By Joshua Schneyer
Reuters/Rebecca Cook
NEW YORK
Thu Sep 30, 2010 7:09pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - University researchers said on Thursday they recently found alarming levels of cancer-causing toxins in an area of the Gulf of Mexico affected by BP's oil spill, raising the specter of long-lasting health concerns.
Oregon State University (OSU) researchers found sharply heightened levels of chemicals including carcinogens in the waters off the coast of Louisiana in August, the last sampling date, even after BP successfully capped its runaway Gulf well in mid-July.
Near Grand Isle, Louisiana, the team discovered that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) -- which include carcinogens and chemicals that pose various risks to human health -- remained at levels 40 times higher than before the area was affected by the oil spill.
The compounds may enter the food chain through organisms like plankton or fish, a researcher said.
"In a natural environment a 40-fold increase is huge," said Oregon State toxicologist Kim Anderson, who led the research. "We don't usually see that at other contamination sites."
The PAH chemicals, which are often linked to oil spills, are most concentrated in the area near the Louisiana Coast, but levels have also jumped 2 to 3 fold in other spill-affected areas off Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, Anderson said.
As of last month, PAH levels remained near those discovered while the oil spill was still flowing heavily, Anderson said. The team will continue to sample for chemicals in months to come.
Although BP has sealed its well, experts are still cataloging the environmental and health hazards left in the wake of the spill. Scores of research teams, including Anderson's, are working with Federal Superfund grants to measure how the spill affected the environment.
Also on Thursday, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva told Reuters he would press for a congressional investigation into whether estimates of the oil spill volume and its related environmental risks were misrepresented in a federal report from early August.
BP's ill-fated Macondo well spilled a total of up to 4.9 million barrels before it was capped, the report said. But it also suggested that most of the oil had been dispersed naturally or removed by clean-up efforts at the time.
Grijalva, who chairs a subcommittee that oversees some wetlands damaged by the spill, said it was unclear whether the Federal report was peer-reviewed and whether its estimates remain accurate.
"I don't want to let BP off the hook, and my suspicion is that the numbers may be wrong and that the oil is still a danger," Grijalva said in an interview.
BP representatives were not immediately available for comment.
(Editing by David Gregorio)
Friday, October 1, 2010
Pakistan slams US-led drone attacks
Press TV Iran
Fri Oct 1, 2010 7:37AM
Fri Oct 1, 2010 7:37AM
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari (L) meets CIA Director Leon Panetta in Islamabad, Pakistan on Thursday, Sept. 30, 2010.
Pakistan has strongly condemned the increasing number of non-UN-sanctioned attacks by US drones and violation of its airspace by US-led forces stationed in Afghanistan. In a Thursday meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta in Pakistan, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari censured violation of his country's sovereignty.
Referring to airstrikes by US-led forces, the president said that "violation of internationally agreed principles is counterproductive and unacceptable," a Press TV correspondent reported on Friday. The visiting CIA chief, for his part, promised to examine reports that NATO helicopters conducted deadly cross-border raids from Afghanistan.
Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, who also held a separate meeting with Panetta on Thursday, expressed profound concern over the increasing drone attacks by NATO's International Security Assistance Force.
“Pakistan being a front-line ally in the war against terror expects from its partners to respect its territorial sovereignty,” he added.
Meanwhile, during a parliament session in Islamabad on Thursday Pakistani lawmakers demanded the government to give a befitting response to the attacks.
They said that if the US strikes were not stopped, then Pakistan should prevent supplies that pass through Pakistan to reach NATO and US-led forces in Afghanistan.
“It is a sheer violation of international norms and direct attack on our sovereignty. We have full right to defend ourselves,” Senator Khurshid Ahmed of Jamaat-i-Islami party told the House.
Senator Tariq Azim also questioned the government for tolerating the attacks asking government to shoot down NATO helicopters violating Pakistan's aerial space.
