Doug Bandow

Doug Bandow is the Robert A. Taft Fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is a member of the Economic Theory & Policy Working Group with the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, and the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire (Xulon Press). This article is an e-publication of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

The Beijing Olympics are less than a year away. While China's extensive

construction program is well underway, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is retreating from its promise to the International Olympic Committee to improve human rights.

The PRC shows increasing confidence in dealing with the world. At home, however, the Chinese leadership fears its own people. Amnesty International recently reported on the disappointing status of human rights in China:

While positive steps have been made in some limited areas . . . these are overshadowed by other negative developments -- in particular the growing crackdown on Chinese human rights activists and journalists, as well as the continued use of "Re-education through Labor" and other forms of detention without trial.

Moreover, "the Olympics are being used to justify such repression in the name of 'harmony' or 'social stability.'"

Repression is on the rise. Earlier this year Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that the Chinese government was engaging in its "largest 'clean-up' of protestors and rights activists in years." HRW pointed to "increasingly violent crackdowns on protesters, petitioners, and rights activists across the country, and a surge in house arrests of activists."

There has been some improvement in "the freedom of foreign journalists to cover news stories in China in the run-up to and during the Olympics," Amnesty says. However, 40 percent of members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China report government intimidation, while their Chinese employees are routinely spied upon and harassed. Moreover, Amnesty warns that these new

. . . regulations were introduced against a background of increased official controls over the distribution of foreign news within China, and a renewed crackdown on domestic journalism, including print, broadcast, and online media.

Periodicals have been closed or forced to dismiss their employees. Posts by on-line publications have been restricted. In August, the group Reporters Without Borders pointed to 29 imprisoned Chinese journalists.

The Internet is a favorite target of the authorities. Web sites have been closed; Internet users are being forced to register under their own names; writers and journalists have been jailed. The government employs an estimated 30,000 cyber-snoops. In August, the Chinese government pressed major blog providers to agree to enforce government standards.

Moreover, warns Amnesty:

While the Chinese authorities have shown growing levels of tolerance for some forms of rights activism which are not perceived to threaten the status quo, activists who report more widely on violations, challenge policies which are deemed to be politically sensitive, or try to rally others to their cause, are facing heightened levels of abuse.

Surveillance, detention, imprisonment, and physical abuse all have been deployed against human rights campaigners. Lawyers who defend human rights activists also face attack.

Religious persecution continues. The government has initiated a crackdown on foreign missionaries and tightened control over house churches. At least 15 leaders of the underground church were arrested in six different provinces as part of a recent drive "against illegal religious and evil cult activity," stated the government. Severe repression continues against Falun Gong practitioners.

This is a sad record for a nation poised to become one of the globe's leading geo-political actors.

What to do to help the Chinese people? Sanctions, including an Olympics boycott, would antagonize Chinese citizens as well as leaders -- without improving the situation in China.

But people of good will should speak out on behalf of the Chinese people. President George W. Bush called his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, to account at the Asia Pacific Cooperation meeting in Sydney in September. Asian and European leaders should add their voices.

Their efforts should be buttressed by private protests. The International Olympic Committee should weigh in, reminding the Chinese government of its commitment to improve human rights.

While the criticism should be sharp, it should point to a positive end. That is, the Chinese government should be urged to follow the logic of its reach for global influence.

A political leadership hoping to win legitimacy and defuse social protest at home should give its citizens a stake in its government. A government demanding respect from the international community should respect its people. The leaders of a powerful nation should trust their people with freedom.

Although outsiders cannot force the People's Republic of China to respect the human rights of its own people, they can encourage, pressure and shame the Chinese authorities to do so. There's no better opportunity to act on behalf of the Chinese people than in advance of the 2008 Olympics. *

"Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark." --Walter Lippmann

John R. Christy

John R. Christy has served as a contributor (1992, 1994, and 1996) and lead author (2001) for the UN reports by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). He has published many articles including studies appearing in Science, Nature, Journal of Climate and The Journal of Geophysical Research. This essay was given as testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality on March 7, 2007.

Chairman Boucher, Ranking Member Hastert and committee members, I am John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science, and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I am also Alabama's State Climatologist. I served as a Lead Author of the IPCC 2001 report and as a Contributing Author of the 2007 report.

I will be reporting today on research that has appeared recently or that will be published shortly.

In the following testimony I will first describe how a carefully reconstructed time series of temperatures in the Central Valley of California indicate that changes since 1910 are more consistent with the impacts of land-use changes than the effects currently expected from the enhanced greenhouse theory. This and other research points to the need for a better temperature index than what is used now over land: daytime temperatures, rather than the average daily temperatures (used now), are more directly representative of the layer in the atmosphere affected by greenhouse gases. Secondly, I will describe results from two papers that examine our knowledge of atmospheric temperatures as they relate to the surface. The results point to a more modest atmospheric warming than anticipated from our current understanding of the enhanced greenhouse theory. Further, I argue for an independent program with significant funding to evaluate climate model simulations and projections with a healthy, objective eye.

I then include comments on my view of the unfortunate and incorrect attempt to demonize energy and its by-products. Without energy, life is brutal and short. The option of ethanol as a substitute for petroleum is addressed pointing out that though there are serious concerns, there is indeed a way to achieve a significant increase in production in the U.S. if that is the course the country deems necessary.

The meaning of my climate research for policy makers is two-fold. First, it is apparent that we have little skill at reproducing and predicting changes on regional scales of the size up to a region like conterminous U.S. Secondly, it is therefore far more difficult to predict the climate effect of a particular policy aimed at altering current emissions of greenhouse gases (by small amounts) and thus somehow "hold back global warming." In other words, we are unable with any confidence to predict or detect climate outcomes from Kyoto-like policy options, especially on the scale where our citizens live.

[Many of the statements below will use the terminology "consistent with" rather than "proof of." This is the way science works in the field of climate because we basically cannot give "proof" of the type found in laboratory experimentation.]

Central California Temperatures

Last year three coauthors and I published a paper on temperature trends in Central California since 1910 (Christy et al. 2006). This was actually a follow-on of work I did as a teenager growing up in the San Joaquin Valley some 40 years ago when all I had was a pencil, graph paper, a slide rule, and a fascination with climate. In this new work, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, we set out to collect all available information on surface temperatures in the Valley and nearby Sierra Nevada foothills and mountains and then develop a means to generate temperature trends with defined levels of confidence.

What drew my attention to this problem was the apparent rapid rise in nighttime temperatures in the Valley, temperatures that appeared to be much above those I remember recording as a teenager. We eventually produced a dataset with many observations never before utilized (we performed the manual digitization of many of those records). In addition, we examined all of the ancillary information to document changes experienced by stations that could affect the overall trends. This involved reading and digitizing over 1600 pages of information about the stations and instruments. This had not been done before in California.

We then developed a method that takes into account the various events that affected each station, i.e., a move, a change of instruments, a change in procedure, etc. We discovered that on average, a station experienced about six events that could produce a change in the surface temperature. After adjusting for these changes, we combined the stations in the Valley to see what went on the last 100 years and did the same for the Sierras as a control experiment. Our work uses literally ten times the amount of data of previous attempts at creating such temperature records.

We discovered that indeed the nighttime temperatures in the 18 Valley stations were warming rapidly, about 6F in summer and fall, while the same daytime temperatures fell about 3¡F. This is consistent with the effects of urbanization and the massive growth in irrigation in the Valley.

The real surprise was the composite temperature record of the 23 stations in the central Sierra foothills and mountains. Here, there was no change in temperature. Irrigation and urbanization have not affected the foothills and mountains to any large extent. Evidently, nothing else had influenced the Sierra temperatures either.

These results did not match the results given by climate models specifically downscaled for California where the Sierras were expected to have warmed more than the Valley over this period (e.g., Snyder et al. 2002).

Because these results were provocative, we performed four different means of determining the error characteristics of these trends and determined that nighttime warming in the Valley was indeed significant but that changes in the Sierras, either day or night, were not. Models suggest that the Sierras are the place where clear impacts of greenhouse warming should be found, but the records we produced did not agree with that hypothesis. For policymakers in California this result is revealing. It suggests that to "do something" about warming in central California means removing agricultural and urban development rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

[Note: as a follow-up to Christy (2002) on Alabama temperature trends, we examined the output from 10 climate models. All models showed a warming trend for 1900 to 2000 in the southeast U.S. However, observations show a cooling trend (common throughout the southeast U.S.). Additionally, Kunkel et al. 2006 perform a similar analysis for the central U.S. where temperatures have not experience a warming trend while model simulations of the same period do. Kunkel et al. identified this feature in the central U.S. as a "warming hole."]

The bottom line here is that models can have serious shortcomings when reproducing the type of regional changes that have occurred. This also implies that they would be ineffective at projecting future regional changes with confidence, especially as a test of the effectiveness for specific policies. In other words it will be almost impossible to say with high confidence that a specific policy will have a predictable or measurable impact on climate.

