By Wade Frazier
Mr. Skeptic and the "Crackpots"
You are visitor number
since October
1999
As should be evident if you read the "not so brief synopsis" of my book, I consider Dennis Lee the greatest human being that I have ever known. Dennis is a human being nevertheless. He has his virtues and failings, like us all. For me, what makes Dennis "great" is not his marketing genius, his entrepreneurial savvy, his audacity, his clever mind or his ability as a great orator. It is his integrity and great heart. Dennis has never really written his life story yet. There have been pieces of it in books like My Quest, but if his full story was ever told, it would sound ridiculous. Dennis is a promoter and BS artist of no mean order, but he need not stretch anything when discussing his life. He leaves many of his life's spectacular details out of his public image. He has probably lived the life of twenty men so far.
In my opinion, not too many people like him have walked the earth in the past thousand years. I think that he is on some sort of special assignment. I lived with him and his family for a year, and have known him since 1986. If you could have seen through my eyes, you would know what I am writing about. With all that said, he is still human, and puts on his pants one leg at a time, etc. Somehow, he married a great woman who has been with him through thick and thin, and it has usually been thin. The hardships they have endured can be hard to believe. Dennis has nearly died so many times that he almost greets it with a yawn anymore.
Dennis became involved with the energy industry over twenty years ago. He has been trying to transform it ever since. I rode in the saddle with him for a few chapters of his adventures. I watched about twenty attempts to steal his companies while I was with him, and they succeeded twice.
I helped Dennis rebuild a couple of times. During my years with Dennis, I encountered thousands of people. A phenomenon I regularly saw was the constant criticism of what he/we were attempting. Dennis has been doggedly at his project for nearly twenty years. Dennis is one of the quickest thinkers I have ever seen, and perhaps the most creative. He has tried nearly every possible avenue to getting alternative energy developed. He had no taboos in that department.
Dennis has approached Wall Street numerous times; he has tried getting large energy companies interested; he has directly sold the equipment and hoped for financing later; he almost got into bed with household name international marketing firm; he almost had a billion dollar deal put together to finance his unstoppable (at least honestly) marketing program for his heat pump with a household name corporation; he has used volunteers; he has surrounded himself with Christians; he has tried numerous marketing/financing programs that he usually devised himself; he has formed nonprofit organizations; he has tried grassroots movements; he has talked with foreign national governments; he has talked with many free energy inventors and tried developing their technologies; he has tried media campaigns; he has tried direct mailing campaigns; he has tried telemarketing campaigns; he has tried buying out electric companies; he has tried working with anti-nuclear protesters; he has talked with numerous billionaires (and they never parted with a dollar); he has tried working with numerous environmental organizations; he has tried getting movie stars involved with him, he has tried doing it from jail; he has considered trying it in foreign countries; he rented out a ballroom in Washington D.C. and invited every politician in town to attend his meetings, to work with him on bringing free energy to the marketplace responsibly; his companies have marketed, built and installed his technologies. In short, I do not know what he has not tried, and Dennis does nothing halfway, and he is immensely talented. He made a worthy attempt with all those techniques. I am not sure who could have done any better.
Perhaps the most common reaction that I saw when describing our latest attempt or situation to people, be they potential employees, potential dealers, strangers, friends, family or what have you, was their instant criticism. After hearing about what we were attempting for less than one minute, or maybe as long as five minutes, people would often chime in with something like, "Aha, I know what you are doing wrong, you just need to (fill in the blank)." Their helpful advice always consisted of something we had tried before, or was something that was quite naïve, like giving it to the energy companies, letting them bring free energy to the world. The energy interests have buried more technologies with the potential for free energy than the world will ever know of. I know of a number of energy-saving technologies that have been ruthlessly crushed by the energy interests, even ignoring what I lived through with Dennis.
The most naïve comment I have heard regarding the predicament of bringing free energy the world is this: "If it is so great, why can't I buy it?" I have heard it many times. It is no crime to be naïve. I lost my naïveté honestly. Naïveté is the starting point when we enter the world. I believe naïveté (at least regarding the "real" world) is a state where you have oversimplified the world due to your lack of experience in it, and think others see it like you do, and act like you. Clinging to your naïveté, when your eyes tell you otherwise, leads to denial. That is how I see it today. My opinion will continue evolving on that subject. Believing the energy companies are a consumer's best friend reflects a mentality you might find on Sesame Street or the Teletubbies, but the corporate world, contrary to popular opinion, only embraces innovation if it helps their bottom line.
The larger and more monopolistic an industry is, the more it can throw its weight around, wiping out competitive and innovative upstarts. Energy, transportation and medicine are three classic cases of that. Energy production methods have not fundamentally changed in this century, if you leave out, as Einstein said, the "one hell of a way to boil water," nuclear energy. Alternative energy is still less than one percent of energy consumption in America. The automobile and its internal combustion engine have not fundamentally changed since Henry Ford. Many superior engine designs have been invented in this century. The reason they are not in cars today is that the level of investment in current technology makes sure Detroit does not convert. The medical paradigm in many ways is insane. Drugs and surgical procedures, with extremely few exceptions, are the only legal "medicines" in the United States. That is not because they are the best, but because they are the most lucrative. Watching alternative cancer treatments get wiped out by the dozen, or watching books become banned and attacked because they suggest that changing our diets can reverse our health problems, is indicative of a tremendous racket going on, raking in the cash as millions of people die needlessly.
Competition is a nice Economics 101 idea, but all capitalists hate the idea of competition. Competition is hell on profit margins, and makes for an uncertain future. Eliminating the competition is the arguably the primary goal of every industry and profession, particularly their trade and professional groups. As I observe in the "spiritual perspective" part of this web site, most people are mostly self-serving. Consequently, there is not an industry or profession I know of that is not self-serving above all else. I have never seen an exception.
In my experience, everybody likes to criticize Dennis, but precious few will actually help him. The loudest critics usually try stealing from him while they lambaste him. If there has ever been a near-constant in my interactions with my friends, family and acquaintances, it is that when the issue of Dennis comes up, I find myself defending him as people launch their opinions and criticisms. I rode in the saddle with Dennis for years, watching almost everything he did. I will not be falsely modest; I am a bright lad. I constantly turned over in my mind the issues, the strategies, the outcomes, and tried seeing a better way of doing things. Sure, Dennis has made his mistakes. Sure, I have my criticisms of some of his actions and strategies, but far outweighing any criticism I could ever make about what Dennis does is my outright awe at what he does so well. His combination of talent and integrity I have never remotely seen in anybody else.
My biggest concern about his style is Dennis' eternal optimism. Dennis does not like hearing "bad news." He has a way of turning the darkest outcome into an opportunity. That is a mixed blessing. As I relate in my "not so brief synopsis," I talked to Dennis on the phone when he was in solitary confinement, while he was writing, My Quest, where he predicted he would be murdered in prison, and he told me how happy he was to be in solitary confinement. He could be accused of being a Pollyanna. The eternal optimism of a promoter of Dennis' stature is a challenging fit with the mentality needed to investigate and develop technologies. Visionaries see the goal, and "realists" get there. You will rarely find one person possessing both attributes in great measure. Dennis is not the universal man, and I doubt that any exist in today's world. His strengths are in integrity, marketing, entrepreneurialism, courage, heart, and creativity. He is not a scientist, nor does he need to be. He has his important role to play in the game, but he does not need to do it all. Yet, it was educational to see him understand some technologies better than the engineers who worked for him. Scientists and engineers do not have all the answers or insight either.
Dennis is learning some painful lessons about developing and marketing new technologies. I think he is learning from them, though. In addition, Dennis has probably been subject to the "game theory" strategies of the energy gangsters (see my "not so brief synopsis" and Tom Bearden), being subtly sabotaged. I do not know of a more fit person to run the project. The answer I always have for those asserting that they can make it happen (usually asserted while attacking Dennis) is "Nothing is stopping you from doing it yourself. Dennis has no monopoly on it." Have I ever seen anybody independently try to make it happen? No. At best, his associates will ride his coattails while he is flying high, and when the energy gangsters attack Dennis, his associates see their golden opportunity to steal the business. Dennis has had his company stolen numerous times. Have the thieves ever done anything productive with what they stole? Never. It always crumbled in their hands, and they gutted the ship as it sank, stealing every dishonest scrap they could. Dennis makes it happen. There are always those appearing on the scene, thinking they can do better. If only they tried building it from scratch like Dennis has. That requires more honor than they possess. Instead, they try stealing what Dennis built.
People can criticize Dennis all day long from their armchairs. I can probably make the most effective criticisms of his efforts. I do give it to him sometimes, not that I think he does much with it. I have searched the world for somebody worthier than Dennis to support in bringing free energy to world. I have never found or heard of anybody coming remotely close to fitting the bill. Integrity is the quality that I value above all others, and that is almost impossible to find, particularly at the level Dennis plays at.
During the past ten years, one group that I have studied at length is the "skeptics." Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and James Randi have all been prominent members of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). With Sagan and Asimov dead, Randi is one of the elder statesmen of the "skeptical" movement. A number of years ago I purchased about twenty back issues of CSICOP's Skeptical Inquirer, the skeptical movement's house organ, and got more education about the "skeptics."
While there were some "skeptics" that I respected, they were relatively few. For every article in the Skeptical Inquirer that impressed me with the reasoned investigation of a researcher, even if I did not always agree with their conclusions, there would be two articles that left me shaking my head. The "skeptics" supposedly investigate paranormal phenomena, as the name of their committee suggests, but I have never heard of them finding evidence of the paranormal. I found it in spades when I was a teenager, which makes me wonder what kind of investigators they are.
It is probably no accident that the "skeptic" I currently respect the most is one of the movement's few women: Susan Blackmore. In her In Search of the Light, she related her journey in investigating extra-sensory perception. I know where she took a number of her "wrong" turns in investigating the paranormal, and her tale demonstrates that even a well-intended person can fail to catch the obvious butterflies when using the wrong net. The paranormal is not something you can nail down on a testing bench, because it relates to our consciousness, something Western scientists have yet to realize, even its paranormal investigators. Blackmore has the good sense to end her book with, "As for the paranormal, I still don't know."(1) That frank uncertainty is a refreshing counterpoint to the cocksure pronouncements I have often seen the "skeptics" utter.
Soon after CSICOP was founded, there was a scandal where CSICOP may have "cooked the numbers" regarding investigating the validity of an aspect of astrology. The issue suggested that CSICOP was more a political organization than a scientific one. Dennis Rawlins, a CSICOP founder whose statistical work hatched the scandal, would later say about his august comrades' motivation, "I now believe that if a flying saucer landed in the backyard of a leading UFO spokesman, he might hide the incident from the public (for the public's own good, of course). He might swiftly convince himself that the landing was a hoax, a delusion or an "unfortunate" interpretation of mundane phenomena that could be explained away with "further research."(2)
I have researched the debunking work of Carl Sagan James Randi, Martin Gardner and others in the CSICOP pantheon. Their work fails to impress me. Some is appallingly bad, and some is dishonest, particularly Carl Sagan's. The frankly political nature of CSICOP's mission can be seen in the Skeptical Inquirer's cartoons. In every issue of The Skeptical Inquirer I saw were cartoons done by their cartoonist of many years, Rob Pudim. Most of his cartoons conveyed ridicule or condescension toward his subjects. His cartoons are of highly questionable humor, and some is downright mean-spirited. In the winter 1989 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, on page 116 is a kind of obituary for Peter Hurkos. It was similar to a black eulogy, remarking the passing of a person of scorn. That kind of eulogy is always in questionable taste. The thrust was that Hurkos was a self-promoting fake of a psychic. A Pudim cartoon accompanied the article. The cartoon was of a man with a clipboard standing over Hurkos' dead body (just after he collapsed), checking off one more "missed" Hurkos prediction. The man said, "Item 9236…missed major heart attack." Unfortunately, I have seen many instances of that brand of "humor" in the "skeptic" ranks.
With that kind of class, it was difficult to take seriously what their organization produced. My book will analyze their work at length. I will finish this essay with my personal encounters with a "skeptic."
Back in 1996, Dennis was doing national speaking tours, promoting technologies, talking about free energy. In September 1996, he finished his second national tour of the year in Philadelphia. Five thousand people attended the show held in the sports arena where the Philadelphia 76ers played. I have participated in many of his shows while watching many others. I could critique Dennis' shows better than almost anybody. I will gladly admit that he did not "demonstrate" much that was impressive regarding free energy at his Philadelphia show. He is not my first candidate to explain the physics of the technologies he promotes, but he was showcasing a few technologies that have extraordinary potential, and was talking to a lay audience. Even if hydraulic heat engines could not produce free energy, they would represent the first new heat engine cycle in a century, and might sweep aside nearly all the others. That brings up issues of physics and thermodynamics that I will not discuss here, but I cover in my book.
