my work is supposed to be a multicultural synthesis of what the world is today, or was. Though I have studied plenty in that realm, there are not enough years in my life, nor enough arrogance in my soul, to think I can speak for the people of India today, or the extinct Taino, or arrive at a sophisticated cultural assessment of the world today. I fully admit that limitation in my work.

My work is in large part my story. I can do something about the lies being told in the society I live in. When my critics dismiss my historical and political writings because the Aztecs had human sacrifice, or the Chinese invaded Tibet, or there is civil war in Africa, I regard their reactions to be a form of denial, if not consciously dishonest. In any case, it is another false dichotomy.

I will have little correspondence with future critics who decry my work because Radio Islam has published part of it, who call it a conspiracy theory without even having read it, who dismiss my work as Marxist, who tell me that China's government is worse than the United States', so it justifies US behavior, or who make the many other criticisms that abandon reason.

My work is iconoclastic; I challenge the system and the beliefs of Americans in particular. As far as I can see, the same dynamics play out continually in all of our intellectual disciplines, whether it is science, religion, politics, economics, philosophy, etc. On my site, I deal with the issue of dogmatism, whether it is scientific, social, political, economic or religious. The dogmas appear related. Holding rigidly to a point of view, no matter what evidence flies in one's face to contradict or temper it, is dogmatic. Essentially, it is based in denial. It can be called blind faith, or a faith that blinds, but what it generally does is short-circuit the thinking process. I believe it is rooted in fear.

In religion, the set of beliefs adhered to can be called a faith. In science, it can be seen as a set of beliefs (theories) called a paradigm. In politics and other disciplines, it can be called a worldview. What it amounts to is how people view "reality." Do we each have our own reality? Do we co-create it? How much does mine have to do with yours? Those are timeless questions. I will give several examples of what I call "paradigmatic thinking" and its roots. What I have found is that paradigms are built from the bottom up. As children, we are inculcated into the prevailing paradigm of our society.

The modern meaning of the term paradigm was coined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A bedrock presumption of the scientific worldview is that of objectivity. There is a world out there, as related to our senses, and we can "objectively" observe what it is. Some of the greatest physicists of all time have challenged that notion. Is there really anything out there, and if there is, is there an objective perspective of it? I submit that science has no answers on that question, but it is a presumption that it operates from. That presumption can be right or wrong, but if I do not share that presumption, the direction that science pursues will be largely meaningless to me. That does not mean that I am right, but I can hardly have a meaningful dialogue with a system of thought in which we differ on our most basic premises. Lines of thought follow from their presumptions.

For instance, the most influential work of physics ever written was Isaac Newton's Principia. In the beginning it makes three presumptions. Two of those are the notion of time and space being absolute. For over two hundred years, Newton's Principia was the guiding light of physics. In the 1880s two scientists, Michelson and Morley, performed the most delicate experiment in history up to that point and determined, much to their surprise, that the speed of light did not vary, no matter the speed of the light's source. A generation later, Albert Einstein theorized that time and space were not absolute, but relative. It looks like Einstein was right. His theories led to the physics we have today, with black holes, lasers, atomic bombs and a new paradigm from which to view the universe. Its foundation was built on challenging the presumptions of the previous paradigm, and challenging the presumptions is how paradigms and belief systems are changed.

People have tried to discredit the paradigm shattering that Einstein did by saying that Newton's work was good enough, until our instruments were able to prove his presumptions wrong. Wrong is wrong. Ptolemy's theory that the earth was the center of universe also worked for its time, until it was eventually proven wrong by scientific observation that led to new theories. Although Ptolemy's astronomy "worked" for the day, it did not make it right. Nearly identically, Newton's derivation of accurate calculation systems regarding the effect of gravity did not make his presumptions about time and space right. In addition, Newton did not even say what he thought gravity was, but merely described its effect, an effect that relativity modified. Einstein will eventually be proven wrong, and Einstein expected it. He said that every theory is eventually killed by a fact. That did not make Newton any less of a towering scientific figure, but his presumptions were eventually shown to be incorrect, which radically altered today's physics.

I had to largely train myself in thermodynamics, partly to defend Dennis Lee in court. I have had the great blessing of knowing those who have challenged the very foundation of that hallowed science, so hallowed that its theories are called laws. James Watt invented the steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution. A couple of generations later, Sadi Carnot created a theoretical framework for the steam engine technology that already existed. One genius who challenged the foundation of thermodynamics is Victor Fischer. Carnot presumed an ideal gas as the working fluid in his ideal engine. He then extrapolated from his logic with gas engines to all working fluids. Fischer and others maintain that Carnot's presumptions and extrapolation were his fatal errors. Fischer maintains that beginning with the steam engine and extrapolating that logic to all engines marched thermodynamics off in the wrong direction, a misdirection from which it has not yet recovered. Because of that faulty presumption (at least in the eyes of Fischer and others whose scientific opinion I respect) regarding heat engines, the notion of liquid heat engines has been ignored ever since. Fischer and others like him (Fischer has helped write thermodynamics textbooks) explain that thermodynamics textbooks are gloriously wrong (folks like Fischer call them "expedient rubbish") as they teach students about thermodynamics, building on Carnot's presumptive foundation. The first prototype of Fischer's engine came closer to Carnot's ideal efficiency than any other heat engine ever had before.

In the realm of microbiology, the same phenomenon can be seen. Antoine Béchamp was one of the nineteenth century's great scientific minds. As my medical essay covers at length, he was the first to convincingly disprove the notion of the spontaneous generation of life, particularly at the microscopic level, with one of his Beacon Experiments in 1857. Louis Pasteur was an opportunistic chemist who plagiarized Béchamp's work, and did not understand what he was stealing. Many years after he stole credit for Béchamp's work, he still did not understand the process of fermentation or why the spontaneous generation theory of life was inaccurate. Pasteur's germ theory of disease was a poorly understood theft of Béchamp's work. He marched microbiology off in the wrong direction over a hundred years ago with his grotesque theft of Béchamp's work.

One standard microbiology textbook is titled Microbiology, An Introduction, by Tortora, Funke and Case (the second edition, published in 1986). At the very beginning of the text, on page 8, the authors give Pasteur full credit for settling the issue of spontaneous generation, in experiments he conducted in 1861. Then they give Pasteur credit for his "Germ Theory of Disease," which is a cornerstone of modern medicine. Pasteur's work literally founded the paradigm. Unfortunately, it was wrong and stolen. To be polite, the authors of Microbiology, An Introduction presented students with something more like a fairy tale than the truth. The entire foundation of microbiology, and hence much of modern medicine, is probably wrong. Béchamp is the first in a long line of scientists who have convincingly shown that pleomorphic theory is far more convincing than the current germ theory of disease. Pasteur's work led to vaccination and other methods that likely have created more disease than they "cured."

My college biology textbook (The Study of Biology, Third Edition, by Baker and Allen), like all the other biology and microbiology textbooks, repeats to its students the lie about Pasteur overturning spontaneous generation theory (pp. 842-843), gives Pasteur full credit as the scientist who figured out fermentation (pp. 210-211), and Béchamp's name is nowhere mentioned.