We are nearing the end of an extensive study of surface temperatures in East Africa, a place I had lived and monitored the weather in the mid-1970s. Our preliminary results are similar to those from Central California in that daytime temperatures are not changing at all, while nighttime temperatures appear to be rising. This particular area is of great interest because two of Africa's ice-capped mountains, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, reside in this region. There is clearly no doubt that these East African ice fields are shrinking. However if general warming is the reason, it should be due to the rise of daytime temperatures, because nighttime temperatures are well below freezing already. However, we find little if any warming in daytime temperatures, suggesting these ice fields are disappearing for reasons unrelated to a general warming, perhaps to decreasing cloudiness and precipitation.

A soon-to-be published paper focuses on surface temperature issues in general (Pielke et al. 2007). It strongly suggests that a new surface temperature index is needed for monitoring the climate system for global change. To date, the typical land surface temperature record is an average of the daytime high and the nighttime low. However, this research, our own research, and that of others indicate that the nighttime low (more so than the daytime high) is affected by numerous local changes that are unrelated to the global climate concerns. These influences include increasing the surface roughness by adding orchards or buildings, changing natural cover to heat-soaking surfaces such as asphalt, putting aerosols and dust in the lowest layer, heavy irrigation, etc.

The nighttime temperature over land occurs in a relatively shallow layer near the surface and thus is more strongly affected by changes in the properties at or near the surface as described above, be they land-use changes or atmospheric concentrations of aerosols. This implies that the more reasonable index to use for monitoring the global climate is the daytime maximum temperature that occurs at a time of day when a deeper layer of air is mixing down to the surface, mitigating the non-climate effects of those local changes. The daytime temperature then represents more closely what is happening in the deep atmosphere where changes due to such drivers as greenhouse gases occur. This idea will be mentioned later.

Atmospheric Temperature Trends

There was considerable media attention given to the Climate Change Science Program's (CCSP) 2006 report about temperature trends in the atmosphere, about 0-35,000 ft, versus those of the surface for the period since 1979. The basic task of the CCSP was to look at the various datasets of atmospheric and surface temperature and draw conclusions about their relative trends. Several atmospheric datasets revealed trends less than or the same as the surface, which is at odds with greenhouse theory as embodied in present-day climate models that anticipate a faster rate of warming in the upper air.

The key statement regarding global trends in the report claimed, "This significant discrepancy no longer exists." It would have been more accurate, in my view, to have said, "The magnitude of these global discrepancies is not significant." This is a subtle but important difference because it not only acknowledges that discrepancies still exist but that the differences between the global surface and atmospheric trends are within the uncertainty bounds of our various measurements at this time. In other words, rather than being a statement claiming certainty of the measurements (and models) it should have been a statement claiming the uncertainty of our knowledge. I had proposed the second rendition, but was unsuccessful in seeing it implemented.

Be that as it may, the more interesting issue is found in the tropical region. Here we have significant discrepancies between surface and atmospheric trends for nearly all datasets. The tropical region is not trivial, constituting one-third of the global area.

The report acknowledged that reasons for this discrepancy were an "open question" but came to a "consensus" statement that the reason for the discrepancy was (a) errors common to models, (b) errors in most observational datasets, or (c) a combination of the two. The report says that the authors "favored" the second reason, i.e., observational error. The word "favored" was used to allow a sense of a majority view, since I did not agree with that assessment. I preferred the third option, that models and observations have roughly the same amount of error.

I was fairly happy with choosing option (c) because I knew of the two papers that were going to appear soon based on research sponsored by the Dept. of Energy, the Dept. of Transportation, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Christy and Norris 2006, Christy et al. 2007). In these papers I dealt specifically with atmospheric trends and the information we have to assess errors and uncertainties. In both papers we show that atmospheric trends from our University of Alabama in Huntsville datasets are most consistent with independent measurements and thus imply that the discrepancy between the tropical surface and upper air trends is quite differently expressed in observations versus model output.

In the second of the papers, we examined eight upper air datasets in the tropics. All but one revealed less cooling aloft than at the surface. And, in all cases, these seven differed from the one "warming" dataset in the same way, something that would be highly improbable by chance if the one "warming" dataset was accurate. The conclusion of the paper was that there is very likely a difference between the surface and atmospheric tropical trends, with the atmosphere being cooler. This is significant because model simulations indicate the atmosphere should be warming faster than the surface by a factor of about 1.3 if greenhouse influences are correctly included in climate models. Thus, while all datasets indicate a warming trend in atmospheric temperatures, and therefore perhaps a consistency with some level of greenhouse forcing, the rate of the warming (a) is more modest than expected and (b) occurs in a different relationship to the surface than expressed by climate models.

Panel Questions

Given the above information I would answer the questions posed to the panel as follows:

(1) Are global temperatures increasing?

Averaged over the surface, over land and ocean, using both day and night temperatures together, the answer is yes. Over land, using daytime temperatures as a likely better indicator of overall climate change, the answer is yes, but at a small rate. In the lower atmosphere since 1979, the answer is yes, but at a rate nearly all datasets show is lower than projected from climate models relative to the surface.

(2) If global temperatures are increasing, to what extent is the increase attributable to greenhouse gas emissions from human activity as opposed to natural variability or other causes?

No one knows. Estimates today are given by climate model simulations made against a backdrop of uncertain natural variability, assumptions about how greenhouse gases affect the climate, and model shortcomings in general. The evidence from our work (and others) is that the way the observed temperatures are changing in many important aspects is not consistent with model simulations. However, with extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere there should be some impact on global surface and atmospheric temperatures, but the exact extent is unknown. Since 1950, the IPCC indicates from model simulations that "most" of the 0.5 ¡C surface warming (perhaps 0.3?) is due to the way models incorporate the effects of extra greenhouse gases.

(3) How do you expect future global temperatures to be affected by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity?

If the simpler aspects of physics prevail in this complicated system, the surface temperature of the planet should rise. How much? The current rate is about 0.15¡C/decade, part of which is very likely due to extra greenhouse gas concentrations, and that rate seems fairly steady. Other questions related are: Will it be possible to detect in the global temperature the consequence of various legislated actions? (Almost certainly no.) What are the consequences of putting more of the basic building block of life, i.e., CO2, into the air? (An invigorated biosphere.) How much is human life going to be improved by the fact energy will be used to enhance human existence? (A great deal, see below under Energy Policy)

Model Evaluation

The inconsistencies between model output and observational data should raise concerns about model confidence. Frankly, I am surprised that so many in our climate community grant high confidence to model output while knowing the crudeness of the assumptions which characterize their construction relative to the complexity of the real world. But testing models is a considerable enterprise dominated now by those who are in some way associated with the modeling enterprise itself. It may be no surprise that many publications conclude that model output is valuable today for policymakers.

I am reminded, from my experience in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report, that model evaluation is often a restricted venture. It was a requirement in the CCSP that all observational datasets used in the report be publicly available in easy-to-access format. Some of us thought the same requirement should be applied to the global and tropical temperature averages from the climate model simulations, especially since those results had already been published the year before and the information was prominently displayed in the report.

In a curious email debate, those who did not want public access given to the climate model averages prevailed. I've encountered this asymmetry before in the field of climate science in which it has typically been very difficult to obtain climate model output in a useful format if at all. Progress has been made with the archiving of the "Climate of the 20th Century" model output at the Dept. of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, but the effort required to retrieve specialized climate variables from scores of climate models is still Herculean. Most investigators do not have the infrastructure and personnel to spend time acquiring the huge raw data files for particular analyses and then climb a steep learning curve to process those files into the something useful.

This type of careful evaluation requires significant computational resources and personnel. However, such costs would represent a fraction of the millions allocated each year to modeling groups today. Having a series of significantly funded, independent, and rigorous evaluation projects to test models is absolutely essential for policymakers, and represents good scientific principles. This is the path model evaluation must go for model output to be thoroughly assessed, and documented, and for progress to result.

More generally, there is a vital need for our nation to investigate "climate change" from all points of view. I submit that there should be a robust program to rigorously investigate outcomes of the climate change field that are not typically supported because they may not be seen as resulting in some alarming consequence, or which have found a significant discrepancy that needs further study.

Using the best of all available datasets these studies would seek to characterize phenomena in the real world that may, for example, show a less sensitive climate system than currently represented in climate models. Such phenomena may lead to an understanding of a climate system that is more (or less) resistant to change than current models indicate. These studies would be done in the rigorous framework of hypothesis testing and peer-reviewed publication. As part of this effort, a thorough examination of climate indices, such as the daytime maximum versus the daily mean temperature for their utility in understanding global changes vs. local changes, would be enlightening. Because of the emotion surrounding the global warming issue, such proposals to investigate a potentially benign climate have a steep, uphill battle for funding opportunities as it struggles with the group-think that is encroaching into our profession. Yet a specific effort should be fostered to test and understand the many assumptions that underlie the current opinions of climate change that may lead to smaller changes than believed.

IPCC 2007

At this time, all we have are the "bullet points" of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM). As one of the contributing authors of the scientific text, I must wait until the full publication is released to understand more of the reasoning behind some of the points made in the IPCC. Contributing authors essentially are asked to contribute a little text at the beginning and to review the first two drafts. We have no control over editing decisions. Even less influence is granted the 2,000 or so reviewers. Thus, to say that 800 contributing authors or 2,000 reviewers reached consensus on anything describes a situation that is not reality.