I personally think that billions of dollars should be spent to develop hydraulic heat engines, even if they could not do free energy. Just as Detroit swatted down, froze out or bought out all the new engine designs, you surely could not trust them to develop new engine designs. At the Philadelphia show, one of the five thousand attendees was a man I will call Mr. Skeptic. Mr. Skeptic was an aspiring debunker, founding a Philadelphia skeptic group.
The day after the Philadelphia show, Mr. Skeptic had up a web site, claiming to investigate Dennis' claims. I attended the Philadelphia show. I had already written one book that was more of a diary of my experiences. I reproduced a medical quotation section from it, and an earlier essay that I wrote on American history. During October 1996, I wrote 400 new pages of text and slapped the whole thing onto the Internet in November 1996.
As I was publishing my web pages, registering them with the various search engines, I searched the Internet, seeing if there was anything out there about Dennis. I found Mr. Skeptic's web site. For the next five months, we engaged in a respectful dialogue. I even allowed him to call me at home, and we had a three-hour conversation. Mr. Skeptic's web site was rather large, and had devoted megabytes of information to Dennis. Mr. Skeptic said that his wife was rather irritated with the hundreds of hours he spent on Dennis. The man was obsessed with Dennis. Mr. Skeptic used one word all over his web site and in my discussions with him. It was the word "fraud." It was obvious from his web site that he thought Dennis was a crook. He speculated loud and long on that issue. He even had fraud hot line numbers to every state government on his site.
I knew that Dennis was not a crook, and I had plenty of experience in defending him over the years. I began a dialogue with Mr. Skeptic, presenting my case. If nothing else, I was trying to encourage Mr. Skeptic to perform an actual investigation. There were heat pumps in Philadelphia that he could have tested, customers he could have talked to, true investigation he could have performed to see if Dennis was crooked or crazy. Merely sifting through the legal documents regarding the various governmental cases against Dennis was stunning. The best book Dennis has written about his experiences was The Alternative, available even today for $12.95 at his company (UCS at 3002 Route 23 N, Newfoundland, NJ 07435). That book provides plenty of official documentation and witness affidavits that clearly present the government's cases against Dennis. The book is strongest when Dennis is merely documenting what he lived through, and is weakest when he ventures into right wing conspiratorial theorizing.
Though Dennis became the biggest case in Mr. Skeptic's skeptical career, I was becoming increasingly disturbed at how Mr. Skeptic avoided any investigation. Dennis has dealt with many establishment hacks over the years, people on the government/energy company payrolls whose jobs were to discredit Dennis and destroy his company. Dennis had no patience with Mr. Skeptic from the beginning, and it was understandable. Mr. Skeptic took a position from the start, and never wavered from it. I have never seen a "skeptic" say there was anything legitimate in what they "investigated." Why did they bat 1000? Could they have perhaps made up their mind before they began "investigating?" People like James Randi proudly state that that is the case.
I have read Randi's work over the years. One of his better known books is Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions. The book's title sets the tenor of his book. Like in the book's title, the book is filled with exclamation points. His pages drip with sarcasm. He calls ESP a delusion in the book's title, a book where he "investigates" ESP. Randi makes it clear that he actively disbelieves in the paranormal, but he does not think that makes him a biased investigator. He wrote a book where he "investigated" Nostradamus and his prophecies, yet began the book by saying that he firmly believes that nobody has ever had prophetic ability.(3) Randi defends such questionable investigation by stating that disbelieving in the phenomenon he is studying makes no difference to the outcome of his investigations.(4) If a historian made those kinds of statements, he would be laughed out of the profession.
My experiences with the work of the "skeptics" did not make me optimistic about Mr. Skeptic, but I good-naturedly tried to get him to at least investigate. The man seemed determined to not perform any investigation. In the past few years, Dennis has not tried to market his heat pump, per se, but was trying to marry the large evaporator from his heat pump to a hydraulic heat engine to make free energy. If you were investigating Dennis' crookedness, the logical place to start would be looking into his past, investigating what he sold, seeing how crooked that might have been. Mr. Skeptic strangely said that he would not investigate the heat pump, since Dennis was no longer selling it. He said he only cared about free energy. My position with Mr. Skeptic was approximately, "Okay, take that position, but admit that you know nothing about the man, and you have plucked your fraud speculations out of the thin air."
To my knowledge, Mr. Skeptic never even parted with $12.95 to get The Alternative. He called Dennis' company to try getting a free copy because he was an "investigator." I have done far more investigation than Mr. Skeptic will ever pretend to, and I have never asked for free materials, particularly from somebody I was planning on writing unflattering things about. As the months went by, Mr. Skeptic was confirming my worst suspicions about the skeptical movement. Being civil to the man was becoming a challenge. He continuously concocted psychological theories to explain how Dennis' followers were deluded, or Dennis was deluded, or I was deluded, in denial about what a con man I had been taken by. They were some of the more hare-brained and half-baked theories that I had ever encountered, but there was a consistency to them. The consistency was this: at every turn, Mr. Skeptic defended the establishment. I had been developing the opinion that the skeptical societies were little more than attack dogs of the scientific establishment. Mr. Skeptic proved the case.
The general "skeptical" attitude, so far as I have seen, is that everything the establishment does is good and righteous, while anything not promoted by the powerful is suspect. The "skeptics" believe that the government faithfully hunts down crooks that threaten society. Although Mr. Skeptic had apparently not bothered obtaining the official documentation regarding the continuous prosecutions of Dennis, he wrote that Dennis' perception of being a victim of establishment persecution was a "delusion." Even when he admitted that perhaps deputies did steal technical material during the raid, Mr. Skeptic theorized that they did so because they were overzealous in protecting the public, not because they were corrupt.
In far right circles there is a phenomenon known as Holocaust Denial, where a number of "scholars" are trying to rehabilitate the image of fascism and Uncle Adolf. They make out the Jewish Holocaust to be a fiction, dismissing the testimony of many thousands of death camp survivors, the testimonies of Nazis who worked in the camps, and engaging in what I have to call intellectual fraud.
Mr. Skeptic specialized in Corruption Denial, dismissing the testimony of nearly everybody closely involved in the Dennis issue, while launching his theories. He is one of the establishment's greatest defenders. For reasons not entirely in my control, my web pages came down in April 1997, and I did not communicate with anybody associated with Dennis until now. I disappeared from the scene. I was Dennis' greatest defender on the Internet, and I heard that after I left the scene, the attacks became merciless. I am sorry that I could not help him.
Mr. Skeptic was a skeptical "hobbyist." He was not a true professional like James Randi. James Randi tutored Mr. Skeptic as they dubiously debunked a technique known as Touch for Health, Mr. Skeptic learning at Randi's knee. Mr. Skeptic finally hit pay dirt with his "investigation" of Dennis. He had an article published in the Skeptical Inquirer in the summer of 1997. Mr. Skeptic unmasked himself for all to see. Putting up a web page is one thing, but submitting an article for publication is another matter entirely.
As I write in my "not so brief synopsis" part of this web site, there is plenty of official documentation regarding the prosecutions and "convictions" of Dennis. The Alternative lays some of it out quite clearly. One thing is clear if you follow Dennis' story: the last thing he does is cover-up his past, particularly regarding the legal system attacks. His books lay them out in excruciating detail. You are inundated with official documentation if you begin researching his case. You are treated to search warrants, investigator reports, court transcripts, witness affidavits, court rulings, prison records, etc. For anybody who begins researching Dennis' case, what is impressive is the documentation he provides.
After nearly a year of spending hundreds of hours investigating Dennis and his "extraordinary claims," Mr. Skeptic had the crowning achievement of his skeptical career by having an article published in the Skeptical Inquirer. It was about one page long.
The article is glib and condescending, in standard Skeptical Inquirer style. Mr. Skeptic begins his article with some facts, like he attended a show in Philadelphia where Dennis talked a lot and did not actually demonstrate much. I have no argument with that. There were some reasons for that, partly governmental, and not in Dennis' control. Mr. Skeptic scoffed at that notion, but I suppose he felt justified.
Then Mr. Skeptic spent a few paragraphs comparing Dennis to his snake-oil model. At best, I can say that Mr. Skeptic evidenced no investigation of the existing and marketed technologies, and hung his hat on whether Dennis had free energy. It was a weak analysis. I was amused at Mr. Skeptic's theorizing, and thought the article harmless until the last paragraph. That is where Mr. Skeptic committed libel. It was not a gentle, unknowing libel. Mr. Skeptic was too knowledgeable to chalk up that paragraph to ignorance. He knowingly lied, but was very calculating about how he lied. I would not be surprised if a lawyer reviewed Mr. Skeptic's article before he published it. Remember, that article was the crowning work of Mr. Skeptic's debunking career. He probably bought twenty copies of that issue.
Mr. Skeptic quoted a newspaper that had libeled Dennis. Mr. Skeptic wrote, "The Utah…News reports that Lee was indicted for fraud in New Jersey in 1975, charged with fraud in the state of Washington in 1985, and pled guilty to two felony counts of consumer fraud in California in 1990 in connection with the sale of his energy-saving heat pump kit. Well, what the hell... they say Jim Bakker is planning a comeback, too."
Back in 1991 and 1992, when Dennis was reviving his venture after getting out of jail the first time, he got involved with the Patriot Movement. Unfortunately, much of the Patriot Movement is located in the northwestern United States, and has more than a tinge of white supremacy associated with it, along with many self-serving "leaders" who seem to be more interested in selling videos than in turning this country around. Dennis became high profile in the movement, to the point where other "Patriot" leaders felt they had to discredit him. The Mormon Church was so alarmed that they apparently threatened ex-communication to any member who got involved with Dennis. "Coincidentally," a Utah newspaper published some libelous articles about Dennis. Of all the massive documentation surrounding Dennis' case, much of it official and published by Dennis himself, Mr. Skeptic decided to quote a Utah newspaper regarding the government's cases against Dennis.
The official record is clear on those matters. The 1975 indictment had to do with bouncing some checks as his company was going out of business, when a customer put a stop payment on a big check to his company. After getting bad legal advice, Dennis naïvely pleaded guilty to fraud for bouncing some checks, a decision that still haunts him. Dennis was not charged with fraud in Washington in 1985. He was charged in a civil matter regarding consumer protection issues, and if anybody committed a crime, it was the Attorney General's office and their buddies. Their efforts killed one of Dennis' employees.
Dennis did not plead guilty to two felony counts of consumer fraud in California in 1990. He pled guilty to not filing a form and paying fifty dollars regarding a civil law. Civil law is not criminal law, and is called "civil code" in the business. His guilty plea amounted to not knowing about the filing requirement (and subsequently believing that he was not required to file) and getting a ruling from the courts on it, and Mr. Skeptic knew it. In addition, the situation regarding his so-called guilty plea is far different than how somebody like Mr. Skeptic likes reporting it. The plea was that Dennis in fact did not file the form, but the deal was that the courts would rule on the constitutionality of the law as it applied to Dennis' case. The courts reneged on that deal, and never held up their end of the "bargain." The situation of U.S. courts violating their own deals is as American as apple pie. Just ask the native tribes how often the U.S. government and courts actually honored the treaties that they forced on the natives, which was a fraudulent strategy crafted by George Washington. In one rare instance when a tribe prevailed in court, the Cherokee tribe won in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the sitting president, Andrew Jackson, openly stated that he would ignore the court's ruling, and the genocidal Trail of Tears happened soon after.
In Dennis' case, the Superior Court judge hoodwinked Dennis into a deal that the courts never honored. When you have the guns, badges and prisons, you always win, and Dennis spent over a year in prison after the courts violated their bargain, and Dennis tried withdrawing his plea because of their violation of the deal. Of course, the judge who hoodwinked Dennis had already been promoted to a higher court (for a deceptive job well done?), and the new judge ignored Dennis' motion and threw him into a prison with murderers, where Dennis nearly died. It is a standard case of American "justice." In reality, Dennis was not convicted, nor did he plead guilty to any crime in California, but that did not stop him from spending two years behind bars and nearly dying there.
The official record is clear on those matters, and my "not so brief synopsis" refers to official documentation that Dennis provides himself in his books. Mr. Skeptic would not be denied his chance to publicly tag Dennis with the fraud label, even if he had to lie to do it.
At the risk of making this web site too redundant, Mr. Skeptic says that Dennis "pled guilty to two felony counts of consumer fraud" in California. In The Alternative, Dennis produces his prison records and court transcript of the proceedings. The judge said that:
"One of the things that we must keep in mind here is that the defendant has not been convicted of theft, he's not been convicted of a crime that requires or there's been any proof by an admission or otherwise that the defendant is convicted of intentionally defrauding people."(5)
Dennis also reproduces his prison records. His prison records plainly stated the "offense" that he was in prison for: "Failure to register marketing plans. (A misdemeanor.)" and cited the civil code that Dennis "violated."(6) Anybody who had performed the elementary step of reading The Alternative, which thousands of people have, would know that Dennis did not plead guilty to felonious fraud in California.