“Is the blood of our soldiers so cheap that we cannot even shoot down two helicopters,” he argued.
Recent increase in US drone attacks in tribal regions near Pakistan and Afghanistan border has provoked anger among the people.
Monday, September 27, 2010
The Dismantling of Civilized Society
By David Michael Green
September 26, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --" -- How stupid are you?
I mean, let's just face it, shall we? That is precisely the question the right has been asking the American public for thirty years (and more) now. And that is the question the American public has been enthusiastically answering for the same period of time.
Like a crack junkie, in fact.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented America with a set of economic lies so transparent that even a monster like George H. W. Bush called them "voodoo economics". When he was contesting Reagan for the Republican nomination, that is. Once Bush had lost it, and when he wanted to be added to the ticket as the Vice Presidential nominee, everything became hunky dory, and no more voodoo critiques were uttered. That was one of the greatest acts of treason (I choose my words carefully) in American history.
But back to Reagan. "Watch this", he said. "I'm gonna slash taxes, especially for the rich, spend huge sums on 'defense', and balance the budget at the same time".
Okay, so he wasn't a math major in college. Two out of three ain't bad, though, eh? Well, it is if you have to pay for his 'mistakes', plus interest, as so many of us continue to do to this day. Prolly not a big problem, though. Even though Americans hate taxes with the passion of the truly infantile, I'm sure they don't mind working extra hours flipping burgers each week to pay for the enrichment of the previous generation of plutocrats and defense contractors. Right?
Or maybe it's just that their answer to the "How stupid" question is: "Very".
You might think that, because Reagan and Bush actually managed to quadruple the national debt with their little exercise in national folly. Or you might especially think that because Lil' Bush came along with the exact same snake oil a decade later. You had to be stupid to buy it the first time, but you had to have been really stupid to buy it the second time. We, of course, were.
And not just in terms of federal debt, either. A generation of Reaganomics has now succeeded in suspending ninety-eight percent of the country in standard-of-living formaldehyde, so that they felt zero effect whatsoever from the substantial growth in GDP over the last thirty years, and now those policies are cutting off their legs from underneath them altogether. All while the people of Reagan's class, of course, just piled on the riches. How stupid do you have to be to not notice who's diddling you?
Very, of course, but not necessarily as stupid as is maximally possible. 'Cause, guess what? Here they come again. This week Republicans once again have issued a manifesto calling for slashing taxes on billionaires and cutting deficits, all at the same time. And once again they will win big electoral landslide victories in November despite that patent idiocy. Or perhaps because of it.
Why don't they just come out and do magic tricks, instead? Oh wait. That's their Jesus bit. Never mind.
On the one hand, I don't blame Americans for voting for the party that isn't the Democratic Party this fall. Obama and crew are miserable failures, as completely unable to provide meaningful solutions to the problems facing Americans today as they are inept at winning political fights against manifest criminals. Looking at the landscape in front of them as it appears to voters' blinkered vision, it makes perfect sense to desperately swing to the party not in government when the house is on fire and the party in government is showing up with squirt guns. What could be more logical? This is, indeed, the fundamental notion of 'responsible government' itself, and it is at the core of democratic theory.
On the other hand, of course, there are two very excellent reasons why such a vote is completely idiotic. First, because there actually are more than two alternatives to choose from. I wish we had viable third parties in America but I don't normally advocate for them, given the massive systemic improbability of their success. That said, if there was ever a moment for which a third party vote was called for, this is it.
And second, because 'the alternative' to the Democrats are the very folks who put us in these crises to start with, and they are now explicitly devoted to making conditions even worse for ordinary Americans. That's exactly what will happen, of course, and if you think the present moment is grim, wait until you see how much fun the next two years are gonna be. They're gonna look like the mangled and ferocious spawn of a tainted marriage between the Depression politics of the Hoover era, the sick depravity of McCarthyism, the relentless scandal-mongering of the Gingrich era, and the completely unmitigated greed of the Cheney years. Welcome to the dismantling of civilized society in America. Yes, yes, I know - it's quite arguable whether such a beast ever existed. Well, at least that's one debate we're about to put to rest definitively.