Scientists like Royal Rife, Gaston Naessens and others have shown that pleomorphic theory is far more persuasive in describing disease dynamics than Pasteur's poorly understood theft from Béchamp. The findings of the revolutionary microscopes of Rife and Naessens not only support Béchamp's pleomorphic theories, but also overturn the theories regarding optics, which is also part of Newton's legacy. Einstein proposed radical ideas of space, time and gravity, and the microscopes of Rife and Naessens produced radical data about optics, enabling them to see life processes never seen before. It does not mean that Newton's work was worthless, but it was something that others improved on, which should be standard scientific practice. Unlike the relatively gracious reception that Einstein's theories received, the work of Rife and Naessens, the proof of which was evident to the observer simply by looking through the lens of their microscopes, was met with jailing and other vile behavior by the scientific and medical establishments. Why? In a pattern that repeats throughout my work, it appears to be because their work led to cancer cures that were harmless, cheap and effective, and threatened the cancer racket. Today's paradigm of "attack the tumor" is thorough insanity, but it guides orthodox cancer therapy and research today, and Pasteur's plagiarism of Béchamp helped create the paradigm that serves up an attack-the-tumor philosophy. I give over twenty examples of how cancer cure pioneers were wiped out in the West, mainly in the United States. The treatments were mainly harmless, cheap and effective. Looking into how the cancer racket works is like looking into Orwell's worst nightmare. Microbiologists are disinformed about their discipline on their first day of class regarding Pasteur's work, hear nothing about the work of Béchamp, Rife, Naessens, etc., and are promptly marched off in the wrong direction. They have been indoctrinated by a faulty paradigm. Most will probably never discover this error.

Science goes far beyond optics and microbiology. A math wizard I know told me that modern math and geometry is merely one of an infinite number of "valid" math systems, and with different presumptions (like Einstein's presumption that parallel lines meet at infinity), each is "valid."

Today the respected astronomer Halton Arp is questioning one of the foundations of astronomy and cosmology: that the universe is expanding from a primordial "Big Bang." The universe may not be expanding at all. Naturally, his work is marginalized, though he has not gone to jail. Theorizing whether the universe is expanding or not generally will not land you in jail, because no economic empires are built on it…yet. Einstein enjoyed that grace. The work of Nikola Tesla, though, had a more practical impact on the lives of average people, so he has been severely marginalized by history, though he invented the electricity that powers our homes today, and was pursuing free energy before the robber baron J.P. Morgan pulled the rug out from under him nearly a century ago.

Those are issues in the "hard" sciences. The disciplines of optics, thermodynamics, astronomy, microbiology, mathematics, etc., are all subject to radical revision. Supposedly, those are no-nonsense studies, but their very foundations are being seriously questioned today. What do we know? NASA probe data suggests artificial structures on Mars and the moon. People I know and trust have received secretive free energy and anti-gravity demonstrations, whose revelations would wipe out many “laws” of physics today as well as radically transform the world economy. Numerous areas of "hard science" are apparently faulty in their theories and data, often because vested political and economic interests actively thwart any progress. The paradigms are shaky at best.

Try engaging a scientist on these issues, and watch what happens. In my experience, only scientists as internally secure as Einstein can gleefully admit that we barely know anything, or that they were taught lies (or "expedient rubbish"). I have interacted with giants in a number of scientific disciplines, and what they all acknowledge is that we barely know anything. That is regarding "hard science." It gets more problematic regarding the "softer" issues like history, the media, politics, religion, economics and the like.

As a child in California, Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Junípero Serra, Thomas Jefferson and others were held up to me as American heroes. If you are an American and over forty years old (and perhaps even younger), compare what you were taught about Columbus to my essay.

The lies that American schoolchildren have been taught for centuries about Columbus and his heroic feat is the very beginning of their American history studies. In his vitally important Lies my Teacher Told Me, James Loewen clearly demonstrates how vapid American high school history textbooks are. Loewen observes that high school children hate learning American history, partly because they know on some level that they are being sold a lie. Loewen devotes a chapter of Lies my Teacher Told Me to the Columbus Myth that children are taught. Virtually no facts about Columbus and his voyages as taught to American schoolchildren are true, except that he sailed in 1492 on the Santa Maria.

Loewen, a college history professor himself, makes the case that college history, on the other hand, is partly about disabusing those students of the fairy tales they were raised with. I still have the history book that I studied during my first year in college (American History: A Survey, Fourth Edition, Volume 1: to 1877; Current, Williams and Freidel are the authors. It was published in 1975). Just as high school history books do, the text began American history with the voyage of Columbus.

After half a page of dubious information on the natives who lived here for most of what we call history, and many thousands of years before that, the authors quickly go across the ocean and describe the European dynamics that led to the voyage of Columbus. They briefly sketched Columbus' career as "discoverer" and concluded that he "deserved the fame that ultimately came to him."[25] The big news of Columbus' career was initiating the world's first and, to my knowledge, only complete extermination of millions of people, the Taino of the Caribbean. Regarding that truly historic event there is barely any mention, and it is only mentioned after the section regarding Columbus is concluded. The text states,

"The first experiments with forced labor, as in the island of Hispaniola, resulted in the near extermination of the natives, but Indians continued to work in the mines or on the ranches of the mainland for centuries…The whites exploited the colored peoples, yet the Spanish conquerors were not particularly cruel and predatory, no more so than the later English colonists. The millions of Indians who died in Spanish America were mostly victims of the white man's diseases."[26]

My college textbook was not exactly an exercise in iconoclasm. I am far from the only student who finished college thinking that Columbus was a hero. Howard Zinn, with a Ph.D. in history, earned at Columbia, never found out any differently about Columbus, until he began researching his A People's History of the United States.

There again you have it, the paradigm being formed with the very first introduction to the subject, and the disinformation deludes its students from that moment forward. As Loewen stated, the purpose of the lies in history textbooks is partly to inculcate a sense of nationalism in American children, to lead them to believe their nation is a great one, forever unstained, marching off to endless feats of "progress." It is a story of the state as hero, which is a form of brainwashing. As Loewen demonstrated, the more "educated" Americans were, the more they supported the rape of Vietnam, for instance. In 1971, 80% of those with a grade school education were against the war, 75% of those with high school education, and only 60% of those with a college education.[27]

In 1925, the American Legion listed the ideal American history textbook's features:

"must dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson, must speak chiefly of success…"[28]

To this day, that largely remains the philosophy of American history textbook publishers. The "dumbing us down" thesis of John Taylor Gatto is elucidated by William Griffin and John Marciano, who wrote:

"Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education. By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence that dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue of their control of the ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape perception on such vital issues as the Vietnam War…Within history texts, for example, the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in which students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would sharpen their critical abilities."[29]

"There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers." - Marc Ferro[30]

I was raised in Ventura, California, a mission town founded by Junípero Serra. The grade school I attended, down the street from where I grew up, was named after Serra. I was taught three years of California history, and like Columbus and American history, Serra is the first significant figure of California history (if you do not count the pirate Drake who briefly visited it), while the many thousands of years of native habitation merits only a brief footnote.

