More Evidence of Scientists Behaving Badly

Eric Felten, in the Weekend Wall Street Journal this week, adds to the list of malfeasants outlined in my piece Politics in Science. Besides pointing out some of the more egregious Climategate examples he adds:

• Dr. Scott S. Reuben of the  Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA  – a respected anesthesiologist and researcher in pain medications, who had fabricated results in up to 21 articles to  in order to secure grants from pharamaceutical companies.
• Cello Energy of Alabama, a company revealed to have dressed up plain old fossil fuels and biodiesel.  For their efforts, a federal jury in Alabama found that investors in Cello Energy had been defrauded of $10.4 m and awarded against the company.
• In England, Lancet, the country’s premiere medical journal ( and recently the purveyor of the nonsense that Palestinian wife beating was brought on by the indignities of the Israeli occupation), retracted its support for an article which, twelve years ago  had linked vaccines and the advent of autism in young children, resulting in thousands of deaths of young children from diseases such as whooping cough which had disappeared in the late 19th Century.
• Also  in England, two prominent stem cell researchers went public with their accusations against their discipline’s peer review process claiming that ” flawed and unoriginal work get published, while publication of truly original findings are either delayed or rejected.”

Eight weeks ago, in the Los Angeles Times, columnist Tim Rutten in the wake of the Climategate scandal,  asked the absurdly naive question,

“What are we to believe: that huge numbers of British and American scientists have entered into a conspiracy to dupe the world on climate change? Why? What would they stand to gain?”

Well, Tim, try money, power and fame.  They seem to be sufficient enough inducements for other human beings to commence a descent into corruption.  Or are scientists beyond the reach of human avarice?  A question to ponder as the veil is increasingly lifted on other scientists behaving badly.

The New Miss Manners

I was interested to see a piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on the latest update to Emily Post’s famous Etiquette (1922).   Because of the success of Etiquette, Emily Post’s name became synonymous, at least in North America, with proper manners.  Nearly half a century after her death, her name is still invoked in titles of books co-authored by Ms. Post’s great-grand daughter Cindy Post Senning and numerous other members of the extended Post family.

The most recent title to issue from the eponymous Emily Post Institute is Prom and Party Etiquette by Cindy and Peggy Post.  The advice that the young women receive in the handbook however would be enough to make old Emily crush her debutante boutonnieres in frustration and despair.  Here girls are advised to consider, coolly and honestly, whether bedding a date on prom night is always such a good idea.  Of course the question itself suggests that in some cases, such a decision may indeed be a very good idea.   The chapter in which this is described is titled ” A Special Act for A Special Evening.”  The “act,” the authors seem to be conceding, is going to be performed anyway, so why resist the zeitgeist and appear prudish.

Megan Cox Gordon complains in the Wall Street Journal piece that such moral neutrality from parents, teachers and contemporary guidebooks, creates a moral matrix within which teenagers feel free to make such decisions.  She claims that giving children the choice is tantamount to giving them the nod, which is no guidance at all.

This was recently reinforced for me when reading Sharlene Azam’s book Oral Sex Is the New The Kiss Goodnight. I was struck by one passage, early in the book, which describes how young girls from prosperous middle class neighborhoods, casually fall into promiscuity and then, in certain cases, into prostitution.

” The biggest surprise was their parents’ complicity.  They witnessed their daughters coming home with new clothing, jewelry and pockets full of cash, and often did nothing.  These parents feel powerless to change their daughters’ behavior because they have surrendered their authority to pop culture, celebrities and the Internet. “

Diana West complains of the same malaise in The Death of the Grown Up. She reports how a parent in Pennsylvania went to court to overturn her 13-year- old’s expulsion from her middle class school for having performed oral sex on a 13-year-old boy on a school bus.  The mother purportedly complained that the expulsion was not fair because the school  was” unclear, in its written policies that having oral sex on a school bus is unacceptable behavior.”   In another case, an upper middle class couple were discovered having hired a $345 -an-hour stripper to have dairy toppings licked off her breasts while she lay on her back on the home patio while both they and a crowd of 15-year-old boys gawked.

Parental absenteeism was also culpable in an incident in my own neighborhood in Los Angeles when a 15-year- old  girl from tony Milken High School in Bel Air was knifed to death at a party that had been hurriedly organized upon  the departure of the host’s parents for a weekend in Las Vegas.  In another incident in the Pico Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles, a girl  from an Orthodox Jewish high school was rushed to hospital with alcohol poisoning after she posted notice on Facebook  of a party at her home after her parents departed for the weekend.  The party was crashed by 500 people, many of them gang members from East L.A.

