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Ted (Comparison: Theatrical Version – Movie-Censorship.com

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Danzig

Compared are the Theatrical Version and the Extended Version (Unrated Version) (both represented by the Universal UK-Blu-ray)

- 23 differences, including 9x alternate footage - difference: 371.9 sec (= 6:12 min)

MacFarlane's voice is an essential part of the success of Family Guy. So it doesn't take a genius to figure out that his voice can't be missing in it and the story of a talking teddy bear does the trick just fine. For Family Guy and American Dad fans, this movie is kind of a reunion because there are many familiar people involved. The narrator of the movie is Patrick Stewart who's playing Stan's boss in American Dad. Then there's Alex Borstein (voice of Lois, Tricia Takanawa and more) as John's mom, Mila "Shut up, Meg!" Kunis as leading actress, Mike Henry (voice of Cleveland, Herbert the Pervert and more) as Southern newscaster, John Viener as Alix, Danny Smith as waiter and Alec Sulkin as screenplay writer. Furthermore, the movie contains loads of popcultural references. There are also many ansurd scenes isolated from the actual storyline. Sound familiar? Well, that's because Family Guy does the exact same thing. Unfortunately, the movie becomes pretty conventional in the end; just like other Hollywood comedies do. But in this case, it's acceptable. The audience has to have thought the same thing because the movie made $500 million worldwide at the box office. With that amazing result, it's the most successful Original R-rated movie ever (Hangover 2 was more successful but that's "just" a sequel). No surprise that a sequel is already in the pipeline.

As expected, the new footage doesn't reinvent the wheel, that's for sure. And there are no scenes that were censored in the Theatrical Version either (like the F-word in the TV Version of Family Guy). Refering to the rampage at Virginia Tech University might be borderline but then again gags like that are on MacFarlane's shows all the time. Probably a highlight is the scene in the beginning when Donny (as a kid) takes notice of Ted for the very first time. Apart from that, the longer version contains some nice gags that enhance the quality of it. Due to the use of alternate footage for some scenes, the Theatrical Version is still worth being watched because some gags from the Theatrical Version have been removed in the process of editing the longer version. Finally, fans don't get around watching both versions anyway.

Time index refers to Theatrical Version Blu-ray / Extended Version Blu-ray

When the kids approach the little ginger (Greenbaum), the scene is longer in the Extended Version; including alternate footage.

The Theatrical Version only shows Greenbaum saying "Oh-oh...".

In the Extended Version, he says that from a different angle while the head of the bullies is approaching. Then the bully says: "It's Jesus' birthday tomorrow and you know what I'm gonna get him?" Greenbaum: "What?" Bully: "My fist in your fucking face?" Greenbaum: "Why would Jesus want that?"

Extended Version 9.3 sec longer

05:12 / 05:22-05:46

Before John enters the kitchen, the Extended Version contains an additional scene with the parents. After some implications, they get straight to the fact that the mom (Helen) gave the dad (Steve) a BJ the previous evening.

Helen: "Well, I think we've had a wonderful Christmas this year." Steve: "One of the best. And I particularly enjoyed the gift you gave me last night." Helen: "Well, my big strong husband works so hard all year. I figured you deserved a little Christmas treat." Steve: "I think those veneers just make it a smoother ride for me." Helen: "Mmm. Well, that's how much I love you." Steve: "Seriously though, that was an outstanding blowjob!"

24.6 sec

06:23 / 06:57-07:08

A further news report, this time from Japan. The female news anchor speaks Japanese before she's getting slapped by the male anchor.

10.9 sec

06:50 / 07:35-08:13

Additional scene. Little Donny is watching the talkshow with Ted which is why he wants a teddy bear in the first place. In the background, his dad is doing some chick, so he just states Donny already got a rake to clean the yard for his birthday.

Donny: "Dad, I want a teddy bear!" Dad: "Hey! What did daddy just get you for your birthday, huh?" Donny: "A rake." Dad: "That's right. An excellent rake. A birthday rake. So when you clean the yard you don't have to pick up the leaves with your hands." Donny: "But, Dad, I want the bear on TV?" Dad: "Donny, shut up, will ya! Daddy's making love to New Mommy." Donny: "But, Daddy..." Dad: "Go to your hammock!" Donny gets up, takes another look at the TV, then he leaves.

38.4 sec

Alternate 13:31-13:32 / 14:54-15:25

The Tom Skerritt dialog is longer. The Extended Version gives Murphy the opportunity to show off with his previleges.

Murphy: "I don't think of him as an actor anymore. He's just, like, a guy. Like, we work... we worked at my garage two months ago. Helped me hang a garage door. You ever hang a garage door with Tom Skerritt?" John: "No..." Murphy: "No! You ever, uh, go miniature golfing with Tom Skerritt's wife and her kid? No. You haven't. Do you ever watch a Bulls game, a Chicago Bulls game, in Chicago with Tom Skerritt? No, you haven't. All right? Liberty, fast track, Skerritt - John."

15:35 / 17:28-17:46

Ted comments John's "So bad, but so good" commentary regarding Flash Gordon with the following words: "Yes, a study in contrast." John replies: "Whoa, whoa, I love this part right here." Now both of them start singing: "He's for every one of us! Stands for everyone of us! He'll save with a mighty hand every man, every woman, every child with a mighty flash!" Ted finally says: "Fuck yeah, Flash!"

17.2 sec

Alternate 18:22-18:25 / 20:32-20:36

A very similar, but still alternate take. In the Extended Version, John expresses himself more direct: "I'm a fucking classy broad."

Extended Version 0.5 sec longer

Alternate 18:40-18:45 / 20:51-21:00

In both versions, John says "I'm taking you to the best place in town." but an alternate take has been used here (recognizable by the arm position). Then he remains still for a moment in the Theatrical Version. The Extended Version on the other hand switches to another shot of him in which he adds: "I've been crapping out room for it for two days. I mean, I know exactly what I'm gonna order." Lori: "You're so disgusting." Then, John's comment "You know I love you" follows. And again, the Extended Version contains an alternate take of his comment.

Extended Version 4.2 sec longer

Alternate 18:55-19:00 / 21:10-21:16

In the Extended Version, the distance shot is a few frames longer. Then an alternate take of John turning around in bed. But he only swears in the Extended Version "Ah, fucking cocksucker motherfucker!" while he's doing so. The Extended Version then just sticks to this shot when Lori addresses him while the Theatrical Version contains footage of from a different with the very same comment of Lori's. Not until its ending, the Theatrical Version goes to the distance shot from the Extended Version.

Extended Version 1 sec longer

21:11 / 23:27-23:31

First a shot of Lori. then Rex who reaches for magnifying glass and says about the photo: "Now, if you look close, you can see the outline of my root."

3.9 sec

Alternate 21:38-21:40 / 23:58-24:13

In the Theatrical Version, Lori says "Goodbye, Rex" from a closer angle. Then she gets up.

25:32 / 28:05-28:15

More dialog. John is being tactless by mentioning the rampage at Virginia Tech University. In the same shot, he adds: "I could have wound up like that Asian kid at Virginia Tech but I didn't because of him. So I'm not that psyched to just, like, kick him out." Lori: "What? It's good to know that a talking teddy bear is the only thing that prevented you from gunning down your classmates."

Subsequently Lori's comment "But you're no longer eight." which ia also in the Theatrical Version.

10.6 sec

Alternate 27:17-27:21 / 30:00-30:09

Ted has an alternate explanation for the excrements on the appartment floor. At first, the Extended Version contains an alternate take, followed by two additional ones.

In the Theatrical Version, Ted says: "Oh, yeah. Yeah, we were playing truth or dare and Cherene's pretty ballsy." In the Extended Version, he says: "Oh, my God! You know what, that's probably what Dierdre was doing over there. Remember she was crouched over in the corner for a really long time? I thought she was just making a phone call or something."

Extended Version 4.2 sec longer

Alternate 27:23-27:28 / 30:11-30:20

After Lori repeated "There is a shit on my floor!", the version continue differently.

In the Theatrical Version, Ted says: "'Or is the floor on the shit?' is what Kierkegaard would say." In the Extended Version, he says: "Yeah, yeah. She's passed out in the bathroom now. She seemed like she was hopped up on something but, you know, mystery solved, I guess, right? She was taking a shit." Lori yells "What the fuck?" one more time.

Extended Version 4.3 sec longer

30:14 / 33:06-33:26

John reacts to the attorney's proposal: "As I said, you would need a law degree for a law school." Ted: "No, no... I'm a special case. I'm a talking teddy bear for Christ's sake. They might make an exception because they'd be all like, 'Oh, my God, this bear's so cool. He can talk and do stuff. Let's give him a job. Maybe he'll give us a few laughs around the office.' And then they're like, 'Oh, my God! He can deliver. He's actually quite a litigator.' And then they'll practically have to give me the Anderson case."

20.5 sec

39:10 / 42:22-43:04

Ted (Comparison: Theatrical Version - Movie-Censorship.com

Fourth Amendment | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII …

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Danzig

FOURTH AMENDMENT: AN OVERVIEW

I. INTERESTS PROTECTED

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The ultimate goal of this provision is to protect peoples right toprivacy and freedom from arbitrary governmentalintrusions. Private intrusions not acting in the color of governmental authority areexempted from theFourth Amendment.

To havestanding to claim protection under the Fourth Amendment, one mustfirst demonstrate an expectation of privacy, which is not merely a subjective expectation in mindbut an expectationthat society is prepared to recognized as reasonable under the circumstances. For instance, warrantless searches ofprivate premises are mostly prohibited unless there are justifiable exceptions; on the other hand,a warrantless seizure of abandoned property usually does not violate the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, the Fourth Amendment protection does not expand to governmental intrusion and information collection conducted upon open fields. AnExpectation of privacy in an open field is not considered reasonable. However, there are some exceptions where state authorities granted protection to open fields.

A bivens action can be filed against federal law enforcement officials for damages resulting from an unlawful search and seizure. States can always establish higher standards for searches and seizures than theFourth Amendmentrequires, but states cannot allow conduct that violates the Fourth Amendment.

The protection under the Fourth Amendment can be waived if one voluntarily consents to or does not object to evidence collected during a warrantless search or seizure.

II. SEARCHES AND SEIZURES UNDER FOURTH AMENDMENT

The courts must determine what constitutes asearchorseizureunder theFourth Amendment. If the conduct challenged does not fall within theFourth Amendment, the individualwill not enjoy protection under Fourth Amendment.

A. Search

A search under Fourth Amendment occurs when a governmental employee or agent of the government violates an individual's reasonableexpectation of privacy.

Strip searches and visual body cavity searches, including anal or genital inspections, constitute reasonable searches under theFourth Amendment when supported by probable cause and conducted in a reasonable manner.

Adog-sniff inspectionis invalid under theFourth Amendmentif the the inspection violates areasonable expectation of privacy. Electronic surveillance is also considered a search under theFourth Amendment.

B. Seizure of a Person

A seizure of a person, within the meaning of theFourth Amendment, occurs when the police's conduct would communicate to a reasonable person, taking into account the circumstances surrounding the encounter, that the person is notfree to ignore the police presence and leave at hiswill.

Two elements must be present to constitute a seizure of a person. First, there must be a show of authority by the police officer. Presence of handcuffs or weapons,the use of forceful language, andphysical contact are each strong indicators of authority. Second, the person being seized must submit to the authority. An individualwho ignores the officers request and walks away has not been seized for Fourth Amendment purposes.

An arrest warrant is preferred but not required to make alawful arrest under theFourth Amendment. A warrantless arrest may be justified whereprobable cause and urgent need are presentprior to the arrest. Probable cause is present when the police officer has a reasonable beliefin the guilt of the suspect based on the facts and information prior to the arrest. For instance, a warrantless arrest may be legitimate in situations where a police officer has a probable belief that a suspect has either committed a crime or is a threat to the public security. Also, apolice officer might arrest a suspect to prevent the suspects escape or to preserve evidence. A warrantless arrest may be invalidatedif the police officer failsto demonstrate exigent circumstances.

The ability to makewarrantless arrests are commonly limited by statutes subject to the due process guaranty of theU.S. Constitution. A suspect arrested without a warrant is entitled toprompt judicial determination, usually within 48 hours.

There are investigatory stops that fall shortof arrests, but nonetheless, theyfall within Fourth Amendmentprotection.For instance, police officers can perform aterry stop or a traffic stop. Usually, these stops provide officers with less dominion and controlling power and impose less of an infringement of personal liberty for individual stopped. Investigatory stops must be temporary questioning for limited purposes and conducted in a manner necessary to fulfill the purpose.

Anofficers reasonable suspicion is sufficient to justify brief stops and detentions. To determine if the officer has met the standard to justify the seizure, the court takes into account the totality of the circumstances and examines whether the officer has a particularized and reasonable belief for suspecting the wrongdoing. Probable cause gained during stops or detentions might effectuate a subsequent warrantless arrest.

C. Seizure of Property

A seizure of property, within the meaning of theFourth Amendment, occurs when there is some meaningful interference with anindividuals possessory interests in the property.

In some circumstances, warrantless seizures of objects in plain view do notconstitute seizures within the meaning of Fourth Amendment. When executing a search warrant, an officer might be able to seize an item observed in plain view even if it is not specified in the warrant.

III. WARRANT REQUIREMENT

A search or seizure is generally unreasonable and illegal without a warrant, subject to only a few exceptions.

To obtain a search warrant or arrest warrant, the law enforcement officer must demonstrate probable causethata search or seizure is justified. Anauthority, usually a magistrate, will consider the totality of circumstances and determine whether to issue the warrant.

The warrant requirement may be excused in exigent circumstances if an officer has probable cause and obtaining a warrant is impractical. For instance, in State v. Helmbright 990 N.E.2d 154, Ohiocourt held that awarrantless search of probationer's person or place of residence complies with the Fourth Amendment if the officer who conducts the search possesses reasonable grounds to believe that the probationer has failed to comply with the terms of hisprobation.

Other well-established exceptions to the warrant requirement include consensual searches, certain brief investigatory stops, searches incident to a valid arrest, and seizures of items in plain view.

There is no general exception to theFourth Amendment warrant requirement in national security cases. Warrantless searches are generally not permitted in exclusively domestic security cases. In foreign security cases, court opinions might differ on whether to accept the foreign security exception to warrant requirement generallyand, if accepted, whether the exception should include bothphysical searches and electronic surveillance.

IV. REASONABLENESS REQUIREMENT

All searches and seizures under Fourth Amendment must be reasonable. No excessive force shall be used. Reasonableness is the ultimate measure of the constitutionality of a search or seizure.

Searches and seizures with a warrant satisfy the reasonableness requirement. Warrantless searches and seizures are presumed to be unreasonable unless they fall within a few exceptions.

In cases of warrantless searches and seizures, the court will try to balance the degree of intrusion on the individuals right toprivacy and the need to promote government interests and special needs. The court will examine the totality of the circumstances to determine if the search or seizure was justified. When analyzingthe reasonableness standard, the court uses an objective assessment and considers factors including the degree of intrusion by the search or seizure andthe manner in which the search or seizure is conducted.

V. EXCLUSIONARY RULE

Under the exclusionary rule, any evidence obtained inviolation of theFourth Amendmentwill be excluded from criminal proceedings. There are a few exceptions to this rule.

VI. ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE

In recent years, the Fourth Amendment's applicability inelectronic searches and seizures has received much attention from the courts. With the advent of the internet and increased popularity of computers, there has been anincreasing amount of crime occurring electronically. Consequently, evidence of such crime can often be found on computers, hard drives, or other electronic devices. TheFourth Amendment applies to the search and seizure ofelectronic devices.

Many electronic search cases involvewhether law enforcement can search a company-owned computer that an employee uses to conduct business. Although the case law is split, the majority holds that employees do not have a legitimate expectationof privacy with regard to information stored on a company-owned computer. In the 2010 case ofCity of Ontario v. Quon (08-1332), the Supreme Court extended this lack of an expectation of privacy to text messages sent and received on an employer-owned pager.

Lately, electronic surveillance and wiretapping has also caused a significant amount of Fourth Amendment litigation.

VII.THE USA PATRIOT ACT

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Congress and the President enacted legislation to strengthen the intelligence gathering communitys ability to combat domestic terrorism. Entitled the USA Patriot Act, the legislations provisions aimed to increase the ability of law enforcement to search email and telephonic communications in addition to medical, financial, and library records.

One provision permitslaw enforcement to obtain access to stored voicemails by obtaining a basic search warrant rather than a surveillance warrant. Obtaining a basic search warrantrequires a much lower evidentiary showing. A highlycontroversial provision of the Act includespermission for law enforcement to use sneak-and-peak warrants. A sneak-and-peak warrant is a warrant in which law enforcement can delay notifying the property owner about the warrants issuance. In an Oregon federal district court case that drew national attention, Judge Ann Aiken struck down the use of sneak-and-peak warrants as unconstitutional and inviolation of the Fourth Amendment. See 504 F.Supp.2d 1023 (D. Or. 2007).

The Patriot Act also expanded the practice of using National Security Letters (NSL). An NSL is an administrative subpoena that requires certain persons, groups, organizations, or companies to provide documents about certain persons. These documents typically involve telephone, email, and financial records. NSLs also carry a gag order, meaningthe person or persons responsible for complying cannot mention theexistence of the NSL. Under the Patriot Act provisions, law enforcement can use NSLs when investigating U.S. citizens, even when law enforcement does not think the individual under investigation has committed a crime. The Department of Homeland Security has used NSLs frequently since its inception. By using anNSL, an agency has no responsibility to first obtain a warrant or court order before conducting its search of records.

See constitutional amendment.

See the article here:

Fourth Amendment | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII ...

Naked Redhead Men

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Danzig

Its been a while since Ive been out looking for redheads of gay porn. Lucky there are some old standbys where I know new guys will be found. Chaos Men is awesome at keeping the redhead lineup growing. It was awesome seeing one of there recent additions, Brant.

Brant has a boyish face that makes him look younger than he is. His hairless chest and stomach dont help although the nipple rings kind of give him a bad boy feel. The great part of Brant comes when he lowers his pants and underwear. He keeps his pubes trimmed but intact. I do love those red pubes! While he shaves his ball sack, his ass crack is lined with a thick crimson fuzz. He gives us a few close up views of that oh so sweet ass too. It doesnt take much work before Brant is totally hard and the wow factor hits. If you like big dicks, Brant doesnt disappoint!

Brant is new so he only has two scenes online so far. His second time around he gets a blowjob while tied up (edge) and shoots a huge load with a big smile on his face. lets hope that they can convince this hottie to return for some more man on man action. Ill be waiting.

Original post:

Naked Redhead Men

Future – Wikipedia

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Danzig

The future is what will happen in the time after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. The future and the concept of eternity have been major subjects of philosophy, religion, and science, and defining them non-controversially has consistently eluded the greatest of minds.[1] In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected time line that is anticipated to occur.[2] In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.[3]

In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists and the future and the past are unreal. Religions consider the future when they address issues such as karma, life after death, and eschatologies that study what the end of time and the end of the world will be. Religious figures such as prophets and diviners have claimed to see into the future. Organized efforts to predict or forecast the future may have derived from observations by early man of heavenly objects.

Future studies, or futurology, is the science, art and practice of postulating possible futures. Modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures.

The concept of the future has been explored extensively in cultural production, including art movements and genres devoted entirely to its elucidation, such as the 20th century movement futurism.

Forecasting is the process of estimating outcomes in uncontrolled situations. Forecasting is applied in many areas, such as weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, transport planning, and labour market planning. Due to the element of the unknown, risk and uncertainty are central to forecasting.

Statistically based forecasting employs time series with cross-sectional or longitudinal data. Econometric forecasting methods use the assumption that it is possible to identify the underlying factors that might influence the variable that is being forecast. If the causes are understood, projections of the influencing variables can be made and used in the forecast. Judgmental forecasting methods incorporate intuitive judgments, opinions and probability estimates, as in the case of the Delphi method, scenario building, and simulations.

Prediction is similar to forecasting but is used more generally, for instance to also include baseless claims on the future. Organized efforts to predict the future began with practices like astrology, haruspicy, and augury. These are all considered to be pseudoscience today, evolving from the human desire to know the future in advance.

Modern efforts such as future studies attempt to predict technological and societal trends, while more ancient practices, such as weather forecasting, have benefited from scientific and causal modelling. Despite the development of cognitive instruments for the comprehension of future, the stochastic and chaotic nature of many natural and social processes has made precise forecasting of the future elusive.

Future studies or futurology is the science, art and practice of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue, what is likely to change, and what is novel. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and trends. A key part of this process is understanding the potential future impact of decisions made by individuals, organisations and governments. Leaders use results of such work to assist in decision-making.

Futures is an interdisciplinary field, studying yesterday's and today's changes, and aggregating and analyzing both lay and professional strategies, and opinions with respect to tomorrow. It includes analyzing the sources, patterns, and causes of change and stability in the attempt to develop foresight and to map possible futures. Modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures.

Three factors usually distinguish futures studies from the research conducted by other disciplines (although all disciplines overlap, to differing degrees). First, futures studies often examines not only possible but also probable, preferable, and "wild card" futures. Second, futures studies typically attempts to gain a holistic or systemic view based on insights from a range of different disciplines. Third, futures studies challenges and unpacks the assumptions behind dominant and contending views of the future. The future thus is not empty but fraught with hidden assumptions.

Futures studies does not generally include the work of economists who forecast movements of interest rates over the next business cycle, or of managers or investors with short-term time horizons. Most strategic planning, which develops operational plans for preferred futures with time horizons of one to three years, is also not considered futures. But plans and strategies with longer time horizons that specifically attempt to anticipate and be robust to possible future events, are part of a major subdiscipline of futures studies called strategic foresight.

The futures field also excludes those who make future predictions through professed supernatural means. At the same time, it does seek to understand the models such groups use and the interpretations they give to these models.

In physics, time is a fourth dimension. Physicists argue that space-time can be understood as a sort of stretchy fabric that bends due to forces such as gravity. In classical physics the future is just a half of the timeline, which is the same for all observers. In special relativity the flow of time is relative to the observer's frame of reference. The faster an observer is traveling away from a reference object, the slower that object seems to move through time. Hence, future is not an objective notion anymore. A more significant notion is absolute future or the future light cone. While a person can move backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions, many physicists argue you are only able to move forward in time.[4]

One of the outcomes of Special Relativity Theory is that a person can travel into the future (but never come back) by traveling at very high speeds. While this effect is negligible under ordinary conditions, space travel at very high speeds can change the flow of time considerably. As depicted in many science fiction stories and movies (e.g. Dj Vu), a person traveling for even a short time at near light speed will return to an Earth that is many years in the future.

Some physicists claim that by using a wormhole to connect two regions of space-time a person could theoretically travel in time. Physicist Michio Kaku points out that to power this hypothetical time machine and "punch a hole into the fabric of space-time", it would require the energy of a star. Another theory is that a person could travel in time with cosmic strings.

"The trouble with the future is that it's so much less knowable than the past."

In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists, and the future and past are unreal. Past and future "entities" are construed as logical constructions or fictions. The opposite of presentism is 'eternalism', which is the belief that things in the past and things yet to come exist eternally. Another view (not held by many philosophers) is sometimes called the 'growing block' theory of timewhich postulates that the past and present exist, but the future does not.[6]

Presentism is compatible with Galilean relativity, in which time is independent of space, but is probably incompatible with Lorentzian/Einsteinian relativity in conjunction with certain other philosophical theses that many find uncontroversial. Saint Augustine proposed that the present is a knife edge between the past and the future and could not contain any extended period of time.

Contrary to Saint Augustine, some philosophers propose that conscious experience is extended in time. For instance, William James said that time is "...the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible."[citation needed] Augustine proposed that God is outside of time and present for all times, in eternity. Other early philosophers who were presentists include the Buddhists (in the tradition of Indian Buddhism). A leading scholar from the modern era on Buddhist philosophy is Stcherbatsky, who has written extensively on Buddhist presentism:

While ethologists consider animal behavior largely based on fixed action patterns or other learned traits in an animal's past[citation needed], human behavior is known to encompass anticipation of the future. Anticipatory behavior can be the result of a psychological outlook toward the future, for examples optimism, pessimism, and hope.

Optimism is an outlook on life such that one maintains a view of the world as a positive place. People would say that optimism is seeing the glass "half full" of water as opposed to half empty. It is the philosophical opposite of pessimism. Optimists generally believe that people and events are inherently good, so that most situations work out in the end for the best. Hope is a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. Hope implies a certain amount of despair, wanting, wishing, suffering or perseverance i.e., believing that a better or positive outcome is possible even when there is some evidence to the contrary. "Hopefulness" is somewhat different from optimism in that hope is an emotional state, whereas optimism is a conclusion reached through a deliberate thought pattern that leads to a positive attitude.

