Corporate Patriotism

by Tiger Tom

 Editor’s Note:  Tiger Tom posted this article to the Pure Water Gazette’s former site during the period of post-911 patriotic madness when homeland-loving corporations were scrambling for a choice place at the feeding trough. –Hardly Waite.

It makes you proud to be an American when you see how our corporations answer the call in time of crisis. I mean, individuals are certainly doing their  share.  Many people have put up a big heavy flag on their home, or at least a small one on their car, or both. Some, like the guy below, even have big bloody or weepy signs and pictures.  But, as important as individual patriots are, it’s our corporations that have really come through for us.

Here are some examples of what they’re doing for the good of the nation.

The big round numbers I’ll put behind the names of the corporations and trade associations are the amount they’ve given from 1999 to the present (late 2001) in campaign contributions.  I, Tiger Tom, did not  go to a lot of trouble looking these numbers up.  Instead, I copied them from some research done by Public Campaign (http://www.publicampaign.org), a non-profit group that pushes hard for campaign finance reform.  I do not include these numbers to suggest that the obscenely rich companies mentioned are attempting to buy favors from the government. I would never think that about these patriotic corporate friends that keep America strong.

California date growers ($25,000) patriotically asked the Pentagon to buy dates for the food packages being dropped in Afghanistan. Getting dates rather than peanut butter would show the Afghans we care and  make them  feel much better about being bombed.  I, Tiger Tom, say that this is a good idea, and I suggest that the U.S. would not have been so steamed about Pearl Harbor if the Japanese had had the good manners to make an extra pass or two after the bombing to drop the survivors some sodas and potato chips.

American Traffic Safety Services Association ($26,000) made the patriotic suggestion that much more federal cash is needed for road signs to prevent traffic snarls after terrorist attacks.  Nothing ruins your day like driving off into a bomb crater because the feds scrimped on detour signs.

Telecom services and equipment makers ($21.3 million) suggested that the answer to terrorism is to re-establish telecommunications monopolies.  Big, powerful companies, they say,  unencumbered by the nuisance of competition, can better keep us safe.

The oil and gas megaglomerates ($38.8 million) suggest we meet the challenge of terrorism by drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

I, Tiger Tom ($4.75), wrote my senator to suggest conserving energy by asking patriots to drive their flagmobiles a little slower, say at a voluntary 55 mph or so,  but so far I’ve had no answer.

The travel industry ($9.3 million) came up with the patriotic notion of a $1,000 per family tax credit to help offset vacation expenses.  Think of it.  You could patriotically fly to Acapulco and get a tax credit for your trouble. That’s not much harder than putting a flag on your car.

Farm lobbies ($69.9 million) are proposing a Farm Security Act that would serve as a “bulwark against disruptions in food supplies” and, incidentally, provide millions in subsidies for corporate “farmers” in the process.

I, Tiger Tom ($4.75), wrote the president suggesting reestablishment of  Victory Gardens but have not yet had an answer.

Verizon Communications ($3.7 million) is patriotically asking the federal government to remove rules that give smaller competitors access to its network. This would be good for the fight against terrorism, the company says, because big companies can get things done in time of crisis.

Boeing (a paltry $500,000), with the Marine Corps’ help,  is begging Congress to bring back the hapless V-22 Osprey, its unique experimental aircraft that crashes now and then and kills a few Marines. 20% of the Ospreys that have been built have crashed. Nothing’s perfect. As an airplane, it’s a flop,  but it has the advantage of costing  a lot and will get Boeing back to work and be good  for the old economy. Congress has apparently already caved in on this one and is giving Boeing a billion (that’s a thousand million) to keep working on it. The big, weird plane on the right is an Osprey.

The airline industry ($8.3 million), which has had many patriotic suggestions including direct government dole, now suggests a patriotic repeal of the federal tax on jet fuel to save the country.

And finally, everyone surely has heard that our sixteen biggest corporations ($46 million in the last ten years) have patriotically whined and pleaded until congress is handing them back $7 billion (that’s billion with a “b”). Even Enron, now bankrupt, will get around $250 million under this plan . That will certainly get the economy rolling. The big guys are no doubt begging for this handout so they can help the economy by giving big raises to their workers and hiring back their laid-off employees whether they need them or not.

I, Tiger Tom ($4.75), patriotically wrote to my representatives suggesting that they further help these struggling nice-guy companies to make ends meet by putting at least a temporary salary cap of, say, $50 million per year,  on corporate CEOs. I know that this will not be popular with the CEOs, but, as I  suggested in my letter to the Vice President (sent to “Address Unknown”): “These slimy greedheads need to make some sacrifices, too, and it they don’t like it, I, Tiger Tom,  say tell them to put it in their think tank and smoke it.”

Dear Friends,

This letter is for those of you who were born after the Vietnam War.

Many of you are in high school right now. Some of you have recently graduated

and are working the Slurpee machine at the 7-11 (your way of celebrating the

greatest economic boom in history!).

By now, you have probably figured out that a lot of adults have a hard time

speaking the truth. Some are just forgetful, which comes with age. Some need

to believe that the world is ordered a certain way so they can justify their

actions and the way they live their lives. Others just want the pain to go

away, and creating fantasies is one way to relieve the sorrow of the past.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. But that’s not

exactly true. It’s really the 25th anniversary of the Vietnamese VICTORY over

the United States of America. It’s hard for a lot of adults to say those

words. No one likes to lose. We did.

You have probably seen a lot of nonsense on TV this week about how the 58,000

Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam “did not die in vain.”

That, is not the truth.

Those young lives were wasted and eliminated for absolutely no good reason

whatsoever. They were sent to die in Vietnam at the whim of a bunch of

politicians and the men who pick up their tab at the country club.

I encourage you to read “Taking Charge” by Michael Beschloss.  Beschloss

obtained the secretly-recorded White House tapes from the day when President

Johnson decided to send the troops to Vietnam. They show that Johnson KNEW he

was doing the wrong thing, that the war could not be won, but, after a pause

in the conversation, he decided to go ahead anyway. You can hear what little

was left of Johnson’s conscience in that brief pause of self-doubt, and like

the moment of decision in a frightening cliffhanger, you’ll find yourself

shouting at the book, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, thousands — millions! — of

lives will be spared!!” But he does do it. He went to Congress and lied about

an American boat being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam, and the

Senate voted 98 to 2 to send our boys to their early graves.

By now, you have probably also figured out that politicians will lie about

anything to create a justification for their actions. In order to get away

with invading Vietnam without calling it an “invasion,” the political leaders

and their compliant media friends told the American people that the

Communists were overrunning South Vietnam, a democracy and an ally of the

United States (it was a totalitarian state with a puppet leader we installed

after our government helped to assassinate the former leader). We were told

the Communists had to be stopped and, if they weren’t, Communism would spread

throughout all of Asia.

Communism, for those of you too young to have experienced the scare, was this

thing that enslaved billions of people to a system where they had little or

no say, where elections contained essentially no choice on the ballot, where

competition and choice in the marketplace were eliminated, and where

virtually every town had but one newspaper which told them what was going on.

In other words, sorta like the U.S. today!

The truth was, Vietnam had been invaded and colonized by various foreign

powers for a thousand years. In the 1940s, during World War II, a Vietnamese

leader, Ho Chi Minh, sided with America and the Allies to defeat the Japanese

and Germans. After the war, he came to Washington in the hopes of convincing

the President and Congress to back his people’s struggle to be free. He was

certain that the Americans, whose own country was founded through a

revolution against a foreign king, would back his efforts to create a free

and democratic Vietnam. He was not a “Communist” then. His hero was George

Washington. The Vietnamese Constitution he proposed was based on the U.S.

Constitution, which he thought to be a profound document.

The Congress and the President turned him away. The French, who “owned”

Vietnam at the time — you see, they were our “friends.”

Ho and the Vietnamese were forced to look for help elsewhere. And the rest is

history.

There is not much talk on the news today about the Vietnamese who died in the

war. Over two million perished. Two million people were killed in our name,

using our taxes and America’s sons in perpetrating a mass slaughter. You

probably have seen a lot of Senator John McCain this year, everyone talking

about him being a “a war hero.” McCain’s job was to bomb innocent civilians

in the neighborhoods of Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. He got shot down

while committing this heinous act. He ejected and crashed into a lake in the

center of town. How did the Vietnamese react to this American who fell from

the sky after killing their children? Did they string him up and kill him?