The collapse of parental authority and oversight is evident throughout our society as we surrender our moral watch of our children to the Internet and MTV.  And as Rochelle Gurstein notes in The Repeal of Reticence:

” Repeated exposure to indecency, ultimately inures people and threatens to make all of society shameless, in  the precise sense that it considers nothing sacred.”

Maybe that is something Emily Post’s heirs might have considered in their new book.   Rather than attempting to mollify our teenagers by attempting to see life through their eyes, perhaps we need to begin reclaiming our own sense of  “adulthood”  by returning to a world where  the three ‘ r’s’ -  restraint, reticence and rectitude – are not regarded as the outdated remnants from an age of prudery, but the foundational principles of civilized conduct.

THE EUROPEAN UNION AND THE REJECTION OF DEMOCRACY

Seventeen years ago, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, ushering into life the new European Union, I  thought I was witnessing a  turning point in history.  This was going to be the true beginning of the new world order, I proclaimed to anyone who would listen.   After all, Communism was dead, the Soviet Union shattered into a million pieces, Sadaam Hussein neutered and totalitarian regimes around the globe were left quaking in fear of the march of democracy.   The Europeans had it right.  They were going to transform their old European Economic Community into a new supranational government which would issue its own currency and begin to exercise control over not only continental economic policy but arrive at a common foreign and security policy.

In short, the new European Union looked like the harbinger of a new world government that would once and for all eliminate war. Then this former hub of world conflict would become an exemplar of how humanity could come to its senses in eschewing militarism for the finer virtues of economic progress and mutual prosperity.

Well that’s certainly what the founders of the EU would have had us believe.   Several treaties later, the machinery of the new government has bloated to 20,000 bureaucrats, Europeans have slumped into a pacific torpor and the EU has become the largest unrepresentative deliberative body on Earth.

The Treaty of Lisbon, which came into force on December 1, 2009 after an excruciatingly long ratification process among the constituent states, has put the final seal on the European Union, stamping its permanence on the face of the old continent.

But don’t think of this creature as some kind of federated copy of the United States or Canada.  The reborn European Union is actually nothing of the sort.

It is governed by three separate institutions.    The  first, and weakest, is the European Parliament, whose MPs are elected by the populations of their respective constituencies for a fixed five-year term.   They approve the president and members designate of the European Commission and may force the Commission to resign through a vote of censure.   Uniquely among parliaments, however, this new one body lacks any power to reject bills put before it by the executive.  Members are chosen through an unnecessarily complex system of proportional representation and party lists so they do not represent constituents for whom they are accountable.  Parties from the 27 countries are chosen in blocs that claim a shared political outlook, self-described as either Left or Right.  Yet there is no proper opposition and nor could there be when the parliament does not answer to real people but only to the abstract entity of “Europe.”

Then there is the European Commission, which operates as a kind of revamped Committee of Public Safety, hoisted virtually intact from the French Revolution. This  ’super civil service’  formally originates all legislative measures and is responsible for the implementation of all decisions agreed by the Council of Ministers.   It has a number of direct decision-making powers in such spheres as the coal and steel industries, agriculture and the environment. At the head of the Commission is a committee of 20 nominated commissioners who are appointed for a five-year renewable term of office. They are answerable to a president and up to two vice-presidents.  It is a kind of executive, legislative and bureaucratic body all rolled into one.

Yet the true power of the New Europe resides in The Council of Ministers. This is the central and ultimate decision-making body in the union.  Each country has one vote on this Council and no directive can be issued or amended, unless it is agreed by the Council.

What role do ordinary Europeans have in the operation and control of their new government?   Almost none.  There is no voice allowed for the European commoner ( a feudal designation which seems increasingly appropriate for this new absolutist system) because no one actually represents him or her.  In fact when ordinary Europeans are ever asked their opinion, such as in the issue of referenda by the EU’s constituent governments, they are routinely slapped aside.  This indisputably occurred in Ireland in 2008 when the Irish voted not to ratify the new EU constitution but were summarily ignored..  The British government had also promised its citizens a referendum on the Constitution, but it soon reneged, as did the leadership of its two most prominent opposition parties.   There is almost no conduit for ordinary Europeans to have their grievances aired.   What the Europeans governments have done, unbeknownst to most of their citizens, is to set in place an elite permanent bureaucracy, answerable only to a group of 27 men who have been delegated the responsibility governing 500 million people.

