Free Frank Warner

A woodpecker in my wall

I’ve heard him knocking for two weeks. I’m even seen him from time to time on the wood siding outside the window of my second-floor computer room.

I’ve chased the little woodpecker from time to time. I’ve smacked my hand at the inside wall and I’ve stuck my head out the window to shush him away. Sometimes it seemed to work.

The woodpecker disappeared today. But I still heard the knocking. I looked out, but no bird. I quickly realized that he hadn’t really been knocking. He’s been drilling, and now he’s in the wall.

Still hammering away. Sheesh.

Sorry, Woody, but this is NOT going to be your winter home. (You’re right next to the cable line. Are you reading this?)

Frank Warner

Dead Marine’s father wins $11 million award from hateful ‘church’ that picketed funeral

The hate of Westboro Baptist “Church” has lived on the power of lawyers. So it’s only justice that lawyers are stomping out this ugly gang.

A jury in Baltimore today ordered Westboro Baptist to pay $11 million to Albert Snyder of York, Pa., for the emotional distress the “church” members inflicted on Snyder’s family by picketing the March 2006 funeral of Snyder’s son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, with signs that read, “Thank God for dead soldiers,” “God hates fags” and “You’re going to Hell.”

Westboro Baptist of Topeka, Kansas, claimed it had a right to intrude on the private mourning of any Marine’s family because the U.S. Marines represents the United States, and the United States tolerates homosexuality.

Westboro isn’t saying Snyder or other fallen troops were gay, but that the Marines and soldiers committed the unforgivable sin of fighting for the freedom of both straights and gays.

That “church” should be sued to Hell.

Frank Warner

Brian Doherty poo-pooing the fight for freedom: Maybe fascism in Iraq would have disappeared without a war

Brian Doherty argues today that most Americans may again see the invasion and liberation of Iraq as a good thing, but he won’t because maybe Iraq would have ended its fascism all by itself.

The gist of his argument in Reason Online:

The real question before a war needs to be: “is this absolutely necessary given a fair consideration of the horrors and unpredictability of war and the purpose of the U.S. military?” Which is not: “make the world a better place, somewhere down the line, killing lots of people on the way.” For America’s future, this kind of victory in Iraq could really mean defeat.

And Doherty throws in the old and ignorant suggestion that some totalitarian police states go away without firing a shot.

The progress of civilization being what it is, and people’s ability to gin up strong feelings about events far away in space and time being what they are, it can all start to seem For the Best. Some wicked regime gone (and don’t suggest they would ever have gone away without being conquered! Except for maybe Soviet Russia, but….), new buildings built, the dead largely forgotten.

Let’s take that parenthetical point first. Doherty says Soviet Russia just went away “without being conquered.”

Dead largely forgotton. The Soviet Union didn’t just “go away.” Its tyranny hung around for more than 70 years, giving tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of its people, whole lifetimes without a breath of freedom. It killed tens of millions of its people in purges and mass executions. The Soviet Union managed to top Nazi Germany’s murder toll while it didn’t just go away.

The Soviet Union didn’t just “go away.” From 1945 to 1989, it sealed all of Eastern Europe behind an Iron Curtain, and regularly invaded its puppet states to murder any people who rallied for freedom and democracy. The Soviet Union also handed its deadly ideology and support to China, which went on to beat the Soviet record for deaths by execution and state-imposed famine.

The Soviet Union didn’t just “go away.” It was conquered by the Free World through a mighty expensive and bloody Cold War. As the Soviets were imprisoning, torturing and murdering “their people” beyond our eyes, we fought them back with massive armaments and economic aid to Western Europe, Taiwan and Japan, bloody wars in Korea and Vietnam, a risky blockade of Cuba and even some temporary deals with relatively weak dictatorships along the way. (Doherty pretends our support for the shah of Iran happened in a vacuum, not in the context of Soviet influence on Mosaddeq to expand Communist repression.)

Saddam’s lethal repression. Like the Soviet Union, Saddam’s totalitarianism denied all “his people” a taste of freedom. He murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, tortured political opponents, financed terrorists, invaded two neighboring nations and attacked several more countries with missiles. By 2003, Iraqis were dying of starvation and sickness at a rate of 5,000 to 10,000 a month because of the U.N. sanctions that Saddam had brought on his nation and because he was diverting Oil for Food money for palaces and payoffs. Contrary to U.N. Resolution 688, he had not ended his repression.

For the hundreds of thousands Saddam had executed, for the hundreds of thousands more he sent to their deaths in pointless wars of aggression and for the hundreds of thousands more he starved, the liberation of Iraq was “absolutely necessary” more than two decades before the U.S. led it in March 2003. It should have come earlier.

For the 60 million Russians and other unfortunate residents of the Soviet Union murdered in its 73 horrible years, and possibly for the 70 million more people whom Communist China killed, it was “absolutely necessary” that someone intervene defend the defenseless and free the oppressed long ago.

Resolve handcuffed by appeasers. The United States moved mountains to counter Communism, but history shows we probably didn’t do enough, and didn’t act soon enough to cut short Soviet cruelties. Cynical defeatists and selfish appeasers like Doherty, who won’t react to the screams they cannot hear, made it difficult to stop the Soviet slaughter. They either denied the problem or pretended it wasn’t so bad.

No totalitarian dictatorship ever has been toppled from within. They fall only with overwhelming outside support or (even less often) on the whim of the dictator himself. The Soviet Union might still be there had not the dictator himself, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided to end it. The people couldn’t topple it. It was up to Gorbachev to act. And even that decision would not have been made without powerful outside military, economic and political influences, and a bit of luck.

The luck was the fact that Gorbachev was the fourth Soviet premier in three years. Brezhnev died in 1982; Andropov in 1984; and Chernenko in 1985. That accidental shake-up shook up the Soviet bureaucracy and ripped apart old loyalties, and it might have given Gorbachev just enough freedom to act boldly. But how often can the oppressed expect luck like that? That took almost 60 years.