Like the Columbus Myth, I looked into the Serra Myth, which I deal with at length. Serra is up for sainthood today. It turns out that Junípero Serra was a fanatical and masochistic priest who initiated the genocide of the natives of California, another little fact that escaped the history I was taught. What was the difference between Serra, Columbus and Hitler? In the end, not a great deal. Hitler was not so much an aberration as the logical conclusion of the Western mentality.

Similarly, George Washington was the richest man in America when he became president, building his fortune on his inheritance, marrying well, owning slaves to plant and harvest his tobacco (on stolen native land), and he was the primary architect of the strategy of forcing the natives to sign treaties that the new nation called the United States would never honor. Most American politicians have faithfully continued that strategy. "Heroes" like Custer and Jefferson fared similarly under scrutiny, as well as Andrew Jackson, Kit Carson and Wyatt Earp.

That kind of "teaching" creates a paradigm that guides our thinking. In the case of the history I was taught, the paradigm was that my ancestors were great and noble heroes, "civilizing" the Western Hemisphere. Why? Apparently, so I will believe I live in a great nation, forever progressing to new vistas of wonder, leading the world to the light. It worked for a while. The paradigm blinded me to reality and put me in a fantasy world. Why? Apparently, it was to control me. With my brain carefully washed, I would gladly march off to distant lands to annihilate the natives, to "defend" my great nation, or cheer as others do so. I would believe in the insanity of attacking the tumor as a way of "curing" cancer. That cancer paradigm has created an awesome amount of suffering and death, while "coincidentally" lining the pockets of the drug companies, doctors and others in the medical business. The nationalism paradigm has created even more suffering and death, but generally for people of other nations, those we have attacked with the world's biggest killing machine, while "coincidentally" lining the pockets of military contractors and others.

In religion one can see the same paradigm manufacturing going on, also at square one. The book of Genesis, in its first section, states:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”[31]

Such a sweet deal that was. God put us in charge. We Westerners feel we have the right to treat animals and other "lesser" creatures however we wish, which has led to the evils of factory farming and the animal experiments of today. That is also why the English saw Native Americans as subhuman. We could be in charge of them, treating them however we saw fit, annihilating them when they got in the way. Although that first creation myth said nothing about the inferiority of women, a later passage in Genesis, during the Garden of Eden tale, has God making the first woman from Adam's rib. Then Eve messed up paradise with the serpent and forbidden fruit, with Adam blaming Eve for his sin, which has justified the treatment of women as inferior creatures, a paradigm that continues to this present day. Women did not get the right to vote in the United States, that revered democratic nation, until fewer than a hundred years ago. Slaves and Jews got the right to vote in America before women did. If you are a man, the paradigm as initiated by Genesis sounds like a good deal. If you were a woman or animal (or "inferior" race), the deal was not so good.

In the realm of economics, a paradigm built on presumptions and myths prevails. The dogma of free markets dominates economic theory. There is no such thing as a free market or free trade. Free markets are as plentiful as unicorns. Under capitalism, the game is to give the consumers the right to buy whatever they want, but you just have to limit their menu. Americans can choose any cancer treatment they want, as long as it is surgery, radiation or chemotherapy. Americans can get their energy any way they want, as long as they pay the electric or oil companies for it. Americans can pay for their goods any way they want, as long as it is in U.S. dollars. Americans can get around any way they want, as long as it is by car. In practice, alternatives can be chosen through great effort and privation, like going to Mexico for your cancer treatment, for instance, if the U.S. medical gangsters do not burn down the Mexican clinic or kidnap its director. Generally, it is far too much trouble, if Americans are even aware of the alternatives, so they shuffle along with the herd.

In orthodox economic theory, we have the law of supply and demand, called a law as if it were the law of gravity. The law of supply and demand is founded upon a presumption of human greed. There exist other societies where greed is not the "law." Donald Walsch's god said to him, when discussing the highly evolved societies around the universe (which we are definitely not):

"In those cultures it would not be possible to fail to share. Nor would it be possible to think of 'charging' increasingly exorbitant 'prices' the more rare a necessity became. Only extremely primitive societies would do this. Only very primitive beings would see scarcity of that which is commonly needed as an opportunity for greater profits. 'Supply and demand' does not drive the HEB (Highly Evolved Being) system. That is part of a system that humans claim contributes to their quality of life and to the common good. Yet, from the vantage point of a highly evolved being, your system violates the common good, for it does not allow that which is good to be experienced in common.[32]

Greed was an almost unknown vice in the "primitive" civilizations of the New World and Africa (the Aztecs being a rare exception), before the white man came along.

Again, we have a paradigm being built on a presumption, and a primitive one at that. How does one enforce the paradigm? As far I have seen, it is accomplished by attacking and marginalizing anybody who does not subscribe to it. Hence, the U.S. war against "communism" and its anti-capitalistic heresies of sharing. Ironically, Christians were the first communists in the West, which is obvious if one studies early Christianity. The paradigm enforcers harass, jail and murder doctors who cure cancer patients without attacking the tumor. They throw free energy revolutionaries like Dennis Lee into prison on fabricated charges. They write Béchamp and Tesla out of the history books. Halton Arp and Noam Chomsky are unheard of by most Americans, but hacks like Carl Sagan and Rush Limbaugh are household words. The paradigm creators/enforcers parade Columbus, Serra, Washington, Jefferson, Custer and the rest of that rogues' gallery as the heroes our children are supposed to look up to.

In the world of politics, similar enforcement mechanisms are in place to keep the paradigm from being challenged. Much of it is "innocent" in that once people get the paradigm drilled into their heads, they are incapable of seeing beyond it. Ralph McGehee, who I write about at length on my web site, discovered the hard way what his employer, the CIA, was really up to. I synopsize his Deadly Deceits on my site.

Ralph had to run the gauntlet in order to tell the American people what the CIA really did. The CIA has nothing to do with defending freedom, and never did (his book was recently reprinted, and is available through Amazon.com, among other places). The CIA was and is all about keeping the subject nations enslaved to capitalism, which is largely colonialism with new rhetoric. I received an email from Ralph about how the CIA policymakers would "cull" the data so it would conform to the prevailing ideology. Thus, most Americans and nearly everybody at the CIA did not realize that what happened in Vietnam and the whole Cold War was generally the U.S.' efforts to keep the people of the post-colonial world enslaved to the West. The realization that the "communist menace" was only the attempt of the populations in Vietnam, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, etc., to free themselves from the white man's domination was fleetingly acknowledged by barely anybody in America, and our mainstream media and its pundits have never admitted it. Ralph wrote,

"As I discovered in my 'Vietnam days' policy dictated intelligence with William Colby and others ensuring that no information challenging our policy saw the light of day. However, the rejection of reality started from the very first days from just after WWII and prior to the creation of the CIA.

"Later even Sam Adams, the number one analyst/protestor on Vietnam, had little knowledge about the Communists "People's War," written about ad naseum by Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh and even Mao Tse-Tung.

"Agency analysts do not use open source data/datum - and herewith lies one major cause of its egregiously terrible intelligence. Another is the multi-leveled bureaucratic structure of the CIA that authorizes politicized bureaucrats at all levels to hack away at raw intelligence until it supports policy.