No, they jumped into the lake and saved his life. Thirty-two years later, he

rides with the press on his “Straight Talk Express” and calls them “gooks”

and few bother to report it.

A lot of people my age and older went to Vietnam. They were not bad people.

They were just kids who didn’t know they were being used. But, we are all

responsible for our individual actions, and on judgment day, using the excuse

that you were “only following orders” will not sit well. But neither will our

lack of compassion and understanding. “All are punish’d.”

The only true heroes of the Vietnam War — you will not read about them in

your high school history books or see statues of them in city parks — were

the brave ones who stood up against the government and refused to go and kill

Vietnamese. Contrary to what you may have seen on TV, being against the war

was never the popular position to take (until near the very end). Those who

protested took a lot of abuse, not to mention a few billy clubs to the head.

Those who refused to be drafted were sent to jail. Over a hundred thousand

escaped to Canada, a country that took them in without question. Families

were ripped apart. To this day, in spite of the amnesty, the government

continues to track down and punish those unfairly accused of violently trying

to stop the war (please read the excellent article on Howard Mechanic in

today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/)

Nine guys who went to my high school were killed in Vietnam. If there is

anything you take from this letter, it is my hope that you will always resist

our government’s efforts to send you off to fight the rich man’s wars. Most

would agree that there come those times in history when, out of sheer

self-defense, a nation must defend itself. That is not what happened in

Vietnam — or in Grenada or Panama or Nicaragua or Iraq or Kosovo. These are

wars to make the world safe for oil and sweatshops. Don’t ever let an adult

tell you any differently. They will lie to you because they need YOU to go

fight THEIR war. Don’t fall for it. Only the strong and brave and courageous

are able to resist what appears to be the human instinct to kill other

humans. Be brave. Be strong. Learn from your parents’ and grandparents’

mistakes.

Twenty-five years later, many of them still can’t figure out what went wrong.

That’s why I believe April 30 should be a national holiday, a day to always

remember what went wrong with us, so that it never happens again. In Vietnam,

it’s not called the “Vietnam War.” It’s called the “American War.” The BBC

news ticker that runs across the top of my computer screen just flashed on:

“Vietnam Celebrates American Defeat.” Defeat? Defeat! I have not read a

headline like that in the U.S.

As long as we can’t call it for what it was, we are doomed to repeat our

worst mistake. Kids, help us.

Yours,

Michael Moore

Obituaries

by Gary North

March 28, 2002

Milton Berle died yesterday. For a brief moment, just before “The West Wing,” this message flashed on the screen:

Milton Berle, 1908-2002

There was no other comment.

I went to Drudge’s site this morning. I figured there would have to be a link to the obituary. There was. But beneath it, there was another link:

British comedian Dudley Moore dies at age 66

Milton Berle got a 5-second screen shot on NBC. Dudley Moore didn’t. Such is death.

Milton Berle was known as “Mr. Television.” This was based on his weekly TV show, which ran from 1948 to 1956.  He was the biggest star on television in the years in which TV first penetrated America. Americans bought TV sets just to watch Milton Berle. This seems inconceivable in
retrospect. The Kinescope clips from his old shows usually feature him dressed as a woman or even a pre-pubescent girl with a huge lollipop. After 1956, he pretty much faded from public view.

The man’s career is a testament to the truth that the comedy of one era rarely survives into the next. Written humor survives (Mark Twain, Will Rogers), but verbal comedy doesn’t. If your audience laughs out loud rather than smiles or chuckles, your career will probably be short. Bob Hope was an exception, but his individual jokes did not survive his show’s closing credits. Would anyone actually sit through a re-run of a Bob Hope Special? He knew it, too, which is why he toured military bases all those years. The troops would laugh at anything. He was beloved. When
he dies, flags will probably be flown at half mast. But no one remembers even one of his tens of thousands of jokes, which still sit in huge index files.

Back to Berle. I can vaguely recall one dramatic role on a weekly TV series which he impressed me — maybe on “The Defenders” — but that was probably forty years ago. I thought, “This guy can act.” But he rarely did. He spent the rest of his career doing cameos or parodies of himself.

The most information I ever read on Berle is the obituary linked from Drudge. I hadn’t known how long he had been in movies an on stage: from age 5. I didn’t know that he had been a big vaudeville performer, headlining with the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936. He was so well known at the dawn of TV that he got his 5-second death notice on NBC. Dudley Moore didn’t.

I started listening to Dudley Moore/Peter Cook skits in the mid-1960’s, and I saw them on stage around 1975. “The Frog and Peach” was their big skit back then. Cook died in 1995. His most famous movie role is probably as the lisping bishop in “The Princess Bride.” Moore starred in several major movies, most notably “10” and “Arthur.” He died of a crippling disease, PSP.

These were famous men for a time, but they all died in obscurity. Two of them received obituary links on Drudge. You and I won’t.

This is an advantage, you know. Millions of readers will not think, “Why, I thought he had died years ago.” They also will not think, “I’m sure glad I’m not a has-been.” Because, honestly, that’s what I thought when I read Berle’s obituary. The alternative thought isn’t much better: “What a tragedy. He went out at the peak of his career.”

Buried in Newspaper

The obituary is a recent invention: the product of the newspaper. Millions of readers like to read obituaries of famous people. They check the obituary page daily just to see if anyone worth reading about has died. I’m not sure why. Are we comparing the deceased with ourselves? Are we
thinking, “I’m alive, and he isn’t”? Do we enjoy discovering that former giants have faded in the stretch?  After all, if a person lives long enough, he fades (exceptfor George Burns). As someone has said, “Old age is when men who were attractive to women and men who were not attractive to women become equally unattractive to women” (except for Cary Grant and Sean Connery).

I recall a former colleague of mine at the Foundation for Economic Education, an older man whose job I could never quite figure out. He read the NEW YORK TIMES’s obituary page every day. I found that I developed the same habit when I subscribed to the paper version. Now that I read it on-line, and only occasionally, I no longer read the obituary section. In fact, I rarely read them. But I do think about this artifact of modern civilization.

Really famous deceased people make it to the front page of the newspapers.

Obituaries are positive unless the person was a convicted felon. They are not quite eulogies, but the
familiar rule of etiquette, “never speak badly of the dead,” generally holds. I recall only one truly savage obituary. It began with what I regard as the classic opening line for any obituary. It was for Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, one of the era’s more flamboyant despots, noted for the teenage girls who accompanied him. He died in 1971. The obituary began with these words (I am quoting from a 31-year memory):

Yesterday, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier was visited by Haiti’s last remaining democratic
institution.

Which brings me to my topic of the day: the equalizing effects of death. Or, as King Solomon put it so long ago: For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion (Ecclesiastes 9:4).

It’s About Time

The numerical disparity between rich and poor is enormous, e.g., Bill Gates vs. just about anyone. But in terms of lifestyle, there is not much difference. Gates can hire more servants that you can. He lives in a larger home. I have seen it from the water that surrounds it: I was boating with a friend. I saw it when it was being built. It looked kind of like the skeleton for a Ramada Inn. I never wanted to live in a Ramada Inn. In any case, how much time does he spend in it? Maybe his wife does,
but he built it before he got married. It’s the kind of home that is for entertaining large crowds. But who wants to entertain large crowds at home? Not I.

Gates can fly anywhere he wants to in his corporate jet. But I can get there almost as fast. Besides, I don’t want to go anywhere.

With his money, Gates can do a lot more good than you or I can, and also a lot more harm.

I live 40 minutes down Highway 540 from four of the five heirs of Sam Walton. The combined wealth of all five: $100 billion. They don’t like publicity. They rarely get written up in the local newspaper. They stay out of sight. They live in nondescript houses, as big houses go.

Cancer got Sam Walton. He could not buy another year, Just as Ralph Stanley sings. I once wrote to him about a potential cancer cure — unconventional. He wrote back, thanking me for my concern. But he stuck with conventional, expensive treatment.

The difference in life spans, you vs. Walton, or a Chinese peasant who reaches his fifth year vs. anyone else who reaches his fifth year, is minimal, compared to wealth differences. The bell-shaped curve of life expectancy is pretty tight. There aren’t many people on the far right-hand side of the curve. When it comes to standard deviation, there isn’t much deviation.