Cease-fire violations. Saddam wasn’t about to “go away” in 2003. Even if he had, he had two sadistic sons ready to replace him and a Baathist Party intent on maintaining the police state forever. The tyranny was well entrenched, and people were dying. Though Saddam seems to have eliminated most of his WMD stockpiles, he was nonetheless violating almost all the terms of the 1991 cease-fire. He already was at war. He wasn’t some innocent-until-proven-guilty defendant. He was a convict on probation, and he had ripped off his tracker bracelet.

It was long past time to arrest the murderer. Of course it was the right thing to remove him by force. Saddam was given a chance to go, but he would not “go away” on his own. It would have been a crime to tolerate him longer. And now, as after World War II, it’s the right thing to replace the old dictatorship with democracy.

An Iraq democracy is Iraq’s only chance for a lasting peace. It may be the Middle East’s only chance for a lasting peace. Without America’s intervention there, Iraqi freedom might have waited another 50 years, and it would have been 50 years without hope.

Was the liberation of Iraq “absolutely necessary”? You bet it was. Totalitarians don’t just “go away,” and no one deserves a lifetime in bloody chains.

Frank Warner

How dare you burn the Burning Man!

A San Francisco “artist” has been charged with prematurely setting fire to the giant Burning Man effigy at the Burning Man festival last August in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

Imagine that. There’s something wrong with burning the Burning Man. It seems as odd as declaring Saddam’s hangmen had botched his execution. (They wanted him dead. He ended up dead. What botched?)

I guess the real news is that this same alleged burner of the Burning Man has been charged with more recently trying to set fire to a cathedral on San Francisco’s Knob Hill. Now that makes no sense at all.

Frank Warner

Rudy Giuliani: Democrats will change minds on Iraq war

Rudy Giuliani has a way of summarizing things well. He’s also figured out early that the Democrats eventually will come to see the necessity of the Iraq war and the Arab democracy it produced.

In about 10 years or so, most Democrats are going to say that the liberation of Iraq was the right thing to do.

“Do I think the mission overall in Iraq is the correct one? I think without a doubt it is,” Giuliani said today, noting that Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards once favored a democratic victory in Iraq. “And I think the Democrats are going to change their minds about it again.

“I think they’re going to change their minds. I think the verdict of history is going to be that it was the right decision” to remove Saddam Hussein and replace the totalitarian dictatorship with democracy.

“Suppose Hillary Clinton and John Edwards’ new position was their position back then, that it was a mistake to take him out. Wouldn’t we be dealing with Saddam Hussein becoming nuclear right now? If Iran was becoming nuclear what would he be doing? Sitting there letting his arch enemy gain nuclear power over him? Or would we now be dealing with two countries seeking to become nuclear powers?”

All good questions, asked eloquently. Yes, the Democrats will change their minds on Iraq. My guess is, the sooner a Democrat is elected president, the sooner they’ll see how important it was to secure that Iraqi democracy.

Frank Warner

High Noon: Dutch want Tom Lantos to apologize

The Dutch want Congressman Tom Lantos to apologize for telling the truth. Somehow it’s “Cowboy diplomacy” to rebuke Europeans who look for excuses not to defend Europe.

“Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay,” Lantos recently told a delegation of Dutch politicians who had just visited the U.S. prison holding 330 terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The politicians from the Netherlands were offended that anyone would burst their bubble with a reality check. They were telling Lantos that Holland might withdraw its 1,600 troops from Afghanistan if the U.S. doesn’t close Guantanamo.

That’s when Lantos, a Democrat, told them:

“You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany.”

Outrage in Holland. That was truth overload. The Dutch don’t like to be reminded that the Americans liberated them in 1944 and that the United States has guaranteed their freedom ever since. Some of them might like to think it all happened by accident. In the illusion too many Old Europeans live, they imagine they could have pushed back Hitler, Nazism, Stalin and Soviet Communism all by themselves.

“The comments killed the debate,” Harry van Bommel, member of the Dutch Socialist Party said. “It was insulting and counterproductive.”

The Van Der Galien Gazette blog wants Lantos to say he’s sorry. In fact, Michael Van Der Galien, a Dutch “conservative liberal” who is not anti-American, wants just about everyone in Washington to apologize for Lantos’ comments.

“This is a great example of just why America is so unpopular in European countries right now,” Van Der Galien says. “Granted, there’s a lot of irrational anti-Americanism as well, but these are the kind of comments by which American politicians anger just about every single Europe; whether they’re pro- or anti-America.

“Lantos should apologize, and the Democratic leadership should do so as well. America’s leadership even.

“Funny enough, this is yet another example of Cowboy diplomacy -- from Democrats. As I wrote recently, the Democrats don’t seem to be any better at diplomacy than the Republicans are. If this is the Democratic way of ‘reaching’ out, well, I’m afraid that the hand that’s reaching out will be politely ignored by the world.”

Share the burden. I wish I could agree with Van Der Galien’s conclusion that Europe has a right to be angry with Lantos, but I can’t. Of course, it is rude to remind a rescued ingrate of the debt he owes, even if you don’t demand the debt be repaid in full. However, the Dutch don’t have to thank us, like us or repay us. We expect only that they do their fair share of defending free Europe and its perimeter.

Lantos did employ some ironic hyperbole. Europe probably was more outraged by the Auschwitz death camp (though the Europeans may have complained much less about it at the time). In any case, it was obvious what Lantos meant.

Who’s the bad cowboy here? The Miller gang is coming to make trouble at high noon. Marshal Kane, who had planned to leave town with his bride, is trying instead to gather some local residents as deputies to defend their own community. But the locals say, We’re too busy, you do it, Marshal, it’s your job. Maybe Ayaan Hirsi Ali can help you. Good luck, but we’d rather avoid the unpleasantness.

And oh, yeah, Marshal, we don’t like your jail.

‘Their own Guantanamos.’ In one of the more insightful responses to Van Der Galien’s post, someone named Ion wrote:

“This is also a great example of just why Europe is unpopular in America. You may not like what Lantos said, or how he said it, but you didn’t say he was incorrect.

“When this war finally hits Europe, some will surrender immediately, and the rest will make their own Guantanamos. You can count on it. It’s what they’ve always done.”