In Washington, Dennis was not prosecuted for fraud. With those prosecutions of Dennis, the mind-boggling fraud was perpetrated by people like the Attorney General's office, the electric companies, the sheriff's department, the District Attorney's office, the Superior Court, etc. In Washington, Dennis' company was charged in a civil matter. Fraud is a criminal matter, not a civil matter. The Washington civil suit was one of the more unconscionable frauds that I have ever seen. The Deputy Attorney General who prosecuted the lawsuit (whose conscience eventually got to her, and quit her job in the midst of bludgeoning Dennis' company), made her case in her correspondence with Dennis, trying to get him to settle her fraudulent lawsuit. She boldly stated that she could find a violation of the law, even if there was never any intent to deceive anybody.
Ms. Deputy Attorney General hung her hat on a letter from a person who innocently misunderstood one statement made in the video pitch Dennis' company used. She seized on the fact that one person in the entire state misunderstood one thing Dennis said. In her letter to Dennis, she made it clear how she would get him. She stated:
"… It is important to underscore that the consumer protection lawsuit is a civil suit… state does not allege, nor does it need prove that the defendants intended to deceive or deal unfairly with their customers…Rather the issue is whether representations have the tendency or capacity to mislead regardless of the intentions of those who make them…the seller's state of mind is excluded. Intent to deceive or act unfairly is not an element of proof in a Consumer Protection cause of action; similarly lack of intent is not a defense for the seller."(7)
Just like in California, the way that law was applied to Dennis, i.e. one person in the state misunderstood something Dennis said, could have been applied to every business in the state. Dennis was the only person in the state singled out that way, and Mr. Skeptic had the gall to state that Dennis' perception of persecution was a "delusion." Mr. Skeptic is quite familiar with Dennis' case and the documentation surrounding it. To this day, Mr. Skeptic publishes a page of mine where I outlined the facts of the cases against Dennis, referring to the exhibits in The Alternative that present the government's cases. I wrote that piece partly in response to Mr. Skeptic's musings that he was hearing too much from Dennis' defenders (I was not the only one.), and he would like to see the government's case presented. I presented it, with the government's own documents, right from Dennis' book. Mr. Skeptic has published my essay for the past two years, calling it a "long-winded" attack of the skeptics. It was long-winded, but it also presented the government's cases against Dennis quite clearly, exposing their fraudulent nature.
When it came time to go on the record about Dennis, what did Mr. Skeptic do? Instead of referring to the readily available official documentation regarding the cases against Dennis, Mr. Skeptic did some digging and found libelous comments made by a newspaper, then reproduced it for his readers as his only evidence that Dennis was crooked. In Logic 101 classes, what Mr. Skeptic did is called "appeal to inappropriate authority." If you are prudent and logical, and if the voice of authority stares you in the face, telling you what their legal actions against Dennis were, you accept their rendering of the issue, or you at least give it weight. What you do not do is ignore them, scraping around for a rumor about their actions that suits your uses better. Not only is it crudely dishonest, it abandons the most elementary standards of scholarship.
Let me put it in more personal terms. Imagine that one day you got a parking ticket, one you innocently received because the "No Parking" sign had been removed. You were the only person on your block receiving a parking ticket, because the police had it in for you, because they were being paid to have it in for you. You pay your ticket under duress (or in Dennis' case, go to prison for your parking violation), then go about your life. Then somebody like Mr. Skeptic appears, telling everybody you are a car thief. You have the paid ticket in your hand, the police themselves will say that you only had a parking ticket, and you did not steal any cars that they could prove (In Dennis' case, the car thieves were the police themselves.). That was not good enough for somebody like Mr. Skeptic. He looked around for a rumor that the police convicted you of car theft. Not bothering to consult the police or courts, even carefully avoiding them, he announced that Mr. Jones down the street said the police convicted you of car theft. It was likely more malicious than that, because he actually read the judicial verdicts, but ignored them so he could lie about them, so he could print rumors about the verdicts, which fits Mr. Skeptic's case better, I believe. Then that person wrote to a national magazine, submitting an article that said you were a convicted car thief. In essence, that is what Mr. Skeptic did.
In his fervent desire to call Dennis a crook, Mr. Skeptic scraped around for any lie that he could. He tarred himself with his own brush. His article in the Skeptical Inquirer is a prime example of libel. He has no defense, except insanity or a low IQ. Dennis would win a libel suit against him easily. People who lie for a living are usually careful about how they do it. They lie when they can get away with it, and in a way they can get away with it. Mr. Skeptic is probably relying on Dennis' integrity, which would keep him from suing for such an offensive act. In his mission to paint Dennis as a criminal, Mr. Skeptic committed one of the more fraudulent acts that I have seen regarding Dennis. The Skeptical Inquirer also abetted the crime. Cavalierly printing Mr. Skeptic's glib libel piece clearly demonstrated what kind of rag the Skeptical Inquirer is. They should have known that quoting a newspaper account of somebody's alleged criminal record is incredibly poor scholarship, and potentially libelous. Accusing somebody of being a criminal is a serious business. You had better get your facts straight. Mr. Skeptic went out of his way to find a lie and print it. Referring to a maliciously incorrect newspaper account regarding somebody's criminal record, when the "criminal" himself openly publishes the official documentation regarding his crime, is one of the greater acts of fraud I have seen in awhile.
Ironically, Mr. Skeptic gave a better endorsement of Dennis than I ever could. After spending hundreds of hours "investigating" Dennis, when it came time to go on the record, Mr. Skeptic resorted to lying. His motivation is laid bare, and there is no reason to take him seriously as a "debunker." He is a propagandist, to be polite. His Skeptical Inquirer article told me more than I needed to know about the "skeptics." I have seen Carl Sagan display dishonesty that was shocking.(8) I have seen evidence of James Randi not quite playing straight.(9) Mr. Skeptic's libelous fraud took the cake. If Dennis had ever publicly published something that dishonest and damaging about somebody else, he would still be behind bars.
It is also much worse than I have represented here so far. I informed Mr. Skeptic about his misrepresentations of Dennis' "criminal" past over a year ago, as have others. I knew that Mr. Skeptic was being intentionally fraudulent with his presentation of Dennis' "criminal" past, or he was an idiot. Instead of uttering a thousand mea culpas when informed of his libel, Mr. Skeptic has actually been stepping up his attacks, harping recently on Dennis' "criminal" past. Mr. Skeptic obviously has no interest in presenting anything resembling the truth, and he even has the gall to call himself the only voice of reason on the Dennis issue. I have seen his kind before, and anymore, I think he may indeed be a paid "skeptic" of Dennis', campaigning like the BPA hit man did, trying to chase off people from involvement with Dennis. Anybody who has the slightest knowledge of the true story about Dennis knows that Mr. Skeptic is a fraud. Mr. Skeptic appears to be counting on his poison convincing the gullible, knowing that the knowledgeable know he is a fraud, but he does not care, as long as he can poison as many people as possible. He is setting himself up for some grim karma down the road.
Mr. Skeptic's web site gives the appearance of thoroughly debunking Dennis and his efforts. Appearance is the operative word. I have seen Mr. Skeptic announce numerous times how he "debunked" and otherwise disposed of Dennis. I have never seen him come close to doing that. Dennis feels that Mr. Skeptic may be clandestinely working for the energy interests (like the corporate hit men that we encountered were) or some agency like the CIA. I do not know. I used to be more than half convinced that the man was free-lancing his efforts, naturally being applauded by the energy interests and the establishment in general, but I was probably wrong. If he does not work for them, they have likely offered their assistance, either openly or clandestinely..
A prominent piece of Mr. Skeptic's web site shows his true colors, and makes me wonder about his intelligence. He has a "crackpot" page on his web site. He apparently is quite proud of it, and put substantial effort into constructing it. His crackpot page is a compendium of links to "crackpot" web sites. I too have studied fringe groups and their work for a long time. I have read the work of Jewish Holocaust Deniers. I have studied the Militias. I have intensively studied the right and left ends of the political spectrum. Dennis was prominent in the Patriot movement. Many people associated with Dennis' organization have some very alternative thinking. I have studied fringe science for a long time, and have studied metaphysics since I was a teenager. I have seen a lot of the strange and unusual, but Mr. Skeptic's crackpot page is one of the more "way out" things that I have ever seen. His page is nearly as weird as the most extreme conspiracy theorist's work.
Once you hit the page, you are treated to X-Files music and the moving image of a ghoul, like it is trying to grab you. Other images are big eyes that blink (obviously paranoid eyes), a flying ghost, a marching religious zealot, and other "fun" images. He has listed well over a hundred links to "crackpot" sites. Few will argue against there being many strange groups of people out there, and Mr. Skeptic links to many, but his derision and commentary is as "wacko" as the worst of those he derides. His categories are: Hate Groups, Dizzy New Age Groups, Total Schizo, Just Stupid, Strange Hobbies, Political Crackpots, Pseudo-science, Religious Nuts, and Other Lists of Crackpots. As if his headings were not informative enough, he provides his commentary: "This broad really hates men… more pro Waco wackos… a wacky female channeling cult… hot headed gays," and on and on.
Mr. Skeptic has linked to some strange sites, but a fair number did not seem to justify Mr. Skeptic's ranting. Some were not in English. I already knew well the work represented by several of those web sites. At best, Mr. Skeptic demonstrated no discernment over what is alternative, and what might be a little "out there." What he has done is label many things not mainstream thought as crackpot, even if it was from some of the most respected intellectuals alive. I have to wonder what is fueling his zeal. Maybe CIA money is, and maybe not.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that he once belonged to a religious cult, something he has openly admitted. Maybe that has fueled his fire. Mr. Skeptic has been damaged during his journey through life, as we all have, and it shows. I wonder how it happened. It might help explain his behavior. I will give a few examples of Mr. Skeptic's acumen and some of those "crackpot" sites he linked to. Judge for yourself what kind of "skeptic" he is.
Mr. Skeptic has a link to a group of activists trying to prevent the execution of Mumia Abu Jamal. Mr. Skeptic lists that group under "Hate Groups," alongside neonazi groups. If you do not know who Mumia Abu-Jamal is, he is one of the world's most famous political prisoners. He is on death row for a crime he supposedly committed in Philadelphia, which has one of America's most corrupt police forces. For years, Frank Rizzo headed Philadelphia's police force, and it was legendary for its brutality and corruption.
In my book, I cover the last generation's political ferment and the establishment's attempts to crush it. The FBI was a key element in destroying civil rights movements. The FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program was specifically designed to wipe out political activists. Black, native, student, anti-war, and civil rights activists were among those targeted by the FBI for "neutralization."(10) The FBI virtually wiped out the Black Panthers, murdering a number of them outright, like Fred Hampton. Many others were railroaded into prison on a variety of fabricated charges. The FBI often worked closely with local police. The worst offenses were committed in large cities like Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland and Chicago.
Mumia Abu-Jamal helped found the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers. His political career goes back to age 14 when he protested at George ("Segregation Forever") Wallace's 1968 presidential rally, and was beaten and arrested for his trouble. He became an influential journalist who the intensely racist Philadelphia police hated. During his career, Abu-Jamal interviewed such people as Julius Erving, Alex Haley and Bob Marley, and his work received national recognition, ending up in the Associated Press and on National Public Radio. Philadelphia Magazine named Abu-Jamal as one of its "people to watch" in 1981, citing his "eloquent, often passionate, and always insightful interviews (which) bring a special dimension to radio reporting."(11) For the FBI and Philadelphia police, Abu-Jamal had long been one of their "people to watch." He was under surveillance for years, and had been openly threatened by Philadelphia policemen.
In Philadelphia, radical blacks formed an organization called MOVE. MOVE was a back to the earth, militant, self-help movement for the blacks. It's leader, John Africa, became in incendiary political figure, a great orator who spoke out against the system's exploitation of black people. Predictably, the group came under fire from the Philadelphia police. They regularly harassed and beat MOVE members, sometimes murdering them. Abu-Jamal produced journalistic criticism of the police regularly, earning him the hatred of the police and then Mayor Rizzo. At a press conference, Rizzo openly called for silencing that gadfly Abu Jamal. Not long after that ominous comment by Rizzo, Abu Jamal found himself on death row.
In 1978, Philadelphia police laid siege to a MOVE home with 600 police. In 1985, the Philadelphia police made history when it dropped a fire bomb from a helicopter on a MOVE neighborhood, murdering six adults, five children and burning down sixty homes.
Kangaroo Court has been a regular feature of the Philadelphia judicial system. In recent years a scandal has rocked Philadelphia, as over one hundred prisoners have been released due to irregularities in the judicial process, like paying witnesses for perjured testimony to gain a conviction.(12)
Abu-Jamal was moonlighting as a cab driver one night in 1981, when he drove by the common scene of a Philadelphia policeman beating a black motorist. The motorist was Abu-Jamal's brother. It may have been a case of mistaken identity, as the brothers looked alike. Abu-Jamal stopped the cab and tried ending the beating. In short order, Abu-Jamal and the policeman were lying on the ground with gunshot wounds.