But there is some, or so the obituary notices indicate. I don’t know if we can trust the following. The examples are amazing. The final entry is the most amazing of all (scroll down). Li Chang Yun’s 1933 obituary is said to have been the inspiration for James Hilton’s novel, LOST HORIZON (1934), the story of Shangri-la. The movie’s character was played by Sam Jaffe. Unlike Gunga Din, this Jaffe character was like the Energizer Bunny. Could the following really be true?

http://www.custance.org/Library/SOTW/APPENDIXES/App_I.html

My point is, that with a few exceptions, there is remarkable equality of the capital asset we call life expectancy. The most precious resource of all is uniformly distributed across the human race. While the distribution of other capital assets can vary widely, time is handed out pretty evenly. Pareto’s 80-20 rule does not apply to life expectancy. Twenty percent of the population does not live 80% longer than the others.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away (Psalm 90:10).

Time is our only irreplaceable resource. This includes Bill Gates. It included Sam Walton.

In this one area of life — life itself — all of us have close to the same quantity of goods.

This is our great opportunity as individuals. Nobody has a significant advantage.

Yet, in terms of capital, the West is richer than the rest of the world. You and I have tremendous advantages that the typical Asian doesn’t enjoy,

This article is reprinted from Issue 127 (March 28, 2002) of Gary North’s very interesting financial email newsletter,  REALITY CHECK.

And It Still Stinks

by Hardly Waite, Pure Water Gazette Senior Editor

 

In 1838 and 1839 the United States government committed a vicious act of genocide,  our own version of the holocaust,  against the Cherokee Indians, a peaceful, civilized 16,000-member tribe living in Georgia. The Cherokees’ crime was that gold had been found on the land they occupied, and the state of Georgia wanted their land for settlement.  Although the U. S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall had ruled that the Cherokees constituted an independent nation and the state of Georgia had no jurisdiction over its territory,  President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the court’s ruling (thereby violating his oath of office in which he swore to uphold the Constitution) and Georgia took away the Cherokees’ land by sponsoring a  public lottery.

In spite of vehement protests of such notable Americans as Senators Davy Crockett and Henry Clay and America’s greatest writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Congress, by a margin of a single vote, decreed  the “relocation” to Oklahoma. of 16,000 Cherokees.   The relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, consisted of a brutal forced march in which fully a fourth of the Cherokee tribe died.  The suffering was unspeakable.  There was no justification and there can be no explanation other than greed.

While the relocation was being plotted by government officials and a fake treaty was signed to make the theft of the Indian land appear legitimate,  Emerson wrote a moving letter of protest to President Martin Van Buren.  In part,  he said:

Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy were never heard of in times of peace and in the dealing of a nation with its own allies and wards, since the earth was made. Sir, does this government think that the people of  the United States are become savage and mad? From their mind are the sentiments of love and good nature wiped clean out? The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is in the heart’s heart in all men form Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business.

You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit to infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.

Ralph was right.  And it still stinks.

Medical Heresy in the Nineteenth Century: Women and the Water Cure

 by Gene Franks

Health and bodily perfectionism might be the ultimate metaphors for self-determination and choice amid cultural uncertainty and upheaval; they do indeed yield a self-directed, life-giving, empowering vision. Now, as then, health may be one of the few arenas in which a utopian, perfectionist ideal can be sought and–for given moments–realized.–Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement in Women’s Health. 

 

Editor/Publisher/Writer’s Note: The article that follows is twice-recycled. It appeared first in a paper version in Pure Water Gazette #22, October, 1989, then was improved and expanded for paper publication in Gazette #47, Fall, 1997.  The present version, improved, I hope,  dates from the Spring of 2001.  The pictures are from a magazine article published a century and a half ago.

I think you’ll be surprised at how the current upsurge of popularity of alternative healing systems had its exact parallel in pre-Civil War America. You may be surprised, too, at how little the “regulars,” or allopathic doctors, have changed their ways in the century and a half they’ve been “practicing” since the days described in the article.  The Bleed, Purge, and Poison strategy of Antebellum “heroic” medicine isn’t all that different from today’s Slash, Burn, and Poison style. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the French say.  The more things change, the more they stay forever the same.–Gene Franks.

A century and a half ago, one of America’s most hazardous professions was that of the affluent housewife. Freed from the necessity to contribute to family income, many ladies of the leisure class inherited the role of petted, over-protected dolls–overfed on rich and highly refined foods, inactive, and extremely unhealthy. Among their worst enemies were the dressmaker and the doctor.

Fashion was such a burden to health that reformer Lydia Sayer Hasbrouk liked to say, “Dress reform to us is synonymous with health reform.” In an effort to achieve the appearance of an unnaturally narrow waist, women were wrapped in “misery-making machines” consisting of tightly-laced corsets stiffened with whalebones and steel splints. These caused pain in the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, and probably contributed to miscarriages and premature births. Many women suffered deformed ribs and chronic shortness of breath. Equally oppressive was the effort to achieve a “tea cosy effect” by wearing six, eight, or more heavy underskirts weighing up to 15 pounds and supported by strings drawn so tightly that they left visible indentations even after death.

Although fashion was hideous, doctors were a more immediate threat. Pre-Civil War doctors treated women, one writer of the time said, like “ignorant children who must be guided by their betters–especially by their physicians.”

For middle- and upper-class women, pregnancy, parturition (as childbirth was called), and postpartum complications were the leading health concerns. Seeking to replace midwives as birthing attendants, doctors waged a systematic campaign–a campaign still much in evidence today–to turn childbirth into a medical problem. As Jane Donegan explains in Hydropathic Highway to Health:

Although then as now, the vast majority of births were uncomplicated, doctors stressed the potential hazards that accompanied every normal case. They capitalized on their medical training to emphasize their claim–not always founded in fact–that only with their assistance could childbearing be transformed into a safer, shorter, and less terrifying event. In the process, physicians redefined parturition. What had once been regarded as a natural physiological function eventually became a pathological condition requiring the physician’s scientific management.

The “scientific management” of childbirth came to be standard fare of the medical system known as “heroic medicine,” which was practiced by “regular” doctors, or allopaths.  Heroic medicine featured an invasive, aggressive attack on disease, relying on such weapons as bloodletting (by way of venesection, or opening of the veins, applying leeches, and cupping) and massive drugging.

The process of procreation was in general shrouded in secrecy, and the information that women got from doctors was less than perfect. Doctors advised, for example, that conception was most likely to occur during menstruation and was least likely during the period we now know as ovulation. It is no wonder that women seemed to be eternally pregnant.

Doctors believed, too, that the cessation of menstruation during pregnancy indicated a problem needing heroic intervention. Bloodletting was the logical cure. Bleeding weakened the “patient” and lent support to the notion that pregnancy was a disease requiring medical treatment. A respected specialist in uterine diseases in 1858 taught medical students to insert leeches into the womb even though he admitted that the practice “could induce a paroxysm of almost intolerable suffering.” Exercise was discouraged, and even young women became virtual invalids during pregnancy and for weeks or months after childbirth.

The famous physician Benjamin Rush defined childbearing as “a disease taking the form of a clonic spasm” and recommended venesection and medicating with opium. Bloodletting, in fact, became the standard treatment for most of the “symptoms” of pregnancy, including morning sickness, swelling of the hands, wrists, and face, headache and vertigo. Doctors even sought to control hemorrhage with bloodletting, theorizing, according to Jane Donegan, that “bleeding a woman [until she was unconscious] would temporarily reduce circulation and encourage her blood to clot.” This practice often led to temporary blindness and prolonged periods of weakness.

Another standard treatment for the disease of childbearing was ergot, a powerful drug used to “excite uterine contractions,” thus inducing labor. Much abused by inexperienced physicians (and some doctors of the time began practice in obstetrics without having so much as witnessed a childbirth), ergot, in the words of one doctor,  left a trail of “ruptured uteri, deadborn children, puerperal convulsions, and widowered husbands.”  The problem was that when given prematurely–as often happened–ergot stimulated forceful uterine contractions that could rupture the uterus or destroy the fetus by forcing it against the undilated cervix.