Lantos to speak again? Lantos has yet to respond to the furor that followed his words. In fact, I’ve yet to see a news story that spells out exactly where or when Lantos said what he said.

But no, he shouldn’t apologize. His point was right on the mark. Yes, it shook up some people. Sometimes it takes some shaking to wake a friend up.

Frank Warner

Bill Richardson vows to open U.S. UFO files on the 1947 Roswell flying saucer

If the voters are loons, promise them lunacy.

In Texas yesterday, Gov. Bill Richardson promised a UFO enthusiast that, if elected president, Richardson would open federal files on the July 8, 1947, sighting of a UFO in Roswell, N.M.

The Associated Press:

Answering questions at a townhall meeting Friday, a Dell employee asked Richardson about the 1947 incident in which many people still believe a flying saucer landed near the eastern New Mexico town.

“I’ve been in government a long time, I’ve been in the cabinet, I’ve been in the Congress and I’ve always felt that the government doesn’t tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues,” said Richardson, who is governor of New Mexico.

“When I was in Congress I said [to the] Department of Defense … ‘What is the data? What is the data you have?’ ”

He was told that the records were classified.

“That ticked me off,” he said, as the crowd laughed.

“What do you want me to do? You want me to open up all those files?” he asked the alien enthusiast, who answered that he did.

“I’ll work with you on that.”

Faith-based science. And they say President Bush’s science programs have been tainted by faith. Under President Richardson, who would run NASA, William Shatner?

Frank Warner

A middleground on interrogating terrorists?

Clifford D. May has some thoughts on the debate over interrogating terrorist prisoners:

On one extreme of the debate over interrogating terrorists are the Jack Bauers, those who — like the lead character in Fox’s hit series 24 — think you do whatever it takes to get the information you need from someone plotting mass murder. At the other extreme is the antiwar Left: They wouldn’t harm a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s head to save Disneyland at Christmas.

Part of the problem is how the debate is framed from the start: One side says some terrorists will reveal important things if subjected to discomfort far short of torture. The other side says that any discomfort in an interrogation is torture.

Definition of torture. Torture should be ruled out. But is waterboarding a form of torture? That seems to be the point where the debate stalls for lack of consensus. It looks awfully uncomfortable and scary, but is it in the same category as drilling into knees and skulls, or pulling out fingernails and fingers?

May:

I also wonder: How much must we tell al-Qaeda and other terrorists about what to expect? If terrorists know they may be waterboarded, they will prepare themselves to withstand the ordeal. In fact, waterboarding has been used to train and toughen American commandoes and spies.

I say let Congress decide on waterboarding. If the members believe it is torture, outlaw it; if not, clearly describe the limited, supervised circumstances in which it may be used. Perhaps Congress informally has decided already.

Don’t torture prisoners, but don’t tell them we don’t torture them.

Frank Warner

Tom Lantos to selfish Dutch: ‘Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitiz as by Guantanamo Bay’ (Schande op Nederland)

The defeatists of the Netherlands, a nation the Americans (my father included) liberated from the Nazis in 1944, are threatening to pull all 1,600 Dutch troops out of Afghanistan to protest the imprisonment of 330 terrorists at the U.S.-run prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Congressman Tom Lantos, a Democrat, told the visiting Dutch politicians:

“Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay…. You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany.”

Lantos 1, the Netherlands 0.

Helping ‘us’? The only bone I’d pick with Lantos is his telling the Dutch that they “have to help us.” Exactly how is it that Europeans securing Europe’s backyard should be seen first as them helping “us” Americans?

The problem is that Old Europeans are so accustomed to the United States spending our money and risking our lives to protect their lives and liberty that they now are convinced they have a right to freedom’s free ride.

But bravo, Tom Lantos! And wake up, Holland. You’re not helping us. We’re helping you. Yet all you can do is debate how to surrender your freedom again. Shame on you. Schande.

Frank Warner

Iraqi troops donate $1,000 to help San Diego fire victims

You know, most Iraqis are nice people, too.

Frank Warner

JJ Mollo: Free markets are best, but this new Gilded Age threatens democracy

JJ Mollo writes that most U.S. workers are feeling an economic pinch while the richest 1 percent of Americans accumulate riches beyond the 19th century Rockefellers’ wildest dreams.

Paul Krugman [new book], along with Christopher Hitchens and Barack Obama, to name a few, believe that we have entered a second Gilded Age. I couldn't agree more. Things get manipulated by the unseen hands. Maybe some of these things are good -- some maybe not. But it is a stretch to say that the US is run democratically.

We have seen the consequences of ceding all authority to the rich. The laws and rules do not apply to the Patricians. Lex Hortensia is obsolete. We have declared war on the unions, opened our doors to slave labor from Mexico and China. We do nothing about corporate greed and excess. (Enron? Haliburton? Blackwater? Pensions?) Huge amounts of money are paid to corporate farms and absentee landlords for not farming. We even think of greed as healthy these days. Our GDP has grown remarkably and remarkably quickly. But why is it that health care and college are still out of reach for the working classes? Why are public educational facilities so diverse?

If you have a piece of the pie -- real estate or stock -- you’re doing all right. In terms of the shifting economy, employment is good, a lot of goods are dirt cheap, but real wages, IMO, have not increased for the majority of Americans for a long time.

The power of 1,000 men. America’s top 100 CEOs now make about 1,000 times the pay of their average workers. Thirty years ago, those chief executives made only 39 times what their average employee made. As JJ points out, this concentration of economic power in the hands of a few means political power also is trickling up to those few hands.

Consider what became of America’s earlier robber barons, according to the Council on International and Public Affairs:

Back in May 1937, shortly after the death of John D. Rockefeller, America’s richest man, newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, America's most revered political pundit, reflected on the future of grand fortunes in the United States.

The nation, Lippmann noted, would likely never see a fortune so grand as Rockefeller’s ever again. The 97-year-old John D., the columnist observed, had “lived long enough to see the methods by which such a fortune can be accumulated outlawed by public opinion, forbidden by statute, and prevented by the tax laws.”