And we also know for sure of yet one more thing Ol' W was wrong about. Remember when he said: "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - You can't get fooled again!"
He shoulda checked with Karl Rove and the rest of his party of predatory shucksters, who seem quite incapable of not constantly trying to fool the public. And he shoulda considered the ridiculous improbability of his own presidency before attempting to quote Pete Townshend. Not to mention the current moment. We know why the GOP has to lie, and does so compulsively. Even in contemporary America, surely the stupidest country on the planet, the homo sapiens are still sentient enough to opt out of the most overt cases of self-immolation. If kleptocratic Republicans told the truth, who in the world would ever vote for them, other than the richest two percent of Americans?
The bigger mystery is why people continue to fall for this crap over and over. This is the "shame on me" concept that Dauphin George was reaching for but couldn't quite grasp (too bad he didn't actually, er, study, when he was at Yale). How many times can fools be told the same foolish line and be fooled into foolishly falling for it, like a pack of so many fools?
It would appear that for Americans, at least, there is no limit, based on the contents of the Republicans' just released "Pledge to America" manifesto, which I could have drafted for them, so predictable is its contents. There is of course, loads of debauchery and rampant destruction in there, dressed up as piety and patriotism. But the fiscal insanity is the most egregious. Can they really pledge the old voodoo economics once again - slashing tax revenue while simultaneously cutting deficits - and get away with it? Yes they can, and yes they have.
Perhaps their lies are more plausible because they have promised to cut spending. It's just that there are two little caveats they hope you won't notice. First, that they somehow miraculously fail to specify in advance of the election what they intend to cut. Gee, I wonder why that is? Could it be that if people knew what those cuts would be they would be aghast? Or could it be - and this brings us to the other small footnote - that what they are proposing is to mathematics what a dropped object falling upward would be to physics?
As Paul Krugman notes, the Republican Pledge claims that "everything must be cut, in ways not specified - 'except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.' In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits. [Krugman should have also mentioned service to the existing debt, which is one of the biggest single items in the federal budget today, and absolutely cannot be touched.] So what's left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won't cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: 'No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.'"
And yet - of course - poll data shows that the folks purveying this heap of garbage are about to be swept into office. Meanwhile, city governments are folding their tents across America, slashing all their services entirely, and the GOP is nominating former witches, anti-masturbators, racists, wrestling promoters and every other form of personal screw-up and jive con-artist to be found everywhere killers and thieves congregate.
I'm sorry, but surveying the landscape, it just feels so over now in America. We seem like little more than a popped balloon, with only the faux blustering fart noises of rapid deflation remaining where once there was an empire and once there were truly revolutionary and truly valuable ideas.
It's no accident, either, that the near-complete obsession of the tea party right and their followers is taxes. It's naked greed, it's more infantile than the politics of a kindergarten sandbox, and it's as corrosive as can be. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society". He meant it, too. When he died, he donated his estate to the US government.
What is happening to America today is nothing short of the dismantling of such civilized society. Does anyone think the country is economically better off today than in the 1950s or 1960s? Does anyone seriously think that the Millennial Generation will be better off than their parents? Would anyone seriously bet on America today, as an economic comer? Does anyone think that the next hundred years will be the American century?
There is so much tragedy to this story that it is hard to know where to start. Perhaps the greatest ugliness of the whole affair is the self-inflicted nature of our demise, and, therefore, the complete lack of necessity for all the pain and suffering already endured and the vastly greater amounts still to come. It never had to be this way, which just makes it all the more pathetic.
If there is any silver lining here it is that the hooligans of the right will manifestly fail at governing, which at least opens up the potential for them to be rejected once again.