Therein lies a mystery. Abu-Jamal survived and the policeman died. The official record is clear on the matter: Abu-Jamal was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on charges of first-degree murder. The two main witnesses who convicted Abu-Jamal were both under Philadelphia police influence because of their criminal records. Compelling evidence exists that their testimonies were fabricated. Several other witnesses to the crime had testimony supporting Abu Jamal's innocence, and their testimony was suppressed. Similarly, the police fabricated a "confession" by Abu Jamal, months after Jamal supposedly made it. The bullet removed from the policeman could not be matched to Abu Jamal's pistol (he had it because he was moonlighting as a cab driver in inner city Philadelphia, an understandable situation). Abu-Jamal has been on death row for over fifteen years. There were many irregularities with his trial and conviction.(13) The judge who sentenced him to death has sentenced more black men to death than any other active judge in the United States. They used to call judges like him "hanging judges." Six former prosecutors have gone on the record, stating from experience that no accused person had a chance at a fair trial in that judge's court.
When one of their own dies, police go out of their way to make somebody pay, and it was apparently too good to be true when a bleeding Abu-Jamal was found lying next to the policeman. I have seen Kangaroo Court in action myself (See "my not so brief synopsis" of my book), and Abu-Jamal's case reads like a textbook example. Abu-Jamal is perhaps America's only political prisoner on death row today.
If you look into it, one thing is clear: Abu-Jamal is a talented writer. His reputation as a journalist was deserved. Just before his scheduled execution in 1995, he published the book Live from Death Row. It is an eloquent series of essays. I could not have written as well from death row. Naturally, like with Dennis' case, writing from prison is considered a crime in the Neanderthal minds that often run our prison systems, particularly when the writing does not flatter the jailers or the judicial system. Abu-Jamal was served with a misconduct report for writing the book.
The struggle continues to save Abu-Jamal's life. The courts have recently denied him a new trial, and the wheels of "justice" are grinding to execute him. Abu Jamal has a new book published with his most recent writings, titled Death Blossoms, Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience. The government is moving to permanently silence his voice. I have heard a rumor that the federal government is planning to send the Marines to Philadelphia when they execute him, to keep back the hordes that will protest and try to prevent his execution. The Mumia Abu Jamal case demonstrates just what kind of nation we are.
The groups trying to save Abu-Jamal's life are the standard left wing groups that have been speaking out against racism, murder and other outrages in our society and around the world. People like Nelson Mandela, Salman Rushdie, Elie Wiesel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jesse Jackson, Wole Soyinka, ex-attorney general Ramsey Clark, Vaclav Havel, actor Michael Farrell (Alan Alda's sidekick on the TV show MASH), Alice Walker (The author of the Color Purple), author E.L. Doctorow and many others are speaking out. "Hate Groups" like Amnesty International, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the European Parliament, and members of several foreign governments like Japan, Denmark, Belgium are also trying to prevent his execution. I have been involved with trying to prevent his execution. In all, global organizations whose members number in the millions are protesting his impending execution. It is almost incomprehensible that Mr. Skeptic has listed a group trying to prevent an execution as a "Hate Group." Maybe Mr. Skeptic believes everything he reads in the newspaper, and he lives near Philadelphia.
One agonizing issue regarding executing a journalist is that we are about the world's only "free" nation with a death penalty, and one of six nations that execute juveniles. We are the world's leader in executing children.(14) The issue of Abu Jamal is illustrative of our nation's barbarity.
Mr. Skeptic classified a group of people who are protesting McDonalds' corporate practices a "Hate Group," describing their site as having a "neo-PC hatred of McDonalds restaurants." To call the people protesting McDonalds' corporate practices a "Hate Group" is another example of Mr. Skeptic's acumen. Like Mumia Abu Jamal, the McDonalds case is another instance where the powerful have tried silencing a voice of dissent. In one sense, calling McDonalds protestors a "Hate Group" is aligned with the "skeptical" philosophy. The standard "skeptical" world-view seems to be that huge corporations and other powerful groups can do no wrong, and anybody who challenges them has a screw loose or, astoundingly, are "Hate Groups." As far as I have seen, the "skeptics" are among the establishment's most strident defenders, and Mr. Skeptic's behavior nearly proves the case. The McDonalds situation in some ways epitomizes the havoc that corporate practices wreak on the population and environment. Such dynamics are invisible to "skeptics" like Mr. Skeptic, and his description of their "neo-PC hatred" lays that out clearly.
McDonalds pioneered the notion of "fast food." McDonalds has been the leader in industrializing the eating experience. The McDonalds protest situation covers vast territory. I will try making it brief. There is a book in process regarding the situation, and an article adapted from it was published in Z Magazine in September 1997. McDonalds is the world's largest user of beef, and second place in chickens. Raising animals to slaughter and eat is a tremendous waste of resources. The West's meat-eating culture is creating large-scale environmental devastation. If you research the numbers, they are overwhelming. For instance, to produce a single pound of meat requires 2,500 gallons of water.(15) It takes 100 times more water to produce a pound of meat than a pound of wheat. Animal flesh is a terribly inefficient way of producing dietary protein. In the watery Northwest, more than half of its vast water supply is used to raise livestock for meat.(16) The meat and dairy industry in California consumes half that state's water supply.
As I cover in my book, the global political-economic order, led by the United States and huge transnational corporations like McDonalds, rules the world. Anybody who steps out of line or tries opting out of the global capitalist system, will invariably be visited by U.S. troops or a U.S.-financed destabilization effort. Killing Hope by William Blum devotes awe-inspiring detail to dozens of instances of U.S. international gangsterism since World War II.
The McDonalds phenomenon is a classic example of how rampant capitalism is destroying the planet. In bringing assembly line strategies to the eating experience, everything has been reduced to the lowest common denominator. The McDonalds strategy has been to sell vast amounts of cheap food with a low profit margin per unit, and the profits attained by the huge volume of food sold. It is a standard corporate strategy. What has that strategy cost the planet?
On the meat front, McDonalds has been a leading influence in revolutionizing how animals are raised. In order to sell the greatest amount of meat at the lowest possible price, the practice of factory farming came into being. I used to say that if a person visited a slaughterhouse and saw what was done to animals to produce their tasty burgers, bacon, and hot dogs, most people would become vegetarian on the spot. Today with factory farming, people only need to visit where the animals are being raised to become vegetarians.
By all accounts, visiting today's chicken and pig factories is a hellish experience. In the drive for maximum profit and minimum costs, fast fading are the days of pigs wandering around a farm, or a barnyard full of chickens. Today's pig and chicken factories are the ultimate triumph of farming's industrialization. Those pigs and chickens live their entire lives without seeing the light of day. They are kept in cages stacked to the ceiling, and fed drugs, antibiotics, hormones, cheap feed, and stimulated to produce the largest weight gain in the shortest amount of time for the least amount of resources used.
Across America's heartland, pig and chicken factories are replacing the farms. Seventy percent of America's pigs are raised in pig factories today, and half of America's small family farms that raised pigs have gone out of business in the past decade. Naturally, the traditional American farmer is not doing the work anymore. America's underclass, like Mexican immigrants, work in the farm factories owned by huge agribusiness corporations. It is among the lowest-paid work in America, down there with picking beans. Chicken factory workers have injury and illness rates far higher than occupations like coal mining and construction. In the pig factories, the workers are supposed to wear gas masks because the excrement fumes are overpowering. Even so, according to the American Lung Association, 70% of those pig factory workers develop respiratory disease symptoms, and 58% have chronic bronchitis. Workers have died numerous times by being exposed to excrement fumes. The pigs do not get gas masks.
Pigs are among the most social of all animals, and probably smarter than dogs. As pigs are crammed into cages, the stress of their inhumane environment leads them to kill each other and engage in cannibalism. In factory farming, pigs, chickens, sheep and cows become "production units" with zero quality to their lives. They are merely machines to turn feed and drugs into profitable flesh. Another problem introduced by pig factory farming is the issue of pig excrement. Across America today, there are lakes, almost oceans, of pig excrement from the factories. Nobody is quite sure what to do with it. It is a similar problem to the nuclear waste lakes at nuclear facilities across America, though, fortunately, pig excrement is not radioactive…yet.
A protégé of mine previously worked at a chicken company where they raised egg-laying hens. They raised them from egg to sale. One day he told me about the business. It was enlightening. At their facility, they had huge incubators where the eggs hatched. As the chicks hatched, they were immediately swept onto a conveyor belt, beginning their corporate careers. The first people the chicks met were known as "sexers." What a sexer did was pick up a chick, turn it over, and see what sex it was. If it was female, it could look forward to a life expectancy of less than two years. Outside of the factory setting, chickens can live to be twenty years old, and average almost ten years. If the chick was male, the sexer dropped it into a chute. The chute led to a grinder where the chick was instantly shredded. The shredded male chicks were carted off as hazardous waste.
The female chicks enjoyed a better fate, though that is arguable. The chicks were immediately put in pens and fed. That company only raised chicks to egg-laying age. They produced an egg-laying hen for about 50 cents apiece. Without antibiotics and drugs, factory farming would be impossible. The confined quarters breed disease, so all factory animals have antibiotics as part of their feed. About half of this nation's antibiotic production goes directly into animal feed.
In a few months, the chicks have been fed and stimulated to maturity, and are ready to begin their egg-laying careers. The modern egg factories typically have cages stacked to the ceiling. Inside these huge buildings, the lighting is manipulated (simulating night and day) to gain the maximum egg production. The chickens are crowded several to a cage, a cage about the size of an oven. The chickens can barely move. Like the pigs, the crowded chickens engage in anti-social behavior, attacking, killing and eating each other. The solution implemented by the geniuses who designed such systems is to de-beak the chickens. De-beaking is done by cutting off the top-half of their beaks, a process done with no anesthesia, obviously, and a procedure that kills many chickens from sheer shock.
The chickens lay about an egg a day under the factory conditions, far more than normal egg-laying hens used to lay. After about eighteen months of life, the hen's back end blows out due to the stress of excessive egg-laying. About twenty percent of the chickens die under those conditions, and do not make it to eighteen months. Those dead chickens are called "spent fowl" in the industry parlance. The "spent fowl" is sold to soup companies and the like. My protégé told me that the production managers lamented the fact that the hens only produced for about a year before their "ass blew out." Another ingenious solution is being developed for that problem. The proposed solution is to genetically engineer chickens that will not explode for perhaps two years of production. I am not making this up. If look into the situation, it blows your mind. Here is a quote by one of those hard-working biological engineers, stating with pride and not a trace of irony, "At the Animal Research Institute, we are trying to breed animals without legs, and chickens without feathers."(17)
Chickens without feathers are easy to pluck, and animals without legs will not "waste" energy moving around, and instead put that food energy to better use, like getting fattened up. A similar situation exists in dairy farming. Dairy cows used to live to be about twenty years old. With the wonderful new factory methods, a dairy cow will live to be four is she is lucky. Dairy cows are artificially inseminated and artificially stimulated to keep producing that milk. Those are reasons why they do not live long. Another byproduct of the dairy industry is the male offspring. Similar to the chicken industry, if the young animal is female, life is "good." If the offspring is male, a common fate is becoming a veal calf. When I looked into how veal calves are produced, it seemed like something the Nazi doctors might have dreamed up.
A veal calf is a similar byproduct to those superfluous male chicks, though their careers last longer, and there is an economic value to them. Veal is treasured for its tender, pale flesh. How do they produce such tender, pale flesh? A veal calf is put into a cage and chained so he cannot lie down, but must stand. He will spend his entire life there. In that manner, he is purposely kept from exercising, keeping his muscles soft. That is how the softness is produced. The pale flesh is created by purposely malnourishing the calf. Veal comes from calves fed a diet designed to make them anemic, hence the flesh's pale color. Of course, such conditions are ripe for disease, so the calf's diet is liberally laced with antibiotics and drugs. Even then, veal calves suffer from diarrhea and other maladies. After about six months of that delightful existence, never seeing the light of day, the calf is slaughtered. Veal is a menu delicacy, which, like pork, is another one of America's "white meats." Hundreds of thousands of calves meet that fate each year in America.
As always with those practices, the goal is maximizing the profits by keeping costs low. The trends are obvious, the goals understandable. In the constant quest for more production, a few years ago Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) was introduced to produce even more milk from those beleaguered cows. Steve Milloy and Elizabeth Whelan (see my Julian Simon section) think BGH is another wonderful agricultural innovation. That system truly merits the term "evil." It is faithful to the materialistic viewpoint that has prevailed in the West for centuries. Factory farming is merely one logical conclusion of that mentality. In a world where the prevailing view denies humans the benefit of souls, animals are far, far down that contrived scale of creation.