I will comment on two of the bullet points, the first being one of the signature claims (paraphrasing for clarity) of the SPM: We are 90 percent certain that most of the global surface warming since 1950 is due to humans. (The actual statement is "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.") The reason for the not-so-certain "very likely" (i.e., 90 percent) confidence of the IPCC authors is that there are nagging problems related to the imperfections in the models' ability to reproduce many of the natural fluctuations found in the observed climate system. Had I had the opportunity to craft that statement, I would have wanted to include the idea of its origins. Perhaps something like this is more useful to policy makers: "Our current climate models are incapable of reproducing the surface temperature changes since 1950 without an extra push from the way these models incorporate the effects of extra greenhouse gases."

Another quote from the SPM that is over-interpreted is the phrase, "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal." This statement seems designed to grant powerful confidence to a very simple idea that the observing systems we now have are able to tell us the earth's surface temperature is warmer now than it was 100 years ago and not colder (certainly a benefit). It says absolutely nothing about the cause of the warming. This becomes a problem of communication when the "unequivocal" bleeds into other claims as the media interprets the report.

All in all, the reductions in the scariest realizations is a welcomed change, i.e. reduction of the increases in sea level and average temperatures.

Energy Policy

Discussions of climate for policy makers inevitably lead to questions about energy use. This leads me to discuss my perspective on energy use about which members have expressed gratitude in other hearings.

In 1900, the global energy technology supported 56 billion human-life-years (i.e., 35-year life expectancy x 1.6 billion people -- it's an index). Today, energy technology supports 426 billion human-life-years, an eight-fold increase. Some of those human-life-years are mine. I've been allowed to become a grandparent, a situation that is now the rule, not the exception. An eight-fold increase in the global experience of human life is a spectacular achievement delivered by affordable energy.

It disturbs me when I hear that energy and its byproducts such as CO2 are being demonized when in fact they represent the greatest achievement of our society. Where there is no energy, life is brutal and short. When you think about that extra CO2 in the air, think also about an eight-fold increase in the experience of human life.

While preparing this testimony, I was reminded of my missionary experience in Africa. As you know, African women collect firewood each day and carry it home for heating and cooking. This source of energy, inefficient and toxic as it is, kills about 1.6 million women and children every year. When an African woman, carrying 50 pounds of firewood on her back, risks her life by jumping out in front of my van in an attempt to force me to give her a lift, I understand the value of energy. You see, what I had in my school van, in terms of the amount of gasoline I could hold in my cupped hands, could move her and her 50 pounds of firewood 2 or 3 miles down the road to her home. I now know what an astounding benefit and blessing energy is, and to what extent she and her people would go to acquire it. Energy demand will grow because it makes life less brutal and less short.

The continuing struggle of the EU and other countries to achieve their self-imposed Kyoto targets, indeed falling behind the U.S. in the slowing of emissions growth, implies a lot of things, but two that stand out to me are (1) underestimating people's demand for energy and (2) the well-known tendency for countries and industries to "game the system" for their own benefits without contributing any real results to emissions reduction. An example of this second point is found in the recent announcement by some U.S. electric power producers who are promoting limits on CO2 emissions. These producers are heavily reliant on natural gas that is more costly than competing coal (and nuclear) power generators, but emits less CO2 than coal. By promoting an extra cost (i.e., tax) on coal-fired generation, these groups hope to create a government-mandated competitive advantage (and an increase in public energy costs).

This body is being encouraged to "do something" about global warming. The dilemma begins with the fact energy demand will grow because the benefits of affordable energy to human life are ubiquitous and innumerable. The dilemma turns to this question, "How can emissions be reduced in a way that doesn't raise energy costs, (especially for the many poor people of my state)"?

There are several new initiatives on emissions controls being proposed. It is difficult at this point to determine what impact each hopes to have on CO2 emissions. Much of the proposed reductions apparently deal with reducing non-CO2 greenhouse gases that may not be directly related to energy production. As a benchmark, for those that are in the ballpark of the Kyoto-like reductions, their relatively small effect on emissions implies a very small impact on whatever the climate does.

I've written a number of papers about the precision of our climate records. The impact of Kyoto-like proposals will be too small for we scientists to measure due to the natural variations of climate and the lack of precision in our observing system. In other words we will not be able to tell lawmakers with high confidence that specific regulations achieve anything in terms of climate in this country or the world. Additionally, the climate system is immensely complicated and really cannot be tweaked for a predictable outcome.

Humanity uses energy at a rate between 10 and 14 terawatts, 80 percent of which comes from sources that emit CO2. To have a 10 percent impact globally on CO2 emissions requires about 1,000 nuclear power plants now. Other options such as solar and wind are comparatively minuscule and troublesome as you will hear in future hearings (though they should be studied carefully) because of their current low intensity, intermittency, cost, transmission length (and losses), environmental impact, and the problems of integrating a variable power supply into a baseload grid. So, to have even a minuscule impact on the climate system by 2050 or 2100, there would need to be a massive infrastructure change, the cost of which would be tremendous, both monetarily and socially (baring an innovation that is spectacular.) I recommend Robert Samuelson's Washington Post column from Feb. 7, 2007, on this subject.

Biofuels

If the nation decides to make a strong commitment to invest in biofuels as a source of energy, there are some hurdles to overcome. The physics of ethanol, as a biofuel example, are not very attractive in terms of "energy in" vs. "energy out." There are also economic concerns regarding, specifically, ethanol expansion that deal with the specter of reduced production of other crops leading to price increases, and competition for corn within the corn market. However, the more agreeable means to accommodate a major expansion in corn production, is simply to grow more corn using land currently fallow. The brief discussion which follows addresses the point that logistically, it is possible to significantly increase corn (or other biofuel feedstock) production without distorting other markets.

It takes about 1000 gallons of water to grow enough corn to produce one gallon of ethanol on a 10-ft. by 10-ft. square. That's not sensible to do in a desert, but in Alabama, we receive on average 4,000 gallons of rain on that square every year. This suggests a sustainable production system is possible where water is plentiful. However, though the numbers demonstrate we have an abundance of rain to support biofuel feedstock, that rain often does not fall at the right time when crops are maturing in the hot summer.

To produce enough ethanol to make a dent in our liquid fuel requirements would require millions of acres of sustainable production in wet places. In Alabama, like other southeastern states, we've lost over 10 million acres of row-crop production because of lack of investment in irrigation -- the kind of investment the federal government has been making for over 75 years in the West. A fraction of those billions, if spent on irrigation infrastructure in states like Alabama, would provide a way to dramatically increase acreage in production. If just one million acres of the 10 million Alabama has lost were reinvigorated with low-cost and environmentally sustainable irrigation systems, we would displace 10 million barrels of Middle Eastern oil per year. Two million acres would produce 20 million barrels. Such volumes from Alabama alone (not to mention the other southeastern states) amounts to a significant contribution to U.S. energy needs. (Similar results would occur for other forms of biofuel feedstocks such as switch-grass if cellulose ethanol becomes feasible.)

There are some benefits to this approach: (1) an area of our nation that is terribly economically depressed would be recharged -- there are a lot of poor people in my state in these areas that would experience economic growth; (2) the U.S. balance of trade would be improved; (3) the stated congressional goal of energy security would be enhanced; and, (4) a measurable impact could be assessed on the regional and national economy as dollars are retained within the U.S. economy. Though ethanol is not without its concerns, one of those should not be a logistical barrier due to the perceived unavailability of land and water.

Though biofuels may provide a relatively small portion of the world's energy needs, the economic and security considerations may be the more forceful drivers that argue for increased production. The goal of reducing CO2 emissions by an appreciable amount will occur through innovation in other ways of energy production that lead to generation of high volume, baseload energy with reduced (or zero) emissions. *

"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse." --John Stuart Mill

References

Christy, J. R., 2002: When was the hottest summer? A state climatologist struggles for an answer. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 83, 723-734.

Christy, J. R., W. B. Norris, K. Redmond and K. P. Gallo, 2006: Methodology and results of calculating Central California surface temperature trends: Evidence of human-induced climate change. J. Climate, 19, 548-563.

Christy, J. R. and W. B. Norris, 2006: Satellite and VIZ radiosondes intercomparison for diagnosis of non-climatic influences. J. Atmos. Oc. Tech. , 23, 1181-1194.

Christy, J. R., W. B. Norris, R. W. Spencer and J. J. Hnilo, 2007: Tropospheric temperature change since 1979 from tropical radiosonde and satellite measurements. J. Geophys. Res. (in press.)

Kunkel, K. E., X,-Z. Liang, J. Zhu, and Y. Lin, 2006. Can CGCMs simulate the twentieth-century "warming hole" in the central United States? J. of Climate, 19: 4137-4153.

Snyder, M.A., J. L. Bell, L. C. Sloan, P. B. Duffy, and B. Govindasamy, 2002: Climate responses to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide for a climatically vulnerable region, Geo. Res. Letters, 29 (11), 10.1029/2001GL014431.

Bob Carroll

Bob Carroll is a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army. He is a 1962 graduate of West Point. He held command positions in Vietnam, Colorado, and Germany. He taught leadership at West Point and later, in the Pentagon, was in charge of the Army's Leader Development Program.