I will be interested - as a political scientist, not as a citizen - to see what sort of budget proposal Republicans will pass out of the House once they control it. Like Reagan and Bush before them, their numbers cannot possibly jibe. Unlike Reagan and Bush, however, they will have far less luxury to resort to the shell game of grossly irresponsible deficits as a way out of their own lies, having made deficit reduction so overtly the centerpiece of their campaign this year. The freaks of the tea party right don't seem so likely to let them off the hook for another round of campaign lies as they were the last two times out. How's that for an irony? The only prospect of real accountability for these monsters would be coming from the monsters of their own constituency.
But, assuming the GOP can find a way around that problem (perhaps by proposing a draconian pretend budget that they know could never be accepted by congressional Democrats or Obama?), I would expect them to prevail again in 2012. Unless the jobs picture changes radically in 2011 - and no economist that I know of is predicting that - Obama is complete toast. Indeed, he is probably so wounded that we might expect a Democrat or two to challenge him in the primaries for the nomination. Doesn't matter, though. Either way, whoever the Republicans nominate will be the next president.
Which is where I start to get real nervous. Governments that combine a commitment to holding power at all costs with a total absence of real policy solutions and an amoral willingness to do anything to serve their true aspirations are a truly scary prospect. History suggests that the years after 2012 could be the ones during which the wheels finally came off the wagon of what is left of American democracy.
But it could be far worse than that, too, for us and for others. The prospect of a hugely powerful empire lashing out at the rest of the world - whether in rage or seeking domestic diversion - is not a pretty one at all. The Soviet superpower was kind enough to implode rather innocuously. I'm not at all convinced that we yanks would be quite so gracious about doing the same.
I remain haunted to this day by the words of John le Carre, written on the eve of the Bush invasion of Iraq: "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War".
Sadly, I think he had everything right in his assessment, save for the word "periods". That term implies a temporariness to our condition that might at least make it somehow barely tolerable.
But what if it only gets worse from here?
And let's be honest. Given the nature of the Republicans, the Democrats, the media and the public in America today, how does it not?
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, http://www.regressiveantidote.net/.
September 26, 2010 "Information Clearing House" --" -- How stupid are you?
I mean, let's just face it, shall we? That is precisely the question the right has been asking the American public for thirty years (and more) now. And that is the question the American public has been enthusiastically answering for the same period of time.
Like a crack junkie, in fact.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented America with a set of economic lies so transparent that even a monster like George H. W. Bush called them "voodoo economics". When he was contesting Reagan for the Republican nomination, that is. Once Bush had lost it, and when he wanted to be added to the ticket as the Vice Presidential nominee, everything became hunky dory, and no more voodoo critiques were uttered. That was one of the greatest acts of treason (I choose my words carefully) in American history.
But back to Reagan. "Watch this", he said. "I'm gonna slash taxes, especially for the rich, spend huge sums on 'defense', and balance the budget at the same time".
Okay, so he wasn't a math major in college. Two out of three ain't bad, though, eh? Well, it is if you have to pay for his 'mistakes', plus interest, as so many of us continue to do to this day. Prolly not a big problem, though. Even though Americans hate taxes with the passion of the truly infantile, I'm sure they don't mind working extra hours flipping burgers each week to pay for the enrichment of the previous generation of plutocrats and defense contractors. Right?
Or maybe it's just that their answer to the "How stupid" question is: "Very".
You might think that, because Reagan and Bush actually managed to quadruple the national debt with their little exercise in national folly. Or you might especially think that because Lil' Bush came along with the exact same snake oil a decade later. You had to be stupid to buy it the first time, but you had to have been really stupid to buy it the second time. We, of course, were.
And not just in terms of federal debt, either. A generation of Reaganomics has now succeeded in suspending ninety-eight percent of the country in standard-of-living formaldehyde, so that they felt zero effect whatsoever from the substantial growth in GDP over the last thirty years, and now those policies are cutting off their legs from underneath them altogether. All while the people of Reagan's class, of course, just piled on the riches. How stupid do you have to be to not notice who's diddling you?