While many other problems attributable to medical treatment could be discussed, such as mercury poisoning and the spread of infection, it is enough to say that by the middle of the nineteenth century women’s health in America was in a deplorable state. Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, made an informal survey of over 1,000 women in 79 communities and found that the sick outnumbered the well by a ratio of three to one. Mrs. Beecher commented: “I am not able to recall, in my immense circle of friends and acquaintances all over the Union, so many as ten married ladies born in this century and country, who are perfectly sound, healthy, and vigorous.”

         Mrs. Beecher’s suggested remedies  for women’s poor health were three: dress reform, vigorous exercise,  and participation in the water cure.

Hydropathy, The Water Cure

                The science of hydropathy, or the water cure, developed as one of the several heretical therapeutic systems that arose to offer alternatives to heroic treatment. Water therapy is based on the reasonable belief that water is the natural sustainer of life and therefore possesses varied and powerful curative properties. Water therapy has a long and interesting history, but here it is convenient to say that nineteenth century hydropathy began with a medically untrained Austrian named Vincent Priessnitz, who developed the essentials of the system while treating himself for, and recovering fully from the effects of what doctors had deemed an “incurable” accident.

In 1826 Priessnitz opened a water cure establishment at Grafenberg in the mountains of Silesia. It was an immediate success and, known as the “Water University,” became a model for many similar establishments in Europe and  America.

The Priessnitz treatment, which centered on water, air, exercise, and diet, was quickly acclaimed for its effectiveness. Priessnitz’ success was explained by Susan Cayleff:

Retrospectively, his success stemmed from removing his patients from the stresses  and excesses that had often induced their illnesses, providing a pleasant communal setting, implementing diet and exercise regimens that strengthened the body, ceasing heroic therapeutics, letting nature help right what was reversible, involving patients in their own cure through habit reformation, and applying the mystical healing powers attributed to Priessnitz’ personality.

The water cure centers stressed plenty of rest, moderate living in all respects, outdoor exercise, a spare and wholesome, often vegetarian diet, avoidance of drugs and invasive medical treatments, and the internal and external use of pure water as a purifying and curative agent. Their success, especially when compared with heroic treatment, would seem inevitable.

Hydropathy spread quickly in America. According to one account, 213 cure centers were established between 1843 and 1900. Although most treated both sexes, the centers were especially popular with women; and women, who had long been denied access to the “regular” medical field, not only gained acceptance but took the lead as water-cure physicians.

The advancement of women as health practitioners was strongly advocated by the very influential Water Cure Journal,  a publication that from 1845 through the 1850s promoted hydropathy as well as the related issues of temperance, women’s rights, and dress and medical reform. The Journal also proclaimed gynecological medicine to be hydropathy’s main concern.  In an age of exaggerated modesty, the Journal addressed such forbidden topics as abortion, the frequency of sexual intercourse, masturbation, and barrenness.  “In all these matters,” Kathryn Kish Sklar writes, “hydropathy lived up to its claim to be the friend of nineteenth-century women. Its sympathy for the special medical problems of women stood in stark contrast to the hostility and indifference characteristic of traditional contemporary medicine.”

Hydropathy presented a totally fresh approach to childbirth, denying that it was a disease, as the allopaths seemed to believe,  or that it was of necessity excruciatingly painful because it was God’s punishment for Eve’s sin, as many believed. Water curists taught that excessive pain in childbirth was unnatural and unnecessary–the result of poor health. They stressed extensive exercise and proper diet during pregnancy and the relaxing effects of free movement and warm-water baths during labor. Perhaps the most startling result of hydropathic parturition was that women found they could be up and about a few days after delivery. With the scientific management of allopathy, two months of invalidism after delivery was not uncommon.

The main message of the water-cure centers to women, though, was the revolutionary premise that “a woman’s body belonged to herself–not to her doctor, not to her children, and not to her husband.”

The cures themselves involved a regulated, wholesome lifestyle and the liberal use of water both internally and externally. Priessnitz urged patients to drink 20 to 30 glasses of water per day to induce internal cleaning, and no other beverage was permitted. A variety of bathing techniques were used to promote general cleansing and to address specific problems. The most commonly used treatment was the wet-sheet pack. In this “bath, ” the patient was wrapped in a mummy-like encasement consisting of a sheet dipped in cold water and four blankets. Additional covers were added until the patient perspired freely. The patient was then removed from the wrapping and plunged into a cold bath. A doctor described the therapeutic effect as follows:

When the pure water of the wet sheet came into contact with the skin the impure water of the blood on the inside of the skin passed through the skin into the water of the wet sheet while pure water of the wet sheet passed through the skin to supply the place of the impure water.  An interchange took place.

From the patient’s viewpoint, the wetsheet wrap was less scientific. Here’s a poem written by a patient named Carrie May at the Saratoga Water-Cure in 1857:

First they wrap you closely

In a dripping sheet.

A bottle of hot water

Is then placed at your feet:

Blanket after blanket

Wrap around your form,

Comfortables in plenty,

Keep you nicely warm: . . .

Acting like an opiate,

Easing all your pain,

Calming down your bounding pulse,

Cooling off your brain.

Puts you in a slumber,

Gives you dreams of bliss,

Naught is any Treatment

Is so nice as this. . .

Whatever the curative effects, the “dreams of bliss” described by Carrie May sound a lot better than having your blood drained by leeches or lancet.

The water-cure centers had a profound effect on American health and American thinking. They served as rallying points for many divergent ideas–from women’s rights and dress reform to dietary and hygienic instruction. The people involved with the cures were for the most part far ahead of their time.

Water-cure doctors, for example, consistently stressed the importance of a spare, meat-free diet. They were forerunners, with hygienists like Sylvester Graham (the man Graham Crackers were named after), of the gradual but steady rise of vegetarianism. Similarly, the water Purists’ successes with drug-free, noninvasive treatment have certainly opened doors in the public mind for the gentler and increasingly popular “alternative” therapies of today. Above all, the hydropathists reminded us of the inseparable relationship that exists between good health and pure water.

Every age considers itself the peak of civilization and loves to point a finger at its ancestors’ follies. From our vantage point, heroic medicine’s reliance on bloodletting seems naive and outrageous.

We should not forget that bloodletting was not a medical fad but the dominant medical strategy for many years. Hundreds and hundreds of years. Many current medical practices, even some that are strongly established as medical tradition, will seem equally absurd to future generations. Certainly the aggressive tactics of modern cancer therapy will be the shame of our age. The shame lies not only in the total failure of the much touted “War on Cancer” (which the medical establishment will continue to wage as long as we are gullible enough to pay for it so lavishly), but equally in the boldfaced suppression of successful alternative therapies. For example, the FDA persecution of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, whose antineoplaston therapy has proven to be not only highly effective but also totally free of the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, is a black page in our history. That one must travel to Mexico to receive the well-documented advantages of the totally natural and harmless Gerson therapy is equally shameful. Dr. Julian Whitaker, editor of Health & Healing  newsletter and a practicing physician, avoids cancer treatment because of the political climate. He writes:

Given our dismal track record in treating cancer, you’d think that the medical establishment would be open to alternatives. However, it is exactly the opposite. Cancer generates billions of dollars, and the financial interests involved work tirelessly to influence government to outlaw alternatives and eliminate your choice. In the state of California, as well as others, it is illegal to treat cancer with anything but surgery, radiation or chemotherapy!

I do not, as a rule, treat cancer patients. My reasons for this are very simple. I do not live in Mexico, and I do not want to go to jail. If the environment was less oppressive, I would open the doors for cancer, and regardless of what I did, I’m convinced that it would be at least as successful as what is being done now. . .

I look upon cancer in the same way that I look upon heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, and even obesity, for that matter, in that by dramatically strengthening the body’s immune system through diet, nutritional supplements, and exercise, the body can rid itself of the cancer, just as it does other degenerative diseases. Consequently, I wouldn’t have chemotherapy and radiation because I’m not interested in therapies that cripple the immune system, and, in my opinion, virtually insure failure for the majority of cancer patients.

Other customs that will certainly earn  us the derision of future generations  include our naive over-reliance on vaccination and the equally outrageous adoption by modern medicine of the religious ritual of circumcision. Circumcision made the jump from superstition to medical treatment simply because it is profitable.

It will be a happy day for men when circumcision finds its final resting place on the scrap heap of medical bad ideas.

