June Week 4, 2006

Monday  June 19 , 2006

Tuesday  June 20 , 2006

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Christy has her last Chemo today. We should have had a party... maybe after she is pronounced cured...

Media Matters asked me:

Do you have any other feedback or suggestions that you'd like to share with Media Matters?

Maybe once a week or so you could post a list to let us know who is getting it right.
Where do we go to get the spin-free truth?

I would like to see a blurb every once and a while when the liberal side gets it wrong or spins a half truth into dogma. Conservatism isn't evil, it is a point of view, Liberalism isn't saintly it is just another point of view.

What is Evil is people like Limbaugh, O' Reilly and Coulter whipping their constituencies into a frenzy to keep their ratings up. We all know that they are just doing what they were hired to do, if they could make more money doing it, they would put on a Barney suit and promote dental hygiene.

The difference between prostitutes and Political Pundits is being a Pundit isn't illegal... yet.

Wednesday  June 21 , 2006

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

Michel de Montaigne

Christy gets her last Neulasta shot in Spokane at 09:15 and Cindy has an appointment with the Optometrist in Colville at 14:45... lot of driving.

Inflammatory Breast Cancer

http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/ibc.asp

http://ww3.komotv.com/global/video/popup/pop_player.asp?ClipID1=785456&

This is a pretty good video, it talks about what Christy has...

Thursday  June 22 , 2006

Stubbornness does have its helpful features. You always know what you are going to be thinking tomorrow.

Glen Beaman

Have to be in Newport for Mike today... not fun... very stressful.

Friday  June 23 , 2006

There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.

Dave Barry

My birthday... 63 years so far... Ye olde phart... Christy and I went out to breakfast at Cathy's Cafe, Amy and Kelly were working and Christy mentioned that it was my birthday to Kelly, so Amy put 5 candles in the butter cup... sweet, silly girls...

At 1300 we went to the clinic and Rick told me I had Diabetes... sure, that's what they all say, I think that all I have to do is eat like a sane person again and I will be fine... We will check it again in a few months.

Jared removed some (a bunch) of skin tags from under my right arm, stings a lot when he'd doing it and it hurts quite a bit for an hour or two after... it will take about 2 weeks for all of them to fall off.

Saturday  June 24 , 2006

I took Christian to Ione to meet up with his ride to Soap Lake Basketball Camp. When I got back I took the girls to Box Canyon Dam to swim. They built an old fashioned swimming hole for the kids... very cool... I love this place

Sunday  June 25 , 2006

I don't recollect that I did a damn thing, I guess I did do the lawn and I replanted some tomatoes...

Massacre of Civilians Was Inevitable

by Eric Margolis
by Eric Margolis

Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and now a new name on the roster of shame, Haditha.

Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment was patrolling the Iraqi town of Haditha last November when a roadside bomb killed one of its members. Kilo's men allegedly burst into the nearest house and gunned down 24 men, women and children cowering inside.

Accused of initially trying to cover up this killing (and other civilian killings in Iraq), the military last month began conducting a criminal investigation.

Many Americans are outraged and are demanding the Marines involved and superior officers face prosecution.

The U.S. military responded with sensitivity sessions about "core values." What a sick joke. Anyone who needs such instruction belongs in jail, not the armed forces.

If Kilo Company's men did murder 24 civilians, they must face trial for murder, and their superior officers for covering it up. But the soldiers' punishment should be mitigated by the fact they were sent into a dirty guerilla war fought in the middle of a largely hostile civilian population in which such atrocities are inevitable.

Iraq and the campaign in Afghanistan are just like typical 20th-century colonial guerilla wars. Faced with frequent sniping, mines, ambushes and treachery by supposed local "allies," even the best-trained occupation armies soon became brutalized, sadistic, cynical, then demoralized.

I have witnessed this same pattern in every guerilla war I covered or observed: Algeria, Vietnam, Kashmir, Angola, Namibia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Chechnya, Kurdistan, South Africa, Kosovo and the Palestinian territories.

Villages that sheltered rebels were destroyed, hostages shot. Civilians quickly became identified with the enemy and considered fair game for increasingly trigger-happy troops.

Murderous reprisals occur in all guerilla wars. German execution of French villagers in reprisals for Resistance ambushes were branded war crimes. When U.S. troops destroyed Vietnamese villages, or leveled a third of the Iraqi city of Fallujah to intimidate the resistance, it was termed "collateral damage."

Any army sent into a dirty guerilla war like Iraq or Afghanistan can be expected to become corrupted and slaughter civilians. The culture of mass reprisals, gratuitous killing, and torture will seep back into the higher military command structure, and then into the domestic security forces.