The irony of this top heavy concentration of power is that the European Commission, on its very own website, extols the primacy of democracy as its central objective:

“The European Union believes that democracy and human rights are universal values that should be vigorously promoted around the world. They are integral to effective work on poverty alleviation and conflict resolution”

But the actual structure of the European Union itself makes it less an pappropriate vehicle for inspiring democratic change around the world, than the mushrooming of an oligarchy which owes little of its power to popular suffrage.

Considering all this, maybe the Europeans don’t have it right afterall. Goaded by their intellectuals and bureaucrats into accepting the EU as a fait accompli, they may awaken one day from their post democratic, post-Christian narcosis to find that they have actually been abandoned by their self appointed guardians.  They may then finally understand that there is no leadership ready or willing  to address their fundamental concerns- the rise of fundamentalist Islam, demographic collapse, the emasculation of national identity and the erosion of traditional values.

In the event that such an awakening occurs, it may, ironically, be the much despised hegemon on the other side of the Atlantic that will emerge as the true model of  modern democracy  -  and of which the European Union will be only a ghostly, fading image.

The Undignified Life of John Mayer

John Mayer seems like a lucky guy.  His four albums have all  gone multi-platinum; he has won four Grammy Awards, dated some of the world’s most glamorous women, is a successful design artist and has nearly three million people following him on Twitter.  And all before the age of 33.

Then why does this guy sound so broken, full of regrets and so lacerated by self-recrimination?   That would be the impression anyone would receive after reading the latest profile of the artist in Rolling Stone Magazine.

The piece begins with Mayer’s description of his repeated encounters with women whom he seduces into joining him in his bedroom, only to find himself rejected before the relationship is consummated.

In the article, Mayer declares that since this has happened more than once, he knows what the girl is thinking: ” Wait till I tell my friends I turned down John Mayer!”  Indignity is heaped on rejection when the departing women ask for his autograph.

Throughout the interview (with Erik Hedegaard), Mayer makes it clear that all is not well in Mayerland.  Two high profile relationships with tabloid superstars collapsed;  his nights are usually spent alone and even his dreams are haunted by the pursuit of paparazzi.

But just as clear is the fact that Mayer has brought many of these problems upon himself.  His pursuit of fame and attention, and his obsessiveness with his image, is all in contrast to the portrait of soulful balladeer, consumed by his music and art.  This troubled, conflicted image has led to his most recent incarnation as a tabloid staple.

Why then should anyone reserve sympathy for John Mayer?  With his fortune, his fame, his  success and romantic conquests he has achieved, at a relatively young age, what other men fail to achieve in a lifetime.

The answer is that Mayer is not a free man, but a victim of fame.  His notoriety, which he admits he cultivates, operates now as a wedge between himself and the rest of the world, making it impossible for him to nurture or sustain relationships.   Though he is really not honest enough to admit it, it is painfully clear that he is aware that something vital is missing in his life and that his own fame has become a trap.

I usually don’t waste time writing about celebrities, since there are quite enough other people already doing it.  But there is a lesson for everyone in Mayer’s life trajectory.  How do we establish dignity in life?  How do we remain committed to the values and ideals which are at the core of our existence without being distracted by what others think of us or trying to become something other than what we are?  For without dignity there can be no successful relationships nor connections to other human beings.

With the collapse of the wall that divides our public from private lives, millions of us, not necessarily as famous nor as rich as Mayer, are asking ourselves the same question.  In the age of Twitter and Facebook, when minute details of our private lives become transparent for the world, we may be losing the struggle to maintain individual dignity and a sense of worthiness.

Mayer, obviously intelligent and aware, emerges from the article deeply conflicted about this, even as he launches into self-aggrandizing soliloquies.

Whenever I read such profiles, I am reminded again of  Judy Garland’s admonition: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”

Garland, sadly, fell victim to the cult of fame and was ruined by it.  Its a good lesson for John Mayer and perhaps for all of us.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Fight

Papers all over the country this morning have front page stories reporting the remarks of  Adm. Michael G. Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top uniformed officer, who, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, came out in favor of revoking the armed forces’ policy of ” dont ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to homosexuals serving in the military.

The policy was set in place in the first few months of the Clinton Administration in 1993, when Clinton,  having pledged to end the long established military ban on homosexuals serving in the military, floundered in his first public act as President when he issued a presidential order to lift the ban.   But the public outcry, followed by a damning Congressional Report, suggested that such a policy would be a grave misstep.  Thus was born the compromise of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell  – a policy by which commanding officers would not ask about the sexual orientation of their subordinates and the subordinates would not tell.

But the ban on gays in the military remained and anyone who crossed the line by openly declaring his or her homosexual inclination or engaging in homosexual conduct, would, under law, be removed from the armed services. 