Pessimism as stated before is the opposite of optimism. It is the tendency to see, anticipate, or emphasize only bad or undesirable outcomes, results, or problems. The word originates in Latin from Pessimus meaning worst and Malus meaning bad.

Religions consider the future when they address issues such as karma, life after death, and eschatologies that study what the end of time and the end of the world will be. In religion, major prophets are said to have the power to change the future. Common religious figures have claimed to see into the future, such as minor prophets and diviners. The term "afterlife" refers to the continuation of existence of the soul, spirit or mind of a human (or animal) after physical death, typically in a spiritual or ghostlike afterworld. Deceased persons are usually believed to go to a specific region or plane of existence in this afterworld, often depending on the rightness of their actions during life.

Some believe the afterlife includes some form of preparation for the soul to transfer to another body (reincarnation). The major views on the afterlife derive from religion, esotericism and metaphysics. There are those who are skeptical of the existence of the afterlife, or believe that it is absolutely impossible, such as the materialist-reductionists, who believe that the topic is supernatural, therefore does not really exist or is unknowable. In metaphysical models, theists generally believe some sort of afterlife awaits people when they die. Atheists generally do not believe in a life after death. Members of some generally non-theistic religions such as Buddhism, tend to believe in an afterlife like reincarnation but without reference to God.

Agnostics generally hold the position that like the existence of God, the existence of supernatural phenomena, such as souls or life after death, is unverifiable and therefore unknowable.[8] Many religions, whether they believe in the souls existence in another world like Christianity, Islam and many pagan belief systems, or in reincarnation like many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, believe that ones status in the afterlife is a reward or punishment for their conduct during life, with the exception of Calvinistic variants of Protestant Christianity, which believes one's status in the afterlife is a gift from God and cannot be earned during life.

Eschatology is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with the final events in the history of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world. While in mysticism the phrase refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the Divine, in many traditional religions it is taught as an actual future event prophesied in sacred texts or folklore. More broadly, eschatology may encompass related concepts such as the Messiah or Messianic Age, the end time, and the end of days.

Futurism as an art movement originated in Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. It developed largely in Italy and in Russia, although it also had adherents in other countries - in England and Portugal for example. The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Futurists had a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. They also espoused a love of speed, technology, and violence. Futurists dubbed the love of the past passisme. The car, the plane, and the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of people over nature. The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 declared: "We will glorify warthe world's only hygienemilitarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."[9] Though it owed much of its character and some of its ideas to radical political movements, it had little involvement in politics until the autumn of 1913.[10]

One[which?] of the many 20th-century classical movements in music paid homage to, included, or imitated machines. Closely identified with the central Italian Futurist movement were brother composers Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and Antonio Russolo (1877-1942), who used instruments known as intonarumori - essentially sound boxes used to create music out of noise. Luigi Russolo's futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises, is considered[by whom?] one of the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics. Other examples of futurist music include Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231 (1923), which imitates the sound of a steam locomotive, Prokofiev's "The Steel Step", and the experiments of Edgard Varse.

Literary futurism made its debut with F.T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909). Futurist poetry used unexpected combinations of images and hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the poem). Futurist theater works have scenes a few sentences long, use nonsensical humor, and try to discredit the deep-rooted dramatic traditions with parody. Longer literature forms, such as novels, had no place in the Futurist aesthetic, which had an obsession with speed and compression.

Futurism expanded to encompass other artistic domains and ultimately included painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre design, textiles, drama, literature, music and architecture. In architecture, it featured a distinctive thrust towards rationalism and modernism through the use of advanced building materials. The ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and commercial culture. Futurism has produced several reactions, including the 1980s-era literary genre of cyberpunk which often treated technology with a critical eye.

Science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein defined science fiction as:

More generally, one can regard science fiction as a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology. Science fiction is found in books, art, television, films, games, theater, and other media. Science fiction differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated laws of nature (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation). Settings may include the future, or alternative time-lines, and stories may depict new or speculative scientific principles (such as time travel or psionics), or new technology (such as nanotechnology, faster-than-light travel or robots). Exploring the consequences of such differences is the traditional purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas".[12]

Some science fiction authors construct a postulated history of the future called a "future history" that provides a common background for their fiction. Sometimes authors publish a timeline of events in their history, while other times the reader can reconstruct the order of the stories from information in the books. Some published works constitute "future history" in a more literal sensei.e., stories or whole books written in the style of a history book but describing events in the future. Examples include H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come (1933) - written in the form of a history book published in the year 2106 and in the manner of a real history book with numerous footnotes and references to the works of (mostly fictitious) prominent historians of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The linear view of time (common in Western thought) draws a stronger distinction between past and future than does the more common cyclic time of cultures such as India, where past and future can coalesce much more readily.[13]

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Future - Wikipedia

Liberal Democrat Voice

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

By The Voice | Sun 11th December 2016 - 1:16 pm

Back in January, Willie Rennie called out both Amazon and Nicola Sturgeon over low wages and poor working conditions at the companys Dunfermline depot. A couple of months later, he found himself banned from the premises after Amazon management cancelled a planned meeting with workers to discuss the issues.

Things havent got any better for the beleaguered employees at the depot. This week, the Courier revealed that some seasonal workers were sleeping out in tents in this weather to save the costs of commuting to and from the depot.

Then an undercover reporter working for the Sunday Times () wrote about her experience of working there:

In one case, a woman who spent three days in hospital with a kidney infection was docked two points, reduced to one on appeal, despite providing a hospital note.

And:

Its almost exactly six years since Vince Cable was taken off the Sky merger case after he was secretly recorded saying that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch. History shows that he was right then and he has been vocally opposing the latest attempt by Murdochs Fox to take control of Sky.

Coincidentally, before the takeover hit the headlines, Vince gave a lecturein which he explored the relationship between media ownership and plurality of opinion and explained why it mattered:

Whatever our views about particular opinions expressed in the press and about particular owners, the health of the press and of democracy itself depends on there being a range of independent providers: in other words, plurality as opposed to competition which may be intense but fails to provide a range of competing opinions and information sources. Pluraity matters in the words of the Journal of Media Law because where a few firms dominate the media landscape they exercise considerable controlthere is now a convincing body of evidence to suggest that particular corporate or political affiliates can lead to media bias or the suppression of information. Ofcom, the media regulator, has stressed the importance of plurality by preventing too much influence over the political process.

Later on, he talked about the need for more checks and balances to prevent future scandals:

Back in August, I said that I couldnt support the Open Britain organisation(the evolution of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign) because it was too enthusiastic about restrictions on free movement of people and because it wasnt calling for a referendum on any Brexit deal.

I still cant sign up to them for the same reasons. However, I do accept that there are areas of common ground between our organisations. This weekend they have conducted some very useful research which shows that half of Leave voters are not prepared to be a penny worse off as a result of leaving the EU.

That YouGov poll, conducted this week, also obliterates the Leave majority. When asked how they would vote if the referendum took place tomorrow, 44% said Leave and 44% said Remain. That is a dramatic reversal of fortune.

Ed Miliband writes about this in todays Observer:

This chimes with the experience in my constituency, where seven in 10 voted to leave. Many of them were desperate for a new beginning for themselves and their families. The government will rightly be subject to an almighty backlash from Leave voters if it makes decisions that make them far poorer and leaves less money for public services. Having voted for a better future, for them this would be the ultimate betrayal.

The evidence is already there that people will be worse off after Brexit. And this isnt just Europhile hyperbole. Its actual government fact as we saw in the Autumn Statement. This is where Milibands article is so depressing. What on earth is the problem with giving the people the chance to determine for themselves whether the final deal on offer is in line with their expectations? What could possibly be more democratic?

Lets look at it this way. If you decide you are going to buy a house, you state your intention to do so by putting in an offer. If it is accepted, you can still pull out if you dont like the terms of the sale. The same thing applies to Brexit. If people realise the true extent of the cost, and that the stuff they were told was Project Fear was actually an underestimation, then they may well choose to reconsider their decision. The You Gov research proves that.

This week Liberal Democrat peer Kate Parminter became only the second woman to deliver the prestigious Burntwood Lecture to the Institution of Environmental Sciences.. She spoke of the challenges facing the environment from Brexit in a 45 minute lecture entitled Separation Anxiety. Read her full lecture below:

Its an honour to have been asked to present the Burntwood Lecture this year, and to follow in the footsteps of such an illustrious parade of former speakers. Many of your previous guests have been eminent scientists or fearless campaigners; I stand here tonight to deliver this lecture (pause) as a politician. Thats not inappropriate, however: Lord Burntwood, the IES first Chairman, whose name the lecture commemorates, was himself a member of parliament and a minister in Clement Attlees Labour government. But more importantly, its not inappropriate because the great challenge of our time, the subject on which Ive been asked to speak, is itself primarily political: Brexit.

How the United Kingdom manages its withdrawal from the European Union will shape this countrys future for decades. In the absence of any clarity from the government over what it sees as the final destination of this process, I hope I can enlist everyone here in helping me to draw up the broad approach the UK should adopt in dealing with environmental policy post-Brexit. Im going to tell you what I think, and I hope youll respond at the end with thoughts of your own.

There are two competing visions for the future of the UK outside the EU. One hinted at by some of the supporters of the Leave side during the referendum, but never fully articulated is of a country free of the kind of burdensome regulations they liked to pretend emanated from Brussels; a fleet-footed, buccaneering, free-trading nation spotting openings in the global marketplace and exploiting them ruthlessly. This vision implies a deregulated low-cost low-tax low-value economy with clear implications for environmental policy. In May this year, for example, George Eustice, the farming minister, attacked quotes spirit-crushing EU directives, including, explicitly, the birds and habitats directives and went on to criticise the use of the precautionary principle as the basis of EU legislation, a criticism echoed by many of his colleagues. You may remember that this kind of approach echoes Conservative ministers attempts, during the coalition government, to water down or scrap environmental regulations through such initiatives as the Red Tape Challenge and the balance of competences review attempts which, happily, Liberal Democrat ministers ensured came to nothing.

Imagine living in a country where the government could just shove you in prison whenever it felt like it. And once they had you in their clutches, subjected you to cruel and degrading torture.

There are plenty people who dont value their vote enough to use it, but imagine if we didnt have it at all.

What if we werent allowed to voice opinions that were out of step with our rulers? Or assemble to protest against their decisions.

Anyone who has been brought up in this country will most likely not have had any direct experience of the things Ive

Anyone with a slight interest in UK Boxing will probably be watching the unstoppable Anthony Joshua (17 wins, 0 losses, 17 KOs) defend his IBF heavyweight title tonight and almost certainly demolish Erik Molina. However, on the undercard is another heavyweight, Luis Ortiz, known as the Real King Kong, who has an equally impressive record (26 wins, 0 losses, 22 KOs). Hes quite interesting because Cuba has produced many great boxers, but no great heavyweights Ortiz is considered the greatest ever Cuban heavyweight.

As you may know, despite producing legendary boxers, the Stalinist regime in Cuba forbids them from turning professional, so they have to stay amateurs for the rest of their lives or defect.

Ortiz took the decision to defect to the USA in 2009, not to secure a lucrative professional contract, but to able to pay for his daughters illness. Despite the Cuban propaganda, the healthcare system in Cuba is terrible. Their answer to Ortizs little girl being born with necrosis in one of her fingers, despite everywhere else in the world being able to treat this, the only answer from Cuban doctors was to amputate. Ortiz was left with two choices, stay in Cuba, fight as an amateur for the rest of his life, stay in relative poverty and have his baby daughter go her life without a finger or risk his and his familys life by making a perilous journey to America where he can make an incredible living for his world class talents and his daughter doesnt have to have a finger cut off and face a lifetime of backwards medical practice.

Last year, Your Liberal Britain was founded by five new members who were keen to set out a clear statement of what a Liberal Britain would look like.

Their work has been supported by the Federal Policy Committee and they have already conducted a wide-ranging consultation. You can read some of the contributions made on this site here.

Now they are taking their work to the next stage with a competition, for which the closing date is 23rd December. Members are asked to set out what Britain would look like in 2030 if the Liberal Democrats were in power. Your Liberal Britain says:

As a party we struggle at times to explain what we stand for: our values mean the world to us, but they can be hard to communicate.

To overcome this we need a short, simple, inspirational description of how life in Britain would be better if the Lib Dems had their way. We need to supplement the preamble to our constitution with a temporary vision statement that helps communicate its statement of our permanent values to the people of Britain today. We can then use this document to guide our policy making, inform our campaigns and communications, induct our new members and support our candidates and elected representatives.

I am going to be one of the judges and another, party president Sal Brinton, explains a bit more about the competition.

Read the original post:

Liberal Democrat Voice

Paul Krugman – The Conscience of a Liberal

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

Fast Food Damnation

Matthew Yglesias has an interesting post about the fast-food tycoon who has been nominated as Labor Secretary. Even aside from the fact that when did you stop beating your wife? would, in fact, be a valid question in this guys confirmation hearings, you might think that this nomination would be seen as a total betrayal of the working-class voters who went overwhelmingly Trump a month ago. Hes anti-worker, anti-higher wages, pro-immigration. Wont there be a huge backlash?

What Yglesias suggests, however, is that his connection with fast food is itself a protection because the white working class likes fast food, liberals dont, and the former feels that this shows the latters contempt for regular people.

I suspect that theres something to this, and that its part of a broader story. And I dont know what to do with it.

What I see a lot, both in general political discourse and in my own inbox, is a tremendous sense of resentment against people like Hillary Clinton or, well, me, that isnt about policy. It boils down, instead, to something along the lines of You people think youre better than us. And it has a lot to do with the way people live.

If populism were simply about income inequality, someone like Trump should be deeply resented by the working class. He has gold toilets! But he gets a pass, partly I think because his tastes seem in line with those of non-college-educated whites. That is, he lives the way they imagine they would if they had a lot of money.

Compare that with affluent liberals say, my neighbors on the Upper West Side. They arent nearly as rich as the plutocrats that will stuff the Trump cabinet. Whats more, they vote for things that will raise their taxes and cost of living, while improving the lives of the very people who disdain them. Objectively, theyre on white workers side.

But they dont eat much fast food, because they believe its unhealthy and theyre watching their weight. They dont watch much reality TV, and do listen to a lot of books on tape or even read books the old-fashioned way. if theyre rich enough to have a second home, its a shabby-chic country place, not Mar-a-Lago.

So there is a sense in which theres a bigger cultural gulf between affluent liberals and the white working class than there is between Trumpkins and the WWC. Do the liberals sneer at the Joe Sixpacks? Actually, Ive never heard it the people I hang out with do understand that living the way they do takes a lot more money and time than hard-pressed Americans have, and arent especially judgmental about lifestyles. But its easy to see how the sense that liberals look down on regular folks might arise, and be fanned by right-wing media.

The question is, what do you do? Again, objectively those liberals are very much on workers side, while the characters who play on this perceived disdain are set to betray the white working class on a massive scale. Is there no way to get this across other than eating lots of burgers with fries?

Donald Trump won the electoral college at least in part by promising to bring coal jobs back to Appalachia and manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt. Neither promise can be honored for the most part were talking about jobs lost, not to unfair foreign competition, but to technological change. But a funny thing happens when people like me try to point that out: we get enraged responses from economists who feel an affinity for the working people of the afflicted regions responses that assume that trying to do the numbers must reflect contempt for regional cultures, or something.

So the other day I mused about the dilemmas of dealing with regional backlash, and noted that even lavishly funded attempts to shore up declining regions dont seem to work very well. Heres what I said:

[T]he track record of regional support policies in other countries, which spend far more on such things than we are likely to, is pretty poor. For example, massive aid to the former East Germany hasnt prevented a large decline in population, much bigger than the population decline in Appalachia over the same period.

In response, I get a long, furious piece from Lyman Stone denouncing me:

Krugman and those who believe him want to believe that the fears of Appalachians (or Rust Belters, or what have you) are overblown, that life has not been so bad for them as it seems.

Wait; did I say that? I dont think so. In fact, if I thought everything was OK in Appalachia, I wouldnt have used it as a comparator for Eastern Germany. The point was precisely that Appalachia is a byword for regional decline, which makes it striking that East Germany, which has received the kind of aid Appalachia can only dream of, is suffering an even faster demographic decline.

And for what its worth, Ive spent decades writing and talking about the problems of rising inequality and stagnant wages, so characterizing me as someone telling workers that their problems exist only in their heads is pretty strange.

Now, if we want to have a discussion of regional policies an argument to the effect that my pessimism is unwarranted fine. As someone who is generally a supporter of government activism, Id actually like to be convinced that a judicious program of subsidies, relocating government departments, whatever, really can sustain communities whose traditional industry has eroded.

But what we get instead is an immediate attack on motives. Apparently even suggesting that the decline in some kinds of traditional employment cant be reversed, and that sustaining regional economies can be hard, is a demonstration of elitist contempt for regular people. You might think that people like me are potential allies for those who want to help working families, wherever they are. But if we cant say anything without facing the hair-trigger tempers of regional advocates, without being accused of insulting their culture, that pretty much forecloses useful discussion.

I see that Tim Duy is angry at me again. The occasion is rather odd: I produced a little paper on trade and jobs, which I explicitly labeled wonkish; the point of the paper was, as I said, to reconcile what seemed to be conflicting assessments of the impacts of trade on overall manufacturing employment.

But Duy is mad, because dry statistics on trade arent working to counter Trump. Um, that wasnt the point of the exercise. This wasnt a political manifesto, and never claimed to be. Nor was it a defense of conventional views on trade. It was about what the data say about a particular question. Are we not allowed to do such things in the age of Trump?

Actually, maybe not. Part of the whole Trump phenomenon involves white working class voters rallying around a candidate who promised to bring back the coal and industrial jobs of the past, and lashing out at anyone who refuses to make similar promises. Yet the promise was and is fraudulent. If trying to get the analysis right is elitist, were in very big trouble and perhaps we are.

So what would a political manifesto aimed at winning over these voters look like? You could promise to make their lives better in ways that dont involve bringing back the old plants and mines which, you know, Obama did with health reform and Hillary would have done with family policies and more. But that apparently isnt an acceptable answer.

Can we promise new, different jobs? Job creation under Obama has been pretty good, but it hasnt offered blue-collar jobs in the same places where the old industrial jobs have eroded.

So maybe the answer is regional policies, to promote employment in declining regions? There is certainly a case in principle for doing this, since the costs of uprooting workers and families are larger than economists like to imagine. I would say, however, that the track record of regional support policies in other countries, which spend far more on such things than we are likely to, is pretty poor. For example, massive aid to the former East Germany hasnt prevented a large decline in population, much bigger than the population decline in Appalachia over the same period.

And I have to admit to a strong suspicion that proposals for regional policies that aim to induce service industries to relocate to the Rust Belt would not be well received, would in fact be attacked as elitist. People want those manufacturing jobs back, not something different. And its snooty and disrespectful to say that this cant be done, even though its the truth.

So I really dont know the answer. But back to the starting point: when I analyze the effects of trade on manufacturing employment, the goal is to understand the effects of trade on manufacturing employment not to win over voters. No, dry statistics arent good for political campaigns; but thats no reason to ban statistics.

Recent conversations indicate some confusion about what the economic analysis of trade and jobs actually says, with an impression of big disagreements when what is really happening is that different papers ask different questions. So I attempt a wonkish clarification.

Im still mulling over the Carrier deal, which I suspect will be a template for the Trump years in general again and again, well see actions that are ridiculous in themselves, but add up to a very scary picture.

Start with the ridiculous nature of the whole thing: were talking, it now turns out, about 800 jobs in a nation with 145 million workers. Around 75,000 workers lose their jobs every working day. How does something that isnt even rounding error in the overall jobs picture come to dominate a couple of news cycles?

Yet it did with overwhelmingly positive coverage, at least on TV news. And thats ominous in itself. It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.

Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent although tiny is not good: its not just crony capitalism, its government as protection racket, where companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes. That is, were looking at what may well be the beginning of a descent into banana republic governance.

This is, as Larry says, bad both for the economic and for freedom. And theres every reason to expect many stories like this in the days ahead.

My original update was right! Screwed up dates. So its back to around 5 1/2 million Trump chumps.

Gah: technical issues involving changes in survey. I now have white-alone, no bachelors declining from 27 million in 2013 to 21.5 million in 2015. So were back to a number like 3.5 million.

Update: It turns out that I can do a lot better than this, using the Census CPS table creator. Heres what I have now: in 2013, 27 million whites without a bachelors degree were uninsured. By 2015, that was down to 18.5 million. So were talking about 8.5 million working-class whites who stand to lose health insurance under Trump. If two-thirds of those losers-to-be voted Trump, were looking at 5.6 million people who basically destroyed their own lives.

As Greg Sargent points out, the choice of Tom Price for HHS probably means the death of Obamacare. Never mind the supposed replacement; it will be a bust. So heres the question: how many people just shot themselves in the face?

My first pass answer is, between 3.5 and 4 million. But someone whos better at trawling through Census data can no doubt do better.

Heres my calculation: we start with the Census-measured decline in uninsurance among non-Hispanic whites, which was 6 million between 2013 and 2015. Essentially all of those gains will be lost if Price gets his way.

How many of those white insurance-losers voted for Trump? Whites in general gave him 57 percent of their votes. Whites without a college degree much more likely to have been uninsured pre-Obama gave him 66 percent. Apportioning the insurance-losers using these numbers gives us 3.42 million if we use the overall vote share, or 3.96 million if we use the non-college vote share.

There are various ways this calculation could be off, in either direction. Also, maybe we should add a million Latinos who, if we believe the exit polls, also voted to lose coverage. But its likely to be in the ballpark. And its pretty awesome.

Trumpists are touting the idea of a big infrastructure build, and some Democrats are making conciliatory noises about working with the new regime on that front. But remember who youre dealing with: if you invest anything with this guy, be it money or reputation, you are at great risk of being scammed. So, what do we know about the Trump infrastructure plan, such as it is?

Crucially, its not a plan to borrow $1 trillion and spend it on much-needed projects which would be the straightforward, obvious thing to do. It is, instead, supposed to involve having private investors do the work both of raising money and building the projects with the aid of a huge tax credit that gives them back 82 percent of the equity they put in. To compensate for the small sliver of additional equity and the interest on their borrowing, the private investors then have to somehow make profits on the assets they end up owning.

You should immediately ask three questions about all of this.

First, why involve private investors at all? Its not as if the federal government is having any trouble raising money in fact, a large part of the justification for infrastructure investment is precisely that the government can borrow so cheaply. Why do we need private equity at all?

One answer might be that this way you avoid incurring additional public debt. But thats just accounting confusion. Imagine that youre building a toll road. If the government builds it, it ends up paying interest but gets the future revenue from the tolls. If it turns the project over to private investors, it avoids the interest cost but also loses the future toll revenue. The governments future cash flow is no better than it would have been if it borrowed directly, and worse if it strikes a bad deal, say because the investors have political connections.

Second, how is this kind of scheme supposed to finance investment that doesnt produce a revenue stream? Toll roads are not the main thing we need right now; what about sewage systems, making up for deferred maintenance, and so on? You could bring in private investors by guaranteeing them future government money say, paying rent in perpetuity for the use of a water system built by a private consortium. But this, even more than having someone else collect tolls, would simply be government borrowing through the back door with much less transparency, and hence greater opportunities for giveaways to favored interests.

A lot of people in politics and the media are scrambling to normalize what just happened to us, saying that it will all be OK and we can work with Trump. No, it wont, and no, we cant. The next occupant of the White House will be a pathological liar with a loose grip on reality; he is already surrounding himself with racists, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists; his administration will be the most corrupt in America history.

How did this happen? There were multiple causes, but you just cant ignore the reality that key institutions and their leaders utterly failed. Every news organization that decided, for the sake of ratings, to ignore policy and barely cover Trump scandals while obsessing over Clinton emails, every reporter who, for whatever reason often sheer pettiness played up Wikileaks nonsense and talked about how various Clinton stuff raised questions and cast shadows is complicit in this disaster. And then theres the FBI: its quite reasonable to argue that James Comey, whether it was careerism, cowardice, or something worse, tipped the scales and may have doomed the world.

No, Im not giving up hope. Maybe, just maybe, the sheer awfulness of whats happening will sink in. Maybe the backlash will be big enough to constrain Trump from destroying democracy in the next few months, and/or sweep his gang from power in the next few years. But if thats going to happen, enough people will have to be true patriots, which means taking a stand.