"In my last few years in the CIA as a skeptic I saw that distorting intelligence to support policy was a universal truism. This can be deduced particularly from Mel Goodwin's experience regarding CIA intelligence on the Soviet Union. William Casey was a total practitioner of this phenomenon.

"…For a successful career in the CIA one must accept that the Emperor wears gorgeous robes - stating the obvious kills the messenger."

Of the major ex-CIA authors who are critical of the Agency, four men make up nearly all of them: McGehee, Phil Agee, John Stockwell and Victor Marchetti. They all either endured huge legal battles to publish what they did, or endured many illegal intimidations. Agee essentially lost his citizenship for publishing Inside the Company, and lived under political asylum in Germany, after being hounded across Europe. The CIA tried cloak-and-dagger strategies to prevent him from publishing his book, like bugging his typewriter to find his Paris hideout while he wrote his memoirs and trying to lure him to Spain to possibly murder him. Marchetti and McGehee engaged in huge legal battles with the CIA, as they tried publishing their books "legally." Stockwell was like Agee in that he did not let the CIA censor his book before publication, and had a running legal battle with them after he published his In Search of Enemies. Other ex-CIA authors write under pseudonyms to avoid those fates.

Wiping out the messenger is how the false paradigm can be sustained, never more apparent than in the CIA's case. Ralph was tailed to the grocery store and had his house bugged for daring to publish Deadly Deceits and continuing his efforts with his CIABASE, which was a completely legal enterprise that informed people what the CIA was up to with totally public-domain material. Through escalating CIA intimidation of Ralph, leading to bodily injury in early 2000, they finally succeeded in silencing Ralph, as his CIABASE is now out of business.

In their masterful Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky clearly demonstrate the complete subservience of the media to government/corporate policy during the Vietnam days, during the bludgeoning of Central America in the 1980s and so on. The true motivation of our aggression in Southeast Asia was never hinted at. The media completely inverted reality, so the people we invaded and murdered by the million were the aggressors, while our invading army was the one doing all the suffering. It would be as if the Nazi invasion of Poland were depicted as a Polish aggression against Germany. That inversion of reality over Vietnam lasts to this very day in the U.S. mainstream media. My work deals at great length with the American media, how it works, and what it produces. Orwell would have been impressed with their work.

What a work like Manufacturing Consent clearly demonstrates is a total adherence to a paradigm (e.g., we are the good guys) that no amount of contradictory data is ever able to shake, no matter how bald and undeniable. No matter how many lies our politicians told (obvious to anybody who could read and had a brain), no matter how many dishonorable actions by our diplomats, the corporate media could be counted on to put the best possible spin on it, somehow transforming genocide into a noble affair. Somehow, the United States killed several million people and destroyed the lives of many millions more in Southeast Asia, but our motives were pure, through and through.

The American people themselves do not buy the Vietnam propaganda (most saw the war as immoral on our part), but the media and other establishment mouthpieces have never admitted it, and it looks like they never will. They repeat the dogma that our motivation was pure, but our strategy unfortunate or "unwinnable." Although most Americans believe our motivation regarding Vietnam was tainted and immoral, that notion has never, ever entered the pages of the mainstream media. As Herman and Chomsky state, the notion is simply "unthinkable" by the mainstream media, their brains thoroughly washed.

As Herman and Chomsky summarized in Manufacturing Consent, regarding the media's retrospective treatment of the Vietnam War:

"The war was a 'tragic error,' but not 'fundamentally wrong or immoral' (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression - the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the United States, or an ally or client.

"Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as 'fundamentally wrong and immoral,' or as an outright criminal aggression - a war crime - is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable.

"All of this reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests."[33]

It appears that we will never apologize to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Cuba, El Salvador, Indonesia, Chile, the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Philippines, etc., etc. Being the world's most powerful nation, with the world's largest killing machine, means never having to say you are sorry.

I write at length about how fluoride was magically transformed from a deadly industrial waste into a tooth's best friend. It turns out that most of the fluoridation pioneers had conflicts of interest or directly worked for fluoride polluters, like Harold Hodge did, though his employment by the fluoride-polluting military was kept secret. Industry-employed scientists fabricated and distorted data to make an industrial waste appear to be a safe cavity preventive, though there is no credible evidence that supports that notion, and all evidence shows that fluoride is a deadly poison that actually destroys the teeth and damages our brains, among other health disasters.

I have to admit that the system can be sophisticated and subtle. It is not always easy to see through the many layers of deception. The reason all those false paradigms are held in place is because they provide comforting fictions for many people, and great wealth and power for a select few. If, like Nazi Germany and probably every other nation, Americans can see themselves as forever noble, virtuous and heroic, as a presumption, they can inflict their violence at will on anybody else with a clear conscience. In that regard, the American history brainwashing, the CIA's lies, the media inversions of reality and so on form an interlock of self-interest. For those at the top of that food chain, life is "good." In addition, Americans get cheap bananas, oil, tin and other imports due to America's enforcement of the international neocolonial order. White, educated American men are the most privileged demographic group in world history, and eagerly believe the lies because it justifies their privileged position. Virtually without exception, they are the people who most take my work to task. As the Ralph McGehees, Rodney Stiches and Dennis Lees of the world have discovered at great personal cost, the enforcers of those murderous paradigms do not deal gently with their heretics, and for the nearly 99% of humanity who are the losers in such a system, life is not pretty.

Although those at the food chain's apex think life is great, they also get sacrificed on the altar of power and profit, dying agonizing deaths from cancer (the "orthodox" treatments are actually worse than the disease) and drinking fluoridated water, which helps give them cancer and impair their intelligence. Under the prevailing paradigm, everybody is ultimately a loser. If today's genetic engineering wizardry in which there is a capitalistic rush to own life itself ends up unleashing something like Stephen King's Captain Trips onto humanity, annihilating nearly all of us (Walsch's god says that we are facing exactly that, as do others), it will be a monument to the dangers of allegiance to a paradigm that elevates power and greed, while denigrating truth and love.

Not all paradigms blind their adherents. The problem is adhering rigidly to any paradigm and suspending our mental and emotional faculties. Many paradigms can illuminate, but in a world where power and greed rule, the healthy paradigms are still waiting to be adopted. Let us pray that we adopt them before it is too late.

Intimately related to the issue of founding paradigms on false assumptions is a phenomenon where we conveniently forget the lessons we were taught as small children, thinking that we are now too grown-up and smart for that. We dogmatically recall the self-serving assumptions, while rejecting the other-serving admonitions. That part of growing up is not exactly a triumph. For instance, one of the greatest American spiritual masterpieces to make it into mainstream awareness in my lifetime is Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. If you are a literate American, it has been virtually impossible to avoid seeing the list that he developed. Fulghum makes the case that all the truly important things worth knowing were taught to us by age five. It is hard to argue with him. The first seven items on his list were about being a “good citizen” and being considerate when interacting with others. I will present his first seven rules, and how the West, and the United States in particular, has learned those lessons.