In 1993, the Congressional Report could not have been clearer on its insistence that open homosexuality in the armed forces could seriously affect the morale and effectivness of U.S. armed forces:

“The armed forces must maintain personnel policies that    exclude persons whose presence in the armed forces would create an unacceptable risk to the armed forces’ high standards of  morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the   essence of military capability. The presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capabilities.”

So what has changed since April, 1993?   Well, according to Rea Carey, the Executive Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance – just about everything.  For her Mullen’s remark ” represents a change in society and frankly, a change in the world.”

Well, um, not really.  Mullen made clear that he was speaking for himself and nobody else (why the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be making public pronouncements of his private views on such a sensitive topic is anyone’s guess). But more than that, society’s willing embrace of homosexual lifestyles as normative conduct is not as pervasive as either Mullen or Carey would like to think.

According to a 2008 Gallup poll,  homosexuality emerged as the most divisive of 16 major social and cultural issues measured in the May 8-11, 2008 survey. Only doctor-assisted suicide and abortion come close to it in splitting public opinion. The poll revealed the public to be evenly split between proponents and opponents, but this cannot be used to establish broad public acceptance. 

Even more convincing evidence of the failure of homosexual rights to garner the support of a broad consensus in American society is the fact that gay marriage propositions have been widely defeated in recent state ballots in Florida, Arizona and California and bills to legalize gay marriage rejected by state legislatures in New Jersey, New York  and Maine.  Only five states have legalized same sex marriage – Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts and within most of these states, legal challenges are still burning a fuse.

But even if we do recognize that public acceptance of homosexuality is growing (and the polls make that claim incontrovertible) that does not mean the Army should suddenly swing open its doors to alternative life styles.   As Mackubin Thomas Owens argues persuasively in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“The destructive impact of such relationships on unit cohesion can be denied only by ideologues. Does a superior order his or her beloved into danger? If he or she demonstrates favoritism, what is the consequence for unit morale and discipline? What happens when jealousy rears its head? These are questions of life and death, and they help to explain why open homosexuality and homosexual behavior traditionally have been considered incompatible with military service.”

How men, living in close quarters with one another and bound by a camaraderie and commitment to one another’s safety (which is essential to military effectivness) can be expected to endure the sexual tensions that such a policy would arouse, should be the primary question in this debate.

For as the 1993 Congressional Report itself states:

‘The extraordinary responsibilities of the armed forces, the unique conditions of military service, and the critical role of unit cohesion, require that the military community, while subject to civilian control, exist as a specialized  society. This military society is characterized by its own laws, rules, customs, and traditions, including numerous restrictions on personal behavior, that would not be acceptable in civilian society.”    

 

 

This specialized society is a social environment that neither Bill Clinton, nor Barack Obama can recognize for neither served in uniform.  If they had, perhaps their own views would be tethered to the realities of life in the military and what it takes to build an effective and deadly fighting force. That might not excuse the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but who knows what political considerations are driving the expression of such private views.

The New Goodnight Kiss

In last week’s AFA Weekly Gazette, we offered a story on the release of a new DVD and book Oral Sex is the News Goodnight Kiss by Canadian author and film maker Sharlene Azam.

In the film, pre-teens and teenagers as young as 11, discuss their attitudes to oral sex as a legitimate form of ‘ romantic ‘ exchange between boys and girls.  It offers a portrait of a society in which such girls consider oral sex ” no biggie”  especially when it comes to potential rewards such as drugs, alcohol or money. 

Blurring the lines between romance and prostitution is a deadly game being played in our society encouraged by television programming, internet access, billboards, magazines and even shop windows.   In short, our children, no matter where or how they are raised, cannot escape the propaganda of our highly sexualized culture and we run the risk of raising a generation of children for whom romance, reticence, politeness and respect for the opposite sex will disappear entirely as governing social attitudes, opening the door to the acceptance of prostitution, pornography and sexual license for children as societal norms. 

This was brought home to me a few weeks ago when a friend confided to me that he was extremely disturbed by what he had been seeing in the conversations on his son’s Facebook page. The 13 and 14-year- olds, all hailing from Orthodox Jewish high schools, regularly employed words such as ” Ho”  ” Bitches” and ” Sh-tface.”  Even the girls were getting in on the act, gleefully referring to themselves with the same pejoratives.  