And anyone who doesnt who plays along and plays it safe is betraying America, and mankind.

As I said in todays column, nobody who thought Trump would be a disaster should change his or her mind because he won the election. He will, in fact, be a disaster on every front. And I think he will eventually drag the Republican Party into the abyss along with his own reputation; the question is whether he drags the rest of the country, and the world, down with him.

But its important not to expect this to happen right away. Theres a temptation to predict immediate economic or foreign-policy collapse; I gave in to that temptation Tuesday night, but quickly realized that I was making the same mistake as the opponents of Brexit (which I got right). So I am retracting that call, right now. Its at least possible that bigger budget deficits will, if anything, strengthen the economy briefly. More detail in Mondays column, I suspect.

On other fronts, too, dont expect immediate vindication. America has a vast stock of reputational capital, built up over generations; even Trump will take some time to squander it.

The true awfulness of Trump will become apparent over time. Bad things will happen, and he will be clueless about how to respond; if you want a parallel, think about how Katrina revealed the hollowness of the Bush administration, and multiply by a hundred. And his promises to bring back the good old days will eventually be revealed as the lies they are.

But it probably wont happen in a year. So the effort to reclaim American decency is going to have to have staying power; we need to build the case, organize, create the framework. And, of course, never forget who is right.

Its going to be a long time in the wilderness, and its going to be awful. If I sound calm and philosophical, Im not like everyone who cares, Im frazzled, sleepless, depressed. But we need to be stalwart.

Anyone who claims to be philosophical and detached after yesterday is either lying or has something very wrong with him (or her, but I doubt many women are in that camp.) Its a disaster on multiple levels, and the damage will echo down the decades if not the generations. And like anyone on my side of this debate, I keep feeling waves of grief.

Its natural, only human, to engage in recriminations, some of which are surely deserved. But while a post-mortem is going to be necessary, lashing out doesnt seem helpful or good for the lashers-out themselves.

Eventually those of us on the center-left will have to talk about political strategy. For now, however, I want to share some thoughts on how we should deal with this personally.

First of all, its always important to remember that elections determine who has the power, not who has the truth. The stunning upset doesnt mean that the alt-right is correct to view nonwhites as inferior, that voodoo economics works, whatever. And you have to hold to the truth as best you see it, even if it suffers political defeat.

That said, does it make sense on a personal level to keep struggling after this kind of blow? Why not give up on trying to save the world, and just look out for yourself and those close to you? Quietism does have its appeal. Admission: I spent a lot of today listening to music, working out, reading a novel, basically taking a vacation in my head. You cant help feeling tired and frustrated after this kind of setback.

But eventually one has to go back to standing for what you believe in. Its going to be a much harder, longer road than I imagined, and maybe it ends in irreversible defeat, if nothing else from runaway climate change. But I couldnt live with myself if I just gave up. And I hope others will feel the same.

I tweeted this out earlier, but for blog readers here it is in this form.

Some morning-after thoughts: what hits me and other so hard isnt just the immense damage Trump will surely do, to climate above all. Theres also a vast disillusionment that as of now I think of as the end of the romantic vision of America (which I still love).

What I mean is the notion of US history as a sort of novel in which there may be great tragedy, but theres always a happy ending. That is, we tell a story in which at times of crisis we always find the leader Lincoln, FDR and the moral courage we need.

Its a particular kind of American exceptionalism; other countries dont tell that kind of story about themselves. But I, like others, believed it.

Now it doesnt look very good, does it? But giving up is not an option. The world needs a decent, democratic America, or were all lost. And theres still a lot of decency in the nation its just not as dominant as I imagined. Time to rethink, for sure. But not to surrender.

Binyamin Appelbaum has a nice piece about the stall in world trade growth, which I (and many others) have been tracking for a while. And I thought Id write a bit more about this, if only to serve as a much-needed distraction from the election.

If theres a problem with the Appelbaum piece, it is that on casual reading it might seem to suggest that slowing trade growth is (a) necessarily the result of protectionism and (b) necessarily a bad thing. Neither of these is right.

I found myself thinking about this some years ago, when teaching trade policy at the Woodrow Wilson School. I was very struck by a paper by Taylor et al on the interwar decline in trade, which argued that much of this decline reflected rising transport costs, not protectionism. But how could transport costs have gone up? Was there technological regress?

The answer, as the paper correctly pointed out, is that real transport costs will rise even if there is continuing technological progress, as long as that progress is slower than in the rest of the economy.

To clear that story up in my own mind, I wrote up a little toy model, contained in these class notes from sometime last decade (?). Pretty sure I wrote them before the global trade stagnation happened, but theyre a useful guide all the same.

As I see it, we had some big technological advances in transportation containerization, probably better communication making it easier to break up the value chain; plus the great move of developing countries away from import substitution toward export orientation. (Thats a decline in tau and t in my toy model.) But this was a one-time event. Now that its behind us, no presumption that trade will grow faster than GDP. This need not represent a problem; its just the end of one technological era.

It is kind of ironic that globalization seems to be plateauing just as the political backlash mounts. But were not going to talk about the election.

Both Ross Douthat and David Brooks have now weighed in on the state of conservative intellectuals; both deserve credit for taking a critical look at their team.

But of course theres a but Id argue that they and others on the right still have huge blind spots. In fact, these blind spots are so huge as to make the critiques all but useless as a basis for reform. For if you ignore the true, deep roots of the conservative intellectual implosion, youre never going to make a real start on reconstruction.

What are these blind spots? First, belief in a golden age that never existed. Second, a simply weird refusal to acknowledge the huge role played by money and monetary incentives promoting bad ideas.

On the first point: Were supposed to think back nostalgically to the era when serious conservative intellectuals like Irving Kristol tried to understand the world, rather than treating everything as a political exercise in which ideas were just there to help their team win.

But it was never like that. Dont take my word for it; take the word of Irving Kristol himself, in his book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Kristol explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities. This justified a cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or financial problems, because political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.

In short, never mind whether its right, as long as its politically useful. When David complains that conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else, hes describing something that happened well before Reagan.

But shouldnt there have been some reality checks along the way, with politically convenient ideas falling out of favor because they didnt work in practice? No because being wrong in the right way has always been a financially secure activity. I see this very clearly in economics, where there are three kinds of economists: liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists, and professional conservative economist the fourth box is more or less empty, because billionaires dont lavishly support hacks on the left.

There was a time, not long ago, when deficit scolds were actively dangerous when their huffing and puffing came quite close to stampeding Washington into really bad policies like raising the Medicare age (which wouldnt even have saved money) and short-term fiscal austerity. At this point their influence doesnt reach nearly that far. But they continue to play a malign role in our national discourse because they divert and distract attention from much more deserving problems, depriving crucial issues of political oxygen.

You saw that in the debates: four, count them, four questions about debt from the CRFB, not one about climate change. And you see it again in todays Times, with Pete Peterson (of course) and Paul Volcker (sigh) lecturing us about the usual stuff.

Whats so bad about this kind of deficit scolding? Its deeply misleading on two levels: the problem it purports to lay out is far less clearly a major issue than the scolds claim, and the insistence that we need immediate action is just incoherent.

So, about that supposed debt crisis: right now we have a more or less stable ratio of debt to GDP, and no hint of a financing problem. So claims that we are facing something terrible rest on the presumption that the budget situation will worsen dramatically over time. How sure are we about that? Less than you may imagine.

Yes, the population is getting older, which means more spending on Medicare and Social Security. But its already 2016, which means that quite a few baby boomers are already drawing on those programs; by 2020 well be about halfway through the demographic transition, and current estimates dont suggest a big budget problem.

Why, then, do you see projections of a large debt increase? The answer lies not in a known factor an aging population but in assumed growth in health care costs and rising interest rates. And the truth is that we dont know that these are going to happen. In fact, health costs have grown much more slowly since 2010 than previously projected, and interest rates have been much lower. As the chart above shows, taking these favorable surprises into account has already drastically reduced long-run debt projections. These days the long-run outlook looks vastly less scary than people used to imagine.

Like Claudia Sahm, I was struck by polling results indicating that around half of Trump supporters completely distrust official data although maybe a bit less surprised, since Ive been living in that world for years. In particular, the failure of high inflation to materialize led quite a few people on the right side of the political spectrum including the likes of Niall Ferguson to insist that the numbers were being cooked, so this is neither a new phenomenon nor one restricted to Trump types.

As it happened, there was a very easy answer to the inflation truthers: quite aside from the absurdity of claiming a conspiracy at the BLS, we had independent estimates such as the Billion Prices Index that closely matched official data. And theres similar independent evidence for a lot of the things where people now claim that official numbers are skewed. For example, the Gallup Healthways index provides independent confirmation of the huge gains in insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

But aside from validity, what explains this distrust of statistics? Is it because peoples own experience clashes with what theyre being told? I dont think so. In fact, when people are asked about personal outcomes, not about the economy, the story they tell is a lot like the official numbers. From that poll about Trumpian distrust of the data:

So people are feeling better, in line with what the data say, but claim that the economy is getting worse. Hard to believe that this isnt political, a case of going with the party line in the teeth of personal experience.

Here is the original post:

Paul Krugman - The Conscience of a Liberal

Cohousing – Wikipedia

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

Cohousing[1] is an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space. Each attached or single family home has traditional amenities, including a private kitchen. Shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Shared outdoor space may include parking, walkways, open space, and gardens. Neighbors also share resources like tools and lawnmowers.

Households have independent incomes and private lives, but neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces. The legal structure is typically an HOA, Condo Association, or Housing Cooperative. Community activities feature regularly-scheduled shared meals, meetings, and workdays. Neighbors gather for parties, games, movies, or other events. Cohousing makes it easy to form clubs, organize child and elder care, and carpool.

Cohousing facilitates interaction among neighbors for social and practical benefits, economic and environmental benefits.[2][3]

Neighbors commit to being part of a community for everyones mutual benefit. Cohousing cultivates a culture of sharing and caring. Design features and neighborhood size (typically 20-40 homes) promote frequent interaction and close relationships.

Cohousing neighborhoods are designed for privacy as well as community. Residents balance privacy and community by choosing their own level of engagement.

Decision making is participatory and often based on consensus. Self-management empowers residents, builds community, and saves money.

Cohousing communities support residents in actualizing shared values. Cohousing communities typically adopt green approaches to living.

The modern theory of cohousing originated in Denmark in the 1960s among groups of families who were dissatisfied with existing housing and communities that they felt did not meet their needs. Bodil Graae wrote a newspaper article titled "Children Should Have One Hundred Parents,"[4] spurring a group of 50 families to organize around a community project in 1967. This group developed the cohousing project Sttedammen, which is the oldest known modern cohousing community in the world. Another key organizer was Jan Gudmand Hyer who drew inspiration from his architectural studies at Harvard and interaction with experimental U.S. communities of the era. He published the article "The Missing Link between Utopia and the Dated Single Family House" [5] in 1968, converging a second group.

The Danish term bofllesskab (living community) was introduced to North America as cohousing by two American architects, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, who visited several cohousing communities and wrote a book about it.[2] The book resonated with some existing and forming communities, such as Sharingwood in Washington state and N Street in California, who embraced the cohousing concept as a crystallization of what they were already about. Though most cohousing groups seek to develop multi-generational communities, some focus on creating senior communities. Charles Durrett later wrote a handbook on creating senior cohousing.[3] The first community in the United States to be designed, constructed and occupied specifically for cohousing is Muir Commons in Davis, California.[6][7]Architects, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett were responsible for the programming and the design of the site plan, common house and private houses.

There are precedents for cohousing in the 1920s in New York with the cooperative apartment housing with shared facilities and good social interaction. The Siheyuan, or quadrangle design of housing in China has a shared courtyard and is thus similar in some respects to cohousing.

Cohousing communities are part of the new cooperative economy in the United States and are predicted to expand rapidly in the next few decades as individuals and families seek to live more sustainably, and in community with neighbors. Since the first cohousing community was completed in the U.S. Muir Commons in Davis, California, now celebrating 25 years more than 160 communities have been established in 25 states plus the District of Columbia, with more than 125 in process. For a listing of cohousing communities visit http://www.cohousing.org/directory. Most cohousing communities are intergenerational with both children and elders; in recent years, senior cohousing focused on older adult needs have grown. These communities come in a variety, but are often environment friendly and socially sustainable.

Hundreds of cohousing communities exist in Denmark and other countries in northern Europe. In Canada, there are 11 completed communities, and approximately 19 in the forming or development phase (see [1]). There are more than 300 cohousing communities in the Netherlands (73 mixed-generation and 231 senior cohousing), with about 60 others in planning or construction phases. [8] There are also communities in Australia (see Cohousing Australia), the United Kingdom (see UK Cohousing Network http://www.cohousing.org.uk for information, Threshold Centre Cohousing Community http://www.thresholdcentre.org.uk/ offers training), and other parts of the world.

Cohousing started to develop in the UK at the end of the 1990s. The movement has gradually built up momentum and there are now 14 purpose built cohousing communities. A further 40+ cohousing groups are developing projects and new groups are forming all the time. Cohousing communities in the UK range from around 8 households to around 30 households. Most communities are mixed communities with single people, couples and families but some are only for people over 50 and one is only for women over 50 years. The communities themselves range from new developments built to modern eco standards to conversions of everything from farms to Jacobean mansions to former hospital buildings and are in urban, rural and semi- rural locations.

Because each cohousing community is planned in its context, a key feature of this model is its flexibility to the needs and values of its residents and the characteristics of the site. Cohousing can be urban, suburban or rural. The physical form is typically compact but varies from low-rise apartments to townhouses to clustered detached houses. They tend to keep cars to the periphery which promotes walking through the community and interacting with neighbors as well as increasing safety for children at play within the community. Shared green space is another characteristic, whether for gardening, play, or places to gather. When more land is available than is needed for the physical structures, the structures are usually clustered closely together, leaving as much of the land as possible "open" for shared use. This aspect of cohousing directly addresses the growing problem of suburban sprawl.

In addition to "from-scratch" new-built communities (including those physically retrofitting/re-using existing structures), there are also "retrofit" (aka "organic") communities in which neighbors create "intentional neighborhoods" by buying adjacent properties and removing fences. Often, they create common amenities such as Common Houses after the fact, while living there. N Street Cohousing in Davis, CA, is the canonical example of this type; it came together before the term Cohousing was popularized here.

Cohousing differs from some types of intentional communities in that the residents do not have a shared economy or a common set of beliefs or religion, but instead invest in creating a socially rich and interconnected community. A non-hierarchical structure employing a consensus decision-making model is common in managing cohousing. Individuals do take on leadership roles, such as being responsible for coordinating a garden or facilitating a meeting.

Cohousing communities in the U.S. currently rely on one of two existing legal forms of real estate ownership: individually titled houses with common areas owned by a homeowner association(condominium)s or a housing cooperative. Condo ownership is most common because it fits financial institutions' and cities' models for multi-unit owner-occupied housing development. U.S. banks lend more readily on single-family homes and condominiums than housing cooperatives. Charles Durrett points out that rental cohousing is a very likely future model, as it has already is being practiced in Europe.

Cohousing differs from standard condominium development and master-planned subdivisions because the development is designed by, or with considerable input from, its future residents. The design process invariably emphasizes consciously fostering social relationships among its residents. Common facilities are based on the actual needs of the residents, rather than on what a developer thinks will help sell units. Turnover in cohousing developments is typically very low, and there is usually a waiting list for units to become available.

In Europe the term "joint building ventures" has been coined to define the form of ownership and housing characterized as cohousing. According to the European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN): "Joint building ventures are a legal federation of persons willing to build who want to create owner-occupied housing and to participate actively in planning and building."[9]

Cohousing - Wikipedia

Why Darwinism Is False | Center for Science and Culture

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

Jonathan Wells Discovery Institute May 18, 2009 Print Article

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. In Why Evolution is True, he summarizes Darwinismthe modern theory of evolutionas follows: Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive speciesperhaps a self-replicating moleculethat lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.1

Coyne further explains that evolution simply means that a species undergoes genetic change over time. That is, over many generations a species can evolve into something quite different, and those differences are based on changes in the DNA, which originate as mutations. The species of animals and plants living today werent around in the past, but are descended from those that lived earlier.2

According to Coyne, however, if evolution meant only gradual genetic change within a species, wed have only one species todaya single highly evolved descendant of the first species. Yet we have many How does this diversity arise from one ancestral form? It arises because of splitting, or, more accurately, speciation, which simply means the evolution of different groups that cant interbreed.3

If Darwinian theory were true, we should be able to find some cases of speciation in the fossil record, with one line of descent dividing into two or more. And we should be able to find new species forming in the wild. Furthermore, we should be able to find examples of species that link together major groups suspected to have common ancestry, like birds with reptiles and fish with amphibians. Finally, there are facts that make sense only in light of the theory of evolution but do not make sense in the light of creation or design. These include patterns of species distribution on the earths surface, peculiarities of how organisms develop from embryos, and the existence of vestigial features that are of no apparent use. Coyne concludes his introduction with the bold statement that all the evidenceboth old and newleads ineluctably to the conclusion that evolution is true.4

Of course, evolution is undeniably true if it means simply that existing species can change in minor ways over time, or that many species living today did not exist in the past. But Darwins claim that all species are modified descendants of a common ancestor, and Coynes claim that DNA mutations and natural selection have produced those modifications, are not so undeniably true. Coyne devotes the remainder of his book to providing evidence for them.

Fossils

Coyne turns first to the fossil record. We should be able, he writes, to find some evidence for evolutionary change in the fossil record. The deepest (and oldest) layers of rock would contain the fossils of more primitive species, and some fossils should become more complex as the layers of rock become younger, with organisms resembling present-day species found in the most recent layers. And we should be able to see some species changing over time, forming lineages showing descent with modification (adaptation). In particular, later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.5

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin acknowledged that the fossil record presented difficulties for his theory. By the theory of natural selection, he wrote, all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the natural and domestic varieties of the same species at the present day. Thus in the past the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But Darwin knew that the major animal groupswhich modern biologists call phylaappeared fully formed in what were at the time the earliest known fossil-bearing rocks, deposited during a geological period known as the Cambrian. He considered this a serious difficulty for his theory, since if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures. And to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. So the case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.6

Darwin defended his theory by citing the imperfection of the geological record. In particular, he argued that Precambrian fossils had been destroyed by heat, pressure, and erosion. Some of Darwins modern followers have likewise argued that Precambrian fossils existed but were later destroyed, or that Precambrian organisms were too small or too soft to have fossilized in the first place. Since 1859, however, paleontologists have discovered many Precambrian fossils, many of them microscopic or soft-bodied. As American paleobiologist William Schopf wrote in 1994, The long-held notion that Precambrian organisms must have been too small or too delicate to have been preserved in geological materials [is] now recognized as incorrect. If anything, the abrupt appearance of the major animal phyla about 540 million years agowhich modern biologists call the Cambrian explosion or biologys Big Bangis better documented now than in Darwins time. According to Berkeley paleontologist James Valentine and his colleagues, the explosion is real, it is too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record. Indeed, as more fossils are discovered it becomes clear that the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned.7

What does Coynes book have to say about this?

Around 600 million years ago, Coyne writes, a whole gamut of relatively simple but multicelled organisms arise, including worms, jellyfish, and sponges. These groups diversify over the next several million years, with terrestrial plants and tetrapods (four-legged animals, the earliest of which were lobe-finned fish) appearing about 400 million years ago.8

In other words, Coynes account of evolutionary history jumps from 600 to 400 million years ago without mentioning the 540 million year-old Cambrian explosion. In this respect, Coynes book reads like a modern biology textbook that has been written to indoctrinate students in Darwinian evolution rather than provide them with the facts.

Coyne goes on to discuss several transitional forms. One of our best examples of an evolutionary transition, he writes, is the fossil record of whales, since we have a chronologically ordered series of fossils, perhaps a lineage of ancestors and descendants, showing their movement from land to water.9

The sequence begins, Coyne writes, with the recently discovered fossil of a close relative of whales, a raccoon-sized animal called Indohyus. Living 48 million years ago, Indohyus was probably very close to what the whale ancestor looked like. In the next paragraph, Coyne writes, Indohyus was not the ancestor of whales, but was almost certainly its cousin. But if we go back 4 million more years, to 52 million years ago, we see what might well be that ancestor. It is a fossil skull from a wolf-sized creature called Pakicetus, which is bit more whalelike than Indohyus. On the page separating these two paragraphs is a figure captioned Transitional forms in the evolution of modern whales, which shows Indohyus as the first in the series and Pakicetus as the second.10

But Pakicetusas Coyne just told usis 4 million years older than Indohyus. To a Darwinist, this doesnt matter: Pakicetus is more whalelike than Indohyus, so it must fall between Indohyus and modern whales, regardless of the fossil evidence.

(Coyne performs the same trick with fossils that are supposedly ancestral to modern birds. The textbook icon Archaeopteryx, with feathered wings like a modern bird but teeth and a tail like a reptile, is dated at 145 million years. But what Coyne calls the nonflying feathered dinosaur fossilswhich should have come before Archaeopteryxare tens of millions of years younger. Like Darwinists Kevin Padian and Luis Chiappe eleven years earlier, Coyne simply rearranges the evidence to fit Darwinian theory.)11

So much for Coynes prediction that later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones. And so much for his argument that if evolution were not true, fossils would not occur in an order that makes evolutionary sense. Ignoring the facts he himself has just presented, Coyne brazenly concludes: When we find transitional forms, they occur in the fossil record precisely where they should. If Coynes book were turned into a movie, this scene might feature Chico Marx saying, Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?12

There is another problem with the whale series (and every other series of fossils) that Coyne fails to address: No species in the series could possibly be the ancestor of any other, because all of them possess characteristics they would first have to lose before evolving into a subsequent form. This is why the scientific literature typically shows each species branching off a supposed lineage.

In the figure below, all the lines are hypothetical. The diagram on the left is a representation of evolutionary theory: Species A is ancestral to B, which is ancestral to C, which is ancestral to D, which is ancestral to E. But the diagram on the right is a better representation of the evidence: Species A, B, C and D are not in the actual lineage leading to E, which remains unknown.

It turns out that no series of fossils can provide evidence for Darwinian descent with modification. Even in the case of living species, buried remains cannot generally be used to establish ancestor-descendant relationships. Imagine finding two human skeletons in the same grave, one about thirty years older than the other. Was the older individual the parent of the younger? Without written genealogical records and identifying marks (or in some cases DNA), it is impossible to answer the question. And in this case we would be dealing with two skeletons from the same species that are only a generation apart and from the same location. With fossils from different species that are now extinct, and widely separated in time and space, there is no way to establish that one is the ancestor of anotherno matter how many transitional fossils we find.

In 1978, Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History wrote: The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.13Nature science writer Henry Gee wrote in 1999 that no fossil is buried with its birth certificate. When we call new fossil discoveries missing links, it is as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices. Gee concluded: To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime storyamusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.14

Embryos

So evolutionary theory needs better evidence than the fossil record can provide. Coyne correctly notes: When he wrote The Origin, Darwin considered embryology his strongest evidence for evolution. Darwin had written that the evidence seemed to show that the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar, a pattern that reveals community of descent. Indeed, Darwin thought that early embryos show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult state.15

But Darwin was not an embryologist. In The Origin of Species he supported his contention by citing a passage by German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer:

The embryos of mammals, birds, lizards and snakes, and probably chelonia [turtles] are in their earliest states exceedingly like one another.... In my possession are two little embryos in spirit, whose names I have omitted to attach, and at present I am quite unable to say to what class they belong. They may be lizards or small birds, or very young mammals, so complete is the similarity in the mode of formation of the head and trunk in these animals.16

Coyne claims that this is something von Baer wrote to Darwin, but Coynes history is as unreliable as his paleontology. The passage Darwin cited was from a work written in German by von Baer in 1828; Thomas Henry Huxley translated it into English and published it in 1853. Darwin didnt even realize at first that it was from von Baer: In the first two editions of The Origin of Species he incorrectly attributed the passage to Louis Agassiz.17

Ironically, von Baer was a strong critic of Darwins theory, rejecting the idea that all vertebrates share a common ancestor. According to historian of science Timothy Lenoir, von Baer feared that Darwin and his followers had already accepted the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis as true before they set to the task of observing embryos. The myth that von Baers work supported Darwins theory was due primarily to another German biologist, Ernst Haeckel.18 Haeckel maintained not only that all vertebrate embryos evolved from a common ancestor, but also that in their development (ontogeny) they replay (recapitulate) their evolutionary history (phylogeny). He called this The Biogenetic Law: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

In Why Evolution Is True, Coyne writes that the recapitulation of an evolutionary sequence is seen in the developmental sequence of various organs. Each vertebrate undergoes development in a series of stages, and the sequence of those stages happens to follow the evolutionary sequence of its ancestors. The probable reason for this is that as one species evolves into another, the descendant inherits the developmental program of its ancestor. So the descendant tacks changes onto what is already a robust and basic developmental plan. It is best for things that evolved later to be programmed to develop later in the embryo. This adding new stuff onto old principle also explains why the sequence of developmental stages mirrors the evolutionary sequence of organisms. As one group evolves from another, it often adds its developmental program on top of the old one. Thus all vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor.19

Nevertheless, Coyne writes, Haeckels Biogenetic Law wasnt strictly true, because embryonic stages dont look like the adult forms of their ancestors, as Haeckel (and Darwin) believed, but like the embryonic forms of their ancestors. But this reformulation of The Biogenetic Law doesnt solve the problem. First, fossil embryos are extremely rare,20 so the reformulated law has to rely on embryos of modern organisms that are assumed to resemble ancestral forms. The result is a circular argument: According to Darwins theory, fish are our ancestors; human embryos (allegedly) look like fish embryos; therefore, human embryos look like the embryos of our ancestors. Theory first, observation laterjust as von Baer had objected.