Share. The conquest of the world by Europe is the greatest act of genocide and theft in history. Its effects over the centuries have resulted in the situation where the earth’s richest one thousand people have more wealth than the poorest three billion, for a wealth ratio of millions-to-one. The U.S.-inflicted genocide in Iraq today has everything to do with controlling the oil supplies of the Middle East, which no sane person can deny. The United States is currently stealing Iraq’s oil, while millions of Iraqi citizens die. Today, the United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but consumes a quarter of its energy, and the West consumes the vast majority of the world’s resources, while the people in the subject nations live lives of dire poverty and oppression. Because of neocolonial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary fund, almost all of the world’s poorest nations export food to the United States, as they earn “foreign exchange” to pay off “loans” that those nations’ people never received any benefit from. It is merely a new form of slavery. In the United States, the richest 1% owns more than the poorest 95%, and until recently, the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, had more wealth than the poorest 100 million Americans. These situations are not laws of nature, but due to several hundred years of exploitation of the world by white people, with the current incarnation of the rapacious system called “global capitalism.”

Play Fair. The West has never come close to playing fair with those it has exploited and murdered. From the very beginning of the world’s conquest, the legal tactics of the Spanish were used as a form of fraud to steal the land from the natives, as well as enslaving them. Priests, soldiers and lawyers formed the vanguard of the enslavement of Mesoamerica’s natives. The natives of the Caribbean were completely exterminated during the early days of conquest, so today’s Mexico is the first place that the Spanish truly “colonized” (if we do not count their rape of the Canary Islands). That colonization was anything but fair. When the other colonial powers got into the game, the same patterns were repeated. Christopher Columbus and George Washington were two of the darkest figures of American history, yet they have national holidays in their name. Washington first proposed the strategy of stealing native land by forcing treaties on the Native American tribes that the United States would never honor, a strategy that was immediately adopted by the Continental Congress, and of over 370 treaties forced on the native American tribes by the United States government, historians cannot find even one that the United States honored. That legalistic fraud is not merely something in our history that has been covered up. In today’s international arena, the United States is the world’s most lawless nation. As Noam Chomsky says, the United States’ disregard for the restraints of international law is the worst the world has seen since the days of Nazi Germany.[34] The blatant vote fraud (and subsequent Supreme Court fraud) that took place in Florida during the 2000 U.S. presidential election is one more example of how we “play fair” in America. In the 1990s the United States began the practice of kidnapping people from Mexico to bring them to America for “justice.” Though it was a violation of international law that not even Hitler could get away with, the Supreme Court chief justice, the noted racist William Renquist, ruled that kidnapping people from Mexico was OK because the extradition treaty with Mexico did not explicitly say “no kidnapping allowed.”[35] I had brutal experience regarding how our legal system plays fair when I tried to help bring alternative energy to the marketplace.

Don’t Hit. Internationally, the United States is the most violent nation of all time. Nobody comes close. The genocide of Native Americans during the nineteenth century was a mere warm-up to the violence that the United States has inflicted on humanity during the past fifty years. Usually, the United States merely finances and arms our pawns, like Indonesia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Central American banana republics and elsewhere. That record would be bad enough, and by itself is one of the bloodiest records in world history.[36] Using its own armed forces, the United States has also killed several million people directly over the past fifty years, in places like Southeast Asia, Korea, Iraq, Panama and elsewhere. More people have died as a direct result of the United States’ efforts in Southeast Asia and Iraq than died in Hitler’s death camps. But somehow, we are the good guys, defending the high principles of freedom. Rhetoric and reality regarding that situation are on nearly opposite ends of the spectrum, and people who believe the U.S. government’s rationales for its endless violence are as deluded as they come, and the most fervent believers of the propaganda are educated Americans.

Put Things Back Where You Found Them. This rule is related to not taking things that belong to others and cleaning up after ourselves. It relates directly to my “play fair” observations and the “clean up your mess” rule, which I deal with below.

Clean up Your Mess. The United States is the world leader in creating environmental devastation. From fossil-fuel emissions to the environmental devastation of our subject nations, the United States (and the West in general) has created the greatest environmental devastation the world has known. As the environmental movement in the United States gained momentum in my lifetime, environmentally-disastrous activities like mining, oil exploration and pumping, deforestation and the like have been exported to our subject nations. We have also dumped our toxic waste in our subject nations. In America, we have always dumped our waste in the poorest areas, including the land the remnants of the Native American tribes live on. For a clear illustration of that principle in practice, a memorandum from the World’s Bank’s chief economist was leaked to the public in the early 1990s. In his memo, the chief economist, Lawrence Summers, encouraged the Bank to promote the migration of the “dirty industries” to the less developed nations. Summers’ argued that since the workers in those nations earn far less than workers in the developed nations, the health problems and deaths they would endure from those “dirty industries“ would be less costly than the misery and death that would be inflicted on the industrialized world’s workers. Summers wrote, “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”[37] What kind of public disgrace and career scuttling did Summers experience when that memo became public? In 1999, Bill Clinton promoted him to be the US Secretary of the Treasury.

Don’t Take Things That Aren’t Yours. All imperial cultures have been master thieves, and the United States is no different. From stealing the native land, using George Washington’s criminal strategy, to stealing Iraq’s oil with the oil-for-food swindle, the United States has always been a kleptocracy, and is now playing the game on a global scale.

Say You Are Sorry When You Hurt Somebody. After America shot down a passenger plane taking off from Iran, killing hundreds of people, the then U.S. Vice President George Bush said, “I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.”[38] That is not an aberration, but standard United States foreign policy. Not long ago, lame duck Bill Clinton made a public relations trip to Vietnam. The United States indefensibly murdered millions of Vietnamese citizens during the 1960s and 1970s, while trying to recolonize the region, even though the Vietnamese citizens, led by Ho Chi Minh, were instrumental in thwarting Japan’s imperial ambition in the area during World War II, and were considered U.S. allies. While Clinton expressed a willingness to let the past be the past, and to move forward in bettering U.S.-Vietnamese relations, when asked if he would apologize for what the United States did to Vietnam, he declined to do so.

Although declassified documents have now proven beyond any reasonable doubt that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan, and especially Nagasaki, had virtually nothing to do with saving American lives, saving Japanese lives, or any of that noble-sounding rhetoric,[39] Harry Truman proudly justified the atom bombs dropped on Japan long after he had left office. In 1958, regarding the bombing of Hiroshima, Truman wrote that he had "no qualms about it whatsoever." Truman's words were widely circulated throughout Japan, which led the Hiroshima City Council to state that if Truman actually wrote those words, it was a "gross defilement" of the victims of Hiroshima. The City Council finished with,

"We, the City Council, do hereby protest against it in deep indignation shared by our citizens and declare that in the name of humanity and peace we appeal to the wisdom of the United States and her citizens and to their inner voice for peace that said statement be retracted and that they fulfill their obligations for the cause of world peace."