A friend asked me for my thoughts about the movie Redacted, a recently premiered movie about war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and a critical review of the movie by Bob McMahon, an Army First Lieutenant in 1968 in Vietnam and currently Treasurer and Co-Executive Director of the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation [the review can be found at: www.vvlf.org/]. Because the reviewer commented on anti-war movies of the Vietnam era, I have included some thoughts on Vietnam and Iraq.

First, I haven't seen, and most likely will not see, Redacted. I was too pained and insulted by Platoon, best picture in 1986 (13 years after the U.S. left Vietnam) to see any more of its ilk. On the one hand, Platoon was grippingly real in its detail, from which it gained credibility. On the other hand, Oliver Stone crammed into two hours every bad thing that happened to every Infantry platoon over a ten-year period. It was a horrible portrayal of officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), totally failing in leadership, ethics, and judgment. It was a war without control, conscience, or compassion.

The duty of officers and NCOs is to insure passions of war (especially fear, hatred, and revenge) are kept under control. I well remember requiring our men, totally exhausted after a battle and after caring for our own dead and wounded, to bury the enemy dead. It was a task required, not desired. I also well remember keeping a young female enemy soldier under guard at my company command post over night because l wanted to insure that this prisoner of war was not raped, and my command post was the safest place for her. She was about 18, unarmed, carrying water to an enemy base camp. Civilian or enemy? This is the conundrum our soldiers face in insurgencies.

Looking more broadly at the deluge of anti-war movies post-Vietnam, there clearly was a characterization of demented warriors. This followed a decade or so of anti-war sentiment that targeted the soldier, not the Washington politician, who sent the soldier to war. I again have vivid memories of being treated as less than human in a masters program at Northwestern University in 1968. The man/woman in uniform became the face of the war and the focus of disdain. And it was extremely painful. Our generation had no parades. There was no heart-wrenching story published about a friend of mine who survived -- barely -- an AK 47 round to his head and now lives in Englewood with about two-thirds of his previous mental ability.

Most vets I know have gotten on with their lives; Some continued for a full career in the Army (I know retired Command Sergeants Major, Captains, Colonels, and four-star Generals). Others got out and had careers in business (I know a bus driver, a real-estate broker, a venture capitalist, and the founder of America On Line.) Most of my contacts do not dwell on Vietnam.

But some Vietnam vets are still in anguish over what they had to go through. The hurt is deep. The reviewer of the film, McMahon, is among the group that has dedicated most of their lives to some form of "righting" of what occurred to them. It was a tough war. It enjoyed very little support at home. And it was lost. The fact that what happened on American streets and in Congress contributed to that loss does not erase the pain of losing. I personally believe the anti-war movies came later and were not a contributing factor in the loss of the war.

The armed forces, as a major institution in our country, was very badly wounded by all this. In the aftermath of the war, as we entered the era of the all-volunteer force, the U.S. Army was still plagued with serious problems of racial division, drug use, and poor morale and discipline. I am proud to have played a small role in the 1970s and 1980s in pulling the Army up by its bootstraps to the point where General Schwarzkopf's forces could be so amazingly successful.

As I transition now to the war in Iraq, don't underestimate this power of success. One of MacArthur's famous lines is, "There is no substitute for victory." I am in the camp of "Winning is more important than withdrawing."

It appears the war on the ground in Iraq is turning in our favor. This is great news and very important for the Armed Forces, our country, and of course the Iraqis. (Hopefully the Iraqi political reconciliation will make some headway.) I listed the Armed Forces first in the above sentence, because our nation is not at war. The Army and the Marine Corps are at war. Granted our significant funding of the Iraq war has impacted the federal budget, but most Americans have not paid any price. I fault Bush for this. Look what Roosevelt did to mobilize support for WW II, with the help of Pearl Harbor. But Bush had his own Pearl Harbor. Contrast our current Army troop strength and the resultant multiple tours with General George Marshall's spectacular expansion of a weak and ill-equipped Army in 1939 to over 8 million in 1942, a 40-fold increase in three years!

And with all the focus on casualties, don't fail to put into perspective, even though each death is tragic and very personal, the relative battle deaths in American wars:

Revolutionary: 4,435

War of 1812: 2,000

Indian: 1,000 (approx., although I don't think they counted Indians!)

Mexican: 1,733

Civil War: 214,938 (Union and Confederate)

Spanish American: 385

WW I: 53,402

WW II: 291,557

Korea: 33,741

Vietnam: 47,424

Gulf War I: 147

Afghanistan/lraq: 4,000 (approx.)

And I find it encouraging that the Bush/Crocker/Petraeus game plan appears to be breeding success, and includes significant troop withdrawals by voting time next year (Nov. 2008). My own view is that this will neutralize the anti-war proposals and make any difference between Republican and Democratic strategies in Iraq very small. This means the main issue in the next Presidential election may be the economy.

But this is not my issue, nor is Iraq. I believe we are faced with a multigenerational war with Islamic Fundamentalists. Harvard's Sam Huntington's 1996 The Clash of Civilizations is a must read! As the Annapolis peace talks get under way, I happen to think this is a hugely important endeavor that impacts our broader war against radical Islamists, because the U.S. marriage with the State of Israel is such a rallying cry for the 1.3 billion Muslims across the world. We can't, and would never try to, reduce the number of Muslims. (In fact they are expanding faster than any other civilization.) But we must reduce the number of radical Muslims. And that requires much more than an extremely effective Armed Forces.

A final plug for universal service: The all-volunteer force is amazing. My hat is off to each and every one of our volunteer service members. And it is not just the fighting combatants. Every person who wears, or wore, the uniform is a hero in my book! But America is estranged from its fighting force. A profile would show that service men and women come disproportionately from a middle slice of our socio-economic distribution. Not the very poor; they aren't educated enough. Not the rich; they aren't induced by the bonuses. Not the very bright; Harvard grads don't enlist, even to go to officer candidate school. Mostly the services are populated by patriotic families with ties going back several generations from rural or small towns across America. I believe large-scale service to our country in a myriad of ways would solve a lot of our national problems that need help. And this would do wonders for the pride, patriotism, and discipline of our youth. *

"The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green." --Thomas Carlyle

Paul Kengor

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006), associate professor of Political Science, and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

This article is an e-publication of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The questions are posed by Visions & Values to Paul Kengor. The subject of this interview is his latest book: The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007).

V&V. Dr. Kengor, you've written, along with co-author Patricia Clark Doerner, a biography of Judge William P. "Bill" Clark. This is the biography of the man that everyone -- from Edmund Morris and Lou Cannon to Michael Reagan and Cap Weinberger -- agreed was Ronald Reagan's important adviser, who literally one day in 1985 rode off into the sunset and refused to write his memoirs and tell his story.

The publisher is billing this as the untold story of the Cold War. We will get to that, but first it should be noted that there is much more in here about foreign policy generally, and one thing in particular of very strong relevance to the world today. There is a major revelation in the book on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. This month marks separate anniversaries of both the capture and ultimate hanging of Saddam Hussein, in December 2003 and December 2006, respectively. Tell us what Clark told you -- which he disclosed for the first time, two full decades after the fact.

Paul Kengor: Sure. It is commonly asserted, especially among the left, that the United States, and specifically the Reagan administration in the 1980s, "armed" Saddam Hussein. If you actually sit down and read the junk on the web on this, it is extremely sloppy and unreliable. Nonetheless, the charges persist and clearly are not going away. They seem to have become common perception. Well, Bill Clark has intimate knowledge of this issue. Let me give some background first.

When we first began doing interviews for this book at Clark's California ranch, he one day showed me a pistol he received from Saddam Hussein as a gift. Clark and his family were ranchers, sheriffs, and lawmen. They know guns. Saddam knew that and gave him one. But my immediate question to Clark was, "Gee, how and when and where did you meet Saddam Hussein?" Clark never ceased to surprise me with all he did, but this one came out of nowhere.

He proceeded to tell me about a two-hour meeting, one-on-one, that he had with Saddam in January 1986. This was a full year after Clark had left the Reagan administration for good. Still, he continued to be Ronald Reagan's troubleshooter and reliable right-hand man. When Reagan had a sensitive assignment that required an aide of utter, complete trust, he called on Bill Clark, as he had done since his governorship in the 1960s.

So, Clark told me about this unpublicized, unannounced trip to Baghdad, where he met with Tariq Aziz, Nizar Hamdoon, and every top official in the Iraqi government. He then met with Saddam. I asked him if Saddam requested American arms to help in Iraq's war with Iran, which by then was into its sixth terrible year. When I asked this, Clark was more baffled than annoyed. He didn't understand my point. "He didn't ask for arms," he told me flatly. "Why would he?"

I explained that there was a kind of left-wing cottage industry dedicated to exposing the alleged Reagan conspiracy to arm Saddam in the 1980s, including arming him with WMDs [Weapons of Mass Destruction]. This really confused him. He didn't want to respond to something so baseless, and couldn't believe anyone would level such a reckless charge. I told him I would demonstrate when we got to his office in town later that afternoon. When we got there, I did a Google search on "Reagan armed Saddam." Clark was shocked at all the hits.

For the record, Clark says: "We never armed Saddam. And to my knowledge, we certainly did not give him anything like WMD technology, or assist him in developing WMD."

By the way, as I gained access to Clark's private papers, I came across the minutes and memos from this meeting. Indeed, there was no mention whatsoever of weapons.