A single scrap heap will not be large  enough to hold the medical atrocities against women. Certainly the problems of childbirth have not diminished with modern medical management of pregnancy, and the “regulars”  continue to wage war against  midwives.  As Dr. Robert Mendelsohn pointed out in Confessions of a Medical Heretic, the Church of Modern Medicine still views women as second-class creatures. Pregnancy is still treated as if it  were a disease. The bag of tricks has new gadgets, but the result is the same. Dr. Mendelsohn writes:

                If you’re pregnant, you go to the doctor and he treats you as if you’re sick. Childbirth is a nine-month disease which  must be treated, so you’re sold on intravenous fluid bags, fetal monitors a host of drugs, the totally unnecessary episiotomy, and–the top of the line product–the caesarean birth!

The U.S. now ranks second only to Brazil in the percentage of Caesarean births. Our Caesarean birth rate grew from 5% in 1962 to 23% in 1992. That’s progress!

Medicine copes with changes in direction

By Stephen Smith

When researchers last week dropped bombshells debunking long-held beliefs about hormones and knee surgery, it was stunning – but hardly surprising.

The history of medicine is pocked with reversals, yesterday’s panacea branded as today’s poison.

Witness this swatch of advice, resounding with the august authority that Americans had come to expect from the white-jacketed high priests of medicine.

”The notion that a baby should not have direct sunlight is a major mistake,” Dr. Herman Bundesen, president of the Chicago Board of Health, wrote in 1938 on the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal. ”When the baby is a month old, put him directly in the sunlight. The best time of the day is between 10 and 2 o’clock.”

Doctors changed their minds about that – just as they did last week when two medical studies challenged the value of hormone replacement therapy for women and knee surgery for arthritis-hobbled patients. Hormones, researchers found, actually increase a woman’s risk of some of the very ills they were intended to conquer, including heart disease. And, scientists reported, patients who underwent arthroscopic knee operations fared no better than those who got a sham procedure.

Patients who had undergone these treatments and critics of big medicine expressed annoyance and outrage. Yet medical historians and leading physicians view the twin reversals not as troubling setbacks for American medicine but as proof that the system is doing its job. Science is constantly reaching new conclusions about once-widely accepted treatments, a tradition that validates the need for rigorous research and the willingness to abandon medical orthodoxy.

Last week’s revelations also underscore profound shifts in how scientists evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Once, it was enough for individual physicians to observe how patients fared after swallowing a pill or enduring an operation. And, sometimes, as with the 1938 recommendation regarding the benefits of sun, blind intuition was embraced in the absence of unblinking scientific evidence.

Water Filter Cartridges Many Sizes. Many Styles

Today, the standards are far more exacting. Researchers subject drugs to elaborately designed trials, with scientists linked into networks involving dozens of universities and hospitals.

It turned out that hormones and arthroscopic knee surgery – treatments in broad use for decades – found themselves squeezed in the vise of past favorable anecdotal experience and present large-scale studies reporting major problems.

Left in the wake of these scientific course corrections: further damage to the once-easy confidence vested in doctors. For years, patients have lamented the confusion stirred by dueling medical studies, but both hormone replacement therapy and arthroscopic knee surgery stood as essential weapons in the medical arsenal. If researchers reverse course on them, ordinary patients wondered, what’s next?

”I understand the concern that this may undermine the sense of the infallibility of physicians,” said Dr. John G. Clarkson, dean of the University of Miami medical school. ”You know what? There’s nothing wrong with that because none of us are infallible, and clinical research is not infallible. What’s important is how we move forward and do a better job of taking care of patients by constantly questioning our suppositions and subjecting them to the scientific method.”

Such reconsiderations have been prominent features on the health care landscape for years. There’s thalidomide, for instance, a drug to reduce pregnant women’s morning sickness that was banned from the marketplace in the 1960s after being implicated as the cause of hideous birth defects. Now, it’s available again, used to treat leprosy. And, of course, a few generations back, lobotomies – the removal of a section of the brain – were acceptable treatment for the insane.

More recently, heart doctors found themselves altering their recommendations regarding diet. Once, stick margarine was in. Now, it’s out, since any benefits are trumped by concerns over transfatty acids, which cause cholesterol to spike.

”There’s a natural rhythm to a lot of discoveries in medicine,” said Dr. Mark Hlatky, a Stanford University cardiologist and health policy researcher. ”In the long run, there’s going to be ups and downs with clinical research. This is what gives you advances: You have an idea, you float the idea, and some of them don’t pan out.”

But rarely, if ever, has there been a week like the one just past.

First, researchers at the National Institutes of Health revealed that hormone replacement therapy taken by 6 million menopausal women does more harm than good. Touted for their supposed ability to prevent heart disease and cancer, hormones became commonplace in the medicine cabinets of millions of women – sometimes for life. But while the pills remain valuable in alleviating the consequences of menopause, the NIH scientists reported that long-term use can actually put women at peril, although the risk to individual women is slight.

Then, Texas scientists disclosed results showing that surgery performed on at least 225,000 Americans annually with arthritic knees was actually no better than a sham procedure performed in their study. It wasn’t so much that doctors were wrong when they perceived that patients improved. Rather, the Texas study calls into question whether that’s due to the procedure or, instead, can be attributed to the placebo effect – when a patient’s improvement is caused not by the medical treatment but by the belief that a pill or operation has helped.

”It can be confusing to the average person and even to the medical professional,” said Dr. Stephen Hulley, chairman of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco medical school. ”If you have different studies pointing in different directions and different experts drawing different conclusions, you obviously have a situation where it’s more difficult for the average person to make a good decision.”

How did this happen? How did hormone pills once hailed as a panacea for women with hot flashes and the other aspects of menopause go from medical savior to medical villain?

The answer, in large measure, resides in one of the pivotal shifts in 20th century medical history.

Physicians have always demanded evidence before prescribing a drug or a surgical procedure. It is the nature of that evidence that evolved so dramatically during the past quarter century.

Anecdotal experience once was the widely embraced standard. Give a patient a pill and if it works, then give the same pill to another patient with the same ailment.

”It’s sort of like when you’re a parent and you’re taking care of your children,” said Dr. Judy Ockene, a University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher and a principal investigator of the Women’s Health Initiative, which examined the hormone treatment. ”What you do with your children is based on whatever the evidence is telling you and what your own experience tells you is best.”

In fact, the experience with hormones is an object lesson in how things were – and how things have changed.

The pills, in use for six decades, were subjected to repeated medical trials reported in leading medical journals. But those studies were not the rigorous kind that are part of the medical canon today. Instead, conclusions were drawn simply by observing the effects of hormones on women who took the pills – there was no comparison group against which assumptions could be tested.

When he was a medical student more than 20 years ago, Stanford’s Hlatky recalls, there were few ”randomized” clinical trials. Those are the reviews of drugs that, with extreme precision, divide study participants into one group that gets the medicine under study, another that downs a dummy pill, and, sometimes, a third group that receives an entirely different treatment. Such studies typically proceed in a ”blind” fashion, meaning that neither participant nor researcher knows who got what pill until the research is complete.

Now that double blind approach is the gold standard. In fact, the NIH has established sites across the country designed to help researchers become better at their jobs. And those studies gain even more firepower by linking scientists into networks stretching from one coast to the other, a process designed to assure that the discovery at a lone university is no mere statistical anomaly.

The hormone study revealed last week followed that model, the first time the drug had been subjected to such unflinching scrutiny.

”We really now have a new capacity to critically assess therapies that we did not have before,” said Allan Brandt, a professor of the history of medicine at Harvard. ”Rather than seeing what happened with hormone replacement therapy and knee surgery as science having gone off in the wrong direction and now it needs to be corrected, it’s part of a constant process of evaluating therapeutic techniques based on new and innovative processes.”

It is a process likely to ensnare even more drugs and surgical procedures in the future. In fact, the experience with hormone replacement therapy and knee surgery could inspire evaluations anew of other long-embraced techniques and beliefs.

”There are lots of things out there that we do because that’s the way we’ve always done them,” Miami’s Clarkson said. ”And until we subject them to the scientific method, we will continue to do them.”

Instead of being cowed by the whipsaw of discovery from last week, researchers and historians said, patients should view the developments as an opportunity to seize control. Ask questions, they said. And demand scientific proof that what your doctor wants you to take really works.