It seems just, but also unfair, to prosecute Kilo company when other U.S. forces have killed an estimated 38,000 Iraqi civilians (some say up to 100,000), wrecked much of what once was the Arab world's most advanced country, and hold more than 20,000 prisoners – more than Saddam Hussein.

The simple answer is that the U.S. Army and Marines should never have been sent to wage a neo-colonial war of pacification in Iraq – or Afghanistan. The longer U.S. forces stay there, the more they will become brutalized, undisciplined, and hated. Canadian forces in Afghanistan will inevitably face the same problems.

U.S. forces are trying to avoid killing civilians. But bombing and shelling, the primary cause of civilian deaths, are too often used to cow villages and tribes, or punish enemy ambushes. The rule: Bomb or shoot or shell first, check later. Dead civilians are generally labeled "suspected Iraqi terrorists."

The real blame for Haditha, of course, belongs to an administration that plunged the U.S. into an unnecessary, no-win war in Iraq, and with Pentagon brass. And with those senior Washington officials who spit on the Geneva Conventions and laws of war and telegraphed their contempt right down the line.

June 19, 2006

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.

Copyright © 2006 Eric Margolis

Eric Margolis Archives

Atrocities in the 'Good War': A Tract for Today

by Robert Higgs
by Robert Higgs

Even Americans who detest war and recognize that nearly every war is the product of mendacious, power-hungry political leaders generally make an exception for World War II, the so-called Good War. They believe that the Americans fought for an entirely good and proper cause, that they fought only after having been attacked without provocation, that their enemies were vile monsters, and that their victory made the world a better and more hopeful place for all mankind. In short, they believe in a myth. Perhaps they do so in part because so many of those who composed the so-called Greatest Generation had engaged personally in the war and needed a way to understand their involvement and to forgive themselves for what they had done or witnessed their comrades doing without objection. In any event, their actual actions in that war, which contrast starkly with the story line of the prevailing myth, might well teach valuable lessons to Americans today, as they ponder the meaning of atrocities such as those committed by U.S. soldiers, airmen, and Marines at Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and Haditha, among many other places in Iraq yet to receive comparable publicity.

After "forty months of war duty and five major battles" in which Edgar L. Jones served as "an ambulance driver, a merchant seaman, an Army historian, and a war correspondent," he wrote an article titled "One War Is Enough" for the February 1946 issue of the Atlantic Monthly (available at http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/nonatlserv.shtml). Some of the actions he described in that article may come as a shock to many readers today; they're not the sort of actions John Wayne was taking in all those postwar movies about World War II. Yet, over the years, many soldier-memoirists, such as Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge, and many historians, such as Michael C. C. Adams, John W. Dower, and Gerald F. Linderman, have confirmed them. The text that follows is excerpted verbatim from Jones's article.

We Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world. What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter.

As victors we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes against humanity; but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that if we were on trial for breaking international laws, we should be found guilty on a dozen counts. We fought a dishonorable war, because morality had a low priority in battle. The tougher the fighting, the less room for decency, and in Pacific contests we saw mankind reach the blackest depths of bestiality.

Not every American soldier, or even one per cent of our troops, deliberately committed unwarranted atrocities, and the same might be said for the Germans and Japanese. The exigencies of war necessitated many so-called crimes, and the bulk of the rest could be blamed on the mental distortion which war produced. But we publicized every inhuman act of our opponents and censored any recognition of our own moral frailty in moments of desperation.

I have asked fighting men, for instance, why they – or actually, why we – regulated flame-throwers in such a way that enemy soldiers were set afire, to die slowly and painfully, rather than killed outright with a full blast of burning oil. Was it because they hated the enemy so thoroughly? The answer was invariably, "No, we don’t hate those poor bastards particularly; we just hate the whole goddam mess and have to take it out on somebody." Possibly for the same reason, we mutilated the bodies of enemy dead, cutting off their ears and kicking out their gold teeth for souvenirs, and buried them with their testicles in their mouths, but such flagrant violations of all moral codes reach into still-unexplored realms of battle psychology.

It is not my intention either to excuse our late opponents or to discredit our own fighting men. I do, however, believe that all of us, not just the battle-enlightened GI’s, should fully understand the horror and degradation of war before talking so casually of another one. War does horrible things to men, our own sons included. It demands the worst of a person and pays off in brutality and maladjustment. It has become so mechanical, inhuman, and crassly destructive that men lose all sense of personal responsibility for their actions. They fight without compassion, because that is the only way to fight a total war. . . .