V&V: So, can you say definitively that we never aided Saddam in the 1980s?

Kengor: I want to be careful with this. I've learned many times that history is much more complicated than we realize. So many things happen with this massive federal government, and all the people associated with it, that it's foolish to say "never" to anything. The more you know, the more you learn you don't know. Neither Clark nor I claim to know everything. That said, to Clark's knowledge -- and keep in mind that Clark is extremely credible, and was closer to Reagan than anyone, especially on foreign policy and national security -- we did not arm Saddam, and certainly not with WMD technology.

If you want to know who armed Saddam throughout the 1980s, it was the Soviets, the French, and the Chinese. That has been thoroughly documented. When we went to war against Iraq in Kuwait in 1991, we were fighting Soviet tanks, not our own. To the best of my personal knowledge, any possible American military support of Saddam was at best extremely small, especially compared to the aforementioned countries, and not at all substantial. It would hardly rise to the level of what the fringe left means by "arming Saddam."

Very importantly, Clark did clarify the nature of our support, which was limited, but which did involve some assistance in the war between Iraq and Iran.

V&V: What was that support, and what was the Reagan administration's objective with Saddam?

Kengor: We provided some quite helpful satellite imagery to Saddam. This was highly detailed photos of Iranian troop movements and tank columns and that kind of thing. Saddam was impressed and deeply grateful for this assistance.

V&V: So, in other words, we were trying to help Saddam -- or, at least, to help him defeat Iran?

Kengor: What we were trying to do was to prevent a single power from emerging from the conflict as a dominant hegemon in the region, which has always been the traditional U.S. strategic objective in the Middle East, especially since the fall of the Shah. Here again, I will quote Clark: "We wanted a stalemate [in the war], a stand-off. A ceasefire between Iraq and Iran was our clear objective, and that did occur."

We sincerely wanted both sides to stop fighting and for neither to emerge as the dominant power in the region. The worst prospect would have been to have one giant Iraq or one giant Iran in the place of both of them. It was an ugly situation regardless. And many of the critics of the Reagan administration on this issue don't realize the total lack of attractive options when dealing with nations like these. It is very difficult. People need to try to be understanding of the tremendous challenge of trying to bring good out of evil.

V&V: Also, we should recall that Iran was our main enemy at the time -- the leading supporter of terrorism. This is the first decade of the Ayatollah's theocracy.

Kengor: Yes, that's correct. Context is crucial, and our memories are short. But keep in mind that Saddam Hussein, throughout the 1980s, was also doing terrorism -- not just terrorizing his own population in his Republic of Fear, but was also exporting terror. He would increase that behavior in the l990s, to the point that the final Clinton State Department report on terrorism devoted more words to Iraq than any other country, including Iran. The Clinton State Department rightly listed Iraq and Iran as the two leading state sponsors of terrorism throughout the 1990s.

And here's where Clark's meeting continues to be very relevant today. Clark asked Saddam, on behalf of President Reagan, to "dry up" any support he was providing to Palestinian terror camps inside Iraq, where these killers were training to murder innocent Israelis. Saddam promised Clark he would do so. Clark believes that at the time Saddam might have been sincere, and even left the meeting with the impression that Saddam "wanted to be our friend." All of this collapsed, however, when Saddam invaded Kuwait and then directed his troops to the border of Saudi Arabia in August 1990. He destroyed the relationship by his aggressive actions. Everything descended downhill quickly after that.

V&V: What are some of the other revelations in The Judge that are of contemporary policy relevance?

Kengor: Clark spoke for the first time about the French plot to assassinate Moammar Kaddafi in 1981 -- French intelligence came to Reagan to ask if he would join them -- about Reagan warning the Soviets that he would shoot down their MiGs over Nicaragua in the spring of 1982, about the secret mission to Suriname in April 1983, about Clark as Reagan's liaison to Pope John Paul II's Vatican in 1982 and 1983, about Clark's role in urging Iran-Contra pardons in 1987, and how Nancy Reagan stopped the pardons. There is also a great, untold story about how we averted disaster by not joining the Chinese in joint construction of the Three Gorges Dam project -- that was Clark's recommendation to Reagan, and Reagan thankfully agreed with Clark. Those are just a few examples.

V&V: Do any of the revelations in your new book involve Reagan policy toward the Soviet Union?

Paul Kengor: Yes, several of them. I will note two in particular: the MiG incident and the major historical revelation in the book -- the secret mission to Suriname.

On the MiG incident: This was never before reported until Clark shared the story for this book. It occurred in 1982, when Ronald Reagan was still a relatively new president. The Soviets were known to test new presidents -- like J.F.K. in Berlin. The historians on Bill Clark's NSC staff warned him about the possibility the Russians would test Reagan somewhere.

Well, the test suddenly appeared to be unfolding in Nicaragua. In the spring of 1982, Clark's staff received reports that the Soviets were behind the construction of a large new airfield west of Managua. The runway was large enough to handle large military transports and bombers. As Clark put it, "This was for Soviet MiGs, and certainly not for Pan-Am airlines."

Clark remembers that the president -- far from the detached, bumbling grandfather type depicted by the left -- grew quite angry. He turned to Secretary of State Al Haig and ordered that he deliver a message to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin:

You tell Dobrynin that if they move MiGs into that new lengthened airfield in Managua, we'll take them out within 24 hours.

Haig saluted. The Soviets backed down.

That's the kind of thing you didn't read about in the early biographies that made Ronald Reagan out to be a puppet controlled by his more moderate advisers -- the true geniuses, of course.

V&V: What about Suriname? What happened there?

Kengor: Only a handful of people knew even a few details about this. Here's what happened:

At the start of the 1980s, the Soviets were hoping to have another busy decade of expansion into the Third World, and especially into the Western Hemisphere. One man stood in the way: Ronald Reagan. The Soviets soon learned that Bill Clark was the other man who stood in the way. As a cover story on Clark in the New York Times Magazine reported at the time, Clark was not only "the most influential foreign-policy figure in the Reagan administration," but "the president's chief instrument" in confronting Soviet influence in the world, particularly in Latin America.

Well, at the northern tip of South America is the nation of Suriname, which had undergone a coup by a military despot named Desi Bouterse, who was suddenly getting very close to the USSR and Cuba. The Soviets, Clark's staff learned, actually had plans for a full-scale embassy in Suriname's capital. They saw this country as a significant military-strategic outpost, for reasons we lay out in the book. It gets worse: there was also a terrorist connection to Moammar Kaddafi's Libya. Further, the American company ALCOA had a plant there, and Clark and Reagan were very fearful of a potential hostage situation.

There are many similarities here to what happened in Grenada, but with one major difference: We didn't invade or use U.S. military force, which is not to say we didn't suggest a threat to do so. Clark and a few others flew a secret mission to Suriname, authorized by Ronald Reagan and not shared with White House moderates and leakers. Their objective was to try to salvage this situation with unique, dramatic, carrot-and-stick diplomacy. They pulled it off. And then, none of them talked about it until this book.

V&V: So, this is an unknown case of Ronald Reagan stopping the Soviet advance in Latin America? And Reagan never talked about it?

Kengor: Near the end of his presidency, Reagan rightly declared that during his eight years, "not one inch of ground has fallen to the Communists" -- compared to 11 nations that fell into the Soviet camp under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. As an example of where Communism was halted, Reagan openly pointed to countries like Grenada, but was silent on Suriname.

V&V: This book has a strong religious component, which is integral to the Cold War story; it is the only book on a Reagan official published by a religious press. Explain that.

Kengor: Here were two men, Reagan and Clark, a devout Protestant president and devout Catholic, who prayed together, and who spoke of what they together, in their personal code language, called "the DP" -- the Divine Plan. They believed they had a mutual, spiritual obligation to drive a stake into the heart of an evil and self-acknowledged atheistic empire. And they proceeded to do just that. Reagan decided on the destination and Clark laid the railroad, which is now evident through a paper trail of declassified NSDDs [National Security Decision Directives] quoted at length in the book. Clark managed the NSC [National Security Council] staff that produced all those remarkable NSDDs that stated categorically that the plan was to undermine Soviet Communism, reverse Communism's hold on Eastern Europe, bring political pluralism to the USSR, and change the course of history by actually winning the Cold War.

These documents, which were done by Clark's NSC, and refined in daily consultation between Clark and Reagan, often meeting alone, expressed these precise goals. This is one of the biggest stories of the end of the 20th century.

The two men also together established the vital Cold War relationship with Pope John Paul II's Vatican, with Clark being the principal liaison.

V&V: How did Clark manage to get praised by the likes of Time and Michael Reagan, by the New York Times and Cap Weinberger, by Edmund Morris and Ed Meese, by tree huggers and Cold Warriors? You believe this is the only book on a Reagan official, or maybe anyone, endorsed by both Presidents George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Was there anyone who didn't like Clark?

Kengor: People liked him as a person. Politically and ideologically, however, he had his opponents, such as the moderates and pragmatists in the Reagan White House. Among them were Mike Deaver and Nancy Reagan, who wanted Clark fired. Some of these folks thought that if only hard-line Bill Clark would quit backing Ronald Reagan in his primitive desire to bankrupt the USSR, the Nobel Committee would show up at the Oval Office one day with the Peace Prize.