Second, the idea that later evolutionary stages can simply be tacked onto development is biologically unrealistic. A human is not just a fish embryo with some added features. As British embryologist Walter Garstang pointed out in 1922, a house is not a cottage with an extra story on the top. A house represents a higher grade in the evolution of a residence, but the whole building is alteredfoundations, timbers, and roofeven if the bricks are the same.21

Third, and most important, vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their earliest stages. In the 1860s, Haeckel made some drawings to show that vertebrate embryos look almost identical in their first stagebut his drawings were faked. Not only had he distorted the embryos by making them appear more similar than they really are, but he had also omitted earlier stages in which the embryos are strikingly different from each other. A human embryo in its earliest stages looks nothing like a fish embryo.

Only after vertebrate embryos have progressed halfway through their development do they reach the stage that Darwin and Haeckel treated as the first. Developmental biologists call this different-similar-different pattern the developmental hourglass. Vertebrate embryos do not resemble each other in their earliest stages, but they converge somewhat in appearance midway through development before diverging again. If ontogeny were a recapitulation of phylogeny, such a pattern would be more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry. Modern Darwinists attempt to salvage their theory by assuming that the common ancestry of vertebrates is obscured because early development can evolve easily, but there is no justification for this assumption other than the theory itself.22

Although Haeckels drawings were exposed as fakes by his own contemporaries, biology textbooks used them throughout the twentieth century to convince students that humans share a common ancestor with fish. Then, in 1997, a scientific journal published an article comparing photos of vertebrate embryos to Haeckels drawings, which the lead author described as one of the most famous fakes in biology. In 2000, Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called Haeckels drawings fraudulent and wrote that biologists should be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks.23

But Coyne is not ashamed. He defends Haeckels drawings Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly, Coyne writes, of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar than they really are. Yet we shouldnt throw out the baby with the bath water.24 The baby is Darwins theory, which Coyne stubbornly defends regardless of the evidence.

Vestiges and Bad Design

Darwin argued in The Origin of Species that the widespread occurrence of vestigial organsorgans that may have once had a function but are now uselessis evidence against creation. On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility should so frequently occur. But such organs, he argued, are readily explained by his theory: On the view of descent with modification, we may conclude that the existence of organs in a rudimentary, imperfect, and useless condition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a strange difficulty, as they assuredly do on the old doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated in accordance with the views here explained.25

In The Descent of Man, Darwin cited the human appendix as an example of a vestigial organ. But Darwin was mistaken: The appendix is now known to be an important source of antibody-producing blood cells and thus an integral part of the human immune system. It may also serve as a compartment for beneficial bacteria that are needed for normal digestion. So the appendix is not useless at all.26

In 1981, Canadian biologist Steven Scadding argued that although he had no objection to Darwinism, vestigial organs provide no evidence for evolutionary theory. The primarily reason is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to unambiguously identify organs totally lacking in function. Scadding cited the human appendix as an organ previously thought to be vestigial but now known to have a function. Another Canadian biologist, Bruce Naylor, countered that an organ with some function can still be considered vestigial. Furthermore, Naylor argued, perfectly designed organisms necessitated the existence of a creator, but organisms are often something less than perfectly designed and thus better explained by evolution. Scadding replied: The entire argument of Darwin and others regarding vestigial organs hinges on their uselessness and inutility. Otherwise, the argument from vestigiality is nothing more than an argument from homology, and Darwin treated these arguments separately recognizing that they were in fact independent. Scadding also objected that Naylors less than perfectly designed argument was based on a theological assumption about the nature of God, i.e. that he would not create useless structures. Whatever the validity of this theological claim, it certainly cannot be defended as a scientific statement, and thus should be given no place in a scientific discussion of evolution.27

In Why Evolution Is True, Coyne (like Darwin) cites the human appendix as an example of a vestigial organ. Unlike Darwin, however, Coyne concedes that it may be of some small use. The appendix contains patches of tissue that may function as part of the immune system. It has also been suggested that it provides a refuge for useful gut bacteria. But these minor benefits are surely outweighed by the severe problems that come with the human appendix. In any case, Coyne argues, the appendix is still vestigial, for it no longer performs the function for which it evolved.28

As Scadding had pointed out nearly thirty years ago, however, Darwins argument rested on lack of function, not change of function. Furthermore, if vestigiality were redefined as Coyne proposes, it would include many features never before thought to be vestigial. For example, if the human arm evolved from the leg of a four-footed mammal (as Darwinists claim), then the human arm is vestigial. And if (as Coyne argues) the wings of flying birds evolved from feathered forelimbs of dinosaurs that used them for other purposes, then the wings of flying birds are vestigial. This is the opposite of what most people mean by vestigial.29

Coyne also ignores Scaddings other criticism, arguing that whether the human appendix is useless or not, it is an example of imperfect or bad design. What I mean by bad design, Coyne writes, is the notion that if organisms were built from scratch by a designerone who used the biological building blocks or nerves, muscles, bone, and so onthey would not have such imperfections. Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; in fact, its precisely what we expect from evolution.30

An even better example of bad design, Coyne argues, is the prevalence of dead genes. According to the modern version of Darwinism that Coyne defends, DNA carries a genetic program that encodes proteins that direct embryo development; mutations occasionally alter the genetic program to produce new proteins (or change their locations); and natural selection then sorts those mutations to produce evolution. In the 1970s, however, molecular biologists discovered that most of our DNA does not encode proteins. In 1972 Susumu Ohno called this junk, and in 1976 Richard Dawkins wrote: A large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein. From the point of view of the individual organism this seems paradoxical. If the purpose of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies, it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. From the point of view of Darwinian evolution, however, there is no paradox. The true purpose of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.31

Like Dawkins, Coyne regards much of our DNA as parasitic. He writes in Why Evolution Is True: When a trait is no longer used, or becomes reduced, the genes that make it don't instantly disappear from the genome: evolution stops their action by inactivating them, not snipping them out of the DNA. From this we can make a prediction. We expect to find, in the genomes of many species, silenced, or dead, genes: genes that once were useful but are no longer intact or expressed. In other words, there should be vestigial genes. In contrast, the idea that all species were created from scratch predicts that no such genes would exist. Coyne continues: Thirty years ago we couldn't test this prediction because we had no way to read the DNA code. Now, however, its quite easy to sequence the complete genome of species, and its been done for many of them, including humans. This gives us a unique tool to study evolution when we realize that the normal function of a gene is to make a proteina protein whose sequence of amino acids is determined by the sequence of nucleotide bases that make up the DNA. And once we have the DNA sequence of a given gene, we can usually tell if it is expressed normallythat is, whether it makes a functional proteinor whether it is silenced and makes nothing. We can see, for example, whether mutations have changed the gene so that a usable protein can no longer be made, or whether the control regions responsible for turning on a gene have been inactivated. A gene that doesnt function is called a pseudogene. And the evolutionary prediction that well find pseudogenes has been fulfilledamply. Virtually every species harbors dead genes, many of them still active in its relatives. This implies that those genes were also active in a common ancestor, and were killed off in some descendants but not in others. Out of about thirty thousand genes, for example, we humans carry more than two thousand pseudogenes. Our genomeand that of other speciesare truly well populated graveyards of dead genes.32

But Coyne is dead wrong.

Evidence pouring in from genome-sequencing projects shows that virtually all of an organisms DNA is transcribed into RNA, and that even though most of that RNA is not translated into proteins, it performs essential regulatory functions. Every month, science journals publish articles describing more such functions. And this is not late-breaking news: The evidence has been accumulating since 2003 (when scientists finished sequencing the human genome) that pseudogenes and other so-called junk DNA sequences are not useless after all.33Why Evolution Is True ignores this enormous body of evidence, which decisively refutes Coynes Darwinian prediction that our genome should contain lots of dead DNA. Its no wonder that Coyne falls back again and again on the sort of theological arguments that Scadding wrote should be given no place in a scientific discussion of evolution.

Biogeography

Theological arguments are also prominent in The Origin of Species. For example, Darwin argued that the geographic distribution of living things made no sense if species had been separately created, but it did make sense in the context of his theory. Cases such as the presence of peculiar species of bats on oceanic islands and the absence of all other terrestrial mammals, Darwin wrote, are facts utterly inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation. In particular: Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? According to Darwin, on my view this question can easily be answered; for no terrestrial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across.34

But Darwin knew that migration cannot account for all patterns of geographic distribution. He wrote in The Origin of Species that the identity of many plants and animals, on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where Alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one point to the other. Darwin argued that the recent ice age affords a simple explanation of these facts. Arctic plants and animals that were nearly the same could have flourished everywhere in Europe and North America, but when the warmth had fully returned, the same species, which had lately lived together on the European and North American lowlands, would again be found in the arctic regions of the Old and New Worlds, and on many isolated mountain-summits far distant from each other.35

So some cases of geographic distribution may not be due to migration, but to the splitting of a formerly large, widespread population into small, isolated populationswhat modern biologists call vicariance. Darwin argued that all modern distributions of species could be explained by these two possibilities. Yet there are many cases of geographic distribution that neither migration nor vicariance seem able to explain.

One example is the worldwide distribution of flightless birds, or ratites. These include ostriches in Africa, rheas in South America, emus and cassowaries in Australia, and kiwis in New Zealand. Since the birds are flightless, explanations based on migration over vast oceanic distances are implausible. After continental drift was discovered in the twentieth century, it was thought that the various populations might have separated with the landmasses. But ostriches and kiwis are much too recent; the continents had already drifted apart when these species originated. So neither migration nor vicariance explain ratite biogeography.36

Another example is freshwater crabs. Studied intensively by Italian biologist Giuseppe Colosi in the 1920s, these animals complete their life cycles exclusively in freshwater habitats and are incapable of surviving prolonged exposure to salt water. Today, very similar species are found in widely separated lakes and rivers in Central and South America, Africa, Madagascar, southern Europe, India, Asia and Australia. Fossil and molecular evidence indicates that these animals originated long after the continents separated, so their distribution is inconsistent with the vicariance hypothesis. Some biologists speculate that the crabs may have migrated by transoceanic rafting in hollow logs, but this seems unlikely given their inability to tolerate salt water. So neither vicariance nor migration provides a convincing explanation for the biogeography of these animals.37

An alternative explanation was suggested in the mid-twentieth century by Lon Croizat, a French biologist raised in Italy. Croizat found that Darwins theory did not seem to agree at all with certain important facts of nature, especially the facts of biogeography. Indeed, he concluded, Darwinism is by now only a straitjacket a thoroughly decrepit skin to hold new wine. Croizat did not argue for independent acts of creation; instead, he proposed that in many cases a widespread primitive species was split into fragments, then its remnants evolved in parallel, in separate locations, into new species that were remarkably similar. Croizat called this process of parallel evolution orthogenesis. Neo-Darwinists such as Ernst Mayr, however, pointed out that there is no mechanism for orthogenesis, which impliescontrary to Darwinismthat evolution is guided in certain directions; so they rejected Croizats hypothesis.38

In Why Evolution Is True, Coyne (like Darwin) attributes the biogeography of oceanic islands to migration, and certain other distributions to vicariance. But Coyne (unlike Darwin) acknowledges that these two processes cannot explain everything. For example, the internal anatomy of marsupial mammals is so different from the internal anatomy of placental mammals that the two groups are thought to have split a long time ago. Yet there are marsupial flying squirrels, anteaters and moles in Australia that strikingly resemble placental flying squirrels, anteaters and moles on other continents, and these forms originated long after the continents had separated.

Coyne attributes the similarities to a well-known process called convergent evolution. According to Coyne. Its really quite simple. Species that live in similar habitats will experience similar selection pressures from their environment, so they may evolve similar adaptations, or converge, coming to look and behave very much alike even though they are unrelated. Put together common ancestry, natural selection, and the origin of species (speciation), add in the fact that distant areas of the world can have similar habitats, and you get convergent evolutionand a simple explanation of a major geographic pattern.39

This is not the same as Croizats orthogenesis, according to which populations of a single species, after becoming separated from each other, evolve in parallel due to some internal directive force. According to Coynes convergent evolution, organisms that are fundamentally different from each other evolve through natural selection to become superficially similar because they inhabit similar environments. The mechanism for orthogenesis is internal, whereas the mechanism for convergence is external. In both cases, however, mechanism is crucial: Without it, orthogenesis and convergence are simply words describing biogeographical patterns, not explanations of how those patterns originated.

So the same question can be asked of convergence that was asked of orthogenesis: What is the evidence for the proposed mechanism? According to Coyne, the mechanism of convergence involves natural selection and speciation.

Selection and Speciation

Coyne writes that Darwin had little direct evidence for selection acting in natural populations. Actually, Darwin had no direct evidence for natural selection; the best he could do in The Origin of Species was give one or two imaginary illustrations. It wasnt until a century later that Bernard Kettlewell provided what he called Darwins missing evidence for natural selectiona shift in the proportion of light- and dark-colored peppered moths that Kettlewell attributed to camouflage and bird predation.40

Since then, biologists have found lots of direct evidence for natural selection. Coyne describes some of it, including an increase in average beak depth of finches on the Galpagos Islands and a change in flowering time in wild mustard plants in Southern Californiaboth due to drought. Like Darwin, Coyne also compares natural selection to the artificial selection used in plant and animal breeding.

But these examples of selectionnatural as well as artificialinvolve only minor changes within existing species. Breeders were familiar with such changes before 1859, which is why Darwin did not write a book titled How Existing Species Change Over Time; he wrote a book titled The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, wrote Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in 1982, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. Yet, Mayr had written earlier, Darwin failed to solve the problem indicated by the title of his work. In 1997, evolutionary biologist Keith Stewart Thomson wrote: A matter of unfinished business for biologists is the identification of evolution's smoking gun, and the smoking gun of evolution is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations. Before Darwin, the consensus was that species can vary only within certain limits; indeed, centuries of artificial selection had seemingly demonstrated such limits experimentally. Darwin had to show that the limits could be broken, wrote Thomson, so do we.41

In 2004, Coyne and H. Allen Orr published a detailed book titled Speciation, in which they noted that biologists have not been able to agree on a definition of species because no single definition fits every case. For example, a definition applicable to living, sexually reproducing organisms might make no sense when applied to fossils or bacteria. In fact, there are more than 25 definitions of species. What definition is best? Coyne and Orr argued that, when deciding on a species concept, one should first identify the nature of one's species problem, and then choose the concept best at solving that problem. Like most other Darwinists, Coyne and Orr favor Ernst Mayr's biological species concept (BSC), according to which species are groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. In Why Evolution Is True, Coyne explains that the biological species concept is the one that evolutionists prefer when studying speciation, because it gets you to the heart of the evolutionary question. Under the BSC, if you can explain how reproductive barriers evolve, youve explained the origin of species.42

Theoretically, reproductive barriers arise when geographically separated populations diverge genetically. But Coyne describes five cases of real-time speciation that involve a different mechanism: chromosome doubling, or polyploidy.43 This usually follows hybridization between two existing plant species. Most hybrids are sterile because their mismatched chromosomes cant separate properly to produce fertile pollen and ovaries; occasionally, however, the chromosomes in a hybrid spontaneously double, producing two perfectly matched sets and making reproduction possible. The result is a fertile plant that is reproductively isolated from the two parentsa new species, according to the BSC.

But speciation by polyploidy (secondary speciation) has been observed only in plants. It does not provide evidence for Darwins theory that species originate through natural selection, nor for the neo-Darwinian theory of speciation by geographic separation and genetic divergence. Indeed, according to evolutionary biologist Douglas J. Futuyma, polyploidy does not confer major new morphological characteristics [and] does not cause the evolution of new genera or higher levels in the biological hierarchy.44

So secondary speciation does not solve Darwins problem. Only primary speciationthe splitting of one species into two by natural selectionwould be capable of producing the branching-tree pattern of Darwinian evolution. But no one has ever observed primary speciation. Evolutions smoking gun has never been found.45

Or has it?

In Why Evolution Is True, Coyne claims that primary speciation was observed in an experiment reported in 1998. Curiously, Coyne did not mention it in the 2004 book he co-authored with Orr, but his 2009 account of it is worth quoting in full:

We can even see the origin of a new, ecologically diverse bacterial species, all within a single laboratory flask. Paul Rainey and his colleagues at Oxford University placed a strain of the bacteria Pseudomonas fluorescens in a small vessel containing nutrient broth, and simply watched it. (Its surprising but true that such a vessel actually contains diverse environments. Oxygen concentration, for example, is highest on the top and lowest on the bottom.) Within ten daysno more than a few hundred generationsthe ancestral free-floating smooth bacterium had evolved into two additional forms occupying different parts of the beaker. One, called wrinkly spreader, formed a mat on top of the broth. The other, called fuzzy spreader, formed a carpet on the bottom. The smooth ancestral type persisted in the liquid environment in the middle. Each of the two new forms was genetically different from the ancestor, having evolved through mutation and natural selection to reproduce best in their respective environments. Here, then, is not only evolution but speciation occurring in the lab: the ancestral form produced, and coexisted with, two ecologically different descendants, and in bacteria such forms are considered distinct species. Over a very short time, natural selection in Pseudomonas yielded a small-scale adaptive radiation, the equivalent of how animals or plants form species when they encounter new environments on an oceanic island.46

But Coyne omits the fact that when the ecologically different forms were placed back into the same environment, they suffered a rapid loss of diversity, according to Rainey. In bacteria, an ecologically distinct population (called an ecotype) may constitute a separate species, but only if the distinction is permanent. As evolutionary microbiologist Frederick Cohan wrote in 2002, species in bacteria are ecologically distinct from one another; and they are irreversibly separate.47 The rapid reversal of ecological distinctions when the bacterial populations in Raineys experiment were put back into the same environment refutes Coynes claim that the experiment demonstrated the origin of a new species.

Exaggerating the evidence to prop up Darwinism is not new. In the Galpagos finches, average beak depth reverted to normal after the drought ended. There was no net evolution, much less speciation. Yet Coyne writes in Why Evolution Is True that everything we require of evolution by natural selection was amply documented by the finch studies. Since scientific theories stand or fall on the evidence, Coynes tendency to exaggerate the evidence does not speak well for the theory he is defending. When a 1999 booklet published by The U. S. National Academy of Sciences called the change in finch beaks a particularly compelling example of speciation, Berkeley law professor and Darwin critic Phillip E. Johnson wrote in The Wall Street Journal: When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble.48

So there are observed instances of secondary speciationwhich is not what Darwinism needsbut no observed instances of primary speciation, not even in bacteria. British bacteriologist Alan H. Linton looked for confirmed reports of primary speciation and concluded in 2001: None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another.49

Conclusions

Darwin called The Origin of Species one long argument for his theory, but Jerry Coyne has given us one long bluff. Why Evolution Is True tries to defend Darwinian evolution by rearranging the fossil record; by misrepresenting the development of vertebrate embryos; by ignoring evidence for the functionality of allegedly vestigial organs and non-coding DNA, then propping up Darwinism with theological arguments about bad design; by attributing some biogeographical patterns to convergence due to the supposedly well-known processes of natural selection and speciation; and then exaggerating the evidence for selection and speciation to make it seem as though they could accomplish what Darwinism requires of them.

The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selectionwhich is to say, minor changes within existing species.

Faced with such evidence, any other scientific theory would probably have been abandoned long ago. Judged by the normal criteria of empirical science, Darwinism is false. Its persists in spite of the evidence, and the eagerness of Darwin and his followers to defend it with theological arguments about creation and design suggests that its persistence has nothing to do with science at all.50

Nevertheless, biology students might find Coynes book useful. Given accurate information and the freedom to exercise critical thinking, students could learn from Why Evolution Is True how Darwinists manipulate the evidence and mix it with theology to recycle a false theory that should have been discarded long ago.

Notes1 Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Viking, 2009), p. 3. 2 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 3-4. 3 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 5-6. 4 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 18-19. 5 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 17-18, 25. 6 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Sixth Edition (London: John Murray, 1872), Chapter X, pp. 266, 285-288. Available online (2009) here. 7 J. William Schopf, The early evolution of life: solution to Darwins dilemma, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 9 (1994): 375-377. James W. Valentine, Stanley M. Awramik, Philip W. Signor & M. Sadler, The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary, Evolutionary Biology 25 (1991): 279-356. James W. Valentine & Douglas H. Erwin, Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record, pp. 71-107 in Rudolf A. Raff & Elizabeth C. Raff, (editors), Development as an Evolutionary Process (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1987). Jeffrey S. Levinton, The Big Bang of Animal Evolution, Scientific American 267 (November, 1992): 84-91. The Scientific Controversy Over the Cambrian Explosion, Discovery Institute. Available online (2009) here. Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002), Chapter 3. More information available online (2009) here. Stephen C. Meyer, The Cambrian Explosion: Biologys Big Bang, pp. 323-402 in John Angus Campbell & Stephen C. Meyer (editors), Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003). More information available online (2009) here. 8 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 28.

9 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 48. 10 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 49-51. 11 Kevin Padian & Luis M. Chiappe, The origin and early evolution of birds, Biological Reviews 73 (1998): 1-42. Available online (2009) here. Wells, Icons of Evolution, pp. 119-122. 12 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 25, 53. Chico Marx in Duck Soup (Paramount Pictures, 1933). This and other Marx Brothers quotations are available online (2009) here. 13 Gareth Nelson, Presentation to the American Museum of Natural History (1969), in David M. Williams & Malte C. Ebach, The reform of palaeontology and the rise of biogeography25 years after 'ontogeny, phylogeny, palaeontology and the biogenetic law' (Nelson, 1978), Journal of Biogeography 31 (2004): 685-712. 14 Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time. New York: Free Press, 1999, pp. 5, 32, 113-117. Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006). More information available online (2009) here.