Another byproduct of that worldview is the practice of animal experimentation. Tens of millions of animals are killed in American laboratories each year for "testing." The apologists for that practice are well paid and many, telling us how "vital" animal experiments are for our standard of living and health. The apologist's standard argument is that if we ever stopped the practice, it would seriously impact our well being. Animal experimentation is called "necessary" for everything from winning the war on cancer to testing shampoo. I do not agree. Many people do not agree. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is one of many groups trying to abolish those inhumane activities. They propose alternatives to every animal experiment there is.
The only rationale for our treatment of animals is "might makes right." We murder tens of millions of animals in "experiments" each year because we can. Few seem to ask themselves if such a practice is ethical, but from both Christianity and science come ready rationales. God put us in charge of the animals, to do with as we please, so goes the popular interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Science in its infinite wisdom has declared that we are the crowning achievement of evolution. Although we possess no souls, according to the materialistic scientism of people like Carl Sagan, less evolved beings like animals are there for our use. Similar logic has justified slavery, genocide and a host of wonders. If humanity survives the coming transition, a new level of awareness will take root, and we will desire to harm no living thing. We are not there yet, but groups like PETA are pioneering that mentality. For all the grotesque justification for animal experimentation, not all doctors and scientists are of the same mindset. Here is a quote from a founder of the Mayo Clinic. "I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil."(18)
McDonalds is not staffed by the world's most evil people. They are just pioneers and one of the most successful practitioners in an evil system. The protestors took on McDonalds to protest the system, McDonalds being a logical target.
With all the bad publicity they have received of late, McDonalds apparently investigated the possibility of using free-range eggs, but abandoned that idea upon learning that "free range" eggs are 50% more expensive than factory eggs.(19) On the issue of cows and beef, McDonalds has long been known to buy the cheapest beef it can. In California the beef industry is large, and I had a few friends in the business. One buddy told me a story regarding a cow auction he attended, where the corporate buyers assembled to buy their supply. The McDonalds buyers were well known to buy the cheapest cows they could. My buddy told me that as a McDonalds crew loaded their bedraggled purchases into the cattle cars, one cow collapsed. The law states that a dead animal cannot be used for human consumption. It must be properly slaughtered. The industry is prepared for collapsed cows. The McDonalds crew had a winch on their truck that they attached to the collapsed cow, and hauled it aboard. If they could get the cow into the slaughterhouse while still alive, it would be legal meat. My buddy told it as a funny story.
In the dairy industry, the cows' bodies become depleted from the stresses of their lives, which is why they do not live long. Like "spent fowl," when a cow collapses, the industry term is "downed cow." Those "downed cows," like the "spent fowl," are sold to companies that make their flesh into something that is fed to the American public.
That multifaceted evil ultimately takes a human toll. Human consumers of factory-farmed animals eat flesh loaded with antibiotics, drugs, hormones, and other chemicals. About 20-30% of all supermarket chickens are infected with live salmonella bacteria (Though recent efforts by the USDA are lowering that number. The meat is not from healthier birds, it is just free of salmonella.). Hundreds of Americans have died due to bacteria-infected hamburgers. We had the recently delight of Mad Cow Disease, caused by feeding cows their ground up relatives, in another ploy to increase those profits. Other nightmares are sure to follow. Naturally, the solution to these mounting problems are other technological "fixes," like nuking the food, subjecting it to radiation as a way to kill the diseases increasingly appearing in the food.
In this century, menarche has steadily decreased in the industrialized nations. A meaningful comparison is Hong Kong versus Mainland China. Hong Kong has an industrialized diet, and 25 of McDonalds 50 biggest outlets are in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, menarche has dropped to 12, whereas on the mainland it is still 17. A prime suspected culprit is the growth hormones the meat was raised with. Since McDonalds first arrived in Hong Kong, the average teenager has gained 13% in weight.(20)
Nutritionally, McDonalds food is indefensible. Virtually all fast food is nutritionally indefensible. It is high in saturated fat, sugar, salt and dozens of additives, and low in fiber, vitamins and minerals. One internal McDonalds memo surfaced that frankly admitted, "We can't really address or defend nutrition. We don't sell nutrition and people don't come to McDonalds for nutrition."(21)
What do people go to McDonalds for? They go for a cheap, fast, tasty meal. Children go there to play on the McDonalds playground, get toys from the latest Disney movie (McDonalds is the Disneyland of food.), and see Ronald McDonalds' smiling face.
McDonalds workers are among the lowest paid workers in their industry, and the retail food industry is one of the lower paying industries to start with. Like virtually all corporations, McDonalds is staunchly anti-union, firing pro-union workers. The employee turnover is immense, well over 100% annually (I have seen the number of 300% in America). McDonalds also helped pioneer another profitable labor practice: hiring part-time workers. Part-time workers receive minimal employee benefits. Companies like Wal Mart and United Parcel Service have emulated such practices. In standard neocolonial fashion, those cute toys given away with Happy Meals are usually made in sweatshop conditions in Asia.
The trash created by fast food is also staggering. Go to any fast food establishment and observe how much trash is created by your meal. Every American city has fast food trash blowing in the wind.
The fast food revolution is also chopping down the rainforests. Of course, it is bigger than just McDonalds, but McDonalds is part of a neocolonial system whereby rainforests are being chopped down to produce cattle ranches so Westerners can have cheap beef. Though McDonalds now avows that their beef will not come from ex-rainforest land, they have led the juggernaut that has produced the trend of chopping down the rainforests to pasture cattle, getting the whole world hooked on beef. Brazil is a notorious example. Cattle ranching in devastated rain forest areas is about as ecologically unsound a practice as there is. Tropical rain forest soils are thin, and cattle ranching on those soils is disastrous, eroding the soil to lifeless bedrock in short order.
McDonalds is no more rapacious than any other corporation, at least consciously. They are going for the profit, like all corporations, and if they have to use sweatshop labor and factory-farmed animals, turn cropland into far less productive pasturage and sell their product with a clown's smiling face, so be it. All the fast food companies play the same game. McDonalds was just the pioneer and most successful practitioner. Again, McDonalds is merely the logical conclusion of industrialization, capitalism and materialism. One way McDonalds kept criticism of their practices from being very public was suing anybody who spoke up, another standard corporate practice.
In England, a handful of people protested McDonalds practices. In 1985, six people handed out flyers titled "What's wrong with McDonalds?" In 1990, McDonalds threatened lawsuits against the protestors. Four backed off, and only two had the courage to continue: a barkeeper and an ex-mail carrier. They were affiliated with Greenpeace.
McDonalds sued for libel, asking $30 billion in damages. It blew up in their faces. What would have become one more marginalized tale became a global story when McDonalds sued those two people. A $30 billion corporate giant tried silencing two people for telling the truth. It became the longest trial in Britain's history. Libel laws in England are very different than United States libel laws. Of course, McDonalds pressured the court as much as possible. I have lived through that kind of situation myself. Money and power talk very loudly in the courtroom, though from behind the scenes. The judge's mouth moves, but the corporate voice is heard. The trial was rigged in a number of ways, and McDonalds was awarded 60,000 pounds. The way the libel laws in England were executed, the judge found in favor of McDonalds although no libel was proven. McDonalds was not put in the position of proving libel, as we in America know it. The defendants were put in the position of "proving" that their charges against McDonalds were not overstated for rhetorical purposes. McDonalds' lawsuit could not have been brought in America.(22) McDonalds bit off far more than it had bargained for. The bad publicity McDonalds received far outweighed their legal victory, although the McDonalds juggernaut rolls onward with undamaged revenues and profits. In the mind of Mr. Skeptic, those English activists were a "Hate Group."
Mr. Skeptic had a link to Steve Milloy's "Junk Science" pages, calling it "A great compendium of Junk Science." Mr. Skeptic is a great admirer and spiritual comrade of Milloy. Milloy was also flaying those "crackpots" and their "junk science." What "junk science" was Milloy "demolishing," and what "sound science" was he promoting? The pejorative of "junk science" says a lot about Mr. Milloy. Milloy is the professional descendant of people like Frederick Stare. The smug sarcasm of Sagan and Randi pales beside Mr. Milloy's work, who appears to have gone to Rush Limbaugh Finishing School.
The notorious Cato Institute, Julian Simon's old haunt, apparently helps fund Milloy. Like all good propaganda, there are nuggets of truth amongst the disinformation. Milloy allows that America's health habits are responsible for a great deal of suffering, in an admission of the obvious. He is like Julian Simon or Elizabeth Whelan, where he has apparently never met an agribusiness or petrochemical company he did not like. He lets others make many of his editorial comments. He will not always get in the line of fire himself, but will reproduce almost any pro-chemical piece he can find. What he and Whelan have done repeatedly is look to the Washington Times as their paper of record. The same person who runs the Moonies owns the Washington Times. It is about as far right a publication as this nation has.
Milloy reproduced a Washington Times article which extolled the virtues of Olestra (The miraculous, indigestible "fake" fat that has given many consumers diarrhea attacks, and God only knows the long-term effects.), an article where the author is openly disappointed that Olestra is not a universal food additive quite yet.(23) Milloy reproduced an article from an Australian organization that believes a major part of air pollution may be caused by grass.(24) His organization The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) promotes Bovine Somatotropin (BST), more popularly known as Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH,).(25) Milloy reproduced a New York Times editorial saying that 100,000 people dying each year from adverse drug reactions is "no epidemic," as it represents 0.5% of all hospital drug treatments.(26) How comforting. That is many times the number of people who die from illegal drugs each year. Milloy reproduced a University of Washington study that suggested that being old and fat was healthier than being old and thin.(27) Here is a clever Milloy quote, epitomizing the tenor of his work: "Schering Plough says its competitor's product (Ex-Lax) causes cancer. I say Schering Plough deserves a junk science enema!"(28)
More of Milloy's propaganda states "One in three Americans develops cancer as a function of being alive."(29) That is one more example of the false logic of assuming the average is normal. Milloy adheres closely to the "you get old, you get cancer, you die" medical establishment party line.
I also saw a new twist on the dirty money angle. While Whelan has generally made it a secret of where her money comes from, Milloy is somewhat open about it. In answering the "Who pays for the Junk Science Home Page?" question, Milloy's web page replies: "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. But who pays isn't important; the substance is. Steve figures he has the junk science debate won when an opponent raises a collateral issue like funding."(30)
TASSC is a spiritual cousin of Whelan's American Council on Science and Health. The TASSC even has the gall to call itself a "grassroots" organization. A genuine grass roots activist's term for TASSC is an "Astroturf" organization. Corporate America has funded many fake "grass roots" organizations that advocate corporate positions from a "neutral" perspective. I have seen that phenomenon far too often.(31) Like Julian Simon, TASSC and Milloy troll the scientific and press release waters for whatever supports their pro-corporate position. Calling it a propaganda operation is being charitable. Mr. Skeptic is a Junk Science fan, and thinks Milloy's pages are a great list of "crackpots."
I will not comment on Mr. Skeptic's listing of Dennis under "Just Stupid" and "Pseudo-science" on his crackpot page. Mr. Skeptic's comments can do the talking. I will finish dealing with Mr. Skeptic with one last clever link. He listed Covert Action Quarterly under "Total Schizo," describing it as a "great zine for conspiracy buffs." Statements like that make me think he may work for somebody else, like the CIA. He has the debunker vocabulary down pat, using more than one pejorative in the same sentence. "Zine" is a hip word that describes a fun, counter-cultural publication, often published from somebody's bedroom, usually a fan magazine about underground music groups. It is not substantial enough to be called a magazine, so the diminutive "zine" came into being. If Mr. Skeptic actually read an issue of Covert Action, he would know that "zine" is about as far from describing that magazine as you can get. I subscribed to Covert Action for several years.
It is the most respected publication regarding exposure of our spy agencies that I know of. One of Covert Action's founders was Phil Agee, the legendary CIA agent who first exposed what the CIA really did, from an insider's perspective. Inside the Company, CIA Diary, was published in 1975 and dealt the CIA a blow from which it is still recovering. The United States hounded Agee across the globe after his book was published. His book On the Run documents how he was expelled from one European nation after another until he gained political asylum in West Germany. On the Run documents how the CIA tried stopping him from writing his book, to the extent where they tried luring him to Spain to "neutralize" him, though from a Kangaroo Court scenario or outright murder is still classified. People like Noam Chomsky, arguably the world's most respected academic, have contributed articles regularly to Covert Action. Covert Action is a magazine of stupendous scholarship.
If there was one publication I would recommend to find out how America is really run, Covert Action might be it. "Zine" does not describing that magazine. The pejorative "conspiracy buff" shows either Mr. Skeptic's political infancy or that he knows what he is doing. "Conspiracy buff" is a standard establishment label for anybody who questions authority. "Buff" is a denigrating term that often portrays serious investigators as hyperactive stamp collectors. If Mr. Skeptic knew anything about politics, he would know that "conspiracy" does not apply to what Covert Action investigates, unless we label everything our military, CIA, NSA, FBI and corporations do as a "conspiracy."