”I think the patients should be happy,” Hlatky said. ”It’s scientific proof instead of just relying on expert opinion. If we just went with expert opinion, everybody would still think the world is flat.”

The Language of God

By Gene Franks

Many Americans will find this unlikely — it will surely come as a shock to George W. Bush — but there are a number of religious thinkers in this world who maintain that That Old Time Religion is seriously showing its age. From the pews to the pulpit, the faith is weakening. There is evidence, in fact, to support the notion that Christianity, as we all know and love-or-hate it, is (to state it in the proper historical parlance) pretty much doomed. –David Templeton. (“Can Jesus Survive the Millennium?” in Northern California Bohemian, April 3, 2001).

Recent developments in genetics, or Genetics, I should say, have underlined just how right I’ve been all the years I’ve been exposing myself to ridicule, scorn,  and

outright raucous laughter by saying that Science, not Christianity, is modern America’s religion. In case you haven’t yet caught on to this—I think it’s only me and about two other people who have—I’ll explain. I do not say that Science has characteristics of a religion, or that Science has similarities to some religions; I say, specifically and without equivocation, that Science is now and for some time has been America’s national religion.

Whatever we might think we believe, we Americans have been so totally indoctrinated in the thinking of the Church of Science that we all share a deep and abiding belief in the Laws of Science and Technology.   Christianity is now one of America’s hobbies, and Science is America’s religion. Americans have far stronger faith in their automobile to get them to church than in their Church’s God-In-Residence to perform even the tiniest of miracles. And if our eye offends us, we do not pluck it out, as Jesus commanded, but rather we go to our certified ophthalmologist for a complete eye examination and professional treatment.  Jesus’ commandment notwithstanding, eye-plucking is now seen by all as barbaric, un-Christian, and, perish the thought, un-Scientific.

Let me make this clearer with an illustration from recent events.

 When not long ago God moved to reveal His true language to the world,  He did not reveal it to the Pope or to Billy Graham or even to Pat Robertson, but to some Holy Researchers with grants from the U.S. Government or high-paying jobs with predatory Science-for-profit Corporations. I am speaking, of course, of the Prophets of the Human Genome Project.

During the historic celebration of the completion of the Genome Project in 2001, I heard at least three of the scientists for the project declare, with solemn reverence, quivering lip, and a somber tone worthy of a Moses stepping down from the Mount with his Tablets,  that with the project’s completion scientists had now laid eyes on “the language of God.” Even President Clinton got into the act, calling the completed Genome “the language in which God created life.”

Think of it.  God’s very own language—discovered not in some long-buried cave in the Holy Land, but right here in a laboratory in California.

Now, if the Pope were to announce that he had been made privy to God’s sacred idiom and therefore has insider information that the rest of us don’t, folks everywhere–Catholics included, I’m guessing– would cry out in outrage. But when the scientific elite anoint themselves the unique custodians of God’s recipe book, no one utters a peep. For Scientists to know God’s secrets seems perfectly natural and fitting to everyone. To believe the Pope requires an act of faith, but everyone knows that Science has The Answer.  That’s because Science is our religion—the only one that we really believe in.

When I read that God’s language had finally been revealed, I thought it was good that God had not given up on us, that He was still trying to communicate with us in spite of difficulties we’ve had figuring out His previous messages.  In Hebrew, Greek, King James English, and other difficult tongues, things weren’t too clear. The Almighty, I reasoned, is now taking a fresh shot at it in His own sacred idiom. The Human Genome will surely clear things up for us.

Anxious to get a glimpse at God’s language, I went straight to one of the websites where the Genomic Gospel is archived.  As I read, in my mind’s ear I could hear preachers of the future, adopting the lofty tone of the original Genomites I had heard on the radio, teaching their flocks from the pulpit:

“And in the Human Genome, Chromosomes Chapter IXX, the Lord speaks to us of His divine plan, saying, “ 1 cggggggccc ggagcgggat cgcggcacct gccgagcggg tcgccgcgtc tgccgcggtc 61 cttggacccc gccgccgccc tggcctggga gcttgccccg ccgcagcggc cggcagcgcg 121 gcgctccgcg ggcggcaggc acgggccccg ggccccctca cggcgcccag ccgcgggcct 181 cccgaggcaa aagcccgtgg gccgccgcga tggccttcaa gatggtgaag ggcagcatcg 241 accgcatgtt cgacaagaat ctgcaggact tggtccgcgg catccgtaac cacaaggagg 301 acgaggcaaa atacatatct cagtgcattg atgagatcaa gcaggagctg aagcaggaca 361 acatagcggt gaaggcgaac gcggtctgca agctgacgta tttacagatg ttgggatacg 421 acatcagctg ggccgccttc aacatcatag aagtgatgag tgcctccaag ttcaccttca 481 agcgaattgg ctacctcgct gcttcccaga gctttcacga aggcaccgac gtcatcatgc 541 tgaccaccaa tcagatccgt aaggacttga gcagccccag ccagtacgac acaggtgttg 601 cactgacggg tctgtcctgc ttcgtcaccc cagaccttgc cagagacctg gcaaatgaca 661 tcatgacact gatgtcacac accaagccct acatcaggaa gaaggctgtg ctgatcgagc 721 ccctcaccaa tctcatccac agcacgtctg ccatgtctct cctctatgaa tgtgtgaaca 781 ccgtgattgc agtgctcatc tcgctgtcct ccggcatgcc caaccacagc gccagcatcc 841 agctttgtgt tcagaaatta aggatattga tcgaggactc cgatcagaac ttgaagtacc 901 tggggctgct ggcaatgtcc aagatcctga agacccaccc caagtccgtg cagtcccaca 961 aggacctcat cctgcagtgc ctggacgaca aggacgagtc catccggctg cgggccctgg 1021 acctgctcta tgggatggtg tccaagaaga acctgatgga gatcgtgaag aagctgatga 1081 cccacgtaga caaggcagag ggtaccacct accgtgacga gctgctcacc aagatcattg 1141 acatctgcag ccagtccaac taccagtaca tcaccaactt cgagtggtac atcagcatcc 1201 tggtggagct gacccggctg gagggcacac ggcacggcca cctcatcgcc gcccaaatgc 1261 tggacgtggc catccgcgtg aaggccatcc gcaagttcgc cgtgtcccag atgtctgcgc 1321 tgcttgacag tgcacacctg ctggccagca gcacccagcg gaacgggatc tgtgaggtgc 1381 tgtacgctgc cgcctggatc tgcggggagt tctcagagca tctgcaggaa ccacaccaca 1441 ctttggaggc catgctgcgg cccagagtca ccacgctgcc aggccacatc caggccgtgt 1501 atgtgcagaa cgtggtcaag ctctacgcct ccatcctgca gcagaaggag caggccgggg 1561 aggcagaggg cgctcaggcc gtcacccagc tcatggtgga ccggctgccc cagtttgtgc 1621 agagcgcaga cctggaggtg caggagcggg cgtcctgcat cctgcagctg gtcaagcaca 1681 tccagaagct tcaggccaag gacgtgcctg tggcagagga ggtcagcgct ctctttgctg 1741 gggagctgaa cccagtggcc cccaaggccc agaagaaggt tccagtcccc gaaggcctgg 1801 acctggacgc ctggatcaat gagccactct cggacagcga gtcagaggac gagaggccca 1861 gggccgtctt ccacgaggag gagcagcggc gtcccaagca ccggccgtcg gaggcggacg 1921 aggaagagct ggctcggcgc cgagaggccc ggaagcagga gcaggccaac aaccccttct 1981 acatcaagag ctcgccatcg ccacagaagc ggtaccagga caccccgggc gtggagcaca 2041 ttcccgtggt gcagattgac ctctccgtcc ccttgaaggt tccagggctg cctatgtcag 2101 atcagtatgt gaagctggag gaggagcggc ggcaccggca gaagctggag aaggacaaga 2161 ggaggaaaaa gaggaaggag aaggagaaga agggcaagcg ccgccacagc tcgctgccca 2221 cggagagcga cgaggacatc gcccctgccc agcaggtgga catcgtcaca gaggagatgc 2281 ctgagaatgc tctgcccagc gacgaggatg acaaagaccc caacgacccc tacagggctc.  2341 tggatattga cctggataag cccttagccg acagcgagaa actgcctatt cagaaacaca 2401 gaaacaccga gacctcaaaa tcccctgaga aggacgttcc catggtagaa aagaagagca 2461 agaaacccaa gaagaaagag aaaaaacaca aagagaaaga gagagacaag gagaagaaga 2521 aggagaagga gaagaaggct gaggacctgg acttctggct gtctaccacc ccaccgcctg 2581 cccccgcccc cgcccccgcc cccgttccat ccacggacga gtgtgaggac gccaagacgg 2641 aggcgcaggg cgaggaggac gatgccgagg ggcaagacca ggacaagaaa tctcccaagc 2701 ctaagaagaa gaagcacagg aaggagaagg aggagcggac caaaggcaag aagaagtcca 2761 agaagcagcc tccaggcagc gaggaggcag cgggggagcc ggtgcagaat ggcgcgccag 2821 aggaggagca gctcccgcct gagtccagct actccctcct cgctgaaaat tcctatgtta 2881 aaatgacctg tgacatccgg ggcagtctgc aggaggacag ccaggtcact gtggccatcg 2941 tgctggagaa caggagcagc agcatcctca agggcatgga gctcagcgtg ctggactcac 3001 tcaatgccag gatggcccgg ccgcagggct cctccgtcca cgatggcgtc cccgtgcctt 3061 tccagctgcc cccaggcgtc tccaacgaag cccagtatgt gttcaccatc cagagcatcg 3121 tcatggcgca gaagctcaag gggaccctgt ccttcattgc caagaatgac gagggtgcga 3181 cccacgagaa gctggacttc aggctgcact tcagctgcag ctcctacttg atcaccactc 3241 cctgctacag tgacgccttt gctaagttgc tggagtctgg ggacttgagc atgagctcaa 3301 tcaaagtcga tggcattcgg atgtccttcc agaatcttct ggcgaagatc tgttttcacc 3361 accatttttc cgttgtggag cgagtggact cctgcgcctc catgtacagc cgctccatcc 3421 agggccacca tgtctgcctc ctggtgaaaa agggtgagaa ctctgtctca gtcgacggga 3481 agtgcagtga ctccacgcta ctgagcaact tgttagaaga gatgaaggcg acgctggcca 3541 agtgttgaga gctgcctgcg agccccgcac caccccgcgg agcacgtacc cagggaccgc 3601 agccctgacg tgtctcgcct ctcctcagtc gtgtgtactg tacccaagcc tgagtgttaa 3661 tttaactcta tgttgtccgc cgtgtagaca tccgaggtca tttgttgcgt tgaattatct 3721 gaccatcctt ttttactgtg actcttccca ttctctttgg caagaagtcc ccttctcgcc 3781 cccaaaccag caagggactc ccccacctgg gtctgtgccc tgccccgcgc tgggggccga 3841 gtccttgaat gtggcttcag gggctcctgt cctgggccag ggcctgatgg gcaccacgtg 3901 aggggcactt ggtggacagg gcggggctga cgtggcctcc tctggggtcg cctgcttttg 3961 acccaaaggt cctgacggtt gcgtccgggg gaggggaagg aagggccgct gtcgccaagg 4021 ttttctctcc cagaacccac agtgggaaag cggtcttgcc aggcgttgtc cattgtcagt 4081 gtgctcgtgg gctggtgact gggtcttggg atcccaggcc acgcgccagc caggctgtgg 4141 gcagggcggg gccagggacg ccaaagagag gttgcagtca gaaccgtgga cggggtgggt 4201 tgaggcctct ctgccacccg tcttcctggt cagcagaagt gcatctcggc ttgggtttgg 4261 ggtggtccgc atcccctgct tgccactatg cgcaccaagg tttccccaca tccttcccag 4321 cacccttagg aaggcccagg cagggcctgg aagcagcgga cctgggctgt tctgtgttga 4381 aggagtgtgc ccagtgccct tgggcaggac ctgtgagagc cacctcacag gcagagcccc 4441 caccaggcag ggcaaggaga ctccgctcac tccccacggc cagcgtgggc acaggactga 4501 cccttcttca gagataatga cattttatct tctccttttg atgaaaactg tcactttagc 4561 atgtaatcca ttacagaatc ccatgcagtg attccaggat ttgaaattgt atgatgtgtt 4621 acataagaat ttatttgcta tcgacattcc cgtataaaga gagagacata tcacgctgct 4681 gtcatgattt tgtgtcaaga tgatccaata aagttgtaaa acaggaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa 4741 aaaa .’”