15 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 79. Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter XIV, pp. 386-396. Available online (2009) here. 16 Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter XIV, pp. 387-388. Available online (2009) here. 17 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 73. Karl Ernst von Baer, On the Development of Animals, with Observations and Reflections: The Fifth Scholium, translated by Thomas Henry Huxley, pp. 186-237 in Arthur Henfrey & Thomas H. Huxley (editors), Scientific Memoirs: Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and from Foreign Journals: Natural History (London, 1853; reprinted 1966 by Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York). The passage quoted by Darwin is on p. 210. Jane M. Oppenheimer, An Embryological Enigma in the Origin of Species, pp. 221-255 in Jane M. Oppenheimer, Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1967). 18 Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 258. Frederick B. Churchill, The Rise of Classical Descriptive Embryology, pp. 1-29 in Scott F. Gilbert (editor), A Conceptual History of Modern Embryology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 19-20. 19 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 77-79. 20 Simon Conway Morris, Fossil Embryos, pp. 703-711 in Claudio D. Stern (editor), Gastrulation: From Cells to Embryos (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004). 21 Walter Garstang, The theory of recapitulation: a critical restatement of the biogenetic law, Journal of the Linnean Society (Zoology), 35 (1922): 81-101. 22 See Chapter Five and accompanying references in Wells, Icons of Evolution. See Chapter Three and accompanying references in Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. 23 Michael K. Richardson, J. Hanken, M. L. Gooneratne, C. Pieau, A. Raynaud, L. Selwood & G. M. Wright, There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development, Anatomy & Embryology 196 (1997): 91-106. Michael K. Richardson, quoted in Elizabeth Pennisi, Haeckels Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered, Science 277 (1997): 1435. Stephen Jay Gould, Abscheulich! Atrocious! Natural History (March, 2000), pp. 42-49. Hoax of Dodos (2007). Available online (2009) here. 24 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 78.Notes 25 Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapters XIV (p. 402) and XV (p. 420). Available online (2009) here. 26 Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, First Edition (London: John Murray, 1871), Chapter I (p. 27). Available online (2009) here. Kohtaro Fujihashi, J.R. McGhee, C. Lue, K.W. Beagley, T. Taga, T. Hirano, T. Kishimoto, J. Mestecky & H. Kiyono, Human Appendix B Cells Naturally Express Receptors for and Respond to Interleukin 6 with Selective IgA1 and IgA2 Synthesis, Journal of Clinical Investigations 88 (1991): 248-252. Available online (2009) here. J.A. Laissue, B.B. Chappuis, C. Mller, J.C. Reubi & J.O. Gebbers, The intestinal immune system and its relation to disease, Digestive Diseases (Basel) 11 (1993): 298-312. Abstract available online (2009) here. Loren G. Martin, What is the function of the human appendix? Scientific American (October 21, 1999), Available online (2009) here. R. Randal Bollinger, Andrew S. Barbas, Errol L. Bush, Shu S. Lin & William Parker, Biofilms in the large bowel suggest an apparent function of the human vermiform appendix, Journal of Theoretical Biology 249 (2007): 826-831. Available online (2009) here. Duke University Medical Center, Appendix Isn't Useless At All: It's A Safe House For Good Bacteria, ScienceDaily (October 8, 2007). Available online (2009) here. 27 Steven R. Scadding, Do vestigial organs provide evidence for evolution? Evolutionary Theory 5 (1981): 173-176. Bruce G. Naylor, Vestigial organs are evidence of evolution, Evolutionary Theory 6 (1982): 91-96. Steven R. Scadding, Vestigial organs do not provide scientific evidence for evolution, Evolutionary Theory 6 (1982): 171-173. 28 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 61-62. 29 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 46. 30 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 81. 31 Susumu Ohno, So much junk DNA in our genome, Brookhaven Symposia in Biology 23 (1972): 366-70. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 47. 32 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 66-67. 33 A few of the many scientific articles published since 2003 that document the function of so-called junk DNA are: E.S Balakirev & F.J. Ayala, Pseudogenes: are they junk or functional DNA? Annual Review of Genetics 37 (2003): 123-151. A. Httenhofer, P. Schattner & N. Polacek, Non-coding RNAs: hope or hype? Trends in Genetics 21 (2005): 289-297. J.S. Mattick & I.V. Makunin, Non-coding RNA, Human Molecular Genetics 15 (2006): R17-R29. R.K. Slotkin & R. Martienssen, Transposable elements and the epigenetic regulation of the genome, Nature Reviews Genetics 8 (2007): 272-285. P. Carninci, J. Yasuda & Y Hayashizaki, Multifaceted mammalian transcriptome, Current Opinion in Cell Biology 20 (2008): 274-80. C.D. Malone & G.J. Hannon, Small RNAs as Guardians of the Genome, Cell 136 (2009): 656668. C.P. Ponting, P.L. Oliver & W. Reik, Evolution and Functions of Long Noncoding RNAs, Cell 136 (2009): 629641.

34 Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapters XIII (pp. 347-352) and XV (p. 419). Available online (2009) here. 35 Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapters XII (pp. 330-332). Available online (2009) here. 36 Alan Cooper, et al., C. Mourer-Chauvir, C.K. Chambers, A. von Haeseler, A.C. Wilson & S. Paabo, Independent origins of New Zealand moas and kiwis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 89 (1992): 8741-8744. Available online (2008) here. Oliver Haddrath & Allan J. Baker, Complete mitochondrial DNA genome sequences of extinct birds: ratite phylogenetics and the vicariance biogeography hypothesis, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 268 (2001): 939-945. John Harshman, E.L. Braun, M.J. Braun, C.J. Huddleston, R.C.K. Bowie, J.L. Chojnowski, S.J. Hackett, K.-L. Han, R.T. Kimball, B.D. Marks, K.J. Miglia, W.S. Moore, S. Reddy, F.H. Sheldon, D.W. Steadman, S.J. Steppan, C.C. Witt & T. Yuri, Phylogenomic evidence for multiple losses of flight in ratite birds, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105 (2008): 13462-13467. Abstract available online (2008) here. Giuseppe Sermonti, L'evoluzione in Italia - La via torinese / How Evolution Came to Italy - The Turin Connection, Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum 94 (2001): 5-12. Available online (2008) here. 37 Giuseppe Colosi, La distribuzione geografica dei Potamonidae, Rivista di Biologia 3 (1921): 294-301. Available online (2009) here. Savel R. Daniels, N. Cumberlidge, M. Prez-Losada, S.A.E. Marijnissen & K.A. Crandall, Evolution of Afrotropical freshwater crab lineages obscured by morphological convergence, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 40 (2006): 227235. Available online (2009) here. R. von Sternberg, N. Cumberlidge & G. Rodriguez. On the marine sister groups of the freshwater crabs (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura), Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research 37 (1999): 1938. Darren C.J. Yeo, et al., Global diversity of crabs (Crustacea: Decapoda: Brachyura) in freshwater, Hydrobiologia 595 (2008): 275-286. 38 Lon Croizat, Space, Time, Form: The Biological Synthesis. Published by the author (Deventer, Netherlands: N. V. Drukkerij Salland, 1962), p. iii. Robin C. Craw, Lon Croizat's Biogeographic Work: A Personal Appreciation, Tuatara 27:1 (August 1984): 8-13. Available online (2009) here. John R. Grehan, Evolution By Law: Croizat's Orthogeny and Darwin's Laws of Growth, Tuatara 27:1 (August 1984): 14-19. Available online (2009) here. Carmen Colacino, Lon Croizats Biogeography and Macroevolution, or Out of Nothing, Nothing Comes, The Philippine Scientist 34 (1997): 73-88. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 529-530. 39 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 92-94.

40 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 116. Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter IV (p. 70). Available online (2009) here. H. B. D. Kettlewell, Darwins Missing Evidence, Scientific American 200 (March, 1959): 48-53.

41 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 403. Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 10. Keith Stewart Thomson, Natural Selection and Evolution's Smoking Gun, American Scientist 85 (1997): 516-518.

42 Jerry A. Coyne & H. Allen Orr, Speciation (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2004), p. 25-39. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 174.

43 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 188.

44 Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005), p. 398.

45 Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Chapter Five (The Ultimate Missing Link), pp. 49-59.

46 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 129-130.

47 Paul B. Rainey & Michael Travisano. Adaptive radiation in a heterogeneous environment, Nature 394 (1998): 69-72. Frederick M. Cohan, What Are Bacterial Species? Annual Review of Microbiology 56 (2002): 457-482. Available online (2009) here.

48 Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 134. National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second edition (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1999), Chapter on Evidence Supporting Biological Evolution, p. 10. Available online (2009) here. Phillip E. Johnson, The Church of Darwin, The Wall Street Journal (August 16, 1999): A14. Available online (2009) here.

49 Alan H. Linton, Scant Search for the Maker, The Times Higher Education Supplement (April 20, 2001), Book Section, p. 29.

Frederick M. Cohan, What Are Bacterial Species? Annual Review of Microbiology 56 (2002): 457-482. Available online (2009) here.

50 Paul A. Nelson, The role of theology in current evolutionary reasoning, Biology and Philosophy 11 (October 1996): 493 - 517. Abstract available online (2009) here. Jonathan Wells, Darwins Straw God Argument, Discovery Institute (December 2008). Available online (2009) here.Jonathan Wells, Darwins Straw God Argument, Discovery Institute (December 2008). Available online (2009) here.

See more here:

Why Darwinism Is False | Center for Science and Culture

Modern evolutionary synthesis – Wikipedia

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

The modern evolutionary synthesis[a] was the widely accepted[1] mid 20th-century synthesis of ideas from fields including genetics, systematics and palaeontology that established evolution as biology's central paradigm.[1][2][3]Embryology was however not integrated into the mid-20th century synthesis; that had to wait for the development of gene manipulation techniques in the 1970s, the growth in understanding of development at a molecular level, and the creation of the modern evolutionary synthesis's successor, evolutionary developmental biology.

The 19th Century ideas of natural selection by Charles Darwin and Mendelian genetics by Gregor Mendel were united by Ronald Fisher, one of the three founders of population genetics, along with J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright, between 1918 and 1932.

The modern synthesis solved difficulties and confusions caused by the specialisation and poor communication between biologists in the early years of the 20th century. At its heart was the question of whether Mendelian genetics could be reconciled with gradual evolution by means of natural selection. A second issue was whether the broad-scale changes of macroevolution seen by palaeontologists could be explained by changes seen in the microevolution of local populations.

The synthesis included evidence from geneticists who studied populations in the field and in the laboratory. These studies were crucial to evolutionary theory. The synthesis drew together ideas from several branches of biology which had become separated, particularly genetics, cytology, systematics, botany, morphology, ecology and paleontology.

Julian Huxley invented the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. Major figures in the modern synthesis include, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ivan Schmalhausen,[4]E. B. Ford, Ernst Mayr, Bernhard Rensch, Sergei Chetverikov, George Gaylord Simpson, and G. Ledyard Stebbins.

The modern synthesis of the mid 20th century bridged the gap between the work of experimental geneticists and naturalists, and paleontologists. It states that:[5][6][7]

The idea that speciation occurs after populations are reproductively isolated has been much debated. In plants, polyploidy must be included in any view of speciation. Formulations such as 'evolution consists primarily of changes in the frequencies of alleles between one generation and another' were proposed rather later. The traditional view is that developmental biology played little part in the synthesis,[9] but an account of Gavin de Beer's work by Stephen J. Gould suggests he may be an exception.[10]

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was successful in convincing most biologists that evolution had occurred, but was less successful in convincing them that natural selection was its primary mechanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, variations of Lamarckism, orthogenesis ('progressive' evolution), and saltationism (evolution by jumps) were discussed as alternatives.[11] Also, Darwin did not offer a precise explanation of how new species arise. As part of the disagreement about whether natural selection alone was sufficient to explain speciation, George Romanes coined the term neo-Darwinism to refer to the version of evolution advocated by Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann with its heavy dependence on natural selection.[12] Weismann and Wallace rejected the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics, something that Darwin had not ruled out.[13]

Weismann's idea was that the relationship between the hereditary material, which he called the germ plasm (German, Keimplasma), and the rest of the body (the soma) was a one-way relationship: the germ-plasm formed the body, but the body did not influence the germ-plasm, except indirectly in its participation in a population subject to natural selection. Weismann was translated into English, and though he was influential, it took many years for the full significance of his work to be appreciated.[14] Later, after the completion of the modern synthesis, the term neo-Darwinism came to be associated with its core concept: evolution, driven by natural selection acting on variation produced by genetic mutation, and genetic recombination (chromosomal crossovers).[12]

Gregor Mendel's work was re-discovered by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns in 1900. News of this reached William Bateson in England, who reported on the paper during a presentation to the Royal Horticultural Society in May 1900.[15] It showed that the contributions of each parent retained their integrity rather than blending with the contribution of the other parent. This reinforced a division of thought, which was already present in the 1890s.[16] The two schools were:

The relevance of Mendelism to evolution was unclear and hotly debated, especially by Bateson, who opposed the biometric ideas of his former teacher Weldon. Many scientists believed the two theories substantially contradicted each other.[18] This debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians continued for some 20 years and was only solved by the development of population genetics.

Thomas Hunt Morgan began his career in genetics as a saltationist, and started out trying to demonstrate that mutations could produce new species in fruit flies. However, the experimental work at his lab with the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which helped establish the link between Mendelian genetics and the chromosomal theory of inheritance, demonstrated that rather than creating new species in a single step, mutations increased the genetic variation in the population.[19]

The first step towards the synthesis was the development of population genetics. R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright provided critical contributions. In 1918, Fisher produced the paper "The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,"[20] which showed how the continuous variation measured by the biometricians could be the result of the action of many discrete genetic loci. In this and subsequent papers culminating in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection,[21] Fisher was able to show how Mendelian genetics was, contrary to the thinking of many early geneticists, completely consistent with the idea of evolution driven by natural selection.[22] During the 1920s, a series of papers by Haldane applied mathematical analysis to real-world examples of natural selection such as the evolution of industrial melanism in peppered moths.[22] Haldane established that natural selection could work in the real world at a faster rate than even Fisher had assumed.[23]

Sewall Wright focused on combinations of genes that interacted as complexes, and the effects of inbreeding on small relatively isolated populations, which could exhibit genetic drift. In a 1932 paper, he introduced the concept of an adaptive landscape in which phenomena such as cross breeding and genetic drift in small populations could push them away from adaptive peaks, which would in turn allow natural selection to push them towards new adaptive peaks.[22][24] Wright's model would appeal to field naturalists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr who were becoming aware of the importance of geographical isolation in real world populations.[23] The work of Fisher, Haldane and Wright founded the discipline of population genetics. This is the precursor of the modern synthesis, which is an even broader coalition of ideas.[22][23][25]

Theodosius Dobzhansky, an emigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, who had been a postdoctoral worker in Morgan's fruit fly lab, was one of the first to apply genetics to natural populations. He worked mostly with Drosophila pseudoobscura. He says pointedly: "Russia has a variety of climates from the Arctic to sub-tropical... Exclusively laboratory workers who neither possess nor wish to have any knowledge of living beings in nature were and are in a minority."[26] Not surprisingly, there were other Russian geneticists with similar ideas, though for some time their work was known to only a few in the West. His 1937 work Genetics and the Origin of Species[27] was a key step in bridging the gap between population geneticists and field naturalists. It presented the conclusions reached by Fisher, Haldane, and especially Wright in their highly mathematical papers in a form that was easily accessible to others. It also emphasized that real world populations had far more genetic variability than the early population geneticists had assumed in their models, and that genetically distinct sub-populations were important. Dobzhansky argued that natural selection worked to maintain genetic diversity as well as driving change. Dobzhansky had been influenced by his exposure in the 1920s to the work of a Russian geneticist Sergei Chetverikov who had looked at the role of recessive genes in maintaining a reservoir of genetic variability in a population before his work was shut down by the rise of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.[22][23]

E. B. Ford's work complemented that of Dobzhansky. It was as a result of Ford's work, as well as his own, that Dobzhansky changed the emphasis in the third edition of his famous text from drift to selection.[28] Ford was an experimental naturalist who wanted to test natural selection in nature. He virtually invented the field of research known as ecological genetics. His work on natural selection in wild populations of butterflies and moths was the first to show that predictions made by R. A. Fisher were correct. He was the first to describe and define genetic polymorphism, and to predict that human blood group polymorphisms might be maintained in the population by providing some protection against disease.[29]

Ernst Mayr's key contribution to the synthesis was Systematics and the Origin of Species, published in 1942.[30] Mayr emphasized the importance of allopatric speciation, where geographically isolated sub-populations diverge so far that reproductive isolation occurs. He was skeptical of the reality of sympatric speciation believing that geographical isolation was a prerequisite for building up intrinsic (reproductive) isolating mechanisms. Mayr also introduced the biological species concept that defined a species as a group of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations that were reproductively isolated from all other populations.[22][23][31] Before he left Germany for the United States in 1930, Mayr had been influenced by the work of German biologist Bernhard Rensch. In the 1920s Rensch, who like Mayr did field work in Indonesia, analyzed the geographic distribution of polytypic species and complexes of closely related species paying particular attention to how variations between different populations correlated with local environmental factors such as differences in climate. In 1947, Rensch published Neuere Probleme der Abstammungslehre. Die transspezifische Evolution (1959 English translation of 2nd edition: Evolution Above the Species Level).[32] This looked at how the same evolutionary mechanisms involved in speciation might be extended to explain the origins of the differences between the higher level taxa. His writings contributed to the rapid acceptance of the synthesis in Germany.[33][34]

George Gaylord Simpson was responsible for showing that the modern synthesis was compatible with paleontology in his book Tempo and Mode in Evolution published in 1944. Simpson's work was crucial because so many paleontologists had disagreed, in some cases vigorously, with the idea that natural selection was the main mechanism of evolution. It showed that the trends of linear progression (in for example the evolution of the horse) that earlier paleontologists had used as support for neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis did not hold up under careful examination. Instead the fossil record was consistent with the irregular, branching, and non-directional pattern predicted by the modern synthesis.[22][23]

The botanist G. Ledyard Stebbins extended the synthesis to encompass botany including the important effects of hybridization and polyploidy in plants in his 1950 book Variation and Evolution in Plants.[22]

In 2007, more than half a century after the modern synthesis, Massimo Pigliucci called for an extended evolutionary synthesis to incorporate aspects of biology that had not been included or did not exist in the mid-20th century.[35][36]

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Modern evolutionary synthesis - Wikipedia

VR, Virtual Reality | Virtalis

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Satanism – RationalWiki

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

This page contains too many unsourced statements, and needs to be improved.

Satanism could use some help. Please research the article's assertions. Whatever is credible should be sourced, and what is not should be removed.

And who created Satan? It was God. Satan is the opposite of God, and, as one of His aspects, he contains a holy spark.

Satanism is a loose term which has been used in a number of different ways and covers several distinct concepts, not all of which involve bowing to our Dark Lord.

The idea of devil worship is centuries old, although the usage of the term "Satanism" to describe a specific belief system appears to date from the nineteenth century.[1] Stories of devil-worshippers existed in the middle ages and later but were largely folkloric and did not describe genuine religious practices. However, there have been a few branches of religious belief which involve the worship of Satan.

In Sweden, where the process of Christianization lasted into the second millenium AD,[2] there is evidence that Satan received a degree of popular worship into the early modern era as an ambivalent or even benign spirit of nature, possibly the result of the Judeo-Christian figure blending with traces of local pagan deities. For example, in 1739 a Swedish fisherman named Mickel Kalkstrm remarked that he prayed to the Devil for help in his pursuit, believing that God had little or no power over fish. Testimonies from the trials of alleged sorcerers in seventeenth-century Sweden, meanwhile, equate Satan with various traditional nature spirits. Historian Mikael Hll points out that many of these people were outlaws living in the woods, and speculates that they may have adopted Satan as a sort of patron spirit. He concludes that, while it is unlikely that there was an organised cult of devil-worship in Sweden at the time, there were people who could be termed Satanists.[3]

Like most religions, there are a variety of beliefs, but a few precepts are generally observed by most Satanists. This belief system is often referred to by Satanists and other Western esoterics as the "Left-Hand Path", in contrast to the "Right-Hand Path" of the Abrahamic religions and the moral systems derived from them, both religious and secular. The term "Left-Hand Path" was first coined by Helena Blavatsky, who in turn derived the idea from the Hindu concept of vamachara, "left-handed philosophy", which described heterodox spiritual practices that violated the status quo. While Blavatsky and other early occultists viewed the Left-Hand Path as harmful and equated it with black magic, instead identifying with the Right-Hand Path, Satanists readily adopted the Left-Hand Path as a philosophy to live one's life by.[4]

In terms of theology, Satanists today can be divided into two main groups:

Atheistic Satanism does not believe that "Satan" actually exists, as such; they do not worship Satan. They believe every person is their own god and that everyone should worship themselves. To them, "Satan" is a symbol of rebellion rather than a literal figure; they do not worship Satan any more than Buddhists worship Buddha.

Theistic Satanism believes that "Satan" is an actual independently existing being, which serves as a God-analogue. While atheistic Satanists categorically deny that any gods or higher powers exist, theistic Satanists vary in their opinions:

A prominent example of theistic Satanism is the Temple of Set.

Luciferianism is an offshoot of theistic Satanism that follows most of the same precepts, with the main point of contention between the two groups being one of philosophical hair-splitting: Luciferians tend to look down upon Satanism as being too preoccupied with the carnal and with anti-Christian rebellion, whereas they, on the other hand, seek to rise above their status as base animals.[6]

LaVeyan Satanism is an atheistic religion whose chief organization, the Church of Satan,[7] was founded by Anton LaVey in 1960s San Francisco. They all but admit that they chose to call their belief system "Satanism" to annoy Christians. While anti-religious, it also rejects many of the ethical tenets of secular humanism, feeling them to be too close to Christian morality (which they feel represses the individual) and instead following a combination of pseudo-Nietzschean ideas and Ayn Rand worship that it identifies with the Left-Hand Path.[8] For the record, they officially frown on child and animal sacrifices, saying that we should all strive to be like children or animals.

Similar to LaVeyan Satanism, the Satanic Temple is an atheistic organization, and does not believe in a literal Satan, though some of its members are theistic Satanists. Unlike LaVeyans, however, the Satanic Temple rejects the supernatural entirely. This has been brought up in the assessment of whether or not they actually are a religion, and they have responded by stating that this belief is outdated and ignorant, saying that to define religion as supernatural is to give the enemy free license to label as they please.[9] They also differ from LaVeyans in that they reject the "might makes right" philosophy of the Church of Satan, and have a set of tenets founded on secular humanism rather than social Darwinism.[10]

The Satanic Temple is best known in the media for its publicity stunts done in the interest of protecting church-state separation, in a manner similar to Pastafarianism. They're responsible for a number of the antics described above in the "First Amendment and religious freedom" section, such as attempts to have a statue of Baphomet displayed wherever Christian symbols are shown on government property.[11] As a result, they have become quite popular with the atheist community. Their spokesperson, Lucien Greaves (real name Doug Mesner) has appeared on shows like The Friendly Atheist podcast and others.[12]

In early 2016, the Satanic Temple wanted to give an invocation at the city council of Phoenix, Arizona. Some councillors wanted only a rota of council-approved clergy to give invocations. The Freedom From Religion Foundation planned legal action if the First Amendment was breached.[13] Phoenix chose a moment of silence instead, but legal action was threatened from Christians who wanted explicitly Christian prayer in government.[14][15]

The Satanic Temple is launching Satanic after school clubs.

Its important that children be given an opportunity to realize that the evangelical materials now creeping into their schools are representative of but one religious opinion amongst many. While the Good News Clubs focus on indoctrination, instilling them with a fear of Hell and Gods wrath, After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us. We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of everlasting other-worldly horrors.

Satan clubs will only be in areas and schools where there are already after school Bible study groups. Schools cannot discriminate by banning Satan clubs while allowing Bible study, or they will risk legal action over the First Amendment.[17] A legal expert for Liberty Counsel said Satan Clubs have a First Amendment right to exist, but later threatened to sue. The Satanic Temple, by contrast, maintains that, without studying the curriculum of the Satan Clubs, the Liberty Counsel's actions are premature.[18] According to Hemant Mehta, the Liberty Counsel has misrepresented the Satan clubs.[19] The Satan clubs are looking for donations.[20] Legal action is considered in one Georgian district because the authorities have ignored repeated requests to start a Satan Club.[21] Future developments could be interesting. A district in Washington state decided they have to allow the Satan clubs.[22] The first After School Satan Club has opened in Portland, Oregon in mid November 2016 with Christian protesters outside.[23]

Groups such as the Church of Satan fall into the category of Organized Satanism: publicly known Satanic groups which oppose criminal activity and have well-developed theologies which they often publish electronically or in printed form. Outside of organized Satanism, we find marginal groups which can be divided along more sociological terms.[24]

Dabblers are people, usually teenagers, who turn to Satanism as a form of rebellion against authority. Generally, they lack a well-developed theology, taking most of their beliefs from stuff gleaned off the internet and various books, from pop culture depictions of Satanism, and even from Christian tracts about Satanic evil (all the better to shock their parents, teachers, and pastors with), combined with an unhealthy dose of teen angst. They are often involved in petty crimes such as vandalism (churches are a popular and obvious target), although occasionally, they have been linked to more serious criminal activity, including property theft, assault, and the murder of animals, including pets. Most of them grow out of their Satanism by the time they reach their twenties, although some will develop into another form of Satanism over time.

"Sicko" Satanists are criminals and psychopathic individuals who use Satanism as a justification for murder, rape, kidnapping, child abuse, and similar activities. They are most commonly loners or occasionally small groups, and like dabblers, they generally lack a developed theology. In some cases, the trappings of Satanism are used to try to scare victims (especially children) and prevent them from reporting the crimes, while in other cases, Satanism is used to get media attention instead (the classic "Satan made me do it" explanation). Some of the more notorious examples of "sicko" Satanism include:

A controversial issue is the alleged existence of large scale, conspiratorial groups which practice human sacrifice, child molestation, etc., many of whose members allegedly occupy positions of power, authority or respect in their communities (such as doctors, lawyers, politicians, police officers, schoolteachers, etc.) Some believe in the existence of this form of Satanism; however, there is no evidence for its actual existence, so it seems to most likely be a form of urban legend or mass hysteria.