Is it any wonder?   Look at some of the  “children’s” television offered on Network TV these days, including  The Secret Life  Life of the American Teenager, Roommates or The Hard Life of RJ Berger  – a recent NBC offering whose teenage hero’s claim to fame is the size of his penis.   Even shows as seemingly innocuous as The Suite Life of Zack and Cody or Hannah Montana present young children, not much older than those presented in The New Goodnight Kiss, who are given adult roles with adult responses to adult situations.  Sexual innuendo runs unfettered throughout most of these shows, even if  there is an attempt to render it subtle and hidden.

The collapse of the boundary between public and private life, intimacy and sex, romance and pornography – and its societal implications, has been a concern of mine for years and was highlighted in my Western Word Radio show with Diana West in March, 2009 and in my blog entry Four Bedrooms, One Bathroom, No Boundaries. Readers may want to also pick up a copy of Rochelle Gurstein’s The Repeal of Reticence (1999) where the author argues that there has been a death in the U.S. of a “reticent sensibility” valuing tact, discretion, good taste and politeness.  She points out  how our culture has become a  ”noisy, vulgar circus where privacy and modesty are flouted, and where so-called avant-garde artists invoke free-speech rights to justify violent, dehumanizing or pornographic works.”

That assessment could not be more accurate.  In the Davis household we have a word to descibe the moral demarcation between good taste and prurience.  That word is” inappropriate” and it is employed by my sons regularly to identify areas where they know they cannnot go.   This, of course, does not shield them from the images and influences with which they are bombarded every day and there cannot be a sensitive parent alive who is not worried, no matter how good they believe their children to be, about the content of the text messages their children receive from  friends, or the Facebook interactions they undertake each day.

Carol Shipman, the ABC News Anchor who broke the story on The New Goodnight Kiss,  wrote in her own news blog about this  parental dilemma:

“Firm family rules and values and limits are key. We were told this stuff is not about money–it happens in the “best” of families, with well-intentioned parents who are not neglecting their children. But who may simply be somewhat distracted–and not paying active attention to what is going on in their children’s lives.”

While I agree with that, I don’t agree with what she says next about resolving the problem:

“And talking early is critical. About sex, about feelings, about everything. Bring up all of the tough stuff when your kids will still talk to you–and you will ensure they will always talk to you. If they have a sex question at age 5 or 6 or 7–answer it. Make your family a safe place for those conversations.”

This is precisely the answer that Pat Gentile, the president for the Alliance for Family Entertainment gave when she was asked why programs such as Roommates and The Secret Life of the American Teenager were being produced as family fare.  She was quoted exactly a year ago in the L.A. Times:  

“I’d love for these shows to be ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ but that isn’t going to happen. Family programming is all about bringing families together to watch shows so that they can dialogue about these sensitive topics.”

Wrong, Pat. Dead wrong.  The idea that we need to be open with our children about adult passions and attractions seems ludicrous when we remember that children, who are largely blank slates, actually deserve a childhood.   They will  have plenty of  time to be adults and to deal with all the confusions and difficulties life throws at them.  They do not to be shouldered with mysteries of adult life at the age of six or seven, no matter what they are told at school or see on the Internet.   The fact that even people like Shipman, who was appalled by the content of the documentary she previewed, would feel the need to invoke ” the parent as  family therapist” model  is unsettling to say the least.

The Ordeal of Tony Blair

The sight of former British prime minister  Tony Blair being pillioried and harassed by a prosecutorial Parliamentary committee as if he is a common criminal, is really enough to make you wonder whether Britain today is living in the real world.

Because if it was living in the real world, it would have recognized that the country’s commitment to unseating Saddam Hussein was a vital element in ridding the planet of  a regime that posed a grave threat to global stability and a terrifying menace to Iraqi citizens.

The charges against Blair, that he conspired with the Bush Administration in concocting evidence of Sadaam’s weapons of mass destruction, and that the invasion resulted in needless loss of life, are spurious.  Sadaam did have biological and chemical weapons,  and even ballistic missiles that were ferreted out of the country even as the invading coalition forces were approaching Bagdad.

But even this seems besides the point.  Hussein is dead and Iraq, the locus for so much instability in the region, is free of his tyranny.  His henchmen are dead.  His Ba’ath Party, which suckled on Nazi ideology and was the Middle East’s most apparent successor to  the Nazis, is in retreat.   Iraqi democracy, while still fledgling and uncertain, remains a force for hope in the region.  While it might be true that 179 British soldiers died in the Iraqi campaign and many thousands of Iraqi citizens were killed in the internecine warfare which erupted in the wake of the invasion, these all should be regarded as the price of preserving freedom and protecting our homelands from emerging threats. With hindsight, this will become clear.  History has demonstrated that it is better for democracies to go to war when they have the advantage and lose what they must, than  suffer the prospect of  debacles and huge casualties in the future.  The problem is that leaders rarely have the opportunity to prove or justify any of it since the event they sought to avoid never takes place.  Hence we have Tony Blair in the dock today.