Very, of course, but not necessarily as stupid as is maximally possible. 'Cause, guess what? Here they come again. This week Republicans once again have issued a manifesto calling for slashing taxes on billionaires and cutting deficits, all at the same time. And once again they will win big electoral landslide victories in November despite that patent idiocy. Or perhaps because of it.
Why don't they just come out and do magic tricks, instead? Oh wait. That's their Jesus bit. Never mind.
On the one hand, I don't blame Americans for voting for the party that isn't the Democratic Party this fall. Obama and crew are miserable failures, as completely unable to provide meaningful solutions to the problems facing Americans today as they are inept at winning political fights against manifest criminals. Looking at the landscape in front of them as it appears to voters' blinkered vision, it makes perfect sense to desperately swing to the party not in government when the house is on fire and the party in government is showing up with squirt guns. What could be more logical? This is, indeed, the fundamental notion of 'responsible government' itself, and it is at the core of democratic theory.
On the other hand, of course, there are two very excellent reasons why such a vote is completely idiotic. First, because there actually are more than two alternatives to choose from. I wish we had viable third parties in America but I don't normally advocate for them, given the massive systemic improbability of their success. That said, if there was ever a moment for which a third party vote was called for, this is it.
And second, because 'the alternative' to the Democrats are the very folks who put us in these crises to start with, and they are now explicitly devoted to making conditions even worse for ordinary Americans. That's exactly what will happen, of course, and if you think the present moment is grim, wait until you see how much fun the next two years are gonna be. They're gonna look like the mangled and ferocious spawn of a tainted marriage between the Depression politics of the Hoover era, the sick depravity of McCarthyism, the relentless scandal-mongering of the Gingrich era, and the completely unmitigated greed of the Cheney years. Welcome to the dismantling of civilized society in America. Yes, yes, I know - it's quite arguable whether such a beast ever existed. Well, at least that's one debate we're about to put to rest definitively.
And we also know for sure of yet one more thing Ol' W was wrong about. Remember when he said: "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - You can't get fooled again!"
He shoulda checked with Karl Rove and the rest of his party of predatory shucksters, who seem quite incapable of not constantly trying to fool the public. And he shoulda considered the ridiculous improbability of his own presidency before attempting to quote Pete Townshend. Not to mention the current moment. We know why the GOP has to lie, and does so compulsively. Even in contemporary America, surely the stupidest country on the planet, the homo sapiens are still sentient enough to opt out of the most overt cases of self-immolation. If kleptocratic Republicans told the truth, who in the world would ever vote for them, other than the richest two percent of Americans?
The bigger mystery is why people continue to fall for this crap over and over. This is the "shame on me" concept that Dauphin George was reaching for but couldn't quite grasp (too bad he didn't actually, er, study, when he was at Yale). How many times can fools be told the same foolish line and be fooled into foolishly falling for it, like a pack of so many fools?
It would appear that for Americans, at least, there is no limit, based on the contents of the Republicans' just released "Pledge to America" manifesto, which I could have drafted for them, so predictable is its contents. There is of course, loads of debauchery and rampant destruction in there, dressed up as piety and patriotism. But the fiscal insanity is the most egregious. Can they really pledge the old voodoo economics once again - slashing tax revenue while simultaneously cutting deficits - and get away with it? Yes they can, and yes they have.
Perhaps their lies are more plausible because they have promised to cut spending. It's just that there are two little caveats they hope you won't notice. First, that they somehow miraculously fail to specify in advance of the election what they intend to cut. Gee, I wonder why that is? Could it be that if people knew what those cuts would be they would be aghast? Or could it be - and this brings us to the other small footnote - that what they are proposing is to mathematics what a dropped object falling upward would be to physics?