V&V: How did you convince him to tell his story?

Kengor: I can't say I really did. I appealed to his sense of duty to Ronald Reagan and to the historical record. He still regrets the attention this has brought to himself. He has a striking faith-based humility, stemming from a devout Catholicism begun as a young boy on the ranches and vistas of California, connecting to God through nature -- as did his favorite saint, Saint Francis -- and through years of contemplating the priesthood at seminary, which he left for another mission: to fight atheistic Soviet Communism -- to win the Cold War. The fulfillment of that mission would require that he meet an ex-actor named Ronald Reagan. The "DP" ultimately had precisely that in store.

V&V: So, in the end, you say that Clark rode off into the sunset?

Kengor: I will quote Roger Robinson, probably the most significant NSC aide. He says of Clark:

You talk about a dark horse in history. . . . There may have never been a greater dark horse than Bill Clark. He and his president were all about some 300 million people becoming free. And isn't it poetic, isn't it fitting, that this quiet rancher, this unassuming guy, gave everyone else the credit? He wanted no credit for himself. And then he just walked away.

Death in 1991 came to the doorstep of the Kremlin. And somewhere, at some point, when no one was watching, Bill Clark quietly returned to his ranch in California.

There are a number of photos of Clark and Reagan on horseback together. One, however, seems especially poignant. It has a special inscription from Reagan:

Dear Bill: "And As The Sun Slowly Sank in the West" -- Don't Ride Too Far Into the Sunset. Ron.

Well, as that sun sank slowly in the west, Bill Clark one day put all those achievements behind him and silently did just that.

Bill Clark was Ronald Reagan's secret weapon in winning the Cold War -- period. This is the unheralded, enigmatic figure who, more than any other White House official, helped President Reagan undermine atheistic Soviet Communism, and then, quite literally, one day saddled his horse in Washington for the final time, and rode off into the sunset. *

"[J]udges, therefore, should be always men of learning and experience in the laws, of exemplary morals, great patience, calmness, coolness, and attention. Their minds should not be distracted with jarring interests; they should not be dependent upon any man, or body of men." --John Adams

W. Edward Chynoweth

W. Edward Chynoweth is a graduate of West Point, and a retired deputy county prosecutor for San Francisco. He is the author of Masquerade: The Feminist Illusion, University Press of America, 2005.

Public Broadcasting has been airing Ken Burns's latest documentary The War, with scenes of an attack from "unknown planes," along with the stock inference of unfair "racism" and "shame" for the relocation of Japanese-Americans. What is "shameful" about evacuating those of questionalbe loyalty when imminent attack is expected from their aggressive native country? Many Japanese in America still lived in enclaves, and weren't well-known, a risk bearing on security for the west coast. Thousands bore allegiance to the Empire.

Though no fan of the evacuation, Sen. Hayakawa (California Republican serving from 1977-1983) realized its function, and even thought it the best thing that could have happened, since it broke up the enclaves and forced Japanese into the mainstream. Assimilating multi-nationalities in a healthy, productive way is not the simple matter many Americans now pretend.

How can we with any integrity celebrate Veteran's Day, pretentiously honoring the generation who defeated the totalitarian Axis powers, while at the same time judging their efforts "shameful"? Why demean the Kikkei,1 who endured the experience as loyal Americans, by depicting them as servile "victims" little different than cattle? There is either extreme duplicity or plain ignorance at work here, typical of all self-righteous judgments on unfamiliar times. As Edmund Burke put it:

We are too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld.

Despite emphasis on the obvious discomforts, scenes from the documentary of the evacuation never show cattle cars, slave labor, emaciated prisoners, cruel guards, death camps, all in the Auschwitz style, but merely, healthy people being relocated -- along with fences, much like the fences millions of others, mostly GIs, experienced during the war. (Fenced encampments were quite standard during WW II!) Now, it's just another post-60s-style distortion -- of a justifiable wartime measure -- alleging American "racism." An injustice is being condoned that needs correction.

Common sense suggests that, to remain unified, a nation needs an honest consensus of belief about its history. For well-off younger people, oblivious to conditions long ago, to criticize past generations is a grave injustice, and an affront to honesty, amounting to what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." Unfortunately, this is the case with the stock "concentration camp" version of the Relocation, now being repeated in Burns/PBS's version. To younger editors, 1942's "dark period" is now the Relocation, not the thundercloud of a lurking enemy out to conquer us! In 1942, we were underdogs; things could have gone either way, respected leaders were charged with defense of our shores. Logically, the revised version and actual 1942 conditions cannot both be true. The disparity was born in the chaos of the 1960s, when anti-Americanism and youthful second-guessing of former leaders became fashionable. In their self-righteous eagerness, they miss the fact that the relocatees weren't hapless "victims" but citizens deserving respect for doing their wartime duty, like millions of others. Young revisionists (along with misinformed politicians, including even Ronald Reagan, who succumbed to misguided advice from Tom Kean) are dishonoring their own ancestors as well as WW II America!

Two important aspects are neglected: (1) Though the traumatic uprooting occurred, and often with great sacrifice, second-guessers ignore the fact that it wasn't America who brought on the relocatees' uprooting but a vicious assault on our people by forces of the relocatees' native land, a militaristic empire. The resulting war and bloody conflict hung over our lives and national policy for over four years. Countless lives were shattered, many worse than the relocatees.' Most relocatees accepted this in ways that younger citizens don't understand. Caucasian friends rendered much help. (2) The Founders' "more perfect union" is now being destroyed by discontents splitting America between the former republic and disgruntled factions who care nothing for cultivating the Founders' wisdom, good will, or common good necessary for an enduring nation.

Second guessers rely on misguided proceedings in the 1980s that produced a shameful distortion of the facts to show "racism." It's a disgraceful story, reported objectively by a few knowledgeable writers (Dwight Murphey, Joseph Fallon, Roger McGrath, William Hopwood, Ken Masugi, Lillian Baker, Michelle Malkin, etc.), but ignored by revisionists. In stark contrast to the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court's majority finding from still-fresh testimony that the wartime security measure was justified and not "racist," the 1980s hearings were conducted by a biased commission in a "scandalous," "predetermined," "pandering," "unprofessional," and "outrageous" manner, with testimony by government witnesses cut short or subjected to hisses, boos, stomping of feet, and indignities. Though such a railroad job hardly corroborates the revisionists (whom Sen. Hayakawa termed "a small wolf pack of dissidents"), they're allowed mistakenly to assume it does.

Thus the actual history fades into obscurity, reduced now to an overworked pattern of "American racism," and Americans of all races who won WWII are dishonored. What happened in 1942-45 was an example of American self-governance at its best. Despite revisionists' persistence in twisting an obviously trying wartime experience into an American Auschwitz, actually the U.S. government administered the measure as humanely as possible under difficult circumstances, well aware of civil rights. There were varying degrees of freedom and cooperation, including attending college, jobs, etc., depending upon the circumstances.

Numerous factual issues are twisted: (1) One revisionist ingenuously announces a "need for public education about the exclusion and detention" despite over four decades of his one-sided version ignoring the wartime necessity and focusing solely on obvious initial discomforts.

(2) The tired claim of "120,000 in custody" is at best a half-truth. Though 120,000 were initially involved in numerous ways, only around 85,000 were eventually housed in relocation camps (quite benignly, not in criminal "custody," since more than 20,000 eventually left the western danger zone to take up productive lives back east). There were only17,000 largely loyal to the Empire actually interned at Tule Lake (including families whose parents favored the Empire).

(3) The immediacy of risk demanded immediate action, making normal case-by-case handling unfeasible. The resulting initial discomforts diminished in later, permanent camps. Revisionists conveniently ignore the factors of espionage, known saboteurs, high-risk facilities, etc., and also the crucial need to hide our knowledge of individual saboteurs through the Empire's code, which provided information, saving countless lives later.

(4) Ritual mention of the famous Nisei Regimental Combat Team (RCT) always misses the point: The government knew that most Nisei2 were loyal, and hoped to prevent terrorist destruction by disloyal Nisei. Most RCT soldiers understood, and chose not to wallow in resentment, some even giving their lives. Ken Burns makes much of our sending the Nisei RCT "into danger," naively ignoring the fact that that is what RCTs are for! (They even erected a monument to FDR!) Why the resentment from younger Americans?

(5) Another lame argument is that no sabotage occurred, which only proves the effectiveness of the measure!

(6) While some degree of racism was inevitable, it was mainly because the Empire's soldiers were known to be aggressively vicious and some Japanese in the west were known to be disloyal.

(7) True, Hawaii "didn't relocate." It had martial law. Canada actually interned all of her Kikkei, and for a longer time than the U.S.

(8) Though much is made of "barbed wire and towers," they weren't the rule, and were primarily to protect relocatees.

(9) Known risks of other enemy nationalities were also interned, but weren't the same danger to the west coast as the Japanese. Also, as Sen. Hayakawa noted, the latter were less assimilated than, e.g., Germans and Italians. (Exorbitant reparations years later even for known disloyalists reflect a country lacking in common sense, but that's another story.)