In the United States, Lippmann added, “sentiment has turned wholly against the private accumulation of so much wealth.”

That sentiment would set the nation’s economic tone throughout the mid 20th century and help guide the United States, year by year, toward ever greater levels of economic equality. By Walter Lippmann’s death, in 1974, America’s supersized fortunes had nearly totally disappeared. The grand mansions and estates of John D. Rockefeller's robber baron era had become, in the 1950s and 1960s, museums and college campuses.

Today, over four decades later, that more equal America seems like ancient history.

Out of kilter. In this Gilded Age, even the gold is trimmed with more gold. Hedge fund managers are making $500 million a year and more. We don’t want to punish success or discourage the taking of entrepreneurial risks, but something is out of kilter here. Corporate executives are manipulating a novel confluence of information-age forces and complicated tax laws to milk pay and bonuses well in excess of what even the most creative businessman really earns.

Soon something has to give. Maybe Congressman Charlie Rangel has an idea.

Frank Warner

Today is St. Crispin’s Day, when England’s ‘band of brothers’ defeated France

Today is St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, the day in 1415 when King Henry V called his fellow warriors a “band of brothers” as they prepared to fight the Battle of Agincourt in northern France.

In Shakespeare’s “King Henry V,” the English king says:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Battle with France. This was late in the Hundred Years War (1337 to 1453), which started when English King Edward III got fed up with French interference in Scotland and declared he had the right to rule France. After capturing a large part of France, Edward III died in 1377 and was succeeded by Richard II, who was succeed in 1399 by Henry IV. King Henry V assumed the throne two years before the Battle of Agincourt.

Weakened by sickness, fatigue and hunger and outnumbered by French forces, Henry V’s army in 1415 nevertheless won a spectacular victory. In their surrender, the French officially named Henry V heir to the French throne. However, Joan of Arc soon emerged to inspire French resistance to the English presence in France.

Eventually, the English were left only with Henry V’s words, as imagined by Shakespeare in 1599, to remember the Battle of Agincourt and England’s last claim to French soil.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day.

Bond between soldiers. Perhaps the speech glorifies war and gives too little thought to what might establish a lasting peace. But man, could Shakespeare write. He expressed for all time the unique and permanent bond among men who have risked their lives together for a cause greater than themselves.

Frank Warner

1910 in color: A peek into Russia before Communism

Did you see the Seriously Cool web site’€™s remarkable photographs of France in the First World War? The big surprise is that the pictures are in color.

To me, the photos are as if the Internet suddenly gave us a time-travel portal to major historical events. Color pictures of 1917. Who knew?

The photos are real, and they are not colorized. They were taken using an early color film process.

Tsarist empire. That same web site has even older color pictures of Russia, also stunning. These are around 1910, and they also give you the sense you’€™re seeing something you couldn’€™t possibly be seeing.

They’€™re Russia before World War I, before the Red Revolution overthrew Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918). The pictures show us some of Russia’€™s most beautiful churches and cathedrals, usually in the sunshine, often in the most idyllic settings. You wonder if this is old Russia, or the land of Oz.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took the pictures for the tsar.

There is graceful St. Nil Monastery, a study of blue on blue on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger, northwest Russia. There is the ornate Cathedral of St. Nicholas, atop a green hill in rural Mozhaisk, Russia. There is a panoramic shot, with a depth of color, showing us the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, including the Metekhi Cliff on the Mtkvari River.

You can study these pictures and wonder what life was like that distant time in these remote locations. The scenes are so sunny and romantic it’€™s hard to imagine anyone could have been unhappy. Even color film can’€™t record unrest.

What were the Russians and Georgians of 1910 thinking on those green hills and under those blue skies? How many were stirring against the tsar? How many imagined a revolution or what would follow?

And just out of curiosity, what do these places look like today? Send postcards!

Frank Warner

Click here to see the rest of the color photos of 1910 Russia.

Click here to see the color pictures of the First World War.

Jena High myth-busters: There was no ‘whites-only tree’ and the two nooses were strung up to tweak white members of the school rodeo team

On Sept. 24, I posted a report called “What happened in Jena?” It started with Andrew Sullivan’s paraphrased question and tried to identify some facts about recent events in Jena, Louisiana.

Well, I barely scratched the surface. It looks like I got some basic facts wrong.

It turns out the “whites-only tree” where black students allegedly were not allowed to sit or stand at Jena High School was not a “whites-only tree” at all. Both white and black students congregated under it.

‘Lonesome Dove.’ And the real shocker, according to an excellent piece by Craig Franklin in The Christian Science Monitor, is that the two nooses strung up on the tree Sept. 1, 2006, were not meant to insult or threaten black students. They were meant to rile up members of the school rodeo team, who happened to be white. The noose idea was from a scene in “Lonesome Dove.”

Beyond that, the nooses appear to have had nothing to do, even indirectly, with black students beating a white student unconscious on Dec. 4, 2006.

Be sure to read all of “Media myths about the Jena 6.”

Frank Warner

Drudge: New Republic ‘Shock troops’ story collapses

That’s it for The New Republic, except that its editors will keep publishing the same kind of stories, as long as they serve the cause of electing Democrats in the U.S. and defeating democracy in Iraq.

Frank Warner

Christopher Monckton: 35 inconvenient truths

Christopher Monckton, a global warming skeptic, has a list of 35 scientific errors he says he’s found in Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

With the list, published by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Monckton spells out what he says the facts are.

“Error 1” also is one of the nine errors that a British judge on Oct. 10 found in the film:

Gore says that a sea-level rise of up to 6 m (20 ft) will be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland. Though Gore does not say that the sea-level rise will occur in the near future, the judge found that, in the context, it was clear that this is what he had meant, since he showed expensive graphical representations of the effect of his imagined 6 m (20 ft) sea-level rise on existing populations, and he quantified the numbers who would be displaced by the sea-level rise.