Peter Bowman summed up our victory to date in Beach Red when he wrote, "Battle doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left." We destroyed fascists, not fascism; men, not ideas. Our triumphs did not serve as evidence that democracy is best for the world, any more than Russian victories proved that communism is an ideal system for all mankind. Only through our peacetime efforts to abolish war and bring a larger measure of freedom and security to all peoples can we reveal to others that we are any better than our defeated opponents.

Today we stand on trial – we are either for peace or for war, and the rest of the world is prepared to move with us or against us. The burden of proof is on us; and our willingness to make peace, not our capacity to wage war, is the true measure of our good-neighborliness.

June 19, 2006

Robert Higgs [send him mail] is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent book is Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy. He is also the author of Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

Robert Higgs Archives

L. Ron Hubbard:
Spiritual leader or sci-fi con artist?

By Michael Crowley
Posted Friday, July 15, 2005, at 6:16 PM ET


Our summer of Tom Cruise's madness and Katie Holmes' creepy path toward zombie bridedom has been a useful reminder of how truly strange Scientology is. By now those interested in the Cruise-Holmes saga may be passingly familiar with the church's creation myth, in which an evil, intergalactic warlord named Xenu kidnaps billions of alien life forms, chains them near Earth's volcanoes, and blows them up with nuclear weapons. Strange as Scientology's pseudo-theology may be, though, it's not as entertaining as the life story of the church's founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

To hear his disciples tell it, Hubbard, who died in 1986, was the subject of "universal acclaim" and one of the greatest men who ever lived. Not only did he devise the church's founding theory of Dianetics, which promises to free mankind of psychological trauma, he was a source of wisdom about everything from jazz music to nuclear physics. The official Web site dedicated to his life features sub-sites that expound upon his brilliant callings: "The Humanitarian," "The Philosopher," "The Writer," "The Artist," "The Poet/Lyricist," "The Music Maker," "The Yachtsman," and "Adventurer/Explorer: Daring Deeds and Unknown Realms." Visitors can hear an audio recording of Hubbard singing one of his own poems or learn about the soundtrack he composed for his 1,000-page sci-fi epic Battlefield Earth (later brought to Hollywood by Scientologist John Travolta). Hubbard's composition "utilized elements from several genres—from honky-tonk and free-swinging jazz to cutting-edge electronic rock. The result is a wholly new dimension in space opera sound." (Sign me up for a copy!)

There's a deep chasm between the erudite, noble Hubbard of Scientology myth and the true identity of the church's wacky founder. To those not in his thrall, Hubbard might be better described as a pulp science-fiction writer who combined delusions of grandeur with a cynical hucksterism. Yet he turned an oddball theory about human consciousness—which originally appeared in a 25-cent sci-fi magazine—into a far-reaching and powerful multimillion-dollar empire. The church now claims about 8 million members in more than 100 countries. The slow creep of Scientology's anti-drug programs into public schools, the presumably tens of millions of dollars the church keeps with the help of its tax-exempt status, and the accusations that the church has convinced people to hand over their life savings, make Hubbard's bizzarro legacy seem less like tragicomedy and more like a scandal. Comparable crackpots-in-chief like Lyndon LaRouche and Sun Myung Moon have had almost no detectable national influence. But famous Scientologists—Cruise, Travolta, the singer Beck, and even—say it ain't so!—the voice of Bart Simpson, have given Hubbard a veneer of popular credibility and his church a perpetual recruitment ticket.

Hubbard always imagined himself a great man of history. "All men are your slaves," he once wrote in a diary entry unearthed during a 1984 lawsuit. He reportedly once claimed to have written a manuscript that contained such brutal truths that anyone who read it went insane or committed suicide. He fancied himself a nuclear physicist, never mind his lack of training, and posited that fallout from Cold War nuclear tests were interfering with Scientology therapies. (Hubbard even wrote a book titled All About Radiation—a swell read, according to one reviewer on Amazon who says, "I understand radiation better and feel like I could survive an atomic explosion somewhere on the planet, if it wasn't, of course, really close to me.") He reportedly constructed the myth that he was a World War II combat hero, when in fact the Navy reprimanded him after a San Diego-based ship he commanded shelled some nearby Mexican islands for target practice.