If you're looking for an article on that kind of Satanism, see Satanic Panic.

Satanists typically eschew mainstream politics, for what should be obvious reasons. With the majority of the American population at least nominally Christian, not only would an avowed Satanist never stand a chance running for any elected office, but a candidate merely receiving endorsements and/or donations from Satanists would have to explain him or herself to voters as though he or she had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

However, when asked to describe what they believe, many Satanists voice political views that are in line with some form of heterodox libertarianism. This is roughly in keeping with both the theology and culture of Satanism it emerged from the same '60s counterculture that the modern libertarian movement did, it is at best begrudgingly tolerant of Christianity, and it is very supportive of libertarian beliefs in personal freedom, while its heavy emphasis on individualism often leads to dismissal of ideologies that are seen as promoting collective or hierarchical authority. In this, Anton LaVey's influence on modern Satanism is evident he cited both Ayn Rand[29] and the book Might is Right among his inspirations and is known to have (at the very least) drawn heavily from them while writing the Satanic Bible,[30] while the Church of Satan that he founded speaks approvingly of Objectivism as an antecedent to Satanism, albeit not without criticism of some of its finer points.[31] However, the principle of non-aggression and non-coercion, frequently found in libertarian writings, seems to have little counterpart in Satanism.

Libertarian politics are not universal. Other Satanists are more supportive of left-wing views, particularly the tactics of various civil rights or social justice[32] movements, on the grounds that, as an unpopular minority religion, hanging together in mutual support is better than hanging separately with no one to have their back when confronted by people who hate them. The idea of a social safety net and economic protection is also justified from the perspective that, even though Satanists should strive to improve themselves, actually believing in one's own perfection is the height of hubris, and besides, a society with higher mobility and lower economic inequality is one where it is easier for individuals to thrive and improve themselves.[33] Leftism in this sense is interpreted through the lens of Satanic theology, of course; one left-wing Satanist cites Saul Alinsky and other New Left "street fighters" as inspirations, due to their willingness to take drastic action to better themselves and support what they believed in rather than worrying about the ends justifying the means.[34]

And finally, there also exists a small but quite vocal minority of Satanists who believe in neo-fascism. These people are described in more detail further down this page.

As of late, with a number of Supreme Court rulings granting unprecedented power to Christian groups in the name of religious freedom, some Satanic groups have decided to test the limits of these rulings by asserting that, as religious organizations, they too have the right to, say, hold Black Masses in civic centers,[35] pass out literature detailing Satanic rituals at public schools,[36] and put up a monument of Baphomet in front of the Oklahoma Supreme Court.[37][38]

The Satanic Temple, described in more detail further up this page, is one of the leading groups behind many of these moves. While their are often little more than publicity stunts, they (especially the reactions of Christian leaders) do wonders at showcasing the hypocrisy of the religious right when they try to claim that they just support religious freedom as opposed to theocracy.

A sizable number of people on the fringes of both Satanism and the neo-fascist and neo-Nazi movements have taken to blending the two, producing a distinct brand of Satanism that combines the Left-Hand Path with the far right.

"But," you may say, "how can a religion so preoccupied with individualism support a movement that is about subsuming one's identity to the will of the nation or race?" The common ground is wider than you'd think. In some cases, the flirtations with fascism come from historical fascist movements' fixations on the aesthetics of power, which would appeal to those in a religion that, in many of its formulations, spurns egalitarianism and the Golden Rule in favor of calling for the "great" to dominate their enemies. (In short, they see themselves as the future Fhrers and SS legionaries, not the ones starving in concentration camps.) Simple shock value also plays into it; in this sense, Satanism and fascism are viewed as kindred spirits, both "misunderstood" and treated with scorn by the sheeple.[39][40]

Going in the other direction, just as some Satanists have gravitated to fascism out of an admiration of its "badass" imagery and perceived philosophical common ground, so have some neo-Nazis latched onto Satanism out of hostility to Christianity. They see Christianity as a Jewish-derived, Middle Eastern faith that was foisted upon Europe by the elites of the classical and medieval eras and has corrupted its values and "purity", its pacifism and message of "all faithful are equal before God" leaving it spiritually and philosophically defenseless against the non-white hordes. Attempts to racialize the faith, such as Positive Christianity, Christian Identity, and the WASP supremacy of the old Ku Klux Klan, are seen as half-measures at best and Jewish-crafted deceptions at worst that lead nowhere. Therefore, worshiping or otherwise paying tribute to the adversary of the Christian God becomes a necessary component of "stopping white genocide".[41] Parallels can be drawn to the more racist versions of Asatru and some other neo-pagan faiths, as well as the alt-right's lukewarm-at-best relationship with Christianity, albeit with Satan replaced with either the restoration of pre-Christian pantheons, the literal worship of the Aryan race, some form of "natural law", or other inspirations.[40]

The former mindset was visible in the writings of Anton LaVey, who used Nazi symbolism habitually despite being of part-Jewish ancestry himself, and was aware of the irony. In his essay "A Plan", published as part of the posthumous compendium Satan Speaks!, he noted that, for the longest time, the Jewish people were the largest group of religious "rebels" within the Christian world, and were frequently smeared as being in league with Satan by the authorities of the time; as such, he drew intellectual and philosophical connections between Judaism and his philosophy. He envisioned Satanism as a way for modern, non-practicing young Jews (especially those from mixed Jewish/Gentile marriages), who don't fit in with the synagogue, the church, or the white supremacist movement, to claim a new, "tough" identity as an alternative to the humanism of the secular, liberal Jewish mainstream, jokingly suggesting that the Church of Satan was where a "Zionist Odinist Bolshevik Nazi Imperialist Socialist Fascism" could thrive.[42]

LaVey's daughter Zeena later married Nikolas Schreck, an '80s goth-rocker in the underground band Radio Werewolf whose affinity for Nazism went at least somewhat beyond mere stylistic choices in their name, concerts, and album covers, though just how far is hard to say. Regardless, the two of them later abandoned both the Church of Satan and their Nazi flirtations in 1990, eventually converting to the Temple of Set and later Tantric Buddhism, with Zeena denouncing her father as a charlatan and a plagiarist and cutting all ties to him. Underground musician and artist Boyd Rice, another high-profile member who LaVey reportedly asked to succeed him as leader of the Church of Satan (Rice turned down the offer), is also not particularly shy about expressing his sympathy for fascism, though he has denied being a racist or a Nazi and claims he's just a misanthrope.[40]

The Order of Nine Angles (O9A or ONA), an occultist secret society founded in England in the late '60s but claiming descent from older groups (as such organizations are wont to do), is probably the most notorious fascist Satanist group. The O9A enjoyed its greatest boom years in the '70s under one "Anton Long", whose exact identity has never been confirmed but who many researchers believe to be David Myatt, a British neo-Nazi who played a pivotal role in far-right groups like the British Movement, Combat 18, and the National Socialist Movement. (Myatt later converted to Islam in 1998 and espoused a radical Islamist platform, including overt praise for al-Qaeda after 9/11, before renouncing extremism entirely and adopting his own non-racialized brand of mysticism.[43])

For the O9A, fascism is seen as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself, part of a "sinister dialectic" that is key to the "Aeonic evolution" of human civilization into a higher form. However, the "Magian/Nazarene distortion" (i.e. the Christians and the Jews) is holding back Western civilization from reaching its final stage, and must be overthrown if humanity is to "advance".[44] They also explicitly endorse human sacrifice as a means of "culling the weak", and proclaim other Satanist groups to be posers due to their rejection of such.[40]

Another fascist Satanist group of note (mainly due to its outsize presence on the internet) is the Joy of Satan (JoS). The JoS was founded by one "Maxine Dietrich" real name Andrea Herrington, the wife of Clifford Herrington, the former head of the National Socialist Movement (the American group; no relation to the aforementioned British group) who was subsequently expelled from the organization after his wife's Satanism came to light.

The JoS promotes a form of inverted Christianity that proclaims Satan to be humanity's "True Father and Creator God", and the Abrahamic God, Jesus, and the prophets to be illusory falsehoods cobbled together from other myths and legends, created by the New World Order in order to destroy the "spiritual heritage" (i.e. devil-worship) of the masses and cut them off from the occult power they get through Satan. Since Judaism was the first of the Abrahamic religions, they naturally identify the Jews as the leaders of this conspiracy, proclaiming that they created Christianity in order to enslave the Gentiles of the Roman Empire by getting them to direct their spiritual energy towards a "dead Jew on a stick" and follow a bastardized version of the Jewish religion. A virtually identical conspiracy theory is thrown at Islam, claiming that the Prophet Muhammad never existed, that the creation of Islam was a Jewish ploy to enslave the Arabs just as they had done the Europeans with Christianity, and that Iblis (the Arabic term for Satan) was their true god. They cover the nastiest neo-Nazi rhetoric with a thin veneer so as not to scare off curious new followers; on the surface, their main website contains mostly bog-standard rituals, anti-Christian screeds, and other material that you'd expect to find on a Satanist website, with only vague mention of the "New World Order" as the guiding force behind Christianity, but once you check the "Links" section, you'll find sites that openly bash the Jews and extol the Nazis as a glorious attempt to restore the "true Satanic religion" of the Gentiles.[45]

They're also fond of trying to find negative mention of their group online and deleting any evidence if it's on a wiki. So much for their supposed support of free speech, eh?

As if to demonstrate why most sane Satanists don't touch politics with a ten-foot pole, there is the case of Augustus Sol Invictus, an attorney and Libertarian Party candidate for the 2016 US Senate race in where else? Florida.[46] His birth name is unknown Austin Gillespie; he changed it in 2013 to a Latin phrase meaning "majestic unconquered sun" (also "majestic sun god") after renouncing his past law firm, his college degrees, and the Catholic Church. While he's currently a practitioner of Thelema, he had previously been involved in a Satanic group, but had been expelled for his politics. Said politics? While he denies being a white supremacist, pointing to his four Hispanic children, he does admit to being a fascist and receiving support from white supremacists, and he calls for a second Civil War and uses fascist symbolism on his website. Proving that even libertarians have their limits, the only civil war he started was within the Libertarian Party of Florida itself, partly because of the open fascism and the fact that he recruited neo-Nazis into the party in order to support his candidacy, but also because of the fact that he boasted about ritualistically sacrificing a goat (though he denies having "sadistically dismembered" it).[47]

With the entire state Libertarian Party outside his own fanbase standing against him, he wound up losing the party's Senate primary by 48 points[48] to one Paul Stanton, a computer programmer who barely even ran a proper campaign and entered the race at the last minute in May simply to stop him, winning the party's support solely on the basis of being "not Augustus Sol Invictus". His reaction was to rant on Facebook about how he'd been suppressed by the party's leadership, quoting William Ernest Henley and Francis Parker Yockey and asserting that the only reason people didn't like him was because of a smear campaign.[49] He's currently in the process of trying to recast himself as an alt-right revolutionary, calling on "all right-wing intellectuals, martial artists, weapons experts, militia groups, survivalists & preppers, filmographers, writers, and artists" to join him for something called the "Invictus War Room".[50]

The press, for its part, treated his candidacy as the latest in a long line of wacky "Florida Man" news stories.[51]

Many musicians and other artists have used the trappings of Satanism for artistic or "rebel cred" purposes. In some cases, the artist is an actual adherent of organized Satanism and sees his or her art as a vehicle for spreading Satanic ideas. In most cases, however, Satanism is not adopted as a belief system, but rather chosen to be shocking or outrageous, or due to an artistic preference for "dark" imagery.

One of the best-known examples of Satanic imagery being employed in pop culture comes from the heavy metal scene. Pretty much every pioneering metal band in the 1970s and '80s traded heavily in shout-outs at the devil, while the "devil horns" (sticking one's hand in the sky with the index and pinkie fingers raised) are a famous symbol of all things rock and metal.[52] Of course, most of the time this Satanism was just for show, done in order to win fans and make cool music, with the members of such bands often being Christians or irreligious in their private lives. For instance, Black Sabbath (together with Paul McCartney) wrote "After Forever"[53], a song whose lyrics could easily be mistaken for Christian rock if one didn't know otherwise, while in many of their other songs Satan was portrayed as a clearly evil and menacing figure and not something that should be worshiped or idealized.[54] Alice Cooper (birth name Vincent Furnier, but legally changed to Alice Cooper so he didn't have to pay his former band members), meanwhile, is a lifelong born-again Christian.[55] And the "devil horns"? While their exact origin is a mystery, one of the more popular theories claims that Ronnie James Dio adapted it from a hand gesture that his Italian grandmother taught him a gesture that's meant to ward off the "evil eye".[52]

However, many people often found it difficult to tell the difference. Heavy metal was the subject of a massive moral panic in the 1980s that was linked to the broader Satanic Panic of that era. On one hand, Christian groups led boycotts and censorship attempts, and whipped up a manufactroversy over backward masking, while on the other, the bands attracted misaimed fandoms from teenage dabblers who heard their parents and pastors talking about that eeeeeevil music and saw an easy way to rebel.

By the 1990s, the association of heavy metal with Satanism had produced bands that very much were serious about the religious aspects of it. A particularly serious form of "black metal", a subgenre of heavy metal known for its militantly anti-Christian and misanthropic lyrics, emerged in Scandinavia (especially Norway) during this time and spread throughout Europe, taking the Satanic imagery of '80s thrash/black metal bands like Venom, Celtic Frost, Bathory, and Slayer to the next level. The brand of Satanism practiced by many Scandinavian black metal musicians often took on airs of national mysticism, drawing as much inspiration from old Norse legends and myths as it did from "orthodox" Satanism. Whether Satanist or pagan, black metal musicians and fans viewed Christianity as a foreign import from the sunny Mediterranean that was alien to the frigid Nordic lands and people and had oppressed the native pagan faiths, with their attacks on Christianity often being framed as a holy war of national liberation from Christendom. These attitudes often went well beyond just writing songs about hating Christianity and its followers; the movement was associated with over fifty arson attacks against Norwegian churches between 1992 and 1996, a number of which were carried out by the musicians themselves.[56][57]

Not all of the Scandinavian black metal scene was committed to this particular brand of Satanism. One non-thrash black metal band from Denmark, Mercyful Fate, developed parallel with (and independent of) the four aforementioned bands, and was also genuinely Satanic in that the band's leader, singer, and lyricist, King Diamond, was a declared follower of Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible. Mercyful Fate influenced a great many of the Norwegian bands, even though their Satanic philosophies sharply diverged from that of LaVey and King Diamond.

Because so many have asked[58]: the '90s shock rockers Marilyn Manson, arguably the best-known "modern" Satanic rock band, frequently straddled the line between "serious" and "theatrical" in their image. While Manson himself (real name Brian Warner) had been made an honorary reverend in the Church of Satan by Anton LaVey, the band's music and themes were more generally concerned with anti-Christian shock value than anything specifically Satanic[59], and included a good deal of self-parody right from the start.[60]

Apart from the black metal scene, most serious Satanic musicians tend to be fairly underground and obscure. However, this hasn't stopped some conspiracy theorists from updating the old hysteria about heavy metal to claim that Satanists are in control of the entire entertainment industry, forcing aspiring artists to literally sell their souls to Satan in exchange for fame, inserting Satanic messages into hit songs to lure impressionable young people to the Dark Side, and carrying out rituals in the guise of music videos and concerts.[61] A simple YouTube search for " satanism" will turn up an ocean of videos from people with way too much time on their hands, dissecting every frame and lyric for anything that could be tenuously connected to some Satanic/Freemason/Illuminati symbol. Vigilant Citizen, Mark Dice, and Jesus Is Savior are among the more famous promoters of this idea.

Such theories often show up surrounding the death of Tupac Shakur, claiming that the Illuminati had him assassinated after he found out about Their plans and tried to expose them to the public. (Tupac's murder is still unsolved, but while there are several credible theories as to what actually happened, all of them involve his personal feuds and/or gang rivalries, not secret societies hunting him down down because he got too close to "the truth".) The irony here, of course, is that Tupac not only didn't believe in the Illuminati, but criticized those who did[62], saying that conspiracy theories about the Illuminati were distracting people from real problems of racism, inequality, and injustice. He would roll over in his grave if he saw how the "Satanists control pop and hip-hop" crowd turned him into their Vince Foster.

In 2016, this conspiracy theory spawned a meme when several people noticed that Zeena Schreck, the daughter of Anton LaVey, bore a striking resemblance to the pop star Taylor Swift when she was younger, with some of the usual suspects claiming shenanigans namely, that Swift was a clone of Zeena, raised to spread the word of Satan to millions of unsuspecting youth.[63] Given that Zeena, as noted above, left the Church of Satan on fairly bad terms, it's likely that she would've been the first to spill the beans about any secret plot to take over the world with obnoxious teen pop in order to embarrass her father. That said, it's well-known that Taylor Swift is a snake[citationNOT needed], so this does hold water.

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Satanism - RationalWiki

Stay Inspired: Conscious Evolution with Barbara Marx …

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

For Barbara Marx Hubbard, the meaning of I am comes from the source of creation, and it is an impulse that for billions of years has been creating quarks, electron, protons, animals, and now humans. I am the universe in person, she adds, so the I am principle in every one of us is actually our unique experience of the creative impulse of the universe. In this far-seeing and hopeful interview with Lisa Garr, originally webcast on March 9, 2016, Barbara explains the importance of people who are already loving coming together to create a field of attraction and a vision of the future to overcome the negativity of old ways to generate a transformative evolutionary consciousness.

Barbara Marx Hubbard is a visionary and a social innovator. She thinks from an evolutionary perspective and believes that global change happens when we work collectively and selflessly for the greater good, and many would agree she is the global ambassador for conscious change. Deepak Chopra has called her the voice for conscious evolution. A prolific author and educator, she has written seven books on social and planetary evolution and she has produced, hosted and contributed to countless documentaries seen by millions of people around the world.

Stay Inspired: Conscious Evolution with Barbara Marx ...

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day – apod.nasa.gov

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2016 December 11

Explanation: What created the strange spiral structure on the left? No one is sure, although it is likely related to a star in a binary star system entering the planetary nebula phase, when its outer atmosphere is ejected. The huge spiral spans about a third of a light year across and, winding four or five complete turns, has a regularity that is without precedent. Given the expansion rate of the spiral gas, a new layer must appear about every 800 years, a close match to the time it takes for the two stars to orbit each other. The star system that created it is most commonly known as LL Pegasi, but also AFGL 3068. The unusual structure itself has been cataloged as IRAS 23166+1655. The featured image was taken in near-infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope. Why the spiral glows is itself a mystery, with a leading hypothesis being illumination by light reflected from nearby stars.

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP) NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply. NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important Notices A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC & Michigan Tech. U.

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NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day - apod.nasa.gov

Nanomedicine Nanotechnology Journals | Peer Review | OMICS

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

NLM ID: 101562615 Index Copernicus Value: 4.22

You can find a clear view of peer review process by clicking here.

Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. It is the study and application of extremely small things and can be used across all the other science fields, such as chemistry, biology, physics, materials science, and engineering.

Related Journals of Nanotechnology Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Letters, Journal of Nanomedicine & Biotherapeutic Discovery, IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, Photonics and Nanostructures - Fundamentals and Applications

Nanobiotechnology is the application of nanotechnology to the life sciences: The technology encompasses precision engineering as well as electronics, and electromechanical systems as well as mainstream biomedical applications in areas as diverse as gene therapy, drug delivery and novel drug discovery techniques.

Related Journals of Nanobiotechnology Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, Research Journal of Nanoscience and nanotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology Journal, Nanomaterials & Molecular Nanotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nano Letters, Advanced Materials, Nano Today

A Nanocomposite is a multiphase solid material where one of the phases has one, two or three dimensions of less than 100nm, or structure having nano-scale repeat distance between the different phases that make up the material.

Related Journals of Nanocomposites

Journal of Nanomaterial and Nanotechnology, International Journal of Nanotechnology Impact Factor, Journal of Nanomedicine & Biotherapeutic Discovery, Scripta Materialia, Nanoscale, Lab on a Chip - Miniaturisation for Chemistry and Biology, Materials Science & Engineering A: Structural Materials: Properties, Microstructure and Processing

The Integrated Project Nanobiopharmaceutics aims at the development of innovative multidisciplinary approaches for the design, synthesis and evaluation of functionalised nano-carriers and nano-particle-based micro-carriers for the treatment of various diseases based on targeted, controlled delivery of therapeutic peptides and proteins (biopharmaceutics).

Related Journals of Nanobiopharmaceutics Journal of Nanomedicine & Biotherapeutic Discovery, Journal of Nanobiomedical Impact Factor, Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, Journal of Homotopy and Related Structures, Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases

Nanoelectronics is one of the major technologies of Nanotechnology. It plays vital role in the field of engineering and electronics.

Related Journals of Nanoelectronics Journal of Nanotechnology and Electrophysics, Nano Research & Applications, ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, International Journal of Nanotechnology Applications, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Journal of Physical Chemistry C, Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine

Nanomedicine is the medical application of nanotechnology. Nanomedicine ranges from the medical applications of nanomaterials, to nanoelectronic biosensors, and even possible future applications of molecular nanotechnology.

Related Journals of Nanomedicine Nanomaterials & Molecular Nanotechnology, Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, International Journal of Nanomedicine, Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine, Journal of Nanomedicine Research, European Journal of Nanomedicine

Nanotoxicology is a branch of toxicology concerned with the study of the toxicity of nanomaterials, which can be divided into those derived from combustion processes (like diesel soot), manufacturing processes (such as spray drying or grinding) and naturally occurring processes (such as volcanic eruptions or atmospheric reactions).

Related Journals of Nanotoxicology Nanomedicine & Nanotechnology, Nanotechnology Journal Lists, Nano Journal Impact Factor, Microscale Thermophysical Engineering, Microelectronic Engineering, Nano Biomedicine and Engineering, Nano-Micro Letters

Nanoengineering is the practice of engineering on the nanoscale. It derives its name from the nanometre, a unit of measurement equalling one billionth of a meter. Nanoengineering is largely a synonym for nanotechnology, but emphasizes the engineering rather than the pure science aspects of the field.

Related Journals of Nanoengineering Journal of Nanoresearch, Review in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology Journal, Research & Reviews: Journal of Pharmaceutics and Nanotechnology, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology, Nanotoxicology, Precision Engineering, Nanomedicine, Nanotechnology

The spontaneous association of molecules under equilibrium conditions into stable, structurally well-defined aggregates.

Related Journals of Nanofabrications Journal of Nanotechnology Impact Factor, Nanotechnology Journal Lists, Journal of Nano, Nanomaterials & Molecular Nanotechnology, Microporous and Mesoporous Materials, International Journal of Nanomedicine, Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology

Nanofluidics is often defined as the study and application of fluid flow in and around nanosized objects.

Related Journals of Nanofluidics Research Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Nano Journal Impact Factor, Journal of Nanotechnology and Electrophysics, Journal of Bionanoscience, Nanotechnology, Science and Applications, Journal of Nanobiotechnology, Plasmonics, Biomedical Microdevices

Nanohedron aims to exhibit scientific images, with a focus on images depicting nanoscale objects. The work ranges from electron microscopy images of nanoscale materials to graphical renderings of molecules. Scientific images lying outside the realm of nanoscience such as algorithmic art or confocal microscopy images of cells will also be considered.

Related Journals of Nanohedron Biomicrofluidics, Nanotechnology Journal Lists, Nano Journal Impact Factor, IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering

Nano Cars Into the robotics is new technology which is useful for designing robots. Difference in exisiting robotics and nano cars is this system works as nervous system where as in existing system stepper motors are used.

Related Journals of Nanocars Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Journal of Nanobiomedical Impact Factor, Review in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology,Nanomedicine & Biotherapeutic Discovery, ACS Nano, Advanced Functional Materials, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, Biomaterials, Small, Nano Research

Nanothermite, as the name suggests, is thermite in which the particles are so small that they are measured in nanometers is an ultra-fine-grained (UFG) variant of thermite that can be formulated to be explosive by adding gas-releasing substances.

Related Journals of Nanothermite Nanoscale Research Letters, Journal of Nanobiomedical Impact Factor, International Journal of Nanoscience, Microelectronics and Reliability, Journal of Nanoparticle Research, AIP Advances

A sequence of nanoscale C60 atoms arranged in a long thin cylindrical structure. Nanotubes are extremely strong mechanically and very pure conductors of electric current. Applications of the nanotube in nanotechnology include resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes and transistors.