Watching Blair brought to task for decisions on national security he made seven years ago, one has to wonder whether the same treatment would ever have been meted out to early 20th Century prime-minister Herbert Asquith or his Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey for their folly in committing England to a series of alliances which entangled the country in a continental conflagration leading to the needless death of nearly one million young British men in the First World World War.   Or perhaps the British should have held an inquiry into how Neville Chamberlain’s government brought war and destruction down, not simply upon Britain, but the rest of the world in the late 1930s, through an obsequious appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

For all the noise about Blair’s malfeasance, the real motivations behind this show trial are not being spoken aloud.  For what is really going on in London, is not so much the repudiation of the Blair legacy, as a rejection of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance.   The most important connection between the world’s two largest democracies, the vital hub of Western civilization itself, is under assault from those who see Britain’s future and security tied not to the United States but to Europe.  Putting Blair in the dock is just another means of emphasizing that the relationship is ending and with it, perhaps the long term future of Western liberal democracy.

As for Blair, he should realize that his prime ministerial career was rare, not only for its longevity, but for its largely scandal free run.  But he is learning now that even the most pristine reputations can be savaged by critics and historical revisionists who are bent on revenge and dismemberment of political reputations and not necessarily on any governing truth.

 

AUSCHWITZ REMEMBERED IN BLACK AND WHITE

So here we stand once again before the gates of Auschwitz.   Sixty-five years ago the Russian army liberated this camp.   What, we might ask, did they first experience as they approached the gates emblazoned with the unforgettable motif Arbeit Macht Frei?

Contrary to what most people think, the first experience of Auschwitz for the Russians was not the scenes that would later become immortalized in still photographs and film footage.   Rather, it was the overpowering stench of death carried in the air as the soldiers approached from ten miles away.  When they finally reached the camp gates, the scene of utter desolation could barely be believed, even by hardened soldiers who had survived the Battle of Stalingrad and witnessed its horrific carnage.  

Bodies were stacked in places ten feet high; young children, clothed in rags, stumbled from the barracks, emaciated skeletons;  Young men and women, some only in their teens, looked aged well beyond their years, haggard, lice infested and covered in grime.  The footage that cameraman Alexander Vorontsov and director Irmgard von zur Muhlen, took that afternoon, offered us images that have become indelibly stamped on Western memory.   In addition to the utter destitution of the scene, the camera pans across mountains of personal possessions confiscated from the prisoners — nearly half a million suits and dresses and tens of thousands of eyeglasses. The gas chambers, the portable gallows, the warehouse that held countless bags of human hair ( 7.7 tons of it!) and the glare of the silent survivors as they stared unblinking at the camera, were the living reminders of how western civilization had turned on itself.

But the parallel tragedy of the day is often forgotten. Nine days before the liberation, as the Soviets approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, Nazi SS officers forced nearly 60,000 inmates to march west.  Only 7,000, too sick and enfeebled, remained in the camps.

The death march of the winter of 1945 was the final gift of the Nazis to Western civilization.  Although there were many death marches, from most of the concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Treblinka, the Auschwitz Death March is by far the best known and involved the most inmates.  The prisoners, were marched toward Wodzisław Śląski (German: Loslau) and were put on freight trains to other camps.  Of the 60,000, 15,000 prisoners died, either through summary execution, exposure or exhaustion, their bodies thrown into ditches or left to rot on the road where they fell. They marched in the bitterly cold Polish winter 180 miles in 45 days, with very little to eat or drink and no warmth, sleeping in open fields, barns, warehouses–anywhere they could find shelter along the way. They finally arrived at Camp Hirschberg, near the Czechoslovakian border. Many of the survivors of the march would not be liberated until the very last days of the war.

There is no color film that survives from the day of liberation at Auschwitz.   That is perhaps appropriate since color itself, a symbol of vibrancy and life, had become  the nemesis of the Nazi operation at Auschwitz. The drabness of the camp, its dank, gray barracks, the colorless prison uniforms and the stark parade grounds represent the Nazi attempt to erase any semblance of normalcy from daily life and convince Auschwitz’s inmates that this new world was the only one they would ever know.  