As Paul Krugman notes, the Republican Pledge claims that "everything must be cut, in ways not specified - 'except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.' In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits. [Krugman should have also mentioned service to the existing debt, which is one of the biggest single items in the federal budget today, and absolutely cannot be touched.] So what's left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won't cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: 'No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.'"
And yet - of course - poll data shows that the folks purveying this heap of garbage are about to be swept into office. Meanwhile, city governments are folding their tents across America, slashing all their services entirely, and the GOP is nominating former witches, anti-masturbators, racists, wrestling promoters and every other form of personal screw-up and jive con-artist to be found everywhere killers and thieves congregate.
I'm sorry, but surveying the landscape, it just feels so over now in America. We seem like little more than a popped balloon, with only the faux blustering fart noises of rapid deflation remaining where once there was an empire and once there were truly revolutionary and truly valuable ideas.
It's no accident, either, that the near-complete obsession of the tea party right and their followers is taxes. It's naked greed, it's more infantile than the politics of a kindergarten sandbox, and it's as corrosive as can be. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society". He meant it, too. When he died, he donated his estate to the US government.
What is happening to America today is nothing short of the dismantling of such civilized society. Does anyone think the country is economically better off today than in the 1950s or 1960s? Does anyone seriously think that the Millennial Generation will be better off than their parents? Would anyone seriously bet on America today, as an economic comer? Does anyone think that the next hundred years will be the American century?
There is so much tragedy to this story that it is hard to know where to start. Perhaps the greatest ugliness of the whole affair is the self-inflicted nature of our demise, and, therefore, the complete lack of necessity for all the pain and suffering already endured and the vastly greater amounts still to come. It never had to be this way, which just makes it all the more pathetic.
If there is any silver lining here it is that the hooligans of the right will manifestly fail at governing, which at least opens up the potential for them to be rejected once again.
I will be interested - as a political scientist, not as a citizen - to see what sort of budget proposal Republicans will pass out of the House once they control it. Like Reagan and Bush before them, their numbers cannot possibly jibe. Unlike Reagan and Bush, however, they will have far less luxury to resort to the shell game of grossly irresponsible deficits as a way out of their own lies, having made deficit reduction so overtly the centerpiece of their campaign this year. The freaks of the tea party right don't seem so likely to let them off the hook for another round of campaign lies as they were the last two times out. How's that for an irony? The only prospect of real accountability for these monsters would be coming from the monsters of their own constituency.
But, assuming the GOP can find a way around that problem (perhaps by proposing a draconian pretend budget that they know could never be accepted by congressional Democrats or Obama?), I would expect them to prevail again in 2012. Unless the jobs picture changes radically in 2011 - and no economist that I know of is predicting that - Obama is complete toast. Indeed, he is probably so wounded that we might expect a Democrat or two to challenge him in the primaries for the nomination. Doesn't matter, though. Either way, whoever the Republicans nominate will be the next president.
Which is where I start to get real nervous. Governments that combine a commitment to holding power at all costs with a total absence of real policy solutions and an amoral willingness to do anything to serve their true aspirations are a truly scary prospect. History suggests that the years after 2012 could be the ones during which the wheels finally came off the wagon of what is left of American democracy.
But it could be far worse than that, too, for us and for others. The prospect of a hugely powerful empire lashing out at the rest of the world - whether in rage or seeking domestic diversion - is not a pretty one at all. The Soviet superpower was kind enough to implode rather innocuously. I'm not at all convinced that we yanks would be quite so gracious about doing the same.
I remain haunted to this day by the words of John le Carre, written on the eve of the Bush invasion of Iraq: "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War".
Sadly, I think he had everything right in his assessment, save for the word "periods". That term implies a temporariness to our condition that might at least make it somehow barely tolerable.
But what if it only gets worse from here?
And let's be honest. Given the nature of the Republicans, the Democrats, the media and the public in America today, how does it not?