Related Journals of Nanotubes Nanotechnology journals, Nature Nanotechnology Journal, Nano Journal Impact Factor, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, Science of Advanced Materials, Journal of Nanophotonics

Having an organization more complex than that of a molecule.

Realated Journals of Supramolecule Plasmonics, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, International Journal of Nanoscience, Journal of Nanobiomedical Impact Factor, Biomedical Microdevices, Biomicrofluidics, IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology

Nanoionics is the study and application of phenomena, properties, effects and mechanisms of processes connected with fast ion transport (FIT) in all-solid-state nanoscale systems.

Related Journals of Nanoionics Journal of Nanoresearch, Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, Nanomedicine, Nanotechnology, Microporous and Mesoporous Materials, International Journal of Nanomedicine

Nanolithography is the branch of nanotechnology concerned with the study and application of fabricating nanometer-scale structures, meaning patterns with at least one lateral dimension between 1 and 100 nm.

Related Journals of Nanolithography International Journal of Nanotechnology, Journal of Nanotechnology Impact Factor, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Letters, Nano Research, Scripta Materialia, Nanoscale, Lab on a Chip - Miniaturisation for Chemistry and Biology

Nanoparticles are particles between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. In nanotechnology, a particle is defined as a small object that behaves as a whole unit with respect to its transport and properties. Particles are further classified according to diameter.

Related Journals of Nanoparticles Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, International Journal of Nanoscience, Journal of Nanomaterial and Nanotechnology, Journal of Nanoparticle Research, Journal of Nanoparticles, International Journal of Nanoparticles,

Exploitation of biomaterials, devices or methodologies on the nanoscale.

Related Journals of Bionanoscience Pharmaceutical Nanotechnology, Journal of Nanobiomedical Impact Factor, Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology, Recent Patents in Nanotechnology, Journal of Bionanoscience, BioNanoScience, Nanomedicine, Nanotechnology, Microporous and Mesoporous Materials

Nanomedicine Nanotechnology Journals | Peer Review | OMICS

Astrophysics | School of Physics | University of Bristol

Posted on December 11, 2016 by Danzig

University home > School of Physics > Research > Astrophysics

The Astrophysics Group in the School of Physics at Bristol is active in several research areas. It specializes in cosmology, the formation of clusters and galaxies, active galaxies, high-energy astrophysical processes, and the formation of extrasolar planets. Observational work in the Group uses large ground-based and satellite telescopes from the radio to the X-ray bands. Theoretical work is tied closely to the interpretation of these data.

The Group is also heavily involved in the graduate and undergraduate teaching of the School of Physics. The Group runs a number of undergraduate courses associated with degree programmes in Physics with Astrophysics, and holds a continuing series of research seminars for graduate students and staff. Shared research seminars with other universities are held using the Access Grid Node located within the School of Physics.

The research interests of the group run from X-ray to radio wavebands, and cover planetary, galactic, extra galactic, and cosmological subjects.

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Astrophysics | School of Physics | University of Bristol

State crime – Wikipedia

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Danzig

In criminology, state crime is activity or failures to act that break the state's own criminal law or public international law. For these purposes, Ross (2000b) defines a "state" as the elected and appointed officials, the bureaucracy, and the institutions, bodies and organisations comprising the apparatus of the government. Initially, the state was the agency of deterrence, using the threat of punishment as a utilitarian tool to shape the behaviour of its citizens. Then, it became the mediator, interpreting society's wishes for conflict resolution. Theorists then identified the state as the "victim" in victimless crimes. Now, theorists are examining the role of the state as one of the possible perpetrators of crime (Ross, 2000b) whether directly or in the context of state-corporate crime.

Green & Ward (2004) adopt Max Weber's thesis of a sovereign state as claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Thus, the criteria for determining whether a state is "deviant" will draw on international norms and standards of behaviour for achieving the states usual operating goals. One of those standards will be whether the state respects human rights in the exercise of its powers. But, one of the definitional difficulties is that the states themselves define what is criminal within their own territories, and as sovereign powers, they are not accountable to the international community unless they submit to international jurisdiction generally, or criminal jurisdiction in particular.

As international crimes, a state may engage in state terror and terrorism, torture, war crimes, and genocide. Both internationally and nationally, there may be corruption, state-corporate crime, and organized crime. Within its territorial borders, some crimes are either the result of situations where the state is not the direct criminal actor, e.g. arising from natural disasters or through the agency of bodies such as the police. More usually, the state is directly involved in excessive secrecy and cover-ups, disinformation, and unaccountability (including tax evasion by officials) which often reflect upper-class and nonpluralistic interests, and infringe human rights (Ross, 2000a). One of the key issues is the extent to which, if at all, state crime can be controlled. Often state crimes are revealed by an investigative news agency resulting in scandals but, even among first world democratic states, it is difficult to maintain genuinely independent control over the criminal enforcement mechanisms and few senior officers of the state are held personally accountable. When the citizens of second and third world countries which may be of a more authoritarian nature, seek to hold their leaders accountable, the problems become more acute. Public opinion, media attention, and public protests, whether violent or nonviolent, may all be criminalised as political crimes and suppressed, while critical international comments are of little real value.

Barak (1991) examines recent history through Reaganism and Thatcherism which led to a decline in the provision of social services and an increase in public security functions. In turn, this created the opportunity for injustices and state crimes involving the suppression of democratic functions within the state. As Johns and Johnson (1994) note, "The concern of the U.S. policy elites is not, therefore, with the establishment or protection of democracy; it is with the establishment of capitalism world-wide and with the unimpeded control of resources and markets" (p7) "Panama is an especially good example of how the rollback strategy involves subverting or overthrowing not only governments that are socialist or left-wing but the governments of countries that seek full independence from the economic, political, or military influence of the United States" (pp9/10) But, in terms of accountability, they argue that the coverage of the invasion demonstrated "just how subservient the corporate media had become to the political elite in the United States" (p63) Hence, even in democratic countries, it can be difficult to hold political leaders accountable, whether politically or legally, because access to reliable factual information can be limited.

Within the context of state-corporate crime, Green and Ward (2004) examine how the debt repayment schemes in developing countries place such a financial burden on states that they often collude with corporations offering prospects of capital growth. Such collusion frequently entails the softening of environmental and other regulations. The debt service obligation can also exacerbate political instability in countries where the legitimacy of state power is questioned. Such political volatility leads states to adopt clientelistic or patrimonialist patterns of governance, fostering organized crime, corruption, and authoritarianism. In some third world countries, this political atmosphere has encouraged repression and the use of torture. Exceptionally, genocide has occurred.

Not Victimless: Understanding the harmful effects of …

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Danzig

Written by Syed, T.

Syed, T. (1997). Not Victimless: Understanding the harmful effects of police corruption. In Servamus, Vol. 91, No. 1.

In Servamus, Vol. 91, No. 1, 1997.

Talha Syed is a former Research Intern at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

The assumption that police corruption is wrong or a problem to be combatted is often taken for granted in many discussions or analyses of the topic. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the term "corruption" is not neutral, that its connotation of "moral perversion" or "depravity"1 implies that anything labelled corrupt must just inherently be "bad" and is not to be tolerated. Thus, there is sometimes little attention paid to what is wrong with corrupt acts. However, a reliance on a moral view of corruption which just assumes it to be bad can lead to an inadequate understanding of the problem. Especially when corruption seems to be quite widespread and an almost accepted part of some "sub-cultures", unless we articulate exactly what is wrong with it, some people may wonder why it needs to be combatted at all and if it is not better to just ignore it.2

This paper seeks to identify the major effects of corrupt acts on the criminal justice system, police relations with the public and the organisational culture of the police. It will emphasise the "civic morality"3 side of police corruption, i.e., the social harm that corrupt acts result in. The primary purpose of this discussion is to combat the view of police corruption as "victimless". It seeks to bring to the attention of the reader the very damaging effects of corrupt acts and to point out that such acts not only have indirect consequences, but often identifiable victims.

Before outlining some of the major effects of police corruption, it is important to have some idea of what is being referred to by the term "police corruption". Thus, this paper starts by defining police corruption. After that, the effects of corruption are divided into two sections: first, those that have more easily identifiable victims and second, those whose effects need to be viewed in a broader context. Where appropriate, examples of corrupt acts are provided to illustrate the points being made. This is not meant to imply that either the effects of police corruption are always easily distinguishable from each other or that each corrupt act has only one effect. Rather, this exercise is an attempt to broadly outline some of the major effects of corrupt acts and identify some of the practices most strongly related to specific effects.

The definition of police corruption used in this paper is the following:

Thus, to be considered corrupt, an act:

Must be a violation of South African criminal or civil law or qualify as misconduct under the SAPS or traffic officers regulations.4

Must use either the legal or organisational powers of the police. That is, in committing the act, a police officer needs to have made use of some form of knowledge, access, credibility or legal or other power available to her/him by virtue of her/him being a member of the police service.

Must be motivated by the desire to achieve some identifiable personal, group or organisational benefit or reward.

An officer not arresting someone for possession of dagga in return for some money would be an example of a corrupt act using legal police powers (i.e., the discretionary power of non- enforcement). An example of organisational powers being used would be an officer using her/his access to police records to steal and destroy a case docket in return for payment of some sort. In addition, if the officer destroyed the docket of a case where a friend or family member was the defendant, it would also be an example of corruption, as the benefit of helping someone close to you is clearly identifiable. Finally, a police commander ordering her/his officers not to investigate the alleged criminal activities of a politician who is influential and friendly towards the police is also acting corruptly, since there is a benefit to the organisation in terms of continued support from the politician.

It should be noted that there are some "improper" or questionable police practices and forms of misconduct that are not necessarily forms of corruption. One example would be an officer acting in a racist or prejudicial manner towards an alleged offender, perhaps by being discourteous or perhaps by other, more overt means (eg. using unnecessary force). Since it is difficult to identify any tangible gain for the officer involved, such an act would not be defined as corrupt in terms of the definition being used here. However, it needs to be recognised that such actions are still problematic - and may even be crimes - and that they may have the same effects as forms of police corruption. Also, such behaviour may still be viewed by some people as "corrupt". Thus, in the following analysis of effects, where especially appropriate or relevant, practices other than those formally defined as corrupt are also identified and discussed.

What the effects in this section have in common is that they often entail an identifiable person or group of people being harmed and are quite closely connected with the actual operation of the criminal justice system. In fact, they usually result in either the perversion, obstruction or diversion of the aims of justice. Also included in this group are practices which serve to divert police resources towards a particular group, and therefore potentially increase the vulnerability of other individuals, or groups, to crime. As such, the types of corruption looked at in this section often have the most obviously detrimental impact. However, it may not always be the case that a person committing some of the corrupt acts discussed here will concern her/himself with the very direct and dire consequences of her/his actions.

There are a few different ways in which corrupt acts committed by the police result in direct forms of victimisation. One obvious way is when the powers available to police officers are used in committing crimes that have direct victims. One example of this is outright stealing from individuals and businesses. This usually entails officers using their access to certain areas, such as unlocked shops, crime scenes or vehicle compounds, to help themselves to various goods. Officers have also been known to collude with professional criminals in operations such as car hijacking rings. Such cases, as Gauteng anti-corruption unit (ACU) Senior Superintendent Adrian Eager points out, are "particularly perturbing as some of [the] vehicles are obtained" by methods "which could involve murder."5 In such a case, police officers need to realize that they are not just using their powers to rob people, but, by giving police assistance to these operations, are also guilty of complicity in the assault and sometimes murder of the car owners. Another example where officers are only one step removed from the shooting or killing of people is when they sell firearms from police storage or when they rent out their own issue for a brief period.6

Another form of victimisation relates to the investigation of cases and the securing or providing of evidence. When police officers use "illegitimate methods" - such as lying about the circumstances surrounding an arrest or tampering with evidence - simply in order to secure convictions and falsely enhance their performance it must be viewed as corrupt. (In circumstances where such illegitimate methods are used in building cases against legitimate suspects, the use of such methods is still an offense; but since it is no longer motivated by personal gain, it is not, according to the definition being used, corrupt.) Such actions may result in the unlawful arrest or conviction of possibly innocent defendants. An example is the case of the junior examiner in the Western Cape who allegedly mismatched numerous fingerprints in order to provide "favours" for detectives, by helping them to falsely "build stronger cases."7 Another instance is what is referred to as "verballing" among police officers in Queensland, Australia - when the police corroborate earlier falsifications or fraudulently strengthen the case against the defendant by lying in court , knowing that their credibility as officers will give their testimony more weight than that of the accused.8

There are other cases of perjury that are forms of corruption and result in direct victimisation. As mentioned earlier, even though racist or brutal acts committed by police officers are usually not, strictly speaking, forms of corruption (as they result in no obvious gain), they are instances of victimisation. Thus, when an officer covers up for such behaviour by committing perjury, such as by claiming that the victim resisted arrest or was abusing the officer, it is not only a corrupt act (as the officer is gaining by avoiding personal harm), it is also a part of the victimisation process.

The practice of receiving kickbacks is one that is often viewed as victimless. However, besides the fact that certain businesses or people are not given a fair chance to compete for work, kickbacks can also have other, very direct victims. One type of kickback, discussed by James Morton in his look at police corruption in Britain, was when police officers in London would use their considerable "influence over the distribution of legal aid work" to direct cases to specific lawyers, in return for money or other payment or favours. One result of this practice was that lawyers had to be wary of offending, or being "hostile" to the police, and make sure that they "let the police officers down lightly if there were discrepancies in their evidence." In one instance, a "young solicitor who had given the police a hard time whilst defending and obtained an acquittal" was told by a senior partner that "he had received a call from a senior officer reminding him that the firm also relied on the police for their prosecution work."9 In effect, their ability to effectively do their job was compromised, with their clients, the defendants, being victimised. Also, kickbacks that officers receive from businesses such as towing operations or car garages can also lead to victimisation, with officers seeking, or even manufacturing, violations to enforce for the sole purpose of making corrupt funds One example, also from Morton's study, was of officers seeking out and citing vehicle owners for infractions such as driving with worn out tyres and, rather than handing out fines, giving them warnings and directing them to "a co-operative garage", one that gave the police regular payments.10

The extortion of money by police officers is also an overt form of victimisation. Here, police powers of enforcement or police authority may be used in committing a corrupt act. One example of this is the allegation that some police officers in the US Virgin Islands "routinely shake down prostitutes" and "illegal aliens", extorting money from them "by threatening to turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service."11 A South African example of extortion was an incident where five officers used their police authority in allegedly falsely informing a man that "his vehicle had been used in a crime and would have to be confiscated", seizing his car and demanding R6000 for its return.12 Also, when officers refuse to do their jobs, or suggest that certain tasks will not be done, or done properly, unless the person needing police assistance "greases the wheel", they are certainly victimising the hapless citizen.

One final instance of direct victimisation is the case of police officers siding with, and often providing police powers to, "favoured" people or businesses, usually ones that provide some goods (eg. free meals, drinks), when they are in conflict with other citizens. There are reported cases of, for instance, police officers serving, in effect, as security or bouncers for businesses like pubs or restaurants and helping such establishments "take care" of troublesome customers.13 In such cases, it is clear that such customers are being victimised with the police taking a particular side rather than acting in terms of the principles of law enforcement.

"Fostering impunity" here refers to those situations when corrupt acts committed by police officers serve to provide those who have violated the law with immunity against having the law properly enforced against them. This occurs when perpetrators of specific criminal acts are able to receive lighter punishments, or avoid punishment altogether, for their crimes. In assisting such perpetrators, police officers obstruct the criminal justice process and contribute to further injustice done to the victim. Such practices should therefore be understood as amounting to a form of secondary victimisation.14 Reports of police commanders interfering in investigations, to the point of travelling to other jurisdictions to have cases against powerful criminals quashed, are instances of this type of secondary victimisation. Also, every time an officer sells or destroys a docket, s/he has become an accessory to the crime (which could be murder) allegedly committed in that case. The same goes for those who assisted in the escape of Josiaha Rabotapi, a man "wanted in connection with 16 murders and 13 armed robberies."15 Finally, a more subtle way of helping offenders escape the consequences of their acts is for officers to "make a bad case", one that they know the defence can exploit, or to intentionally perform in court in such a way as to help the defendant's case.16

In connection with the above forms of obstruction of justice, a further consequence of this fostering of impunity is the damage it does to other police officers' morale. When officers committed to catching perpetrators and solving cases see their work undone time and again by other officers, it cannot but have devastating consequences for morale. Even if officers are unaware that it is other police officers who are undermining their work, simply witnessing the neutralisation of their efforts can lead to considerable frustration and despair. As one victim of a car hijacking put it when the alleged perpetrators was set free soon after "quick detective work" had led to their apprehension: "the detectives were very excited about the bust. I feel sorry for officers who had worked so hard to catch these guys, but how can you lose high-priority criminals like that?"17

A further form of fostering impunity is when police protection of offenders becomes more regular or systematic. Often, such corruption is linked with organised crime rings such as drug syndicates. Here, the fostering of impunity has at least two major effects. First, it allows drug traffickers (or car hijackers or firearms smugglers) to consistently evade law enforcement and thus more effectively run their operations. Thus, police officers are directly complicit in the devastating harm that drug trafficking (or other organised criminal activity) causes a community and its members. Second, it is certainly not unknown for those who deal in drugs to be engaged in other criminal activity, often in the course of running their business, such as racketeering, armed robberies and murder. By allowing these criminals to remain at large and by giving them the message that they are immune from being brought to book, corrupt officers are actively facilitating the committing of these crimes. In Latin American countries such as Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, where such police collusion with drug cartels is believed to be rife, it can reach the stage where the criminals are viewed as "more powerful than government". Here, the consequence of fostering impunity is "that the drug barons are not simply above the law - they are a law unto themselves."18

Of course, granting immunity through corrupt acts is not limited to police interactions with those commonly perceived as serious criminals. A less obvious, seemingly more benign or even innocent case would be traffic officers who solicit or take bribes for not enforcing traffic violations such as speeding. Such corruption may be justified or rationalised away as not having a victim or any negative consequences, yet it is a perfect illustration of the negative consequences of corrupt acts which foster impunity. The fact is, every time it is done, it contributes to a culture of lawlessness on the road, or at least an attitude that the laws need not be taken seriously. However such laws exist for a reason - to ensure road safety. If they can be flouted with relative ease, it contributes to a decreased level of respect for the rules of the road and may lead to an increase in hazardous driving and traffic accidents. Such long term consequences of corruption are no less real or damaging for being more removed from the individual act and need to be understood by officers whose job it is to ensure that laws aimed towards the security of people are not violated with impunity.

Connected with the above point is the more general impact that acts of favouritism may have on police, and public, perceptions of the law. When people such as politicians, police officers in general and friends of police officers are seen to be given favourable treatment with regards to the enforcement of violations of the law, this feeds into a culture of impunity. In the words of one analyst, such treatment increases people's perceptions of "the fallacy of impartial law enforcement."19 The law is seen to be malleable, not fairly applied to all and thus applicable only to those without influence or connections. These perceptions may have the reverse effect of Robert Klitgaard's "fry the big fish"20 approach to combatting corruption. Klitgaard recommends that to effectively send the message to the general public that corruption will not be tolerated, one needs to expose and prosecute prominent people in a society who are guilty of corruption, thereby making it clear that no one is above the law. The granting of immunity to some may have the opposite impact of undermining the legitimacy of the law, in effect contributing to a view of the law which sees it as applying "just for the little guys"21 and an attitude which views getting caught, not the actual infractions, as being the problem, or something to avoid.

This category refers to instances of public resources, in the form of police time, property or person power, being stolen, misdirected or unfairly allocated, thereby draining the resources available for proper or legitimate law enforcement ends. Often, the end result of this is that the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal justice system is hampered. One example of this is when business owners, such as those operating a restaurant or pub, provide police officers with "perks" such as free or discounted meals or drinks and in return get more visits and protection from the police. In effect, they buy more service from the police, causing an improper distribution of police resources which results in other businesses or community members being treated unfairly and not receiving adequate police services. Furthermore, when this type of misallocation becomes even more serious, such as the case of some police commanders in Mexico selling "security services", in the form of on duty officers working as private security guards, to "merchants and bankers", it is no longer just a case of some favourable treatment towards a few businesses. Rather, it is clear that the policing resources, which are paid for with public money, are being diverted for entirely private ends.22

The selling of police resources can reach the point where legitimate police services are used for improper or even illegal ends. Examples of this are incidents uncovered by the Mollen Commission on corruption in New York of on duty officers using their uniforms or police vehicles to provide protection and escorts for drug transactions.23 This entails police powers being corruptly used for the pursuit and facilitation of criminal activity and while it goes beyond the diversion of resources, such diversion is one of its negative consequences.

Another example of this kind of diversion of resources is the case of Australian politicians in the 1970's using the police for "surveillance of troublesome politicians and other opponents of the ruling regime."24 However, in this case, when such subversion of police powers takes place within the context of a broader misuse of the police, it is unclear if individual officers were necessarily acting corruptly, as they may have simply viewed these tasks as part of their job, with no extra personal incentive or reward. Nevertheless, it is clear that such a (mis)use of the police still results in a form of misallocation or diversion of resources from legitimate to illegitimate ends.

Some other forms of misuse of resources should also be mentioned at this point. Forms of misconduct such as sleeping on the job or absenteeism also serve as a drain on police resources and are therefore similar in impact to cases of "diversion". While such actions may not, strictly speaking, be defined as corrupt (since neither really uses any form of occupational power), they do reduce the ability of the police to operate effectively and, as a result, also deprive the public of services that have been paid for.

One final set of practices in this group are more general forms of "office" corruption that involve the abuse of powers not exclusive to the police. One example, cited by James Morton in his survey of police corruption in Britain, is of senior officers using workers, such as gardeners, who are being paid with police funds, to do private work.25 In Victoria, Australia, as a response to large sums of cash being stolen by police from the pool of lost money turned in by members of the public, one police department simply "covered the losses through its general budgetary process allowing the thief to escape with the cash."26 Here, both the theft and the decision to not cover up for the perpetrator resulted in a misuse of public resources. Finally, outright theft from public resources, such as the alleged collusion between a police inspector and a community policing forum member in the Northern Province to embezzle money from a "peace rally fund"27 is a further example of the corrupt depletion of public resources.

This section discussed those "less direct"effects that most corrupt acts have in common. Such effects are not so much about any identifiable victims being harmed but rather have more to do with negative consequences for the organisational culture of the police and the relations between the police and the public. The costs discussed here are perhaps less immediately perceptible, but no less significant. They damage areas such as the morale of honest officers, the level of integrity of the police and the degree to which citizens are willing to co-operate with the police. Thus their impact needs to be seen in a broader context.

One of the most universal and damaging effects of corrupt acts, especially of those viewed as "petty" or without victims, is that any one act contributes to an attitude or culture which is conducive to future acts of corruption. Every instance of corruption bends or violates a rule or law and, similar to the granting of impunity, may contribute to an officer's perceptions of the law as applying differently to different people and increase the ease with which violations can be rationalised. Lawrence Sherman points to this in his study of how officers become corrupt. He espouses what may be called an "evolutionary view" of corruption, where there is a progress in "moral depravity" with a corrupt officer beginning with minor acts and possibly ending up committing major violations.28

The first opportunities for corruption that an officer is exposed to and may take advantage of are usually what are viewed as minor violations - such as petty theft from a store that has been broken into or a small bribe for not enforcing a parking violation. An officer may justify such corrupt acts as having no "real" victim and therefore harmless. However, it is here that an officer's self-image can begin to change, from an honest person committed to upholding the law to one that may sometimes break a rule or two her/himself. With each infraction, further violations become more palatable and gradually, more serious crimes may be able to be rationalised. For example, an officer who regularly commits "harmless" thefts from crime scenes or drug busts is more likely to "take the next step", such as soliciting corrupt funds for protecting illegal gambling rackets, than an officer who refuses the initial opportunities. A little over a year ago, there was a story in Business Day of an officer who was found guilty of "violating a corpse by removing its heart" so that he could sell it.29 Once an officer has undertaken such an overtly pre-planned activity, one that required more than just taking advantage of opportunities that came his way, one wonders to what degree he is still able to retain any moral constraints on his actions or still view himself as having sufficient integrity to be a police officer.