The IPCC says sea-level increases up to 7 m (23 ft) above today’s levels have happened naturally in the past climate, and would only be likely to happen again after several millennia. In the next 100 years, according to calculations based on figures in the IPCC’s 2007 report, these two ice sheets between them will add a little over 6 cm (2.5 inches) to sea level, not 6 m (this figure of 6 cm is 15% of the IPCC’s total central estimate of a 43 cm or 1 ft 5 in sea-level rise over the next century). Gore has accordingly exaggerated the official sea-level estimate by approaching 10,000 per cent.

Click here to check out the other 34 alleged errors.

This is good. We have a debate!

Frank Warner

Freedom after Fidel

At the State Department today, President Bush will make some proposals for Cuba’s freedom after Fidel Castro dies. Bush’s ideas reportedly include a plan to involve other democracies in the reform and democratization of Cuba. That’s a good idea.

When the tyrant is dead, the officials immediately responsible for enforcing Castro’s police state will be the most vulnerable to vengeful Cubans. All these totalitarian lackeys should be given a safe place, in prison.

Frank Warner

Dare we hope for hope in Iraq?

Osama bin Laden is complaining that Iraq’s insurgents have lost their fervor. Reporters embedded with coalition forces are stunned by the quiet. The violence has died down so much in Iraq that conspiracy theorists are accusing President Bush of covering up his own success.

Dare we hope the fascists are losing in Iraq, and that the shootings and bombings will continue to subside? Considering Iraq’s mischievous neighbors, bin Laden’s suicidal gang and the lingering local criminality, too many bad things remain too likely to happen.

But yes, dare to hope. Let’s hope for a more stable Iraq in 2008, and an even more secure Iraqi democracy every year.

Frank Warner

* * * Iraq war casualties:

January 1991*: 12.
February 1991 (Kuwait liberated)*: 136.

March 2003 (Iraq invasion): 65.
April 2003 (Saddam ousted): 74.
May 2003: 37.
June 2003: 30.
July 2003: 48.
August 2003: 35.
September 2003: 31.
October 2003: 44.
November 2003: 82.
December 2003 (Saddam captured): 40.

January 2004: 47.
February 2004: 20.
March 2004: 52.
April 2004 (Fallujah stalemate): 135.
May 2004: 80.
June 2004: 42.
July 2004: 54.
August 2004: 66.
September 2004: 80.
October 2004: 63.
November 2004 (Fallujah victory): 137.
December 2004: 72.

January 2005 (election prep): 107.
February 2005: 58.
March 2005: 35.
April 2005: 52.
May 2005: 80.
June 2005: 78.
July 2005: 54.
August 2005: 85.
September 2005: 49.
October 2005 (constitution vote):96.
November 2005: 84.
December 2005 (parliament vote): 68.

January 2006: 62.
February 2006 (Golden Mosque provocation): 55.
March 2006: 31.
April 2006: 76.
May 2006: 69.
June 2006: 61.
July 2006: 43.
August 2006: 67.
September 2006: 71.
October 2006 (Baghdad sweep): 106.
November 2006: 69.
December 2006: 112.

January 2007: 83.
February 2007 (early surge): 80.
March 2007 (early surge): 81.
April 2007 (early surge): 104.
May 2007 (surge): 126.
June 2007 (surge): 101.
July 2007 (surge): 74.
August 2007 (surge): 84.
September 2007 (surge): 65.
October 2007 (surge): 29 (as of Oct. 24).

*The 1991 figures are subject to revision. The total is 148, but monthly figures might be off.

* * *

‘Gross Clinic’ follow-up: Thomas Jefferson University names building after trustee

Last year, as the Thomas Jefferson University trustees were selling off the school’s irreplaceable painting, “The Gross Clinic,” I predicted some of the cash would be used to erect buildings with trustees’ names on them.

So guess what I was thinking when I read this story a few days ago in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Thomas Jefferson University unveiled a new $60 million medical classroom building and grassy plaza yesterday that it says will form the heart of its campus, foster interdisciplinary learning, and invigorate a key city neighborhood.

The new building, named after Dorrance H. Hamilton, a longtime board member who donated $25 million for the project, is loaded with simulation settings designed to train teams of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and occupational and physical therapists….

Robert Barchi, Jefferson’s president, said the six-floor Hamilton building at 10th and Locust Streets and the adjacent Sidney and Ethal Lubert Plaza, a 1.4-acre open space named for the parents of Ira M. Lubert, chair of Jefferson’s board, are a step toward making the school feel more like a unified, “full-spectrum health-care university.”

Fundraising vs. extortion. I concede that if someone donates $25 million toward a $60 million building, she is entitled to have her name on it. But where did the other $35 million come from?

At least some of that cash had to come from taking $68 million for the Thomas Eakins masterpiece, which the university’s alumni donated to the school in 1878, and which the students, faculty and alumni had every right to expect would remain at the school in perpetuity.

I point this out because the trustees’ defender insisted that the ransom money, which Philadelphia did pay, would go only to scholarships and to the training of doctors, not to buildings with trustees’ names on them.

Ha!

Sold the institution’s soul. The trustees’ intent to use some of the painting’s proceeds for buildings was known from the beginning. On Nov. 11, 2006, when the trustees announced they would avoid the hard work of real fundraising and sell the university’s soul instead, Barchi explained:

“The University’s strategic plan calls for a redefined medical education, research and teaching complex to support the delivery of 21st century medicine. As a respected teaching institution, Jefferson is completing construction of a new medical education building opening in 2007 and plans to open a new School of Pharmacy and Ambulatory Care Center. This sale will help us realize these projects, bolstering Jefferson’s leadership position and strengthening our reputation as a premier academic health center.”

What wasn’t known was that any building would have a trustee’s name on it. I guessed that, and at that time I found the whole idea disgraceful.

Hamilton’s honor earned. But now, I don’t find it a shame at all that a new medical school building is named for Dorrance Hamilton. She obviously did her part to realize its construction. She deserves the honor.

What did the other trustees do? I mean, what work did they do to raise the other $35 million?

And what happens to the university’s Eakins Gallery, now that its major artwork is gone?

Frank Warner

Josh Marshall on Islamofascism Awareness Week: David Horowitz is nasty

David Horowitz is nasty, according to Democratic zealot Josh Marshall. And so, the illogic goes, because Horowitz organized Islamofascism Awareness Week, no one should take it seriously.