There is a political spectrum in America, generally seen as extending from "left" to "right." "Right" and "left" is overused anymore, and can be misleading. I have found great overlap in the "left" and "right," which are supposedly on opposite ends of the spectrum. People like Noam Chomsky would rather we stopped using those terms (Though he has used it in correspondence with me, calling himself part of the "left press," to demonstrate how ingrained it is.). "Left" and "right" have become clichés in many instances, but I will use it broadly in this analysis, realizing that they can be a limiting terms.
Our mainstream politics are actually right wing, dominated by the rich.(32) To the right of the mainstream are folks like the Militias, the Patriots, the Ku Klux Klan, The Spotlight, Fundamentalist Christians, the John Birch Society, Holocaust Deniers and the like. There are many conspiracy theorists in their ranks, and sometimes the word "buff" might apply. I have studied the right extensively, and there definitely are some strange theories there, but I have seen too many strange things to laugh at them all. Significant aspects of their theories ring true and make me think, and I have had real world experiences that attest to some of them.
The majority stands to the left of the mainstream. Or at least they think to the left, but most still shuffle along with the herd management the elite perform, keeping everybody riveted to the tube, reading the daily newspaper and going to work everyday. The "mainstream" does not really respond to the needs or wishes of most people. To the left of the "mainstream" are groups like feminists, environmentalists, civil rights activists, peace activists, homeless advocates, gay activists, communists, socialists, children advocates, animal rights activists, advocates for the elderly and probably most of Christianity.
The right and left both point out the establishment's abuse of its power, but the way they see it happening differs. It is a conflict similar to the two views of history known as the "Great Man" and "Mass Movement" views. The "Great Man" view has a few extraordinary people changing the course of history, making their way into the history books. The "Mass Movement" view sees history as the cumulative story of humanity, and the historical figures, though great some of them may have been, were like a ship's prow. It is what we see first, but there is plenty behind it. It is like the space program. Neil Armstrong was probably the first man to step on the moon, but the effort of millions of people got him there.
The right often subscribes to the "Great Man" dynamic, and consequently sees many dark societal aspects resulting from the actions of relatively few people, usually conspiring together. The right often poses "conspiracy theories." I have read many of their theories, and I do not agree with many of them, but I also believe many of them could be true, to a degree, and I have not encountered many that seem to beam in from Neptune. With our steeply hierarchical social systems, where four hundred people have as much wealth as four billion, mutual self-interest is something obvious to those at the top. Many conspiracies have played out over the millennia. Julius Caesar was one of six Caesars in a row deposed by Senate conspiracies. In the past decade, the owners of professional baseball teams in America were convicted of a conspiracy to keep players' wages (relatively) low.
The left sees history more as mass action. One prominent area of study in left scholarship is known as "structural analysis," or "institutional analysis." Those studies look at how society is organized, particularly regarding its major institutions, and analyze how those shape society's function. In general, they do not explain the major events of history with conspiracies. They see the sweep of history as the result of how millions and billions of people live their lives, and they also admit the important role elites play. I believe people like Chomsky and Covert Action even go too far in dissociating themselves from "conspiracy theories." Chomsky wrote a book to debunk the notion that JFK was assassinated because he was too much of a "dove" on Vietnam.(33) It created a stir in left circles. A noted left scholar, Michael Parenti, had a vigorous dispute with Chomsky's views on the JFK matter, and stated that there is a "conspiracy phobia" on the left.(34) I took Covert Action to task in 1995 for its rather breezy reviews of Kooks and the 50 Greatest Conspiracies of all Time.(35) Much of the theorizing in those books was not nearly as way out as the Covert Action reviewer made it seem.
In general, those two often-competing viewpoints can also be called "conscious" and "unconscious." With conspiracies, events turn out like a select few want them to. In structural analysis, the system produces the outcome, without conscious design. I do not want to oversimplify the situation, but that is the general trend that I have noticed. I believe it also has to do with one's spiritual beliefs. Religious people generally believe a creator consciously designed the universe. They do not believe they are here by accident. The prevailing cosmology as promoted by people like Carl Sagan is that "In the beginning, there was the Big Bang," and through fortuitous accidents of chemistry and physics, life evolved. Nobody designed it that way, it happened by accident.
In general, the structuralists have the Big Bang and the Theory of Evolution as their Book of Genesis. The "conspiracy theorists" believe that nothing happened by accident. It is fascinating to study those divergent points of view. I believe there is merit in both viewpoints, and limitations in each. Obviously, Covert Action is not the "zine for conspiracy buffs." For Mr. Skeptic to make that statement either shows me his political infancy, or that he is a disinformation expert, working for somebody in clandestine fashion. I believe the "clueless theory" more than the "conspiracy theory" regarding Mr. Skeptic, but I could be wrong.
That is all the writing I plan to do regarding Mr. Skeptic. I do not plan on analyzing or dealing with his work any more. The reader might ask why I have devoted so much effort to him. Should he be beneath my notice? Unfortunately, like Elizabeth Whelan, Steve Milloy, Julian Simon and others, the media has presented Mr. Skeptic as a man with credible things to say. The media has repeatedly portrayed Mr. Skeptic as a valid critic of Dennis and his efforts. As Dennis has been making national noise the past few years, I have become aware of numerous media accounts regarding Dennis, including a nationally televised documentary, where Mr. Skeptic is the prominent critic of Dennis. This essay was partly to show what a "worthy" critic Mr. Skeptic really is.
Mr. Skeptic has been searching for my work on the Internet, and I recently heard from an avid reader of my work. He reproduced my old 600-page web site. Mr. Skeptic found his obscure web site and encouraged my fan to enter the debate. I had an educational experience dialoguing with Mr. Skeptic. One unhappy day, Mr. Skeptic will find this web site and not be pleased with this essay, but I will not engage him in a debate again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. In retrospect, I was far too generous in assessing Mr. Skeptic's motivation. I would rather err on the side of giving somebody the benefit of the doubt, but there is no more doubt to give him the benefit of.
He will likely counter this essay with something like, "Some of what I have criticized Dennis about is legitimate." Yes, some of his criticisms may be legitimate. Mr. Skeptic demonstrated blatant dishonesty and poor judgment by reporting Dennis' "criminal" record the way he did, and by listing a group trying to prevent somebody's execution as a "Hate Group." I will not spend any more time sorting through his lies and disinformation to get at what might be legitimate. You are free to. All disinformation has pieces of truth amongst the rubbish. That is what makes it plausible. Disinformation is only worth analyzing to expose it for what it is. When somebody has demonstrated that they tell lies, particularly the damaging lies Mr. Skeptic has published, you risk plenty by relying on their word for anything. You never know when the next lie will come, or what to believe.
Searching for integrity is my primary compass in sifting through the world of information for the "truth." Sadly, Mr. Skeptic's work lacks it. People can honestly believe and repeat lies, which is unfortunate and something I have seen all too often. Parts of my web site may later prove to be false, yet I am not knowingly presenting anything that I know is false. Mr. Skeptic has repeated lies shamefully and knowingly. His reporting of Dennis' "criminal" record I put in the Big Lie category, and listing a group trying to prevent Abu Jamal's execution as a "Hate Group" almost defies description.
My book covers the "skeptical" movement in much greater detail. I do not wish to dialogue with the "skeptics" anymore. When you realize that you are dealing with a fundamentally dishonest movement, you cannot believe anything they say, and debating them is pointless. I am not saying that they have not validly "debunked" anything. They have, yet the ax they are grinding is so obvious, and their biases so entrenched, and I have seen so many cases of dishonesty in their ranks, the worst coming from prominent members like Carl Sagan, that it is better (for me) to ignore their work as of dubious integrity.
As I relate in the "spiritual perspective" section of this web site, a dark path initiate's favorite strategy to enslave people is putting them behind bars to "protect them." The attacks on Dennis in Washington and California were both "Consumer Protection" actions, with soldiers like Ms. Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Deputy, Ms. Prosecutor and others getting their hands bloody. Mr. Skeptic's stated rationale for relentlessly attacking Dennis was "protecting" all those poor Americans who would buy dealerships and financially support the project. Julian Simon, Elizabeth Whelan and Steve Milloy state they are protecting the public from the disinformation of the "doomsayers." Such selfless "protection" they have provided the public. I could not sleep at night had we traded places, but Milloy and Whelan probably sleep as soundly as babes. They are on their own divine path. I would not want to be in their shoes, and they would not want to be in mine.
(1) Blackmore, In Search of the Light, p. 270.
(2) Rawlins' original account was published in Fate Magazine, in its October 1981 issue. I read the account as it was reproduced in The Velikovskian, vol. II, no. 1, in 1994. Rawlins' quote is on page 18.
(3) Randi. The Mask of Nostradamus. p. 8.
(4) Randi. The Mask of Nostradamus. p. 7.
(5) Dennis Lee, The Alternative, p. 66.
(6) Dennis Lee, The Alternative, exhibit 9C.
(7) Dennis Lee, The Alternative, exhibit 1B.
(8) This will be an inordinately long footnote, and you have my apologies. This can be considered a section by itself. The issue of Carl Sagan is one that I plan to discuss rather thoroughly in future writings. Sagan himself was something of an enigma. On one hand, he was the most famous living scientist, until he died a couple of years ago. On the other hand, there is the question of why he was so famous. He was an astronomer/professor who dealt with a wide range of disciplines beyond his formal training, like I do, but his contributions to science itself do not really befit his popular stature. On one hand, Sagan was a sober voice of reason in science, even of conscience, especially when dealing with environmental or military issues. He could be surprisingly sensitive, when writing about dolphins or religious fanatics. Yet he also could be dogmatic, arrogant, pompous and - which is the issue that concerns me the most - dishonest. Sagan wrote in the realm of science, though some of his colleagues will tell you that at times he did not hold up his end on collaborative efforts, being too busy with his more famous activities. Where he kept to astronomy and other aspects of his professional discipline, I will not comment, except to say that he never did anything Nobel-worthy that I am aware of. His claim to fame was being a popularizer. His book Cosmos spawned a TV series, and that is what made him a household word. There is nothing wrong with that. Einstein is the most famous scientist of all time, justifiably so, in my opinion, who spent much of his time trying to make his ideas understandable to the lay audience.
Sagan's work as a popularizer made him famous. What kind of a popularizer was he? The book Cosmos and the TV series it spawned made him a household name. Hugh Martin analyzes Sagan's use of language in Cosmos, and his analysis is not kind to Sagan, and I have to agree with Martin on his thesis (See "Sagan's Pseudo-Sagacity: Style as a Reflection of Character (or Lack Thereof)" in The Velikovskian, vol. III, No. 4.). To millions of Americans, Sagan was the very voice of science. Sagan regularly wrote articles for Parade Magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement with an audience of eighty million Americans. There is a burden of responsibility in being the voice of science for millions of people. Martin analyzed Sagan's use of language in addressing his lay audience in Cosmos, and laid bare Sagan's lofty prose for what it was: pompous. Using words not typically encountered by the audience you are writing for is a problem that popularizers must face, and how they face it is an important test of the execution of their craft. In Cosmos, Sagan used the words: hubristic, doxological, eschatology, circumjacent, occulted, dryad, maenad and vouchsafed. I have one of the largest vocabularies of anybody I know, and I had to look up doxological and maenad. Hubristic is a word you will never see, except in the dictionary…and Carl Sagan's writing. The use of such five-dollar words is questionable in addressing the Cosmos audience, but that is the least of Sagan's crimes against the English language. In Cosmos, Sagan also used: irreparable, interstices, transmogrified, immolate, provocation, distillation, plenum, concatenation, palpable, fecundated and integuments. I had to look up a few of those words too. The problem with Sagan's use of those words was that he used them improperly. To introduce another big word, what Sagan was writing were malapropisms. Sagan was killing the language through his misuse of the vocabulary, and instead of making things clearer for his readers, he confused them. That is a mistake that a thirteen-year-old boy can make, having a blast with his first thesaurus, but for Sagan to use such highfalutin words, and use them incorrectly, is pathetic. Also, Sagan would write meaningless yet impressive-sounding sentences like "The Cosmos is rich in the subtle machinery of awe." If you can figure out what he meant by that, let me know.
If you are going to use big, esoteric words to a lay audience, what is your purpose? I hope it is to relate big, esoteric ideas in a way that the audience can understand, so they walk away better educated. That is the popularizer's ideal, to educate the uninitiated. When you use those big words to a lay audience, an audience that trusts you, and you cannot even use those words properly, there are a few choice words that can describe that behavior, none of them flattering. Also, Sagan would throw out nuggets to his readers about how evolution and space cameras work in Cosmos, but he would be wrong. Sagan was committing popularizer charlatanry. As far as his image versus reality with his book Cosmos, Sagan was a fake. I think what Sagan was doing, and his readers may have lapped some of it up, was making his writing seem sophisticated and full of meaning. Everybody felt dazzled with his mind and the ideas he discussed, feeling good that they could even pronounce the words that Sagan was using, realizing that actually understanding what he was writing was less important than being impressed with his command of the language. With Sagan, it sometimes seemed that the bigger the word, the smaller the idea. Martin ended his critique with "Good English is honest English. Dr. Sagan's language is dishonest. A lot of people buy his books because they think they're buying difficult but profound thoughts simplified by a remarkable mind. Dr. Sagan is ripping these people off."