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, http://www.regressiveantidote.net/.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Gulf Oil Update: Day 160
Editor's NOTE:
I have tried repeatedly for the past week unsuccessfully to obtain up-to-date information regarding the water and air quality in the Gulf coast areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. It is not clear when the area was last sprayed with Corexit dispersant and when it was last applied to the surface water in that area. At one point several weeks ago for example, the water in and around Orange Beach Alabama was said to contain 13.6 ppm of 2 butoxy ethanol (2BE) and core samples from the sea bed allegedly contained over 66 ppm of the 2 BE "marker" for Corexit according to Local chemist Bob Naman.
It is truly unfortunate that the necessary data required for people to make informed decisions about traveling to the Gulf area has not been released by the appropriate federal and local authorities. BP and the unified command have been very unwilling to reveal the extent to which Corexit spraying and direct surface water application has been continued or stopped at a date certain. It is clear from multiple reports eminating from locals and University research projects that much of the oil once located on the surface has been "dispersed" to the sea bed after falling through the entire water column. The short and long term effects to marine life and the local human populations affected remains to be determined.
At the very least, the controllling government authorities have made it extremely difficult if not impossible for interested individuals to obtain the information they need to make informed decisions about the potential deliterious health related effects to which they might be exposed.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
4 MILES offshore Pensacola: Scuba divers find “what appeared to be tarballs”, “nearby location shows a MUCH THICKER brown film” — Officials deny oil
September 23rd, 2010 at 02:58 PM
Floridaoilspilllaw.com HERE...
Possible oil below the ocean’s surface, WEAR, September 22, 2010.
As we all know, oil is still in the gulf… sitting on the sea floor and dispersed in the water column…
Dan Thomas, WEAR reporter: We’re out here in the Gulf of Mexico about 4 miles off Pensacola beach…
Mike Harrell, Harrell Marine Services: “I have seen what I think and analysis will prove that what I thought was oil.”
Dan Thomas, WEAR reporter: I found what appeared to be tarballs, similar to what we’ve seen on shore. This is video shot by Harrell of a nearby location shows a much thicker brown film. It’s not what he was hoping to find… His marine services company depends on the gulf being pristine.
Mike Harrell, Harrell Marine Services: “I’ve been diving these waters for 25 years and what I have seen, it just doesn’t look like it used to.”
One group of researchers have observed oiled sediments on the seafloor stretching from the wellhead to 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gulfport, MS.
Today the media is reporting that federal teams have been finding oil just off the coast all along the Gulf.
Now WEAR discovers what appears to be submerged oil four miles from shore.
____________
Feds: Finding “plenty” of crude all along Gulf Coast by digging holes just offshore — Up to 25 PERCENT OIL in samples
September 23rd, 2010 at 10:31 AM
Floridaoilspilllaw.com
Oil lingering in waters off Alabama, Mississippi and Florida beaches, Press-Register (Ben Raines), September 23, 2010:
A good deal of oil remains in the shallow waters closest to the beaches in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, according to a federal team using shovels and snorkeling gear to survey the coastline for submerged oil. …
“We’re basically digging potholes approximately 18 inches deep,” [Todd Farrar, who works for Polaris Applied Sciences, a company hired by BP to do the shoreline assessments with federal officials] said… “We’re finding plenty of it.”
In the potholes he dug Wednesday morning, Farrar reported that from 10 to 25 percent of the material in his shovel was oil…
I have tried repeatedly for the past week unsuccessfully to obtain up-to-date information regarding the water and air quality in the Gulf coast areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. It is not clear when the area was last sprayed with Corexit dispersant and when it was last applied to the surface water in that area. At one point several weeks ago for example, the water in and around Orange Beach Alabama was said to contain 13.6 ppm of 2 butoxy ethanol (2BE) and core samples from the sea bed allegedly contained over 66 ppm of the 2 BE "marker" for Corexit according to Local chemist Bob Naman.