Look at the “clownish” educational materials and laugh, Marshall says. After all, Horowitz is nasty.

And Islamofascism is not nasty? Marshall won’t say. To admit it exists would be to feed “the vanity and intellectual pretensions of countless right-wing bloggers and editorialists throughout the English-speaking world.”

Risks weighed. By Marshall’s vain, pretentious, pseudo-liberal way of thinking, better to ignore fascism than to risk feeding a Republican.

Frank Warner

With violence down, New York Times declares ‘the news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse’

It’s too early to tell whether the current reduction in violence in Iraq is part of a trend. We might not know for another five or 10 years.

But since the end of June, when the U.S. troop “surge” hit full strength, violence has dropped 70 percent, according to Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

The recent reports are a welcome sign to those of us who know democracy is the only hope for a lasting peace in Iraq, the Middle East and the world.

Exit Iraq swiftly? It encourages those who care about freedom for all. But for some reason, the good news doesn’t encourage The New York Times, which today seized on the Iraq-Turkey skirmishes as evidence of Armageddon.

“The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse,” The Times editorial says today. “Now Turkey is threatening to send troops across the border to wipe out Kurdish rebel bases, after guerrillas killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers. This latest crisis should have come as no surprise. But it is one more widely predicted problem the Bush administration failed to plan for before its misguided invasion — and one more problem it urgently needs to deal with as part of a swift and orderly exit from Iraq.”

Leave it to The New York Times to grab at any argument for the defeat of democracy. It’s The Times’ usual approach: A problem? No problem. Just surrender to the fascists.

Frank Warner

Pete Stark apologizes for saying Bush gets amusement from American deaths in Iraq

Congressman Pete Stark is a strong supporter of the war and the troops in Iraq. Unfortunately, he supports an endless war and he supports the fascist troops, not the Americans.

And so last week he again demanded that President Bush withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and abandon the new democracy there. Stark claimed that the battle for freedom’s victory was cutting into the health care of American children, and that Bush was sending young men to Iraq only to die “for the president’s amusement.”

“You don’t have money to fund the war or children,” he said Oct. 18. “But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Tears of surrender. Today Stark, faced with a House censure vote, said he was sorry, he cried, and the censure failed 196-173.

“I want to apologize to my colleagues — many of whom I have offended — to the president and his family and to the troops,” Stark said. He added that he hoped the apology would allow him to “become as insignificant as I should be” as the House moves forward on critical, divisive issues.

Stark then left the podium, wiping away tears as Democratic colleagues surrounded him with supportive handshakes.

Stark’s [Oct. 18] comments also resulted in a rescheduling of his plans to be the featured speaker for the California State Society at a Capitol Hill Club luncheon on Nov. 6.

Stuck with Stark. Stark almost certainly will be re-elected this year for the 19th straight time. There’s another argument for term limits.

Frank Warner

Why is Islamofascism the right word for Bin Ladenism?

It’s violent bigotry inspired by a warped view of Islam. It’s repressive and aggressive, and its ideology demands that it conquer the world or kill those who won’t accept its chains.

It’s Islamofascism.

For those who object to the word because they’d feel more comfortable surrendering to friendly murderers rather than to fascists with an Islamic face, Christopher Hitchens explains why fascism is the right suffix.

Hitchens writes:

Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual “deviance”—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures….

As to the nation-state, al-Qaida’s demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn’t this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a “Greater Germany” or with Mussolini’s fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the “pure” and the “exclusive” over the unclean and the kufar or profane….

This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values….

Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. … Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.

The jihadi ideology has a lot in common with Nazi fascism. The most important similarity is that it is doomed.

Frank Warner

Eerie color photos of First World War

It's hard to believe, but there was a color photography process as early as World War I. The colors are muted, but they do add a dimension almost never seen in "the war to end all wars." Heck, we don't see much color in World War II pictures.

Click here and here to see several of the excellent photos. They are slightly enhanced by today's computers.

Frank Warner

What happened to term limits? The Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton phenomenon

Anyone notice a pattern in recent presidential politics? We get a President Bush, a President Clinton, another President Bush, then another President Clinton on the way.

As Gwynne Dyer wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer the other day, “They’re getting around term limits.”

If we can’t re-elect a known name forever, the political parties will find a son or spouse and market him/her as “from the same stock,” as if to tell us only a few American families deserve the privilege of leadership.

Threat to democracy. And so the two-term limit, written into the U.S. Constitution in 1951, is being bypassed. It’s a troubling trend, as Dyer notes.

The 22nd Amendment acknowledged that electing anyone to the presidency three, four or more times is unwise. After eight or 10 years in office, the executive and the related bureaucracy has had too many opportunities to consolidate power much too tightly.

A potentially endless presidency is contrary to the egalitarian notion that other citizens -- many others -- are just as capable of serving. A prolonged term serves inertia. It invites corruption, personality cults and executive dementia. And worst of all, it risks the creation of so many institutional barriers to the political opposition that it threatens democracy itself.

Venezuela and Russia. As the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton phenomenon shows, Americans are taking the anti-democratic bait. But we are not alone in falling for the faux royalty trap. The pattern is repeating itself more dangerously in other countries.

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is leveraging his temporary popularity to abolish term limits to become dictator for life. In Russia, Vladimir Putin won’t run for an illegal third consecutive term as president, but he’s demanding he be appointed next prime minister, with even more power.

Ironically, China, the world superpower supposedly committed to total dictatorship, has adopted an informal limit of two five-year terms for its chief executive Hu Jintao, and the Communist politburo seems to be making that term limit stick. This could give political pluralism its first real chance in mainland China.

The healthy shuffle. Remember the collapse of the Soviet Union? Sure, President Reagan shamed the Evil Empire with his eloquence and tamed it with his resolve. Sure, the free West was outshining the Soviet Union by every economic and political measure. But the decisive factor in “the end of history” may have been the Soviet Union’s accidental term limits.