Sagan was not only the world's most famous scientist, he was also the world's most visible "skeptic." Sagan wrote numerous books and articles to debunk "fringe science" and the paranormal. I am planning to eventually write a critique of The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan's last debunker book that he published before he died. I pick the book up from time to time, then put it down in my anger and dismay. Not all of Sagan's observations are off the mark. I like some of what Sagan has to say, about the scientific establishment and other issues. One big problem I have is when he has no idea of what he is writing about, and tries to come off like an expert. One of the standard words in the debunker's lexicon is "pseudoscience." Sagan uses it dozens of times in The Demon-Haunted World. What does "pseudoscience" mean? Literally, it means "false science." It means something that is not science, parading around as science. Okay, fair enough. What is science? There is a wide range of philosophical literature on just that subject. The philosophy of science has a long history, and I cannot claim to be an expert, though I am familiar with the general arguments. Henry Bauer will tell you that the scientific method is a myth, an ideal seldom achieved. Thomas Kuhn will tell you that scientific revolutions are the result of questioning the founding presumptions of a scientific discipline, and the new "paradigm" that science adopts may not be any more "correct" than the old paradigm, and what makes one prevail over another is the allegiance of the scientists, not really how right or wrong it is, if that can even be determined. The scientific establishment section of my "synopsis" deals with those issues more fully.
How does Sagan define and use "pseudoscience"? On page 13 of The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan gives examples of pseudoscience and why he calls them that. Sagan gives examples of paranormal events, like if "dead people could take control of your hands and write us messages…or if our dreams could…accurately foretell the future. These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature - often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way." Okay Carl, you have given us some examples of pseudoscience. In my "synopsis" section of this web site, I deal in great depth regarding metaphysics and give examples of the wide range of paranormal phenomena that I have experienced and produced. Very few people are as well acquainted with the phenomenon of channeling and its literature as I am. If, as Carl said, "dead people could take control of your hands and write us messages," that is a form of what is known as automatic writing. It is only one variation in a wide spectrum of phenomena known loosely as channeling. Channeling, in one form or another, is as old as history. People have been speaking for the dead, or having the dead speak or write through them for thousands of years, or so they say. For the skeptics, I will grant them that the phenomenon has not been "proven" the way they like, which holds for every paranormal phenomenon that they have ever looked into, to my knowledge. That is partly due to standards of evidence that rest on presumptions that defeat the very purpose of the "investigation." Yet, if I think my dead Aunt Betty is writing me a message through my own hand, how am I pretending that I am practicing science? I am not. How can it be pseudoscience, when it does not even pretend to be science? At that point, Sagan is making the dishonest or ignorant assumption that science is the arbiter of reality, or at least what Sagan calls science and what Sagan calls reality. It is at that point that Sagan dons his priest's robes, becoming the authority of REALITY. The assumption that Sagan is making, and hoping his readers fall for his ruse, is that if something is real, it can be validated by science, and if science cannot validate it, it is not real. The greatest physicists did not believe that line of reasoning, but a much lesser light like Sagan was the very pope of his faith, a faith called materialism. As Sagan has laid down his slippery slope of false logic, he hopes his readers go along for the ride that he has prepared for them, where he denigrates and dismisses anything that materialistic science cannot explain. If science cannot explain it, or does not even have the tools to explore it, Sagan calls it pseudoscience. If my dreams show me future events, and I think they are valid, how am I pretending to practice science? I am not. If I think it is real and valid, am I practicing pseudoscience? According to Sagan I am. Since the practice of Western science is only a few centuries old, when the oracle of Delphi was in action thousands of years ago, how was that "pseudoscience," when science did not even exist yet? It is Sagan who is pretending that science is something it is not. You may think I am being too hard on Carl here, but if I do not accept Carl's presumptions, I will not go skipping merrily down the path he has tried laying for me. People can think I am quibbling, but I feel that Sagan's materialistic writings and "investigations" have done the opposite of bringing light into this world. Much more on that subject in my "synopsis."
There can be honest disagreement between Sagan's ideas about science and reality and mine. What I will devote the rest of this "footnote" to is his dishonesty. It is a very important matter, as he has disinformed millions of Americans with his dishonest writings.
One of most egregious instances of Sagan's dishonesty was regarding the Face on Mars issue. On June 2, 1985, Sagan authored an article in Parade Magazine, a newspaper supplement in millions of Sunday newspapers across America. I read the article the day it came out. It was a name-calling article that had me thinking that maybe there was nothing to the Face at all. If you were informed, though, Sagan's article was an amazing piece of disinformation. Sagan knew exactly what he was doing. He was not misinformed. He knowingly lied about significant aspects of the Face on Mars controversy, and one lie qualified as a Big Lie, and that takes some telling.
Again, Sagan was writing for the lay audience in Parade, addressing a readership in the tens of millions. A great burden of responsibility attends such a position. If you are writing for the lay audience, you had better have your science as accurate as possible, because millions of people will read and heed your words, and are generally not able to tell if you are deceiving them. From what I have seen, Sagan did just the opposite, taking advantage of his position to dispense scientific disinformation, not information, which is a crime that I am sure he is answering for as I write this. With the Face on Mars controversy and others, Sagan used his fame and access to the mainstream media to lie about the issues, or slam the work of others, and do it in a way that his targets could not fairly respond to his charges, while Sagan dusted his hands off and moved on to the next debunking project. Regarding the Face on Mars, Sagan was well aware of the independent image analysis being done by various experts, and the intriguing results being produced. His Parade Magazine article was artful, where he denigrated the qualifications of the image analysis researchers without naming them, calling them "amateur astronomers, flying saucer zealots, and writers of aerospace magazines." His name-calling was one of five propaganda devices Stanley McDaniel analyzed on pages 148-158 of The McDaniel Report, and here is the Big Lie. The process of taking photographs from a probe millions of miles from earth, transmitting them, receiving them, and processing them is not perfect. One imperfection can be missing pixels from the images obtained. One term for them is "transmission error dots." The raw images that came back from Mars had transmission error dots in them. It was a typical artifact of processing space probe data in the 1970s. Image analysis and processing is a sophisticated field of endeavor. A number of the independent researchers who analyzed the Mars images were image analysis professionals, and over the years of following The Face on Mars controversy, I have become familiar with the rudiments of image analysis. There are many processes that can be used on images to refine them, and the professionals who worked on The Face images used everything in their bag of tricks. About the first thing the professionals did to the images was "remove" the transmission error dots. It was one of the process' most elementary steps. They used a program that interpolated values from neighboring pixels to arrive at a value to replace the missing data. Every processed image had the transmission error dots removed as a matter of course. Sagan studied the processed photographs that the Face researchers had produced long before he wrote the Parade Magazine article. Accompanying the Parade Magazine article was a photograph of The Face, but it was oddly processed, adding false color and obscuring its features. Strangely, the transmission error dots were left in. Such processing made little sense, until you read the article and saw the propaganda point Sagan made with the image. Of the many transmission error dots in the Face image, one fell where one might fancy a nostril. Every researcher knew it was a transmission error dot and not a nostril, something Sagan knew quite well. It was beneath mention to anybody familiar with the issue. In fact, a five-year-old boy could have figured out that the transmission error dot was not evidence of a "nostril." Everybody knew it. Sagan was writing for the lay audience in Parade, though, and told a lie that would have made Goebbels proud. Sagan stated, "If we look more carefully at the image, we see that a strategically placed 'nostril' is in fact a bit of lost data in the radio transmission from Mars to Earth." The obvious implication was that the "flying-saucer zealot" investigators were being fooled by the transmission error dot, influencing their belief that The Face was artificial. Sagan made the researchers look like idiots to millions of American readers by telling a lie so cheap, so big, that I can find no conceivable excuse for his behavior. Sagan knew exactly what he was doing. I had been aware of his dubious debunking efforts for many years, and when I understood what he had done, my respect for his debunking work fell to about zero. Behavior like that is blatantly dishonest, done from Sagan's bully pulpit. Sagan could also be quite arrogant in private. During the pre-Parade days of the Face on Mars controversy, Sagan received a lengthy report draft on the Face image with the reply, "It is not whether you're right or wrong sir. You have not even entered the discussion." (See the McDaniel Report, p. 157, n. 4.) In The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan reproduces his Parade article nearly verbatim, and even repeats his "nostril" canard. Stanley McDaniel and crowd have been very gracious with Sagan's disinformation efforts, and lauded his admission in The Demon-Haunted World, that the Face bore closer scrutiny. For his admission to be buried amidst his regurgitation of his Parade article, Sagan's acknowledgement was faint praise indeed. I find little to cheer regarding Sagan's treatment of the Face in The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan even amazingly wrote, "There was an unfortunate dismissal of the feature by a project official as a trick of light and shadow, which prompted a later accusation that NASA was covering up the discovery of the Millennium." (See The Demon-Haunted World, p. 53). The most famous dismissal by a project official was Carl Sagan's Parade article! How he kept a straight face while writing that I will never know. Brian O'Leary, who was, with Sagan, the world's leading Mars expert for many years, was very angry with Sagan's Parade article, though Brian's big heart apologized for his anger toward Sagan, posthumously (See McDaniel and Paxson, eds., The Case for the Face, pp. 42-43.).
By the way, the artificiality of the Face on Mars has not been settled, contrary to establishment opinion. Numerous web sites today deal with the issue, Richard Hoagland's The Enterprise Mission most prominent among them. NASA was guilty of eliminating about 90% of the data from the recent flyby image by removing 75% of the pixels and truncating the data's gray scale values, things they did not tell the public when the photos were released, and only partly admitted to when people like Hoagland publicly took them to task for it. There is every reason to not trust NASA's motivation on those issues, which I cover elsewhere. If NASA had processed a photograph of my face the way that they did that Face image of last year, my mother may not have recognized that the picture was of her son.
Sagan performed similarly in "debunking" other areas of the offbeat and paranormal. His performance on the Sirius-Dogon mystery was an instance of him shouting from his bully pulpit in the public eye, never allowing the other side to air their responses, and even continuing to write as if there was no credible opposition to his views. See Jerome Clark's Unexplained!, pp. 346-348 for a short summary of the performance of Sagan and his "skeptical" colleagues on that issue.
Another area of Sagan's debunking was his 1974 performance at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) symposium on the theories of Emmanuel Velikovsky. Sagan presented a paper that discussed his "ten problems" with Velikovsky's theories. I stumbled into that controversy a few years ago and have read about 10,000 pages of material regarding Velikovsky's theories and the scientific establishment's attacks on him. I have delved much further into the Velikovsky issue than I originally intended, partly because the legitimacy of his theories is contested. His theories represent an ambitious synthesis of several areas of study, including mythology, geology, psychology, physics and astronomy. I have to admit that his theories cover such a broad range of topics that it would take many years of study for one person to properly assess. I do not believe Velikovsky's reconstructions of several planetary near-collisions in historical times, but I have not been quick to dispose of his theories into the "crackpot" bin, and I doubt there should be such a bin. The body of theory Velikovsky promoted is known as "catastrophic" theory. There is vigorous and heated debate today regarding the legitimacy of Velikovsky's theories. I have taken up the study of the topic as a hobby lately, but I know it will take me years of study to properly assess his theories as a whole, and I probably will never succeed in making a learned and complete assessment of his theories. However wrong Velikovsky may have been, how "uncredentialed" he was in many areas of speculation, he was treated mercilessly by the scientific establishment ever since his Worlds in Collision was published in 1950. Ironically, one of the few scientists who gave Velikovsky his ear was Albert Einstein, an academic colleague in Berlin in the 1920s, and a fellow Jew and Princeton resident in his last years. When Velikovsky's prediction that Jupiter would be found to emit radio waves was unexpectedly confirmed in 1955, Einstein was duly impressed, helped Velikovsky get other scientific testing done on his theories, and when he died soon thereafter, the one book open on his desk was Worlds in Collision. When space exploration data from NASA and the Soviet Union confirmed more of Velikovsky's predictions, interest was renewed in his theories, leading to the AAAS Symposium in 1974. In reality, the symposium was designed to publicly put the nails in Velikovsky's theoretical coffin. Sagan led what astronomer Tom Van Flandern called a "sneak attack." Their papers were given in a rigged forum, where Velikovsky was not given a chance to review their papers before they were presented, so to be able to properly respond to them. Sagan's presentation was the centerpiece of the symposium, and his paper was delivered with some of the smug demeanor that he was noted for. One of his one-liners made fun of Velikovsky's theories about what might have been deposited from Venus' atmosphere on earth in a planetary near miss. After Sagan delivered his paper, he never allowed himself to debate Velikovsky in a fair forum, and his bully pulpit job at the AAAS Symposium pretty much killed any interest in Velikovsky's theories by the scientific community, and the debate of his theories today takes place on the fringes of the scientific world. Velikovsky was not the first catastrophist, nor was he the last. Very curiously, catastrophic theories are now much more acceptable today than they were in Velikovsky's day, being presented by credentialed scientists, the most accepted being put forth by Bill Napier and Victor Clube. Last year there were two movies about asteroids/comets crashing into earth, as catastrophic theory has entered the popular imagination. I am not saying that Velikovsky's name should be uttered in the same breath as Einstein's, but I believe there is a debt to him the scientific world will probably never acknowledge, partly because Velikovsky was not "one of them." However accurate Sagan's critique of Velikovsky may have been, the way he delivered it, letting his reputation outweigh his arguments (Obvious by his never dealing publicly with the issue again. His paper was supposed to be a deathblow to Velikovskian theory.) was the kind of unfair dishonesty that Sagan would later display regarding the Face on Mars issue.