Yet if anything stood in defiance at Auschwitz, it was the resilience of nature itself – the blue of the sky, the green of the nearby forests and the warmth of the sun.   Even in the bitterest months of incarceration, the surviving inmates took heart from these reminders that the earth still spun on its axis, that the seasons would still arrive and depart, and that nature, indifferent to Nazi terror, was the one thing that that terrible military machine could not control.   This knowledge infused them with the hope that the Nazi regime was itself transient and would one day be swept away by the tide of history.  

Such a moment of realization is beautifully captured in a scene from Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.   Frankl once visited a young woman in Theresienstadt’s infirmary.   The young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when Frankl talked to her, she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge:

 ”I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.”

The will to live, the determination to defy terror and resist evil, takes its inspiration from many sources, but among the most important of them is the sense that human life has purpose and free will is our most important weapon in affirming it.  As Frankl himself states, “Everything can be taken from a man but the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We who are blessed with greater freedoms than any other human beings in history, might then wish to use this week’s commemoration to recall that nothing in nature, even a couple of blossoms on a chestnut tree, should be taken for granted.  We might want to reinforce the notion that humanity’s course, in defiance of the nihilistic fatalism that dominates so much of our culture, derives from the exercise of our free will.   And we might want to remember that how we choose to live our lives, as both individuals and communities, will ultimately determine our collective fate. 

Many Holocaust victims learned that the art of survival involves more than just putting bread in your mouth.  It also embraces a certain moral world view, one which connects one’s being’s fate to another’s and through love, compassion and caring builds unassailable bonds between them. It is a trait, lest we ever forget, that is distinctly human.

The Farce of Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks

If you have been following the news on the Middle East lately, you will notice a general uptick in the rhetoric on peace between  srael and the Palestinian Authority.

Endless pronuncements from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on how Israel is ready for peace and just as desultory denunciations  from the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas, that anything the Israelis have to offer, is simply not good enough.

Most of this  back and forth has been driven by the  Obama Administration’s determination to wade into the Middle East morass, certain that it can dredge the swamp and find gold.     But in its  earnest, flailing attempts to reach some kind of accord between the sides, it continues to mischaracterize the true nature of the conflict or to discern the reasons the kind of peace the U.S.  expects in the region can ever take root.

Its of course nothing new.  Since 1993  and the signing of the Oslo Accords, no year has gone by without the presentation of another scene from this farcical pantomime.   It always goes something like this:   The U.S. Middle East envoy presents ideas for jump starting peace to the Israeli prime minister.   The  Israeli prime minister makes a public statement to the effect that he is  ” interested”  in the ideas.    The ideas are then presented to the Palestinian Authority leader  who mulls the over for a day or so and then summarily rejects them.

The same political dynamics that have always driven this useless pas de deux are still present.  Israel, for its part, recognizes the importance of American support for its ongoing war with the Muslim world and therefore is willing to play along, knowing full well that the Palestinian leadership is incapable of  compromise.  The Palestinian leader, well aware that not only his regime, but his life itself is forfeit if he concedes even  an inch of  Palestinian demands, stonewalls in the hope of buying himself time.   The United States, ever  eager to dislodge this bone in its throat and move on to more pressing problems in the Middle East, can’t bring itself to do very much more than pretend that it is dealing with real players in a real diplomatic engagement.

Of course it is nothing of the sort.   The Palestinian leadership, having won virtual recognition for the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign body,  has nothing whatsoever to gain from advancing  the U.S. peace agenda.   Its fat cats – from Saeeb Erekat to Mahmoud Abbas and  Ismail Jibrail have grown rich from  Western largesse and world famous as Palestinian celebrities .  They want to keep it that way.  They don’t want to lose control of the region which affords them their monopolies, while , at the same time, they are quite aware of their tenuous grip on power and the threat of their territory transforming, like nearby  Gaza, into a virtual Islamic  republic.   Placating Palestinian extremism has therefore always been far more important to them than mollifying the Americans.

These realities are beginning to dawn on Washington. Yesterday Obama finally admitted what every Administration since Truman’s has discovered to its chagrin:  that the Arabs simply don’t want peace with Israel  -  they want the country removed.  Palestinian nationalism, buttressed by Arab governments throughout the region,  has never been based on securing  a national home for the Palestinians but rather on the elimination of a national home of another people.  Say what you want  about the Palestinian drive for dignity and emancipation -  if they had wanted a state any time in the past 70 years, they could have had it.    But having a state also means  accepting Israel’s existence and its right to secure borders,  and to this day, no Palestinian leader has ever gone on record embracing such a notion.