Hubbard's version is understandably preferable to the reality, which was a dark farce. Hubbard was born in 1911 in Tilden, Neb. After flunking out of George Washington University, he became a pulp science-fiction and adventure writer. In the mid-1940s, he fell in with John Parsons, a wealthy and brilliant young rocket scientist in California, who also happened to be under the tutelage of the infamous satanist Aleister Crowley (no relation to yours truly, thankfully). According to Russell Miller's damning biography of Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah, Parsons was a science-fiction fan who briefly hosted Hubbard at his Pasadena, Calif., mansion, which featured a domed backyard temple and a rotating cast of occultists and eccentrics. Parsons described Hubbard as his "magical partner," and together the men engaged in a rite in which Parsons tried to impregnate with an antichrist child a woman he considered the whore of Babylon, a goal that Crowley had long promoted. With Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" playing in the background, Hubbard allegedly chanted spells over the copulating couple, according to Miller and others. (Ultimately Hubbard would steal Parsons' girlfriend and allegedly bilk him in a Miami yacht venture.) Years later, when Hubbard had grown famous and realized the antichrist episode didn't comport with his image as a man of culture and wisdom, he would reportedly claim to have been working on an undercover mission for U.S. Naval Intelligence to investigate black magic.

Dabbling in (or investigating) witchcraft didn't pay the bills, and by the late 1940s Hubbard was in debt and despondent. Then in 1950 he published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which he billed as "a milestone for man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch." The theory of Dianetics promised to cure almost any physical and mental ailment—including wrinkles—by cleansing people's memories of traumatic past experiences so they could arrive at a "clear" mental state. Well poised to capitalize on a growing national fascination with psychotherapy, the book was an instant best-seller. Dianetics groups and parties sprung up nationwide.

Hubbard became an icon, and thousands of fans sought him out. In 1954, as the book's success—and his income—began to fade, Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology. His son Ron Jr. claimed in a 1983 interview with Penthouse that money was the motive, saying his father "told me and a lot of other people that the way to make a million was to start a religion." Hubbard made his millions quickly and used them to style himself as a sophisticated aristocrat, relocating to an English country home dubbed "Saint Hill Manor."

But Hubbard quickly alienated governments at home and abroad. He and his followers developed a reputation for intimidating critics and church defectors. An official inquiry in Australia concluded that Scientology is "evil" and "a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and often medically ill." In 1963, federal agents, suspicious that Hubbard's therapy might pose a health risk, raided the church's Washington, D.C., branch. The IRS concluded soon after that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from church funds and revoked Scientology's tax-exempt status. (The church won back that status in 1993 after a long, fierce campaign; several European countries still don't recognize Scientology as a religion.) In 1967, Hubbard fled to the high seas for most of the next eight years. During this period he dreamed up the "Sea Org," a special branch of Scientology whose members wear sharp blue naval uniforms and sign contracts pledging their service for 1 billion years.

Hubbard finally returned to land in 1975, first to Washington, D.C., and then to the California desert. Lying low, Hubbard was doted on by a special group of teenage "messengers" who pulled on his socks and followed him with ashtrays when he smoked. He developed Howard Hughes-like eccentricities, flying into rages if he smelled detergent in his clothes, which caused the terrified messengers to rinse his laundry in multiple water buckets.

Meanwhile, the church's ongoing paranoia and vindictiveness culminated in a shockingly elaborate operation, which Hubbard dubbed "Snow White," to spy on and burglarize multiple federal offices, including the IRS and the Justice Department, with the aim of stealing and destroying government documents about Scientology. The Scientologists even planted moles in some federal offices. In 1983, 11 church leaders, including Hubbard's wife, were convicted and sentenced to prison for the conspiracy. Though Hubbard was named as a co-conspirator, he was never indicted.

By that time, in any case, he had gone into hiding. On or around Jan. 17, 1986, Hubbard suffered a catastrophic stroke on a secluded ranch near Big Sur, Calif. A week later he was dead. Scientology attorneys arrived to recover his body, which they sought to have cremated immediately. They were blocked by a county coroner, who, according to Scientology critics, did an autopsy that revealed high levels of a psychiatric drug (Vistaril). That would seem like an embarrassment given the church's hostility to such medications (witness Tom Cruise's recent feud with Brooke Shields), but it didn't stop the church from summoning thousands of followers to the Hollywood Palladium days after Hubbard's death. There they were told that Hubbard "willingly discarded the body after it was no longer useful to him," and that this signified "his ultimate success: the conquest of life that he embarked upon half a century ago." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hubbard's ultimate success lay in convincing millions of people he was something other than a nut.


Michael Crowley is a senior editor at the New Republic.

Photograph of L. Ron Hubbard by Sheila Gaiman/Hulton Getty Photo Archive.