Truman did not respond in silence. Instead, he called a press conference where he again justified the bombing, adding that it would not have been necessary "had we not been shot in the back by Japan at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941."[40]

Truman openly voiced the vengeance-for-Pearl-Harbor sentiments that fueled the ire of Americans during World War II. The war “skeptic” Paul Fussell wrote,

"Revenge is not a rational motive, but it was the main motive in the American destruction of the Japanese empire. A compiler of An Oral History of the War Years in America observes,

"'I distrust people who speak of the (atom) bombings today as an atrocity they strongly opposed in 1945…I don't believe them. At the time virtually everyone was delighted that we dropped the bombs, not only because they shortened the war and saved thousands of American lives but also (quite irrationally, notice) because the "Japs" deserved it for the terrible things they had done to our boys at Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Guadalcanal, and all the way through the Pacific.'"[41]

After the atom bombs were dropped on Japan, the American mood was jubilant, with 23% of Americans wishing that there were more atom bombs to drop on them.[42] In 1995, Bill Clinton stated that the U.S. did not need to apologize to Japan because Truman made the right decision, "based on the facts before him," continuing the attitude of American presidents, with the sole exception of Dwight Eisenhower (sentiments only voiced before and after he left office), since 1945.[43]

Those Seven Noble Rules. Regarding those seven noble rules, the United States regularly ignores them, usually conjuring impressive-sounding rhetoric to justify its behavior, and most Americans either cheer those actions or quietly acquiesce to them. Why is humanity heading toward that brick wall? Because we reject rules of consideration for others which we were taught as young children, thinking they no longer apply, or lying to ourselves that what is so obvious is not really happening. We are either unbelievably stupid, or we are knowingly doing these things. I think it is a little bit of both, which all begins with a hard heart, which is because we are afraid. It does not have to be this way.

Turning Vices Into Virtues. Long before Robert Fulghum walked the earth, the West has been familiar with the seven deadly sins. They are: pride, greed, anger, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. In the insane ideology of today’s world, we have literally enshrined some of those deadly sins as not only benign, but worthy attributes of our societies, even making them the centerpieces of our ideologies. It is exactly the kind of inversion of reality that George Orwell wrote about, where freedom is slavery, war is peace, and ignorance is strength.[44] When 1984 did roll around, I read discussions of why the dark vision of Orwell did not come to pass. The amazing part is that it largely has, which is another ironic comment on those people who so confidently wrote about how his vision did not manifest. Here is how we have been turning deadly sins into either virtues or valuable attributes of our ideologies, or rendering them benign or invisible.

Pride. Nationalism is all about generating feelings of national pride. As I make clear in my work, most of what I was taught regarding generating feelings of national pride was a pack of lies. As we inflict endless violence and suffering onto the world’s people, we do it with great national pride, which is partly how we are blinded to the true nature of what we support.

Greed. Our capitalist ideology has made greed a centerpiece of its theoretical framework. The so-called law of supply and demand assumes greed. The “law” states that people will raise the price of something if it becomes scarce or demand increases, as they seek profits at the expense of others. As Neale Walsch’s god remarked in Conversations with God, it is a “law” that only applies to “primitive” societies, and the mark of a primitive society is that it regards regression as progress, and inverts reality. In Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the corporate raider played by Michael Douglas told an audience that “greed” makes our system work. Stone was being ironic, but I have actually heard such sentiments coming from the mouths of today’s educated Americans. In their minds, greed is good, as it makes our system work. Instead of wondering about a system that runs on greed, or perhaps greed being something to try to reduce, it is cheered as a beneficial aspect of our system, the very engine that drives it. That same mentality has been adopted in corporate ideology, where continually-increasing profits is the only reason for a corporation’s existence. The other aspect of Adam Smith’s economic theorizing was about the “invisible hand of competition.” That “invisible hand” is the fear that your competitor will put you out of business. In Smith’s theorizing, the fear of the competition is what kept people honest. What a sickening way to view things. It makes fear a vital component of how our system works. Instead of working to reduce such dynamics in our society, it is worshipped as a centerpiece of our ideology, a vital piece of our system. Of course, wiping out the competition is the essence of capitalism, which I discovered the hard way during my days with Dennis, which even Smith remarked upon in his work. Our capitalistic ideology is based on greed and fear.

Anger. American men, especially men of my father’s generation, are emotional cripples, and anger is about the only emotion that is acceptable for them to openly display. American men are getting a little better in that department, but anger has too often been enshrined as a virtue. For many years now, I have read and heard Christians (and even supposedly enlightened mystics) laud Jesus’ moment of anger in the temple, whipping the moneychangers out of the temple. What those people always ignore, in my experience, is that his moment of violent anger (the only one we see in the New Testament) led directly to his death, as the high priest Caiaphas, who was getting rich from the temple coffers, led the effort to put Jesus to death, sparked by his performance in the temple, which impacted the temple’s cash flow. Yet, I have seen so many people point to what was likely the lowest moment of Jesus’ life as his greatest triumph. I have talked to people who have justified bombing places like Yugoslavia with Jesus’ moment of anger. To me, his temple tantrum showed that even a Christ can have his bad days, while it has been used by Christians countless times to justify violence. Christians are the most violent people of all time. There are no contenders.

Envy. At this stage in America’s journey, it does not envy anybody else much of anything. What it wanted, it took long ago. We are the kings of the global hill. The people who run this nation knew that a long time ago. Well before World War II was over, the American government knew it would emerge with unprecedented global power. Declassified documents display the mindset of those who ran the American government back then. One of America’s leading diplomats, George Kennan, who was a Soviet Union expert, and was considered the leading dove on the issue of foreign policy, authored Policy Planning Study 23 for the U.S. State Department in 1948. In it, Kennan wrote things that are now infamous in foreign-relations circles. It was a top-secret document long ago, and Kennan was writing it to his own people. He admitted that in the wake of World War II, we had only 6% of the world’s population, but half of its wealth, and such a situation would invite “envy and resentment” from the rest of the world. Kennan admitted that the U.S. foreign policy goal should be to “maintain this position of disparity.” In order to keep that “disparity,” Kennan recommended that we “dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated on our immediate national objectives.” Kennan recommended that talk about “unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization” be stopped, because the “day is not far off when we are going to have to deal with straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

In other words, Kennan expected the “envy” of the world’s citizens, and thought that we should deal in “straight power concepts” to maintain the “disparity” that might cause the envy. Kennan was a dove. A hawk of the day, Paul Nitze, authored the 1950 National Security Council Memorandum 68 for the then Secretary of State, Paul Acheson. Whereas Kennan “gently” called for the use of “straight power concepts,” Nitze called for a subtle assault on the Soviet Union, to sow the “seeds of destruction,” and a militarization of the U.S. economy, where social services would be slashed in order to build the military machine that would be needed to keep our position of “disparity.” In order to do that, the United States needed to silence opposition to the plan and stop its “excess of tolerance” toward dissenters in the United States.[45] Joe McCarthy seems to have taken a page straight from Nitze’s work. Kennan and Nitze urged the United States to meet envy with violence. That is how the slaves are ultimately kept in line. U.S. foreign policy is merely a modern variation of a very old dynamic. Also, there is a lie in that logic. Much of the so-called “envy” of the world’s poor was not envy, per se, but the desire to be free of the shackles of the West, so they can eat the food they grow, etc.