While this cleared up some things, I still had some disturbing doubts.  (Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.).  I was puzzled and troubled about the apparent lack of candor among the high priests of Genetics.  The Genome completion was announced as a triumph, but only a tiny, occasional reference was made to the obvious fact that its main finding, that there were only 30,000 human genes instead of the 100,000 they were assuming, largely negates everything the Genomites had been preaching for the past dozen or so years.

This is a little more serious than the Pope announcing matter-of-factly that the Creation, by the way, took two days rather than six.  What the shortage of genes means is that the Genomites have been either very dishonest or very mistaken. They’ve had the masses revved up for several years in expectation of a genetic cure for almost everything from warts to brain cancer.  They made it sound so simple.  There is a “cancer gene” and a “fat gene,” and a “hair color gene,”  and a “depression gene.”  It’s just a matter of finding the right gene and tweaking it a little. The lame will walk and the blind will see.  The Doctor will work the miracle cures once reserved for Jesus. But it now turns out that humans have fewer genes than a grain of rice and it is obvious that God’s Language is more complicated than expected.

 

Here is medical researcher Dr. Irwin Bross on the subject,  from a very fine article from the Spring 2001 Civil Abolitionist:

Gene scientists have played God but done a terrible job of it. They were dead wrong about the evolutionary strategy for the creation of living organisms—including human beings. Their elitism and anthropomorphism have saddled biology with a whole series of false doctrines that students will have to unlearn. For instance, it has long been thought that each gene contained the instructions for one protein, and therefore the genome search would turn up more than 100,000 human genes (with 100,000 corresponding proteins). Now we have to admit that the low number of human genes and their lack of uniqueness has opened up new possibilities. A single gene might be used by a cell to make several proteins, perhaps by modifying the protein after it’s made. The dogmatism of gene scientists has prevented serious study (or even serious consideration) of the how human proteins are manufactured.

Dr. Bross continues:

 It is now clear that those “scientists” who got media coverage for several years by claiming that once the human genome map was finished, biotechnology could prevent or cure all of the human diseases were (a) totally stupid or (b) were deliberately raising false hopes in the American public as a ploy for grantsmanship. Only now is it possible for Stanley Fields, a geneticist at the University of Washington to say this: ”Deciphering how even [10 million] nucleotides [DNA building blocks] results in a yeast cell – let alone how [3 billion] nucleotides results in Tiger Woods or Britney Spears – only begins  with studying the genes and proteins individually. Understanding how all of these proteins collaborate to carry out cellular processes is the real enterprise at hand.” This is not what those who worship at the altars of biotechnology have been saying (e.g., We will be turning out wonder drugs for all human diseases tomorrow).

Well said, and it’s about time someone said it.  The Genomites speak with a forked tongue, and their much lauded “gene therapy” remains nothing more than a fanciful promise.  Do you know anyone who has recently been cured by “gene therapy?”

As God said in reference to false prophets in Chromosomes 12:24: “Ggtggtccgc atcccctgct tgccactatg cgcaccaagg tttccccaca tccttcccag.”   This, of course, is quite similar to His earlier indictment:

“Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces.” Malachai 2:3.

 

 

 

by Gary North

July 4, 2002

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Thompson: Reviled then honored for his actions in Viet Nam

By Nell Boyce

Reprinted from US News and World Report

Skimming over the Vietnamese village of My Lai in a helicopter with a bubble-shaped windshield, 24-year-old Hugh Thompson had a superb view of the ground below. But what the Army pilot saw didn’t make any sense: piles of Vietnamese bodies and dead water buffalo. He and his two younger crew mates, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, were flying low over the hamlet on March 16, 1968, trying to draw fire so that two gunships flying above could locate and destroy the enemy. On this morning, no one was shooting at them. And yet they saw bodies everywhere, and the wounded civilians they had earlier marked for medical aid were now all dead.