All this only scratches the surface. The "darkest" aspect of the episode is the manner in which younger generations ignore the whole story, thus obscuring the sacrifices of the relocatees, the common good, the Nisei combat team, and dishonoring the wartime administration, and their own heritage as U.S. citizens. Even the 1942 ACLU and Japanese-American Citizens League (whose chairman now claims "racism"!) approved the evacuation! It will take wise, gracious citizens to understand the unselfish service of their forbears in the common interest. Only with such understanding can America endure as a nation. *

"Private and local independence, initiative, and pride withered as the power and functions of the state increased, and the wealth of nations was drained away by an ever-increasing taxation to support a self-multiplying bureaucracy and the endless offences of defense." --Will Durant on the decline of Rome, Caesar and Christ, p. 448

1"Kikkei" is the generic name that applies to all those in the U.S. who came from Japan.

2 "Issei" are those who came to this country as immigrants; the "Nisei" are the first generation born in the United States.

Angus MacDonald

Looking at the first issue of this journal, published February 1968, I noted the cost of a year's subscription was $5!

Our name was Religion and Society until February 1980. Religion and Society remains the name of the educational foundation that publishes our work, but the word "religion" can lead to misunderstanding. The founder of this journal defines religion in terms of behavior. Dogma leaves him cold because it has been an excuse for wickedness. Some clerics in the Middle East are wicked. The justification of wicked behavior in the name of religion is an abuse of language. Civilization demands that the validity of religion must be proper conduct.

The courts and the laws define the kinds of behavior that are not allowed. Hit a man on the head or steal his wallet and you go to jail. The function of religion is to love the good and pursue it, responding to the call of a loving Heavenly Father. If you are beastly, let it be known you are without religion.

Religion is the pursuit and practice of simple decency. Some years ago a friend told me what he believed and then told me what I should believe. I told him he didn't need to tell me what he believed because I could observe his behavior and tell him what he believed.

The world is in trouble, and always has been, by the lust for power and glory. We see this in elections when people run for office, again and again, if they fail in the first effort. They run for office from a love of glory. The bigger the field, the greater the glory, so office-seekers climb the ladder from local office, to county, to state, to federal. Once they get to federal office they solve the country's problems on the national level rather than on the local or state level, where there is a more efficiency and less cost.

I have long held the impossible notion that the man who offers himself for election should be dismissed for arrogance. The man of good manners waits until he is asked rather than be pushy, but the pushy, conceited fellow is always in front and shoves aside those who stand in his way and are probably superior. I suppose this is why elected officials are not always admired in spite of their glory.

I have long held another impossible notion that those elected to office should campaign at their own expense, with a proviso that the person and his office have no commercial relationship. Only such men would have the wisdom to govern with common sense. Would men of independence neglect the "poor and the needy"? I think not. Men of means know that society profits only as the people profit. Henry Ford wanted his employees to be able to buy the cars they made. Benjamin Franklin thought officeholders should not be paid.

Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, lamented the growth of The Leviathan, the state. He would not be surprised at the continued growth of national government and would question if the country could survive. Democracies never have because they are mob-ruled, voting themselves favors their children cannot sustain. Aristotle thought democracies so unstable a dictator would have to succeed to enforce financial unselfishness! He may be wrong. Democracies may not die but descend to sloth. That maybe what we are seeing in Europe.

The United States is a large country and cannot be efficient because of that size. Not long ago I listened on television to a parliamentary debate in Great Britain about social problems in their schools. That can be done with success in a small country. We would do well to meet our needs on the local and state level and limit national legislation to the few jobs it can do well -- defend the country and repair bridges on national highways. That was the basis on which the country was founded, but the vanity of politicians will not allow it to continue. *

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." --Helen Keller

The quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.

Joseph S. Fulda

Joseph Fulda is a freelance writer living in New York City. He is the author of Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism.

Among the many quiet tasks academicians are called on to perform is the evaluation of the work of others, as editors, referees, and reviewers. Thus it was no surprise when a book proposal submitted to a publisher of classical liberal work landed on my desk for analysis and evaluation. The proposed book was a revisionist history, arguing that David and Solomon were "cruel tyrants" and that the wayward kings that followed were liberal heroes, allowing religious pluralism, political freedom, and a measure of individual liberty.

Now an objective reading of the Old Testament supports such views, but I was quick to recommend that the publisher decline to support the proposed work, because objectivity can be an ignis fatuus, a will-o'-the-wisp that leads one away from truth rather than towards truth. To be objective is to be neutral, to start with no premises and take reason wherever it may lead. But one does not wish to take the Bible as just another text to be reasoned from, but as a sacred text, embodying great truths. The exquisite soul who wrote Psalms and the finely touch'd spirit who authored Ecclesiastes were, we are told, great men, among the greatest ever, while the kings who followed were by and large a sorry lot of sinners. And, the argument advanced by the revisionist historian -- that history, including Biblical history, was written by the victors -- denies any special claim to truth for the sacred books of the Bible.

In the absence of prior knowledge, the scientific method, all neutrality and objectivity, is the surest way to the least error. But if one accepts revealed truth, as I do, then objectivity may lure us astray. The revisionist historian regarded idolatry and the worship of the one true God as moral equivalents; hence the regimes that allowed either superior. But to believers, the regimes of ancient Israel were not republics but theocratic monarchies, and the pluralism of which the author spoke so highly was the plural of the true and the false, the one and the many.

Too often, modern believers have been overly occupied with showing that an objective analysis of the Universe is a revelation of God. But what if it is not? What if the objective reasoning of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker makes a better case? No matter, for our beliefs are a priori and we recognize that objectivity is but an imperfect means to the realization of the truth. The Bible is a better means, surely. We must have faith, not because reason demands it, but regardless of reason. That, after all, is what makes faith faith. *

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." --Tacitus

We would like to thank the following people for their generous support of this journal (from 9/14/07 to 11/14/07): H. Wayne, John E. Alderson Jr., William D. Andrews, Ariel, Nephi Barlow, John G. Barrett, Harry S. Barrows, Alexis I. DuP Bayard, Ronald Benson, James B. Black, Erminio Bonacci, Mitzi A. Brown, Patrick J. Buchanan, William G. Buckner, Thomas M. Burt, Edward J. Cain, Dino Casali, James A. Chamberland, Cliff Chambers, W. Edward Chynoweth, Benedetto Cico, Dianne C. DeBoest, Peter R. DeMarco, Francis P. Destefano, Joseph R. Devitto, Hans Dolezalek, Robert M. Ducey, Neil Eckles, Joseph C. Firey, Nansie Lou Follen, Reuben M. Freitas, Donald G. Galow, Mr. & Mrs. Lee E. Goewey, Nancy Goodman, Thad A. Goodwyn, Hollis J. Griffin, Daniel J. Haley, Anthony Harrigan, William J. Hempel, Thomas E. Humphreys, Joseph M. Irvin, Burleigh Jacobs, Marilyn P. Jaeger, O. Guy Johnson, O. Walter Johnson, Robert R. Johnson, Louise H. Jones, Mary A. Kelley, Edward B. Kiolbasa, Gloria Knoblauch, Thomas F. Kordonowy, Dorothy M. Kraus, Robert M. Kubow, William F. Lawless, Leonard S. Leganza, Eric Linhof, Angus MacDonald, Cary M. Maguire, Francis P. Markoe, Curtis Dean Mason, Stanley C. McDonald, Will K. McLain, Roberta R. McQuade, Delbert H. Meyer, Walter M. Moede, Robert A. Moss, John Nickolaus, David Norris, Harold Olson, B. William Pastoor, Arthur J. Perry, Frederick D. Pauf, Valentime Polkowski, Gary J. Pressley, Ronald N. Raimondo, Patrick L. Risch, Steven B. Roorda, Harry Richard Schumache, L. Sideris, Joseph M. Simonet, Ben T. Slade, Thomas E. Snee, Carl G. Stevenson, Charles B. Stevenson, Norman Stewart, Dennis J. Sullivan, Patrick M. Sullivan, Michael S. Swisher, Kenneth R. Thelen, Alan Rufus Waters, Thomas H. Webster, Gaylord T. Willett, Piers Woodriff.

Martin Harris

Martin Harris is an architect, and a property rights and education advocate.

Curiously enough, one of the best places to start if you're seeking an understanding of the substantial gap between educators and parents on the role-of-the-schools question, is with one Joel Kotkin, probably the only academic in the discipline of urban planning who somehow survives even though he openly disparages the politically-correct conventional wisdom which distills down to "cities = good, suburbs = bad" and declares low-density development or "sprawl" to signal (maybe even sooner than global warming?) the imminent end of civilization as we have known it. Kotkin's argument is simple: all the statistics of residency and development show that, contrary to planners' wisdom, Americans prefer suburban to urban or even rural living, and by overwhelming margins. A very large part of that preference traces back through the subtle (and not-so-subtle) variations among adjacent suburbs in terms of various indicators of socio-economic status (SES), to the local public schools where parents hope and expect that their children will be surrounded by the cultural behaviors commonly expected in the suburb of their choice, and will better learn their three R's in such congenial surroundings.