Lust. I have plenty of psychologist friends, and sexual abuse is the childhood abuse they see almost more than any other, at least for ones that can leave debilitating effects for the rest of the patient’s life. The porn industry is the only one on the Internet that makes money. On television, we are flooded with titillating ads and shows with their sexual double-entendres. Even Shakespeare played to that passion in some of his plays. It is also part of what I call the “War Against Women.”

Gluttony and Sloth. These are related vices; with gorging one’s self complementing laziness. Americans are the fattest and most sedentary people in history. 55% of Americans are overweight. This is partly due to the high calorie, high fat, high sugar, high protein, junk food diet that Americans eat. It is also due to the cars, garage-door openers and other conveniences that Americans are the fattest people in human history. Since 1980, the percentage of American adults who are considered “obese” has climbed from 15% to 23%. Americans are especially gluttonous when the starvation happening across the world is taken into consideration. In the West, about half of the adults are overweight. In places like India, most adults are underweight. What the West is doing is called “overconsumption” in the parlance of academia. It used to be called gluttony. The world’s overweight and hungry people are of approximately equal number: well over a billion of each.[46] American gluttony and sloth is the greatest the world has ever known. Not to say that we consider that distinction a great virtue, and pathological reactions to that situation, like anorexia, are understandable. In general, though, most Americans do not think much about it, and the media bombards viewers with all manner of food ads, and most of that advertised “food” I would not touch with a ten-foot pole. Just today, as I was writing this, my wife handed me the Sunday newspaper, where an article discussed the abysmal American diet, and how it directly leads to heart attacks and other degenerative diseases. It is worse in the “beef belt” of America’s Midwest, where coronary surgeons have a booming business. Even as undeniable as the evidence is, most of the afflicted people, filling their plates with greasy food, do not really care. In the words of one customer at a Kansas City barbecue establishment, “We’ve grown up on meat and potatoes. There was always a meat and starch at every meal, and it just carries on to how we eat today.” That customer drove 200 miles to eat that greasy meal.[47] I was recently in Hawaii, where gluttony is a virtue, with billboards advertising all-you-can-eat establishments with smiling local residents who have eaten themselves into gargantuan size. They are local heroes. My brother worked in Hawaiian hospitals where he regularly treated those trenchermen and trencherwomen, where they ended up after having heart attacks and other health failures, for those who survived long enough to get to a hospital.

Forgetting the basics because we think we are too smart for those old lessons, or inverting reality by turning vices into virtues, is an integral aspect of why humanity stands on the edge of the abyss today. It does not have to be this way. My work gives many answers to these situations, but we first have to care, which will help make us more aware.

[1] See the originally censored preface that Orwell wrote to Animal Farm. The censorship still exists, as the only copy of Animal Farm I found that reproduced the preface is the Everyman's Library edition, published by Alfred Knopf. The preface is not restored to its rightful place even in the Everyman's edition, but the book's appendix reproduces it. Orwell writes (on page 106 of the Everyman's edition), "The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record being played at the moment." He was referring to toleration British intellectuals had towards the Stalin regime's atrocities, as at the time (1943), the Soviet Union was the ally of Britain in fighting the Nazis.

[2] For instance, Fred Singer is a leading scientist who downplays the notion of global warming, and has "consulted" for several oil companies. Patrick Michaels is another prominent scientist who downplays global warming, who also makes big money "consulting" for coal companies and other energy interests (they both are prominent authors in Julian Simon's The State of Humanity. See also Ehrlich and Ehrlich, Betrayal of Science and Reason). In the year 2000, several events happened which should take most of the air out of the sails of the oil company "skeptics" regarding global warming. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. winter of 1999-2000 was the warmest on record. The spring of 2000 was also the warmest spring in U.S. history. Since measurements began over a century ago, the eleven hottest years on record, globally, have all been since 1980. Though the New York Times reported a mile-wide hole in the Arctic ice at the North Pole in the summer of 2000, a report that has been discredited as normal summer thawing, the Arctic ice pack is 40% thinner than it was fifty years ago, and the Antarctic ice shelves have been breaking up. Glaciers have been retreating across the planet. The polar bear will be extinct in the wild in a generation at the rate that warming is happening today. The U.S. National Research Council in January 2000 issued a report titled, "Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change." The report states that "the warming of surface temperature that has taken place during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real, and it is at a rate substantially larger than the average warming during the twentieth century." In February 2000, scientists at the NOAA's National Climate Data Center (NCDC) reported that the rate of global warming is increasing over the past twenty-five years (in a report published in the March 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters). The evidence is strong that the rate of increase since 1976 is likely human-induced, according to the NCDC scientists. In June 2000, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released a report that predicted that global fossil fuel emissions would increase the U.S. temperatures by 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. In the September 15, 2000 issue of Science, the findings of an international scientific expedition were published. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University led the 1997 expedition, and it obtained ice core samples from the Dasuopu Glacier on the Himalayan mountain Xixabangma. The ice cores were obtained at 23,500 feet of elevation above sea level, the highest elevation ice cores ever obtained. The global warming models predict that higher elevations and higher latitudes will show the effects first. The highest latitudes are the Polar Regions, and the Himalayan ice cores reveal what is happening at high altitude. The ice cores showed that the past fifty years have been the warmest in the past thousand years. Dust particles had increased four-fold in the past century, and the ice layers gave signs of desertification happening in the region. Thompson said, "There is no question in my mind that the warming is in part, if not totally, driven by human activity. I think the evidence for that is so clear - not only from this site but also from Kilimanjaro in Africa." Thompson led a team to Kilimanjaro in 2000, where the ice on it has declined by over 75% in the past century. Such dramatic warming can create unprecedented human suffering, with droughts and other climate changes that could kill off billions of people and destroy entire ecosystems. Recently, companies like Texaco, Shell, British Petroleum, Ford, DaimlerChrysler and General Motors quit their membership in the Global Climate Coalition, which is an industry front group that is determined to undermine any global efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions. In the wake of the massive corporate abandonment of the coalition, it had to reorganize.

[3] See David Stannard's American Holocaust or Ward Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide for an introduction to that theme.

[4] See, for instance, William Leiss' The Domination of Nature and Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World for introductions to that theme.

[5] See my essay on Julian Simon and whaling on my web site.

[6] See Andrew Goudie's The Human Impact, 5^th edition, p. 60.

[7] See also The Greenpeace Guide to Anti-Environmental Organizations, for a listing of dozens of those corporate front groups. They learned Orwell's lessons well, with anti-environmental organizations adopting all manner of earth-friendly sounding names.

[8] See Chomsky, The New Military Humanism; Lessons from Kosovo, pp. 72-80.

[9] Remarking on the mercantilist system of his day, Smith wrote,

"It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects…In the mercantile regulations…the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Ch. VIII, pp. 180-181, University of Chicago Press edition, 1976. That sentiment is not far removed from Machiavelli's observation about innovation and its reception, which applies neatly to the corrupt industries and professions of today,

"And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system. This lukewarmness partly stems from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, and partly from the skepticism of men who do not truly believe in new things unless they have actually had personal experience of them. Therefore, it happens that whenever those who are enemies have the chance to attack, they do so in a partisan manner, and those others defend hesitantly, so that they, together with the prince, are in danger."

Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI, in Bondanella and Musa, translators and editors, The Portable Machiavelli, p. 94. My experience with Dennis Lee and the energy industry illustrates Machiavelli's observation clearly.

[10] For a mind-blowing glimpse of a system where everybody is a loser, see the first-person account of Michael Roads in his Into a Timeless Realm, pp. 190-239.

[11] Sauer, “Destructive exploitation in modern colonial expansion.” International Geographical Congress, Amsterdam, 1938, volume 3, section IIIC, 494-9, quoted in Goudie, The Human Impact, pp. 7-8.

[12] See Robert Mendelsohn's Confessions of a Medical Heretic, for example, where he shows that "first, do no harm" has been replaced by "first, do something" (because that is how they make money). As Mendelsohn makes clear, the God of Western Medicine is death, not life.

[13] Chomsky writes at length on that issue, citing how the capitalists think "free markets" are a great idea for markets they are trying to break into or dominate, but a bad idea when they are subject to market discipline. They then ask the government to step in to "regulate" it. It is nothing more than naked hypocrisy, served with heavy ideological varnish. See Chomsky, Profits over People, pp. 34-40; World Orders Old and New, pp. 106-107, 180-184; there is a compact disc available of one of Chomsky's talks tiled Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World. For an economist's view on such matters, read Edward Herman's Triumph of the Market. Or you can read my web site section titled “My Adventures.” I received a huge real world dose of how capitalism works in practice.

[14] See Walsch, Conversations with God, Book 3, p. 362

[15] Similarly, the Gore/Bush "choice" in the 2000 presidential election is another example of a false dichotomy, where voters for Ralph Nader were told that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. One could not vote for what Nader stood for and be against both Bush and Gore's positions, in that logical fallacy. The Gore crowd relentlessly attacked the Nader voters because they said that even if Gore was less than ideal, Bush was worse. It was the lesser evil argument. When you choose the lesser evil, you still get evil. The "lesser evil" argument is known also as realpolitik, where power takes precedence over ideals, because it is supposedly "realistic." Machiavelli was one of the fathers of political "realism."

[16] We were the only nation in the United Nations that abstained from voting on holding the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the vote was 150-0-1). We also have the world's only standing government that refused to ratify the treaty that the convention created. One of the convention's resolutions was to ban the death penalty for children. See my Iraq essay.

[17] See Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I. pp. xiv-xvii. See also Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, pp. 33-34.

[18] See Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II. pp. 135-294.

[19] See Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II. pp. 139-140.

[20] It was published in its July 31, 1978 issue, under the title, “Cambodia: An experiment in Genocide.” See an analysis of it in Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II. pp. 163-166.

[21] See Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II, footnote 85, p. 164.

[22] See Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics, pp. 19-32.

[23] For a good introduction to that idea, try Ralph McGehee's Deadly Deceits; William Blum's Killing Hope; Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, Year 501, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, The New Military Humanism (and many other of his works); Edward Herman's Beyond Hypocrisy; Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies; Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence; Michael Parenti's Against Empire.

[24] In December of 1998, America began bombing Iraq again, a bombing that continues to this day. The evening the December bombings began, I was literally sick over what we were doing to Iraq. Instead of writing another letter to the editor, that night I wrote an essay titled "In the Service of Empire." The next day I sent it to dozens of web sites, putting “Iraq” into an Internet search engine and firing off my essay to all the sites it hit. Both the political right and left published it. Hank Roth (a.k.a. The Golem) published part of it with other leftist essays the next day, and my work appeared around the Internet. One especially enthusiastic person was Ahmed Rami, who runs the Radio Islam web site. He posted it to his web site and offered to host on his site whatever I wanted to write. His offer spurred me into writing my web site. Ralph McGehee published my synopsis of his Deadly Deceits across the Internet; the Leading Edge International Research Journal published the first draft of my fluoridation essay, and had it on their web site. One of my readers reproduced my entire 600-page web site from 1996; Hank Roth published some of my letters to the editor, and my work was appearing across the Internet. Although I will allow anybody to publish my work (as long as they do not reproduce excerpts that misrepresent it), I decided that it would be best if I had one roof under which to house my work. This web site is that roof. I have to thank Ahmed for spurring me into creating this web site.

If the Ku Klux Klan or General Motors wanted to publish my work on the Internet, I would let them. That would not mean that I was endorsing their views, but it might mean that they were endorsing mine. The light can glimmer into the darkest caves. I would actually like to see my work grace neonazi web sites or corporate America's, as it may be able to reach people and soften their views. We are all in this together. The Radio Islam site is not filled with what I would call superb scholarship. In fact, it reproduces some of the most notorious anti-Semitic writings in history. It also reproduces the work of Chomsky and other scholars who are critical of Israel. I have used the Radio Islam site as a source of information. The only place I could find Henry Ford's International Jew writings (Hitler praised Ford's anti-Semitic crusade in Mein Kampf, and later called Ford one of his most important influences) was on Radio Islam's site. The problem with Radio Islam's site, though, is that writings like The Protocols of Zion and The International Jew have credibility with Ahmed. His work is decidedly anti-Semitic. Ahmed lives in Sweden and spent time in jail for publishing his work. Even a place like Sweden does not have that much freedom of speech. I did not know the nature of Ahmed's site when I emailed him my work on Iraq, but I certainly do not regret that I did so. I will not be contacting too many right wing sites when my site is finished, partly because it will be a waste of my time, as I doubt they will like what I have to say. Yet, if they want to publish my work, I will happily let them. The left wing will not like everything that I have to write about either. I doubt that any reader will totally agree with my work, as much of it is "out there," and I do not avoid controversial topics.

[25] See Current, Williams and Freidel, American History: A Survey, Fourth Edition, Volume 1: to 1877, p. 8.

[26] See Current, Williams and Freidel, American History: A Survey, Fourth Edition, Volume 1: to 1877, pp. 10-11.

[27] See Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 305.

[28] See Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 272.

[29] See Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 275.

[30] See Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 271.

[31] See Genesis 1.26 to 1.28. The Revised Standard Version.

[32] See Walsch, Conversations with God, book 3, p. 306.

[33] See Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, p. 252.

[34] See, for instance, Noam Chomsky’s The New Military Humanism, pp. 150-157.

[35] See William Blum’s Rogue State, pp. 210-211.

[36] See, for instance, William Blum’s Killing Hope.

[37] See Blum, Rogue State, p. 6.

[38] See Blum, Rogue State, p. 227.

[39] See, for instance, Gar Alperovitz’, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

[40] See Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pp. 562-565.

[41] See Fussell, Wartime, pp. 284-285.

[42] See Adams, The Best War Ever, p. 73.

[43] See Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima and America, pp. 211-222.

[44] See George Orwell’s 1984, in its first few pages.

[45] See a discussion of those documents in Noam Chomsky’s What Uncle Sam Really Wants, and a broader discussion in Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy.

[46] See Gary Gardner and Brian Halweil’s “Nourishing the Underfed and Overfed,” in The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World, 2000, pp. 59-78.

[47] See Stephanie Simon’s “Straight to the Heart,” The Seattle Times, p. A3, May 27, 2001.

Other Costs of Our System

A Note to My Critics

False Dichotomies, Straw Men and Name Calling