If Mikhail Gorbachev hadn’t been the fourth Soviet premier in three years, the democratic revolution might have had to wait. Brezhnev died in 1982; Andropov in 1984; and Chernenko in 1985. Before 1982, Soviet leaders typically held power for much longer periods.

That accidental shuffling and reshuffling of political loyalties might have given Gorbachev just enough leeway to allow the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, free elections in Russia in mid-1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as 1991 ended.

Corruption fighter. Get the point? Term limits are the best way to guarantee the Wheel of Progress keeps moving. Term limits regularly bring in new leaders who are more likely to rededicate the government to openness and accountability.

Way back in 1797, President George Washington left office after two four-year terms. For the United States of America, he was first in war, first in peace, and first with that very good idea.

Today we should be imposing term limits on Congress, not looking for ways to sabotage the presidential restriction. Next to free elections themselves, term limits are the best corruption fighter and the best democracy regenerator.

Advice for voters. The next time you cast your ballot for the same face or the same family you voted for more than 10 years ago, ask yourself why you’re taking that risk. Would you vote in a leader for life? Would you vote in a monarchy? What are you, nuts?

Frank Warner

Note: Michael Barone had some thoughts on this earlier this year.

What ‘rendition’ is

The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the practice of international “rendition,” which has taken on a torture-tinged meaning, especially in the new movie of the same name.

In fact, the term “rendition” in the counterterrorism context means nothing more than moving someone from one country to another, outside the formal process of extradition. For the CIA, rendition has become a key tool for getting terrorists from places where they’re causing trouble to places where they can’t….

According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

When these guys are moved, they are moved somewhere they don’t want to be. No, we don’t want them tortured. But they have earned the trip.

Frank Warner

Did Hillary Clinton give up Socks?

First Bill Clinton pressures Betty Currie to lie in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Then Hillary Clinton gives Currie the family cat.

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president. . . . Being Clinton, she also lectured readers that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition” and warned them to look out for their safety. (Buddy, the chocolate labrador, it should be noted, bounded into a road soon after leaving the White House and was promptly run over.)

I wonder if Socks was Bill Clinton’s alibi? “Now Betty, think about this. Monica and I never were alone in the Oval Office, were we? Socks was there!”

Frank Warner

Our enemy is thoughtlessness

Dr. James Watson’s claim, now retracted, that black Africans are less intelligent than other people gave me a chance to re-examine the proposition that the failure to understand human nature amounts to criminal negligence.

I happen to believe this: If you’ve been too lazy to consider human nature, if you haven’t spent the time to figure out even the basic mechanisms of human progress, you are guilty of a crime.

I’m thinking particularly of Nazism, Communism and Islamism, and how each of these monstrously destructive ideologies were the result of bad thinking or, more accurately, no real thinking at all.

In each of these cases, had the leaders and their early supporters taken even a day to reflect honestly on the vision they were proposing for humanity, they could have predicted the ugly results long before they materialized. They simply had to ask, considering human nature, what kind of world are our rules likely to produce?

When grand isn’t good. The high crime of the Nazis was to pretend the Germans were a race better than all others, and therefore had a right to eliminate or subjugate any other part of humanity. Dr. Watson committed the misdemeanor version of this offense.

The Nazis went further. Lured by the false promise of national greatness, they trampled the rights and freedoms of their own people and extended their cruel totalitarianism to conquered neighbors. On the question of human nature, they refused to use the heads they were born with.

The Communists avoided grand theories of racial superiority. They’ve claimed to champion equality above all else, and yet, when they decided to bulldoze their way toward their goals, they did it over the bodies of tens of millions of people, often selected for ethnic groups associated with democratic activism or economic success.

Communism, in its economic theories and more importantly in its political repression, just never allowed a thought about the horror its cause was causing.

Attack on the intellect. Islamism commits the same felony. In the name of pride, prejudice, grudges and glory, it crowds human nature out of its ideology. Pretending to be on a mission from God, its proponents have embraced a malignant neglect of the intellect.

The Islamists are desperately afraid their outrages against human nature will be spotted and spotlighted by anyone who spends a moment in thought. It’s no wonder they spend so much of their energy stifling debate and blowing up schools.

The crime common to each of these deadly ideologies is the rejection of the truth each human knows from the age of reason -- that all people by nature want to be free, that all people and all societies do best in freedom, and that any program of permanent repression will kill the pursuit of happiness, kill peace, kill progress, kill people.

This is why I am appalled at any political argument that rejects human nature. The claim that “Some people don’t want to be free” is one such argument. We might debate the subtleties of the statement, but we know that all sane, uncorrupted people want to be free, and any statement to the contrary is a lie. So is any assertion that big business or big government should have more power than the people.

Instincts and instructions. The most recent verbal atrocity was Dr. Watson’s remark that “all the testing” shows black people are less intelligent than others. His claim hit in a unique way, in the guise of science, but the idea is part of a long sinister tradition.

Dr. Watson knew better -- even he says he knew better -- but he spoke ignorance anyway. Perhaps he was frustrated that brown and black people haven’t done as well as others, but his careless comment was not likely to make anything better, and if seized on by other desperados, could have made things much worse.

Deep in our DNA, somewhere on the double helix Dr. Watson discovered in 1953, there are the rules and regulations of human nature. There we receive the instincts for self-preservation, freedom and enlightenment, and the instructions for using our intellect to those ends.

In the last six decades, most world leaders have dedicated themselves, at least on paper, to accept human nature and to work to its advantage. Still, there remain groups who are guided instead by anger, insecurity and self-centered bigotry.

Crime against humanity. These relatively small gangs are killing us because they commit the worst crime of all. They don’t think about human nature. They just don’t think.

Frank Warner

Screw the polar caps: Ted Kennedy has killed the Cape Wind windmill project

Sen. Ted Kennedy and friends have strong-armed the Cape Cod Commission in Massachusetts to reject the Cape Wind project’s application to bury the electric cables that would bring wind power ashore.

No power cables, no power, no project. Kennedy didn’t want 130 distant windmills to spoil his view 5 miles away across Nantucket Sound.

The vote yesterday is a major environmental setback because Cape Wind was a test of whether we had even the smallest commitment to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. We can only hope that the global warming Kennedy has welcomed will swallow Hyannis Port first.