It's no secret, though not widely publicized, that the cultural-behavior surroundings parents seek for their kids aren't "diverse." There are whole sets of behaviors that parents who select a suburb (or, within a city, a neighborhood) wish to avoid when they choose to move into a particular town school district or neighborhood school sub-district. To a substantial extent, the variations in cultural behaviors correlate with family income levels, with in-school achievement, and with post-school outcomes.

Educators now want to counter these expectations by engaging in SES "integration" through mandatory enrollment mixing. Over-simplified, that's edu-speak for making sure that lower-income kids mix with higher-income kids in the classroom and on the playground, exactly what parents sought to avoid by moving to the suburb or neighborhood of their choice, for large reason in an effort to reduce their kids' exposure to what they perceive as negative cultural behaviors and the results of those behaviors.

Advocates of SES integration argue for increasing the exposure, but phrase it differently. "History suggests that separate schools for low- and middle-income students will never be equal," argues Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Century Foundation think-tank. "Low-income students do better in middle-class schools." Presumably (he doesn't say) that's because low-income students are exposed (and absorb) middle-income cultural behaviors, which, in last issue's column, I labeled as "radiational aura."

But "radiational aura" works both ways, as parents of students at the Mount Abraham Union High School learned a score of years ago, when -- how can I phrase this analytically -- low-achievement students were solving their self-esteem problems by beating up high-achievement students as an after-school activity. Most parents choose to minimize their own kids' exposure to such instances of "radiational aura" or cultural behavior, which explains why so many politicians in Washington (even the left-leaners) and school superintendents (even in Vermont) send their own kids to private schools.

As you might expect, conservatives have a different take on the value of "radiational aura," either from upper- to lower-income students or vice versa. Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute argues that middle- and upper-income parents invest heavily in the task of "intensively overseeing kids' homework . . . and enrichment activities" -- in short, shaping cultural behaviors, and better parenting yields better school achievement and ultimately higher income -- dare I say socio-economic status -- and do it without "radiational aura" at school. They're not enthusiastic about having those at-home efforts diluted by at-school exposure to other sets of cultural behaviors. History shows they'll change their kids' schools to avoid it. *

"Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." --Arnold Toynbee

Haven Bradford Gow

Haven Bradford Gow is a former law clerk for two Chicago law firms, a T.V. and radio commentator, and writer who teaches religion to children at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Greenville, Mississippi.

As Vanderbilt University scholar Peter Hodgson points out in The Mystery Beneath the Real: Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot (Fortress Press), George Eliot's Silas Marner is a novel of enduring beauty and value.

The book tells the story of Silas Marner, who once was a popular church member in one community but became so embittered after being falsely accused of stealing from a fellow church member (a trusted friend was the real culprit) that he moved to Raveloe, where he lives a lonely and isolated life as a weaver.

Silas has no friends in Raveloe, and the only satisfaction he gains from existence is accumulating gold coins that he receives in payment for his beautiful work.

One day a young, greedy, selfish and irresponsible man breaks into Silas' home and steals his life savings. Silas becomes even more isolated, embittered, and enraged. One day, though, a beautiful little orphan girl literally walks into Silas' home and life. Silas names the little girl Eppie, and Eppie becomes a guiding light and inspiration for everyone with whom she comes into contact. She is like a Christ-figure, a guardian angel, who teaches Silas the meaning of true, spiritual love and the purpose of life. From caring for, raising, and loving Eppie, Silas learns the pathway to personal redemption.

My friend Jamye McCray is a student at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School and a basketball player and gymnastic student at the Hodding Carter YMCA in Greenville, Mississippi. Jamye is like Eppie.

Anyone who comes into contact with Jamye becomes a better person for having known her.

One day Jamye was walking with a little girl at the YMCA; the girl said she was afraid to walk by herself from the youth center building to the playground. Another little girl told Jamye the same thing. So Jamye proceeded to carry one of the little girls on her back all the way to the playground, while at the same time holding on to the hand of the other little girl.

It was a moment of tremendous grace and beauty. And I thank God I was able to witness this happening because I got a glimpse into the beauty and goodness of Jamye's heart and soul. It also reminded me that there are so many beautiful and good children in our communities who -- like Jamye -- have faith in God and treat others the way they would like to be treated.

One afternoon at the YMCA I was playing basketball with my friends Mishayla Johnson, Shuntae Brown, Ronesha Haygood, Rebecca McIntyre, Carlos, Andrew, Steven and Malcolm when a small, handicapped boy named Taylor came to us and said he wanted to play in the game.

All the children readily welcomed him into the game. Instead of becoming bored or irritated with the handicapped boy when he had difficulty dribbling, passing and shooting the ball, Mishayla and the others told him:

Taylor, don't feel bad about making mistakes. You're our friend, and you can play basketball with us any time you want, even if you make mistakes.

On another occasion I was playing basketball with Tekayla Warfield and her friend Jasmine when Jasmine suddenly stopped playing and said: "I feel bad. I play lousy. I keep missing my shots."

Tekeyla immediately put her arm around Jasmine and said:

Jasmine, don't you have Jesus? If you have Jesus, you don't need to feel bad. Jesus will help you to be good.

Christ is right: If we want to make it into heaven, we must possess the spiritual beauty, purity, and innocence of children. He was talking about children like Jamye McCray, Mishayla Johnson, Tekayla Warfield and other children I have been blessed by God to encounter at the Hodding Carter YMCA in Greenville, Mississippi. *

"Courage . . . is the universal virtue of all those who choose to do the right thing over the expedient thing. It is the common currency of all those who do what they are supposed to do in a time of conflict, crisis and confusion." --Florence Nightingale

James R. Harrigan

James R. Harrigan, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of political science at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA., a contributor to the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, at Grove City, PA, and a fellow of Civic and Constitutional Affairs at the Center for Political and Economic Thought. This article is reprinted with permission from the Center for Vision and Values.

Politics is often a matter of life and death. There are constant reminders of this, from the war in Iraq to America's abortion debate. The most telling examples, though, often pass unnoticed. Such an example is currently simmering in Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal not only for the Swiss, but for foreigners too, making the nation the unlikeliest of final destinations.

Switzerland's road to becoming the planned death capital of Europe began in 1918, when the Swiss government declared that, "In modern penal law, suicide is not a crime," and those "aiding and abetting suicide can themselves be inspired by altruistic motives." Over the years this sentiment was enshrined in the Swiss penal code, Article 115 which condones assisted suicide if the assisting person does not profit from the death. Article 115 requires neither the participation of a physician nor that the patient be terminally ill.

This does not mean, of course, that Swiss doctors do not take part in assisted suicides; they simply don't do so as doctors. The law treats doctors assisting with suicides the same way it treats any other citizen acting in a similar capacity. That is to say, the law does not control their activity in any way as long as they act for "altruistic" reasons.

And there is no shortage of those willing to do this dark work for "altruistic" reasons. A number of organizations were formed to serve the market created by Swiss law, and none of these have been more controversial than Dignitas. Dignitas was founded in 1998 by Swiss human rights lawyer Ludwig Minelli, and it is, at present, the only such organization extending its services to foreigners. This raises a host of uncomfortable questions.

Most obvious, the problem of "death tourism" has emerged. The majority of Dignitas' clients are indeed from beyond Switzerland's borders. They are unable to kill themselves legally in their home countries, so they trickle into Switzerland looking for an hospitable place to die. Given the Swiss prohibition of euthanasia, one might question how much assistance one might receive. Indeed, the client must commit the final act on his own after being given the means of his own extermination. This can only mean that the people who ultimately take their own lives are fully capable of doing so, yet they cannot find a way to manage it without traveling to a foreign country.

Making matters worse, there are times when they are not even ill, at least not physically. There has been at least one case in which a client falsified medical records in order to present a more compelling case for suicide. There is also evidence that a number of people have sought out the assistance of Dignitas as a result of mental illnesses. Minelli has been remarkably consistent in his defense of Dignitas' practices. Responding to the case in which medical records were falsified, he asserted that:

The doctor's report . . . indicated the woman was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver as well as hepatitis. And in any case every person in Europe has the right to choose to die, even if they are not terminally ill.

Everyone in Europe?

A good part of Europe disagrees, which is the very reason Dignitas exists at all. But that only tells part of the story. As it turns out, even the Swiss seem to have a problem with assisted suicide, if only where the rubber meets the road, literally.

While there seems to be little backlash against policies that decriminalize assisted suicide, people have nonetheless managed to express their displeasure in light of what might be termed the accessories of death. It seems that the constant parade of hearses is too much for some people to bear. And the parade is constant. In 2006, Dignitas helped nearly 200 people end their lives, all in an apartment dedicated to the purpose.

But now Dignitas has lost its lease. And in the country with some of the most liberal assisted suicide laws in the world, they are having trouble finding a new home. Minelli can assert that everyone in Europe has a right to die, but a good deal more people are telling him, "Not in my back yard."

People are reticent, in the end, to live so close to death's door, and this is a fair indication that it might be time for the Swiss to revisit their assisted suicide policy. Every rational person knows that a ban on suicide will never end the practice. That does not mean the practice is to be condoned. A good number of the Swiss seem to realize this, and have taken steps to ensure that their own neighborhoods and towns will not play host to what amounts to a suicide factory. If their politicians take notice, perhaps the business of death tourism will itself meet a dignified, if overdue, end. *

"The less government we have the better." --Ralph Waldo Emerson