There is much more to say about Sagan's career as a defender of the scientific establishment and a debunker, but not here. The only defense I know of regarding Sagan's apparently dishonest efforts is that he was sloppy and/or stupid, or all of the above. I will finish this "footnote" by saying that Sagan did the skeptical movement no favors with his dishonesty, slipshod "investigations" and arrogance. There are some "skeptics" that I respect, but for the world's most famous scientist to tell lies from his bully pulpit tainted the movement so badly, that I think it may be too tarnished to be redeemed. Mr. Skeptic's libeling of Dennis Lee is just one of many examples like it of the debunker's craft, which is too bad.
(9) Randi has put up a "reward" for many years for "proof" of the paranormal. It used to be a $10,000 reward. Apparently, debunking can be a lucrative career, and Randi has raised the reward to $1 million (apparently also with donations from supporters of his cause). Mr. Skeptic has worked with Randi, and apparently got Randi to extend his reward to Free Energy. I asked Dennis about it, and he said Randi's reward was written so that Dennis could never collect it. Randi apparently wrote his "offer" with the skill of the cleverest lawyer, giving himself an "out." I would never stoop to going after Randi's money like that, and I doubt Dennis would have. The nature of Randi's position makes me kind of ill. His "The money was never safer" (Flim-Flam, p. 252) boast/joke shows his mentality quite well. Too well. Randi's "offer" is not made in the spirit of impartial investigation, but more as an arrogant boast that he is right, and dares the world to prove to him otherwise. I thought about Dennis' comment on Randi's offer, and wondered if Randi was hedging his bet a little. I have studied Randi's work over the years and he seemed honest, if arrogant and narrow-minded. Recently I read something that made me wonder about Randi's integrity. In Rawlins' account of the CSICOP scandal, he wrote some unflattering things about Randi. Rawlins was and is a firm "skeptic" of paranormal phenomena, but he said he also believed in doing honest research into the subject. Rawlins' experience gave plenty of evidence for the political nature of CSICOP and its mission. I have seen no evidence that the mission of the "skeptical" movement has changed from what it always has been: to defend the materialistic worldview. I can accept an honest "skeptic" doing what he thinks is honest investigation (though I believe his beliefs will dictate the outcome of his research), but with CSICOP, as with virtually every organization I have ever encountered, those who run it appear to be far less than saints. Mr. Skeptic's indefensible libel piece on Dennis is just one example of many. The Rawlins scandal evidenced the ugly power politics that plagues nearly every organization. To give you a further idea of the CSICOP gang's mentality, Phil Klass wrote a rebuttal to Rawlins' account of the scandal. Rawlins titled his essay "sTARBABY." It was a title probably too clever for Rawlins' own good. I have seen other instances of Rawlins' work, and I will not take for gospel everything he wrote about the scandal. Klass' rebuttal at least seemed to stick to the facts, but in Klass' "impartial" style that he often uses (not quite fairly, in my experience of studying his work), he could not refrain from making many observations on Rawlins' character and integrity (none of them flattering, naturally), but the title Klass chose for his rebuttal was the typical class CSICOP is known for. Klass titled his article "Crybaby." Rawlins had intimate interaction with James Randi while the scandal began unfolding. Randi was apparently involved in doing damage control on Rawlins. According to Rawlins, Randi was part of an effort to keep Rawlins quiet and in line with the debunking program. Rawlins wrote that Randi spent considerable time with Rawlins, and threatened him to keep him silent. The scandal was brewing in 1978, and Randi apparently did his part in trying to keep the scandal from becoming public. According to Rawlins, Phil Klass was also one of those trying to keep the scandal quiet. Rawlins' account confirmed my experiences with the CSICOP crowd, but one thing Rawlins wrote surprised me. Back when Rawlins was with CSICOP, Randi's "challenge" was only $10,000. During Randi's long, soulful talks with Rawlins, Rawlins says Randi admitted that he planned on never paying out the $10,000 reward because, "I always have an out." See Rawlins, sTARBABY, The Velikovskian, vol. II, no. 1, p. 39. Rawlins further states that Randi plays policeman, judge and jury for his "challenge" tests, and "thus has never supported my idea of neutral judgment of CSICOP tests." Rawlins said that Randi's motivation, as revealed in a confidential memo Randi wrote, was keeping the issue quiet so the "irrationalists" would have nothing to crow about, because CSICOP could "not afford to wash its dirty linen in public." If what Rawlins wrote was true, and I have about zero doubt it is not, and I heard Dennis say almost the same thing, then I am afraid Randi may have to join company with Carl Sagan. I thought that Randi was a true believer in his cause, but having an "out" on his challenge shows me he may not be quite the true disbeliever he presents himself as. Randi may be one more debunker of questionable integrity, but one with the gall to put up a $1 million challenge he may plan on never paying, because he gives himself an "out." See Richard Milton's analysis of Randi's million-dollar challenge on his web site. The link is on my links page.
Here is the debunking/investigating that actually does some good for the world, in my opinion. Telling the real story about fluoride, telling the real story about the cancer racket, exposing our murderous political system for what it is, showing how legitimate our energy industry is. That kind of "debunking" could save millions of lives, make this world a vastly better place and perhaps help save this species from self-annihilation. Of course, that kind of debunking takes on the powerful and can lead to misery and an early death. Debunking psychics does not, as far as I can tell.
Trying to show the world that Uri Geller is a charlatan is pedestrian debunking, in my opinion. Where the Randis of the world have fallen into their holes is not in believing that Geller is a fraud. If he is, sure, expose him. I know many people who do not think that Geller is a fraud (with very credible stories to tell), but may be a trickster, always keeping somebody like Randi guessing. That is not the hole that Randi fell into. The hole he fell into was not believing that Geller had no paranormal ability, but believing that Randi himself has no paranormal ability. Because Randi, Sagan, etc. believe that they are merely bags of chemicals, though complicated ones, they project that belief onto everything that they see, practicing materialistic fundamentalism. If Randi was able to open his mind just a little, he could readily produce paranormal phenomena for himself, and not just for the sake of the phenomena. Once you are witness to or produce irrefutable paranormal phenomena for yourself, it leads you to the idea that maybe you are not just a bag of chemicals, and that leads to a certain comfort that all the materialistic "science" can never take away. Reality is not out there, it is in here. Randi, like Sagan, has free will. The crime that Sagan committed was being so dishonest when doing his debunking, using his national prominence to beat people over the head very unfairly. If Geller is misleading people into thinking that he has paranormal ability, particularly as he makes money off of it, he will answer for it. The crime that Randi may be committing is trying to convince people that they have no paranormal ability.
Having paranormal ability and what it entails has nothing whatsoever to do with superstition, and it amazes me that Randi thinks so. Superstition, like materialism, is putting the power outside of one's self. Walking the light path is putting the power into yourself, and granting others their own inner light. The Randis and Sagans of the world are trying to banish that inner light, though they think that sterile reason is all the inner light that anybody needs. Fundamental materialism is about the dreariest philosophy that I know of, but it somehow exhilarates the Sagans and Randis of the world, though it seems to have been a part of making them such unpleasant men, according to everything I have seen regarding their public personas and debunking work. Sagan's greatest crime was against himself, reducing his existence to the bang and snap of chemical reactions happening at 98.6° . To me, that is sadder than almost anything else. As he has moved on, to a perhaps wiser perspective, Sagan may be in his most delicious position, as he begins to rediscover who he really is, from his nadir of believing that he was a bag of chemicals.
(10) The literature is vast in this area. It is a large topic of study in left politics. I will name a few sources that will lead to many, many others. Once you journey into this area, it never ends. There are three epic books written or edited by Churchill and Vander Wall: The COINTELPRO papers, Cages of Steel, and Agents of Repression. Also, see the periodical Covert Action Quarterly, and Parenti, Dirty Truths. The crushing of dissent and positive action in this country is merely the domestic version of what the United States has been doing to countries around the world for many years. For the international versions of that phenomenon, see Chomsky, Deterring Democracy; Chomsky and Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, and Blum, Killing Hope. For the latest target of the FBI and our police state – environmentalists – see Helvag, The War against the Greens.
(11) Weinglass. Race for Justice. p. 270.
(12) For instance, in 1996 Raymond Carter was released from ten years behind bars, with a judge ruling that his conviction was obtained by a police officer paying a prostitute $500 for the appropriate testimony. The policeman in question is currently in prison himself. Information located at Mr. Skeptic's "Hate Groups" web site, the organization Refuse & Resist! at 305 Madison Ave., Suite 1166, New York, NY 10165.
(13) See Weinglass. Race for Justice for a succinct summary of the judicial irregularities that lead to Abu-Jamal's conviction. Weinglass is Abu Jamal's attorney, so you can expect some bias, but millions of people think the same way Weinglass does. The evidence shouts out at rational observers. "Justice" is not being served by executing a gadfly journalist.
(14) According to Amnesty International, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Yemen are the only nations that have executed children since 1990. The United States has executed more children than those other nations.
(15) Robbins. Diet for a New America. p. 367.
(16) Robbins. Diet for a New America. p. 368.
(17) Gowe, R.S. Director of the Animal Research Institute in Canada, quoted at the conference on "Livestock Intensive Methods of Production," Ottawa, Dec 6-7, 1978. Cited in Robbins. Diet for a New America. p. 64.
(18) Charles Mayo. .Quoted by William H. Hendrix, New York Daily News, Mar. 13, 1961. Cited in PETA fact sheet. "Animal Experimentation: Sadistic Scandal." May 15, 1997.
(19) Kovel, Joel. "What's Wrong with McDonalds?" Z Magazine, September 1997, p. 28.
(20) Kovel, Joel. "What's Wrong with McDonalds?" Z Magazine, September 1997, p. 26.
(21) Kovel, Joel. "What's Wrong with McDonalds?" Z Magazine, September 1997, p. 26.
(22) Kovel, Joel. "What's Wrong with McDonalds?" Z Magazine, September 1997, p. 26.
(23) By Henry I. Miller. "The cutting edge of cutting calories." The Washington Times, April 16, 1998.
(24) CSIRO Australia "Keep Off the Grass - Reduce Air Pollution" media release, April 20, 1998.
(25) Press release of February 9, 1994. "Pure Food Campaign Viewed as Disservice to Sound Science. TASSC Attacks Critics of Bovine Somatotropin (BST)."
(26) "Drugs That Kill Instead of Cure" Editorial, The New York Times. April 18, 1998.
(27) "Weight Loss, Not Weight Gain, A Health Risk For Older Adults." University of Washington. Press release of April 8, 1998.
(28) From Milloy's "Junk Science at Large, Hall of Shame" page, downloaded on April 20, 1998.
(29) Milloy, Steven. "Relax...You Might Not Be Doomed" Public Risk. February 1997.
(30) From the "About Junk Science FAQs," downloaded on April 20, 1998.
(31) There is a short book that lists dozens of those fake environmental organizations titled, The Greenpeace Guide of Anti-environmental Organizations, published by Odonian Press. Those fake environmental organizations are one more avenue of assault on the environmental movement, mainly bankrolled by large corporations.
(32) Gore Vidal wittily calls the "two-party" US political system "one party with two right wings." He even has purposely confused the two on national TV, referring to a suited chap who called himself a liberal "the conservative" and vice versa, while they "debated." See Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, which is a brief, extremely engaging and funny introduction to Vidal's views on the US political environment.
(33) Chomsky, Noam. Rethinking Camelot, JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture. Boston: South End Press, 1993.
(34) See Parenti, Michael. Dirty Truths. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. pp. 153-191.
(35) Smith, Phillip. "Off the Shelf" Book Review, Covert Action, Summer 1995.
The Next Section:
The Handiwork of the BPA
Hit Man