Frank Warner

Ghosts of Chinatown pour cash into Hillary Clinton campaign

The Norman Hsu thing was strange enough. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates and yet he had no legitimate source of income.

Now the Los Angeles Times is reporting that the New York senator and former first lady is receiving large sums of money from apparently poor people who have New York Chinatown addresses, and some of the people can’t even be tracked down in Chinatown.

You’d think after Bill Clinton’s 1996 scandal over taking illegal Chinese campaign contributions, Hillary would be more careful. So far, her contributions appear to be from Chinese-Americans, or at least Chinese-American ghosts.

Frank Warner

Dr. Watson settles it: ‘No scientific basis’ that blacks are less intelligent

Dr. James Wilson doesn’t answer the trick question, “What if he were right?” Instead, now he says he was wrong to claim black Africans are less intelligent than people of other colors.

Five days ago, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist was quoted in The (London) Sunday Times, “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

But yesterday, he apologized and said:

“I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

Case closed for now.

Frank Warner

Deborah Kerr is an actress to remember

Deborah Kerr, the Scottish actress whom many know best for her role opposite Cary Grant in “An Affair to Remember,” is dead. She died two days ago in Suffolk, England.

Kerr also had that memorable beach scene with Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity.” And let’s not forget her performance with Yul Brynner in “The King and I.” I also liked her in “The Night of the Iguana” and “The Innocents.”

She always seemed a little cold -- virginal is the word many are using -- but she acted with an intelligence that suggested deep passion. For some reason, she looked exactly right for those crashing waves with Lancaster.

‘Nearest thing to heaven.’ Should any romantic miss “An Affair to Remember,” melodramatic as it is? Holy cow, she’s hit by a car on her way to meet Cary Grant at the top of the Empire State Building!

Months later, she explains to Grant why she didn’t see the car coming:

“Oh, it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I was looking up... it was the nearest thing to heaven. You were there!”

Dialog like that is so over the top it works.

Deborah Kerr is missed. She was 86.

Frank Warner

Democrat says Bush gets ‘amusement’ from GIs getting ‘heads blown off’

Rep. Pete Stark today:

“You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

I guess the Democrats haven’t given up on giving up.

Frank Warner

Genocide vote loses steam

Thank goodness!

From The Christian Science Monitor:

The sudden misgivings about a popular House resolution condemning as  “genocide” the large-scale killings of Armenians more than nine decades ago illustrate a recurring tug of war in US foreign policy: when to take the moral high ground and when to heed the pragmatic realities of national interests.

That sums it up fairly well, except that, in general, the moral high ground on today’s problems usually is in the national interest. We might have to make a temporary deal with a dictator, like Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, but that’s in pursuit of the main project, which is the liberation of a few other nations.

Frank Warner

Dr. Watson’s bent hypothesis: Black Africans have lower intelligence

Dr. James Watson, discoverer of DNA’s double helix, says “all the testing” shows that black Africans are not so intelligent as people of other colors.

Watson is taking a lot of flak for his statement and, I think, justifiably so. I’ll make my case, and then I’ll ask, as a friend asked me, what if Watson were right?

Exactly what did Watson say? In an interview with The Sunday (London) Times, published four days ago, he said:

“All our social policies are based on the fact that their [black Africans’] intelligence is the same as ours [white people] -- whereas all the testing says not really. …

“There are many people of color who are very talented. But don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level.”

In his new book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science,” Watson also says:

“There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

Science and non-science. For 50 years, Watson, now 79, has been director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. He was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for science in 1962. Today he researches cancer and genetics.

Why do I say Watson is wrong on black Africans and intelligence? Because “all the testing” doesn’t show black people are less intelligent than humans of other colors. First, that testing hasn’t been done. And second, Watson doesn’t point to a shred of hard evidence to justify even the hypothesis.

His hypothesis is his conclusion, and there was no experiment along the way. There was no control group, no sifting out of distorting factors. This isn’t science. It’s prejudice.

‘People’ know. My evidence? Watson told The Sunday Times that he’d like to think all humans are intellectually equal, but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

There’s the problem with Watson’s “research” into intelligence variations. It’s not research at all. It’s an idea designed on a whim, based on a guess and built on a bias.

The best that can be said about his claim is that maybe Watson simply wants to shock us enough that some of us will do some real science and prove him wrong.

‘But what if?’ But what about my friend’s question?

A friend who, for lack of an original way to put this, just happens to be black, read what Watson said, and asked me yesterday, “What if it’s true? What if black people really are less intelligent than other people?”

My instant response? I think I stuttered.

I tried to toss out the premise. “No one can prove people of one color are less intelligent than others,” I said.

‘Scientific proof?’ “But this man is a geneticist,” my friend said. “He’s studied DNA. Suppose he’s found a gene that’s linked to high intelligence, and black people don’t have it. What if he had scientific proof?”

This wasn’t easy to think about. I can’t be true. It could never be, and yet, who knows? Some day someone might measure intelligence differences among certain groups of people.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but let’s say Watson somehow calculated that black people were, on average, a half-percent less intelligent than everyone else. What difference would that make, really? How would a teacher teach black people differently? A half-percent difference would be no difference.”

I noted that other factors were bound to be more important to each child’s ability to learn: Whether they had two loving parents at home or just one (or none), whether their family was affluent or poor, whether their parents had gone to college or not, whether their parents valued reading or not, whether they lived in conditions that produce hope or hopelessness.

Unaskable questions? But my friend didn’t let me off so easily.

“What if the intelligence difference is 10 percent? What if it’s more?” he asked.

“At 10 percent,” I said, “we start to get into significant differences. But it can’t be. And then, would we really want to know? Wouldn’t this information just feed racism? Wouldn’t teachers notice how their students are doing and adjust anyway? Would they have to know this kind of thing?”

“But aren’t we supposed to want to know everything?” my friend asked. “Are there questions we’re not supposed to ask?”

Want the data? He pointed out that The (London) Independent’s story about Watson quotes a lot of people. “All of them condemn Watson, and not one of them asks,