A similar point has been made by many analysts with regards to the progression of vice-related corruption as well as its connections with other corrupt acts with more direct victims. Sherman asserts that the process between taking a bribe for allowing a bar to remain open for an hour longer to accepting money for allowing drug deals is a gradual one filled in by steps such as "looking the other way" for prostitution and gambling offences in return for a pay-off.30 With each step, a more serious (from the officer's point of view) violation is overlooked and rationalised by being victimless and thus "ok" to not enforce. What may happen is that eventually an officer's frame of reference has changed so much that an activity once thought unimaginable (i.e., "helping drug pushers")31 may become acceptable. Even within the parameters of colluding with drug syndicates, there are degrees of wrongdoing, degrees that can eventually become blurred. As David Sisk has pointed out, officers who initially draw the line at accepting bribes for not enforcing laws dealing with the possession or selling of drugs may soon be induced to "promote the criminal organizations" that pay such bribes and "such promotion will include a reluctance to enforce laws against crimes with victims when committed by these same organisations."32

Besides changing an officer's self-image or perception of what is acceptable, petty corrupt acts can lead to more serious ones in other ways as well. One way is when the giving and taking of bribes becomes so routine or common that it is almost expected. A range of activities, such as kickbacks from towing operators and legal firms, bribes for speeding up firearm license applications or paying commanding officers in order to receive vacation time (as happens in Mexico city),33 can contribute to such an atmosphere flourishing. Even "gifts" from members of the community, where no exchange takes place (i.e., the officer provides no immediate service for the gift), can lead to an officer becoming accustomed to receiving "perks" or payments in the course of her/his job. As the National Director of the Anti-Corruption Unit Stefan Grobler points out, officers find it very easy to adjust to having a higher income, to the point where they may become dependent on corrupt funds to maintain their lifestyle.34

In addition to the effects that committing corrupt acts has on an officer her/himself, it also has an impact on the general culture of a police organisation. Each time an officer commits a corrupt act in front of other officers, the group's tolerance level for such behaviour may increase. By taking small kickbacks or bribes or engaging in petty theft, corrupt officers send out a message to each other that such behaviour is acceptable and perhaps even encouraged. These messages or signals help officers "size up" others in the organisation, differentiating between those who will commit corrupt acts and those who will not. Furthermore, they affirm the attitude that "the formal rules", either of society or of the police organisation, "are largely a sham". Instead of such rules, what is to be followed is the informal "code" of the sub-group of peers that often forms the most important reference group for an officer.35 Petty corrupt acts also play an important role in socialising new recruits into this sub-culture. An illuminating example is provided by one former officer who, on his first shift, witnessed his "old timer" partner steal "25- or 30-cent candy bars" from the supermarket. Upon entering the patrol car, the partner insisted he share in the "loot" and told him that "everybody did it and that [he] should get used to it."36 In such a case, where the value of the goods being stolen is so small, it is clear that the importance of the act is as much symbolic as it is material. Also, once an officer has committed a corrupt act, no matter how petty, her/his willingness or ability to expose or discuss the corrupt activities of others may be severely diminished.

The ability of the behaviour of corrupt officers to "convert" those officers seeking to remain honest should not be underestimated, particularly where such behaviour is part of the culture of a particular police department. First, it scarcely needs to be pointed out that seeing their peers commit even minor acts of corruption can have a devastating impact on the morale of those officers who are committed to upholding the law. Second, by not going along with such corrupt activities, honest cops risk alienating themselves from their peers, a dire consequence indeed in such a close-knit occupation, especially when one considers that there may be situations when an officer's life may depend solely on the support provided by her/his peers. This isolation from one's peers and the low morale of an honest officer may be further compounded by the fact that an honest cop, by refusing to "play by the rules", can be hindered in her/his career advancement. More than one observer of police culture has noted the kinds of demotions, transfers and menial tasks that are the lot of an honest officer, largely as a result of the fact that they make the "wrong" arrests (i.e., enforcing violations against those who pay bribes or are influential) or do not go along with other officers' thefts and graft.37 In addition to the damage this does to an effective officer's productivity, such ostracisation may also lead to an honest officer, after considerable resistance, becoming corrupt.38

It should be noted that, in respect of the above processes of how corrupt acts become acceptable, forms of police misconduct other than corruption can also play a significant role. The Mollen Commission found that in addition to encouraging junior officers to steal or take bribes, senior cops socialised new recruits into a culture of breaking the rules by encouraging them to engage in acts of brutality, "as a rite of initiation to prove the officer is a tough or 'good' cop",39 i.e, one that plays by the rule of the peer group. Also, infractions committed by officers in an effort to do their jobs (which can be described as the use of "illegitimate means for legitimate ends"), such as lying in a police report in order to establish grounds for searching a suspect, may also lead to police officers viewing the law as not applying to them. One former detective in New York, Robert Leuci, claimed that it was such "well-intentioned" infractions which were his introduction to rule-breaking, but that they soon became "a casual thing" and not long after, he had "graduate[d] to bigger crimes" for personal gain.40

One other type of corruption which has a strong impact on spreading a culture of corruption, or at least allowing corrupt activities to flourish, is when officers collude in the covering up of corrupt acts. This can take a number of forms, from acts of misconduct, such as not properly following through on investigations or "burying" troublesome files (i.e., those cases that suggest some police involvement in corrupt acts), to illegal acts such as perjury. The motivation for such actions may vary. It may be personal gain in the form of an officer helping out a friend. Or it may be a kind of organisational gain, in the form of a general recognition and acceptance among the police that cops are to be given special treatment - treatment bordering on immunity from law enforcement. Or, as perhaps is often the case, such interference may be the result of a desire to try to avoid damaging publicity, either for a specific unit or for the police service as a whole. In any case, such actions are corrupt. Officers cannot decide whether or not a certain investigation ought to be pursued based solely on its possible negative consequences for their friends or for the police in general. By using police powers such as access to documents, influence over other officers or credibility in a court of law in order to effectively undermine an investigation they are guilty of, at the very least, serious misconduct and often of committing criminal acts. As asserted by the Mollen Commission, it is very unlikely that corrupt officers in New York would have been able to operate effectively without the collusion of usually honest cops such as commanding officers and those in the internal affairs department involved in the "burying" of files and the obstruction or prolonging of investigations involving corrupt activities by other police officers.41

One impact that basically all corrupt activities have is that they decrease public trust in, as well as respect for, the police. Any corrupt act - from citizens witnessing minor kickbacks (eg. from tow truck operators) or "gifts" given by business owners, to reports in the press of bribe taking or collusion with criminal syndicates - reduces the confidence people have in the fairness, integrity and honesty of police officers. Recently, a police inspector in Mpumalanga was found guilty of a variety of "petty" corrupt offences such as demanding "brandy and bags of peanuts from job applicants and residents applying for firearm licenses". The magistrate who sentenced him stated that, rather than inspiring confidence among citizens in the police, the former inspector "ha[d] convinced people that it is simple to buy the police" and that "his actions destroyed his community's trust in the police and the law".42 The damage that corruption does by reducing public confidence in the honesty of the police has a few different consequences.

Perhaps the most severe harm that a decrease in public trust of the police has is that it causes a deterioration in relations between citizens and officers and, as a result, reduces the effectiveness of policing in a community. As Mpumalanga Police Commissioner Alfred Malete has stated, a large number of arrests are "made due to the community co-operating with [the police] or reporting crimes to [the police]".43 Without such public involvement, police efforts in fighting crime are severely hampered. A case in point is the San Jose police department, who, before Joseph McNamara became police chief, had very poor relations with the city, marked by distrust and animosity on both sides. As McNamara states, officers needed to "realize that unless people reported crimes, provided evidence, served as witnesses and - when on juries - believed police testimony, criminals would not be convicted." It was only after efforts were made to repair relations between the public and the police that "the police made more arrests than ever and crime decreased to the point that San Jose became one of the safest large cities" in the United States.44

Thus, given the importance of public assistance to the police in fighting crime, it is easy to see the detrimental effect of police corruption. Perceptions of corruption result in a lack of trust in the police service. A poll taken last year revealed that 67% of respondents believed that members of the SAPS accept bribes and over half said that they felt "that the police lack credibility" and view them as being "corrupt and having no integrity".45 If people lose faith in the integrity of police officers, the amount of cooperation the police receive from the public also decreases. This can reach the point "where many people don't even bother to report many criminal activities"46 to the police, having no confidence in either the abilities or commitment of officers to solve cases. Perhaps the following statement referring to the impact of corruption on police community relations in the US Virgin Islands puts it best: "Public distrust of officers often means that victims and potential witnesses don't come forward and criminals go free."47

Another impact of the lack of public trust in police officers that occurs as a result of perceptions of corruption is the decrease in credibility that police officers have as officers of the court. As the Mollen Commission states, the impact of this on the performance of the criminal justice system "can be devastating." Public trust "in even the most honest officer" may be eroded, leading "the public to disbelieve police testimony" with the result being that "the guilty [are] set free after trial."48 Last year this scenario played itself out in the city of Philadelphia, with over one hundred convictions "overturned in cases involving six police officers who pleaded guilty last fall to corruption charges." As a result, one district attorney asserts that many "current cases that should result in convictions [are] being dismissed because juries and defense lawyers [are] increasingly questioning the integrity of police officers."49 To cite one more example, in the US Virgin Islands, "charges of corruption on the force are so widespread that defense attorneys routinely try to discredit police officers testifying in court."50

In understanding the impact of corruption on officer-citizen relations, one also needs to consider the role it plays in influencing police perceptions of their relationship with the rest of society. Many students of police culture have noted an "us. vs them" mind set being common among police officers.51 The secrecy, stress and danger of police work leads to an insular and close-knit occupational culture that results in a strong distinction being made between members of the police and regular citizens. Such a distinction often entails some officers seeing "the public as a source of trouble", or even as "the 'enemy'",52 and thus isolating themselves and their peers from the rest of society. This division may be further entrenched by a perception on the part of some officers of public animosity towards the police. Thus, any time an officer feels hostility from members of the public, her/his allegiance and loyalty to the community of officers may be strengthened and her/his ties with the community outside of the police weakened.

Corruption can be both a result and a cause of this separation of the police from society. The isolation of the police can lead to a divergence of officers' values from those that the rest of society at least professes to uphold. It may also result in a lack of recognition of, or concern over, the harmful effects that corrupt acts have on society. Thus, it can make committing such acts easier to rationalise or justify. At the same time, every instance of corruption can further reinforce the distance between society and the police by increasing public hostility and distrust towards the the police. Also, every time an officer commits a corrupt act, s/he may be affirming yet again her/his status as an outsider who follows the informal rules of a corrupt peer group, .not the formal rules of society. Thus the relationship between an "us vs. them" mentality among the police and incidents of corruption can be a circular one. As long as officers play by the rules of their peer group and the public continues to negatively label them, any rapprochement between the two is unlikely. A final point, perhaps particularly relevant with regards to South Africa, is that the negative labelling by society may be even more damaging if the police feel it to be hypocritical. That is, if there exists a feeling that most members in society also view the formal rules as being a sham, and act accordingly, then the police may feel even greater embitterment for being singled out and judged by a double standard.

A better understanding of the many effects of police corruption gives us a clearer motivation for why it ought to be combatted. Does it also provide some indications as to how one may be able to address the problem? Before concluding, I would like to suggest a few ways in which it may. First, in term of the implications of this analysis for the efforts of bodies such as the ACU, a few suggestions may be put forward. In an interview, Director Grobler stated that the ACU's priorities are those corrupt acts which have the most detrimental impact on the criminal justice system.53 Judging by the actual operation of the ACU, these would seem to be generally those identified in the first section under "at whose expense", such as the sale of firearms, docket theft or collusion with car hijacking rings. It is suggested that other practices identified in this section, such as the falsification of evidence or testimony, receiving kickbacks from legal firms or the receipt of payments from private businesses should also be listed as priorities, if there is evidence of their occurence.

In addition, while it is certainly appropriate that the ACU focus on these forms of corruption which have the most serious and direct short term consequences, one also needs to consider a few questions: To what degree are the more serious corrupt acts the end result of a process of becoming corrupt? Is their existence facilitated by an acceptance or tolerance of more petty forms of corruption? Of course, one needs to recognise the devastating and direct impact that more serious forms of corruption have on individual victims and the functioning of the criminal justice system and thus make attempts at curbing such corruption. However, some unit or body, perhaps the ACU, also needs to take responsibility for addressing other forms of corruption which may have longer term effects. If as, Director Grobler has stated, the primary concern of anti-corruption work is to combact corrupt acts "which have an impact on the way officers do their jobs",54 then there certainly needs to be a recognition and prioritisation of the need to address the earlier acts which may lead to the more serious ones.

In addressing these earlier acts it will not only be necessary to make use of investigative measures. Longer term strategies - such as education and in-service training - are also needed. Arguably some of the resources which are spent on lengthy and expensive investigations might be better utilised in training, education, increasing accountability or closer supervision, especially during an officer's first couple of years on the service?

In particular the training of recruits should focus more on discussing the effects of, and likely opportunities for, engaging in corruption. Especially with regards to the spreading of a culture of corruption, through "petty" or apparently victimless corrupt acts or the receipt of seemingly innocuous gifts, recruits need to be alerted properly about the possible complexities and moral risks that they will face in their line of work. In the words of Director Grobler, new officers have to recognise the "red flashes" or be able to hear the "alarm bells" of corruption very early in their careers.55 One of the major purposes of this paper was to assist police officers in recognising the very serious consequences of corrupt actions. If police officers are able to recognise these consequences this recognition may serve as a preventive measure against corruption, particularly if officers internalise the view that corruption does indeed have victims and that even minor acts can have a very damaging impact on how they do their job.

Finally, as was noted by the Mollen Commission, honest police officers are among the most important resource in the fight against corruption. They may be witness to a variety of corrupt acts and experience first hand the very damaging consequences of corruption. Thus, they have both the opportunity and the motive to speak out against corruption. However, as we have seen, one of the effects of corruption is the way in which it ostracises and may silence honest officers, especially in situations where commanding officers are acting corruptly by "looking the other way" with regards to corrupt cops. Thus, a major task in fighting corruption needs to be to "provide constant support and recognition to officers who, by reporting corruption, choose to do what is right rather than what their [peer group's] culture expects of them." It must be made clear that "those who expose corruption will be rewarded, and those who help conceal it punished."56 Honest officers need to acknowledge the harm that even minor corrupt acts may cause and take steps to oppose each instance which they are witness to.

1 As defined in Collins English Dictionary, 3rd ed., HarperCollins, Glasgow, 1991 p. 39 1.

2 For one example of this, see the review of James Morton's survey of police corruption in Britain, Bent Coppers, by Rudolf Klein in the Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 1994, p. 26.

3 For a discussion of "private" versus "civic" morality, see Loek Halman "Is there a moral decline? A cross-national inquiry into morality in contemporary society", International Social Science Journal, 45, 1995, pp. 426-427.

4 For the purposes of this paper, not only members of the SAPS, but also traffic officers, who fall under local or provincial "safety and security" jurisdiction, are regarded as police officers.

5 Glynnis Underhill and Kurt Swart, "Probe into cop corruption runs into 'obstacles"', Star, 29 June 1996.

6 This example was provided by Stefan Grobler, director of the Anti-Corruption Unit, in a personal interview on 22 May 1997.

7 "Fingerprint scam uncovered", Star, 14 February 1997.

8 Mark Finnane, "Police Corruption and Police Reform The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland Australia", Policing Society, Vol. 1, 1990, pp. 166-167.

9 James Morton, Bent Coppers, Little Brown and Co., 1993, pp. 224-225

10Ibid, pp. 225-226.

11 Mervin Claxton, "Corruption and Disorder: Police Department at Core of Crime Crisis", Public Service, 13 December 1994, online: http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/1995/winners/works/public-service/13corruption.html

12 "Policemen held on charges of extortion', Business Day, 23 October 1996.

13 Morton, op cit, p. 211

14 Sharon Hammond and Justin Arenstein, "Township thugs still have police on their side", Weekly Mail and Guardian, 6 September 1996.

15 Sasha Jensen, "Police helped 'most wanted'", Star, 20 February 1997.

16 Such forms of police "assistance" to defendants and their counsel is discussed in P.K. Manning and J.L. Redlinger's "Invitational Edges", Carl B. Klockars and Stephen D. Mastrofski, eds., Thinking about Police: Contemporary Readings 2nd ed. MacGraw-Hill Publishing, New York, 1991, p. 359.

17 Priscilla Singh, "Suspicion on police after suspects freed", Star, 20 February 1997. 14

18 "Crime and Transformation", Financial Weekly, 24 April 1997.

19 Lawrence Sherman, "Becoming Bent", F. Elliston and M. Feldberg, eds., Moral Issues in Police Work, Rowman & Allanheld, 1983, pp. 253-265.

20 See his article "Frying Big Fish: Campaigns against Corruption", Indicator South Africa Vol 9/No 3, 1992, p. 13.

21 D. Bell, cited in Ellwyn Stoddard's "Blue Coat Crime", Carl B. Klockars, ed., Thinking about Police: Contemporary Readings 1st ed., MacGraw-Hill Publishing, New York, 1983, p. 339.

22 Sam Dillon, "Mexico City Police Fight Corruption Within Ranks", New York Times News Service, 18 October 1995, online: http://www.latinolink.com/mexlOl8.html

23 Mollen Commission Report, Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department, City of New York, 1994, pp. 32- 33.

24 Finnane, op cit, p. 164.

25 Morton, op cit, p. 220.

26 Raymond Hoser, "Police Corruption in Victoria", 1996, online: http://www.lexicon.net.au/~adder/vrb1.htm

27 Sello Seripe, "Inspector in scandal", New Nation, 8 August 1996. 1996.

28 Sherman, op cit, pp. 253, 263. It should be noted that Sherman's analysis does not assume that all officers follow this path - he does state the importance of individual differences in background, values and character. In any case, the following discussion only partly draws on his model.

29 Bonile Ngqiyaza, "Body parts judgement", Business Day, 14 March 1996.

30 Sherman, op cit, p. 263.

31Ibid, p. 259.

32 David Sisk, "Police Corruption and Criminal Monopoly: Victimless Crimes", Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. IX, June 1982, p. 403.

33 Dillon, op cit.

34 Personal interview with Stefan Grobler, 22 May 1997.

35 Sherman, op cit, pp. 256-257.

36 Stoddard, op cit, p. 344.

37 For three examples, see Morton, op cit, pp. 229-230, Shenim, op cit, p. 258, and Stoddard, op cit, pp. 344-345.

38 Sherman, op cit, p. 258 and Stoddard, op cit, pp. 344-345.

39 Mollen Commission, op cit, p. 47

40 Sarah Glazer, "Police Corruption", Congressional Quarterly Researcher, 24 November 1995 p. 1046.

41 Mollen Commission, op cit, pp. 90- 101.

42 "Police inspector is jailed for 18 years", Citizen, 18 March 1997.

43 "8 policemen arrested", Sowetan, 18 July 1996.

44 Cited in Glazer, op cit, p. 1049

45 Sharon Chetty, "Police 'not doing enough to fight crime'", Sowetan, 28 March 1996.

46 Angella Johnson, "Police chief is shipped out after R70m thefts", Weekly Mail and Guardian, 29 November 1996.

47 Claxton, op cit.

48 Mollen Conmmission, op cit, p. 43

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Discover – Seychelles .Travel – Seychelles Tourism Board

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Danzig

The Republic of Seychelles comprises 115 islands occupying a land area of 455 km and an Exclusive Economic Zone of 1.4 km in the western Indian Ocean. It represents an archipelago of legendary beauty that extends from between 4 and 10 degrees south of the equator and which lies between 480km and 1,600km from the east coast of Africa. Of these 115 islands, 41 constitute the oldest mid-oceanic granite islands on earth while a further 74 form the low-lying coral atolls and reef islands of the Outer Islands.

The granitic islands of the Seychelles archipelago cluster around the main island of Mah, home to the international airport and the capital, Victoria, and its neighbouring islands of Praslin and La Digue. Together, these Inner Islands form the cultural and economic hub of the nation and contain the majority of Seychelles' tourism facilities as well as its most stunning beaches.

This section provides comprehensive information about the geography, climate, history, society, government, people, language, religion, culture, cuisine, recipes, arts, architecture, folklore, flora and fauna of Seychelles, and the 6 island groups that, together, make up Seychelles' Inner and Outer Islands

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Discover - Seychelles .Travel - Seychelles Tourism Board

U.S. High Seas Marine Text Forecasts by Area

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Danzig

U.S. High Seas Marine Text Forecasts by Area

U.S. high seas marine text forecasts are prepared cooperatively by the Ocean Prediction Center(OPC), National Hurricane Center(NHC) and Honolulu Forecast Office(HFO). The map above contains the description for each of these high seas forecast areas. Several high seas forecast products combine these areas. See table below for a more detailed explanation.

Similar webpages for Coastal/Great Lakes Forecasts by Zone and Offshore Marine Forecasts by Zone are available.

These forecasts are also available via e-mail

NOTICE - Check time and date of forecasts. Linked data may not represent the latest forecast. The Internet is not part of the National Weather Service's operational data stream and should never be relied upon as a means to obtain the latest forecast and warning data. Become familiar with and use other means such as NOAA Weather Radio to obtain the latest forecasts and warnings. Please read our DISCLAIMER

This is NOT a complete listing of National Weather Service marine forecast products. See the Marine Forecasts webpage which contains information on the dissemination of NWS marine weather forecasts including frequency and broadcast schedule information as well as links to products and related information.

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U.S. High Seas Marine Text Forecasts by Area

Ascension – Call of Duty: Black Ops Wiki Guide – IGN

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Danzig

Ascension takes place in a Russian Space Station at night. The map will be in black and white until you turn on the power. You can find the Power Switch on the top floor of the main building. You start of the game at the bottom floor of the main building.

Along with Zombies are special enemies called "Space Monkeys." Space Monkeys are pretty fast and extremely hard to hit because of their size. The higher the round, the more Space Monkeys there will be. They will flood into the map like ants. Space Monkeys come every few rounds after a Perk is bought. After you kill them all, they will drop a Max Ammo Power-Up, just like Hell Hounds. Space Monkeys don't attack players right away. Instead, they will latch on to Perk-A-Cola Machines and take your Perks. They only attack the Perk-A-Cola Machines you and your team bought from. It takes a few seconds, but the perk will be stolen after touching the machine. If you can kill all of them before any of them touch a machine, you will earn a brand new Power-Up which gives you and your team a random Perk-A-Cola.

The Mystery Box is available on this map and will always start right next to the Power Switch. After a few uses, the Mystery Box will move to a new location on the map. Look at the TV near the Mystery Box spawn locations to see the location the Mystery Box is currently at.

Two new weapons are added to the Mystery Box. The weapons are called The Gersch Device and Matryoshka Dolls. The Gersch Device replaces your Special Grenades and sucks zombies in like the Ghost Busters. The Matryoshka Dolls replace you Special Grenades and explode multiple times like a cluster bomb.

Two new Perk-A-Colas have been added to Ascension: Stamin-Up and PhD Flopper. Double Tap Root Beer cannot be found on this map, which means there are five Perk-A-Colas in Ascension, yet only four can be bought at a time. Stamin-Up allows you to run for a longer period of time. PhD Flopper prevents you from taking any fall damage or explosive damage, you can even cook a grenade in your hand. If you dive off of a high spot, you will cause a small explosion that can kill any zombies around.

The Pack-A-Punch Machine is back again, but it requires a few steps to gain access. First, you must use the Lunar Lander from all three locations to the main building. Second, you must press a launch button right next to the Power Switch, this will launch the missile from the launch pad. Now the Pack-A-Punch area will be open underneath the launch pad. The area will stay open for the rest of the game.

Power-Ups that are unique to Ascension include:

For a list of Power-Ups available on all maps, view the Power-Ups page.

Along with the color, the power activates all the Perk-A-Cola Machines, Traps, and a new transport called Lunar Landers. The traps on Ascension include Fire Traps, which act exactly like the Electric traps from past map, and Automatic Turrets. The First traps cost 1000 Points while the Automatic Turrets cost 1500 Points. Each use lasts 30 seconds and has a 90 second cool down period.

The new Lunar Lander transport act a bit like teleportation pads. There are four platforms around the map which holds the Lunar Lander. The Lunar Lander starts in the same room you start at. After the power is activated, you can call a Lunar Lander to one of the other platforms. If a player is on the Lunar Lander while it's being called, they will be transported across the map on the Lunar Lander. If a player doesn't call the Lunar Lander to a new location, you must buy a trip for 250 Points. The Lunar Lander will always lead back to the starting position if you buy a trip. After the Lunar Lander reaches it's destination, you must wait 30 seconds for the Lunar Lander to refuel before using it again. If you stand underneath a Lunar Lander while it's landing, you will be downed instantly.

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Ascension - Call of Duty: Black Ops Wiki Guide - IGN

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