As the helicopter hovered a few feet over a paddy field, the team watched a group of Americans approach a wounded young woman lying on the ground. A captain nudged her with his foot, then shot her. The men in the helicopter recoiled in horror, shouting, “You son of a bitch!”

Thompson couldn’t believe it. His suspicions and fear began to grow as they flew over the eastern side of the village and saw dozens of bodies piled in an irrigation ditch. Soldiers were standing nearby, taking a cigarette break. Thompson racked his brains for an explanation. Maybe the civilians had fled to the ditch for cover? Maybe they’d been accidentally killed and the soldiers had made a mass grave? The Army warrant officer just couldn’t wrap his mind around the truth of My Lai.

Before My Lai, Americans always saw their boys in uniform as heroes. Their troops had brought war criminals, the Nazis, to justice. So when the massacre of some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers became public a year and a half later, it shook the country to its core. Many Americans found it so unbelievable they perversely hailed Lt. William Calley, the officer who ordered his men to shoot civilians, as an unjustly accused hero. But My Lai did produce true heroes, says William Eckhardt, who served as chief prosecutor for the My Lai courts-martial. “When you have evil, sometimes, in the midst of it, you will have incredible, selfless good. And that’s Hugh Thompson.”

On that historic morning, Thompson set his helicopter down near the irrigation ditch full of bodies. He asked a sergeant if the soldiers could help the civilians, some of whom were still moving. The sergeant suggested putting them out of their misery. Stunned, Thompson turned to Lieutenant Calley, who told him to mind his own business. Thompson reluctantly got back in his helicopter and began to lift off. Just then Andreotta yelled, “My God, they’re firing into the ditch!”

Thompson finally faced the truth. He and his crew flew around for a few minutes, outraged, wondering what to do. Then they saw several elderly adults and children running for a shelter, chased by Americans. “We thought they had about 30 seconds before they’d die,” recalls Colburn. Thompson landed his chopper between the troops and the shelter, then jumped out and confronted the lieutenant in charge of the chase. He asked for assistance in escorting the civilians out of the bunker; the lieutenant said he’d get them out with a hand grenade. Furious, Thompson announced he was taking the civilians out. He went back to Colburn and Andreotta and told them if the Americans fired, to shoot them. “Glenn and I were staring at each other, dumbfounded,” says Colburn. He says he never pointed his gun at an American soldier, but he might have fired if they had first. The ground soldiers waited and watched.

Thompson coaxed the Vietnamese out of the shelter with hand gestures. They followed, wary. Thompson looked at his three-man helicopter and realized he had nowhere to put them. “There was no thinking about it,” he says now. “It was just something that had to be done, and it had to be done fast.” He got on the radio and begged the gunships to land and fly the four adults and five children to safety, which they did within minutes.

Before returning to base, the helicopter crew saw something moving in the irrigation ditch–a child, about 4 years old. Andreotta waded through bloody cadavers to pull him out. Thompson, who had a son, was overcome by emotion. He immediately flew the child to a nearby hospital.

Thompson wasted no time telling his superiors what had happened. “They said I was screaming quite loud. I was mad. I threatened never to fly again,” Thompson remembers. “I didn’t want to be a part of that. It wasn’t war.” An investigation followed, but it was cursory at best.

A month later, Andreotta died in combat. Thompson was shot down and returned home to teach helicopter piloting. Colburn served his tour of duty and left the military. The two figured those involved in the killing had been court-martialed. In fact, nothing had happened. But rumors of the massacre persisted. One soldier who heard of the atrocities, Ron Ridenhour, vowed to make them public. In the spring of 1969, he sent letters to government officials, which led to a real investigation and sickening revelations: murdered babies and old men, raped and mutilated women, in a village where U.S. soldiers mistakenly expected to find lots of Viet Cong.

Not all soldiers at My Lai participated in the carnage. Some men risked courtmartial or even death by defying Calley’s direct orders to shoot civilians. Eckhardt doesn’t think these men were heroes, because they didn’t try to stop the murderers. But Colburn thinks they did the best they could. “We could just fly away at the end of the day,” he notes. The ground troops had to live together for months.

The Pentagon’s investigation eventually suggested that nearly 80 soldiers had participated in the killing and coverup, although only Calley (who now works at a jewelry store in Columbus, Ga.) was convicted. The eyewitness testimony of Thompson and Colburn proved crucial. But instead of thanking them, America vilified them. Many saw Calley as a scapegoat for regrettable but inevitable civilian casualties. “Rallies for Calley” were held all over the country. Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, urged citizens to leave car headlights on to show support for Calley. Thompson, who got nasty letters and death threats, remembers thinking: “Has everyone gone mad?” He feared a court-martial for his command to fire, if necessary, on U.S. soldiers.

Gradually the furor died down. Colburn and Thompson lived in relative anonymity until a 1989 television documentary on My Lai reclaimed them as forgotten heroes. David Egan, a Clemson University professor who had served in a French village where Nazis killed scores of innocents in World War II, was amazed by the story. He campaigned to have Thompson and his team awarded the coveted Soldier’s Medal. It wasn’t until March 6, 1998, after internal debate among Pentagon officials (who feared an award would reopen old wounds) and outside pressure from reporters, that Thompson and Colburn finally received medals in a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

But both say a far more gratifying reward was a trip back to My Lai this March to dedicate a school and a “peace park.” It was then they finally met a young man named Do Hoa, who they believe was the boy they rescued from that death-filled ditch. “Being reunited with the boy was just…I can’t even describe it,” says Colburn. And Thompson, also overwhelmed, doesn’t even try.

 

Gazette’s Fair Use Statement

The Pure Water Gazette Proudly Awards Its Celebrated and Much Coveted Hero Award To

the late Senator Wayne Morse (1900-1974) of Oregon.

Where is Wayne Morse Now that We Need Him?

Ever heard of Wayne Morse?  Probably most younger readers haven’t.  In the McCarthy era, he was a staunch opponent of the anti-Communist madness that took over our government.  He was an outspoken defender of civil liberties during his twenty-four years in the Senate.

Originally a liberal Republican, he abandoned his party affiliation  in protest of Eisenhower’s choice of Richard Nixon as his vice-presidential candidate.  For a time he sat  in the center aisle of the Senate as an independent before eventually becoming a Democrat. .  Morse made many enemies, and these included five presidents, since he usually voted his own mind and did not bow to party pressures.  It was after he had become a Democrat that he drew the ire of the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson for refusing to toe the party line.

But for that story, you’ll have to read Norman Solomon’s excellent article about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and a subsequent Solomon article about the Iraqui crisis in July 2002.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Solomon’s article about Senator Morse:

In early August 1964, Morse was one of only two senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which served as a green light for the Vietnam War. While reviled by much of the press in his home state of Oregon as well as nationwide, he persisted with fierce oratory for peace. It would have been much easier to acquiesce to the media’s war fever. But Morse was not the silent type, especially in matters of conscience.

On Feb. 27, 1968, I sat in a small room at the Capitol to watch a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Six members of the panel were seated around a long table. Most of all, I remember Morse’s voice, raspy and urgent.

“My views are no longer lonely,” he noted at one point, adding: “You have millions of people who are not going to support this tyranny that American boys are being killed in South Vietnam to maintain in power.”

Morse summed up his position on negotiations between the U.S. government and its Vietnamese adversaries: “Who are we to say there have to be two Vietnams? They are not going to do it and they shouldn’t do it. There isn’t any reason in the world why the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong should ever come to a negotiating table on the basis that there must be two Vietnams.”

Moments before the hearing adjourned, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”

At the time, Oregon’s senior senator was remarkable because he challenged the morality — not just the “winability” — of the war. He passionately asserted that the United States had no right to impose its will on the world. In the process, he made enemies of many fellow Democrats, including President Lyndon Johnson.

Like most heretics, Morse suffered consequences. After 24 years in the Senate, he lost a race for re-election in November 1968. The winner was a slick politician named Robert Packwood, who denounced Morse’s antiwar fervor.

In his lifetime, Morse became a media pariah. In the quarter-century since his death, political reporters have rarely mentioned his name.

“I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right,” Morse said on national television in 1964. “And that’s the American policy in Southeast Asia — just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it.”

Three years later, he declared: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that’s going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia.”

Such heresy infuriated many powerful politicians — and journalists — while Wayne Morse did all he could to block a war train speeding to catastrophe.