Therefore it is not so surprising that Obama could finally admit yesterday:

“I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn’t produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high”

Expectations were raised high, because Obama thinks that diplomacy and statecraft can  override practical  realities.   But lets be very clear.  The U.S’ insistence on treating the Palestinian leadership as a genuine “peace partner” is itself one of the causes of the failed process.  Peace will never come to the Middle East while Palestinian intransigence is treated us a legitimate diplomatic position or when its  resistance to compromise is respected.   The peace process will continue to fail as long as its mediators  misunderstand that the Palestinian urge to statehood is a farce and that its leadership has far  more interest in perpetuating the conflict than in resolving its intractable problems

A New Challenge to Climate Change

Is the climate change industry under seige? According to this latest piece from the Wall Street Journal  Climate Change Claim on Glaciers Under Fire that may be exactly the case.

In its 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPPC) claimed that the Himalayan Glaciers, which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia, were very likely to disappear by the year 2035.

” The receding and thinning of the Glaciers can be attributed to the (sic) global warming due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.”     The report stated.

But that, apparently is not the case, as IPPC chief, Rajendra Pachuari stated this week when he acknowledged that the claim was ” pooorly substantiated”

“ The IPCC report stated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would likely shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035. The report cited a 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. That study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain as saying Himalayan glaciers could disappear “within forty years.”

The  funny thing is that this is a self-correction – coming as it does directly from the mouth of the very organization that has been the most forceful proponent of man made global warming.

So  lets get this straight:   The data that operated as the basis of the IPCC report was based on a quote from a 2005 report by another environmental group which had relied on a 1999 quote from an Indian glaciologist.   Does that sound like sound scientific inquiry to you?  It doesn’t  to me and nor does the rest of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The charter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is

“… to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy.”.

This makes it a high-profile single-focus organization whose existence depends on its own reports. In other words it has a vested interest in promoting claims that would guarantee its funding and justify its continued existence.

This alone would be reason enough to closely examine its procedures and claims but the situation is made worse by the involvement of governments. These governments not only fund the IPCC but apparently accept its claims without question and allocate funding for climate research on the basis of those findings, then repeat the process when the next IPCC Assessment Report draws on the findings of that government-sponsored research to support its hypothesis.

In case you have forgotten the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and is the organization most lauded as having provided the world with the certainty of anthropogenic global warming.

But from the very beginings of its creation in 1988, the IPCC has been a political body first and a scientific body only second.

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its mission, to assess the risk of human-induced climate change  has turned it into a single minded attack machine for anyone who dissents from the conventional view of anthropogenic global warming.

But from its earliest years inthe 1990s, this flagship of the global warming armada developed a distinctly political purpose.  One of the more alarming revelations is that of the controversy which surrounded the IPCC’s second report, The Science of Climate Change in 1995.  According to insiders, the report had originally concluded that there was no evidence that human beings have had any influence on the climate. Yet the original version of the report was substantially edited with 15 different sections of Chapter 8 ( the chapter dealing with the extent of human influence) being amended to reflect the opposite point of view. The Executive Summary to the report, the only part that in practise most politicians ever read, clearly hewed to the accepted fact of human interference, contrary to the conclusions of the original manuscript.

That editorial hit job was almost certainly the work of IPPC’s first chairman, the alarmist Swedish professor Bert Bolin. But he did not get away scot free. Professor Frederick Seitz, the former chairman of the American Science Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 12th, 1996 that  ” I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

He proceeded to demand that the IPCC process be abandoned. From then on,the IPPC’s serial campaign of disinformation only grew more robust and continues today as the flagship of the global warming armada.In discussions with the AGW proponents climate skeptics have often been often told that their views should first be published in peer-reviewed journals before they can be taken into consideration. At first sight this seems a reasonable requirement. But on closer scrutiny this argument is open to criticism. It is a good tradition in science that anybody may criticise any scientific statement with good arguments, irrespective of his or her position or background. However, often the climate establishment does not respect this tradition. On the contrary, as a rule only insiders are allowed to participate in the discussion. In this way an official though flawed idea can survive for a very long time. This has happened many times before in the history of science.

This perhaps explains how an  orphan idea central to the global warming community is coddled and nurtured within the  walls of fortress of climate change and any attack upon it viciously thwarted as an an attack upon reason itself.

The fact that the IPPC is beginning to eat its own young, is a sign that that the tables have turned.  Watch out in the next 12 months as the fortress walls begin to crumble under reaction to  such attacks as ‘Climate Gate’ and the work of other dissenters which will gain much greater public traction.

It is about time the IPCC is challenged in this way.  And it will be a blessing to the millions of people in the West whose lives have already been adversely affected by perverse and inimical legislation based on spurious science.