It is truly unfortunate that the necessary data required for people to make informed decisions about traveling to the Gulf area has not been released by the appropriate federal and local authorities. BP and the unified command have been very unwilling to reveal the extent to which Corexit spraying and direct surface water application has been continued or stopped at a date certain. It is clear from multiple reports eminating from locals and University research projects that much of the oil once located on the surface has been "dispersed" to the sea bed after falling through the entire water column. The short and long term effects to marine life and the local human populations affected remains to be determined.
At the very least, the controllling government authorities have made it extremely difficult if not impossible for interested individuals to obtain the information they need to make informed decisions about the potential deliterious health related effects to which they might be exposed.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
4 MILES offshore Pensacola: Scuba divers find “what appeared to be tarballs”, “nearby location shows a MUCH THICKER brown film” — Officials deny oil
September 23rd, 2010 at 02:58 PM
Floridaoilspilllaw.com HERE...
Possible oil below the ocean’s surface, WEAR, September 22, 2010.
As we all know, oil is still in the gulf… sitting on the sea floor and dispersed in the water column…
Dan Thomas, WEAR reporter: We’re out here in the Gulf of Mexico about 4 miles off Pensacola beach…
Mike Harrell, Harrell Marine Services: “I have seen what I think and analysis will prove that what I thought was oil.”
Dan Thomas, WEAR reporter: I found what appeared to be tarballs, similar to what we’ve seen on shore. This is video shot by Harrell of a nearby location shows a much thicker brown film. It’s not what he was hoping to find… His marine services company depends on the gulf being pristine.
Mike Harrell, Harrell Marine Services: “I’ve been diving these waters for 25 years and what I have seen, it just doesn’t look like it used to.”
One group of researchers have observed oiled sediments on the seafloor stretching from the wellhead to 20 nautical miles off the coast of Gulfport, MS.
Today the media is reporting that federal teams have been finding oil just off the coast all along the Gulf.
Now WEAR discovers what appears to be submerged oil four miles from shore.
____________
Feds: Finding “plenty” of crude all along Gulf Coast by digging holes just offshore — Up to 25 PERCENT OIL in samples
September 23rd, 2010 at 10:31 AM
Floridaoilspilllaw.com
Oil lingering in waters off Alabama, Mississippi and Florida beaches, Press-Register (Ben Raines), September 23, 2010:
A good deal of oil remains in the shallow waters closest to the beaches in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, according to a federal team using shovels and snorkeling gear to survey the coastline for submerged oil. …
“We’re basically digging potholes approximately 18 inches deep,” [Todd Farrar, who works for Polaris Applied Sciences, a company hired by BP to do the shoreline assessments with federal officials] said… “We’re finding plenty of it.”
In the potholes he dug Wednesday morning, Farrar reported that from 10 to 25 percent of the material in his shovel was oil…
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Maybe Muslims Did It?
By Gordon Duff
Veterans Today HERE...
September 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- When President Ahmadinejad announced, before the United Nations that most people in the world believe that the U.S. government was involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, he told the truth. In America, groups have been popping up for years, not “fringe” types, but military and professional organizations, architects, engineers, pilots, intelligence officers.
There is a vast underground that is never reported, never spoken of in the news and continually threatened. The FBI and Homeland Security have infiltrated these groups, illegal surveillance has been on a massive scale and, as the groups have grown and their reach has touched millions of Americans, the government, in the usual whispers, is talking about mass arrests, “unplugging” the internet, all those things the militia movements of the 90′s said would happen.
Outside the United States, not in the Middle East, but Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Far East, finding people who accept the Bush and Obama administration’s “party line” about “box cutters and hijackers” is difficult. No one wants to risk the public scorn of seeming like an imbecile.
However, back here in the “good ole’ USA,” even comedian Jon Stewart, normally an outspoken critic of government insanity, has agreed to lead a march on Washinton to quell “rumors” about 9/11, rumors of wrongdoing by people he despises.
What is the difference? Why do those outside the United States see things do differently? The answer is freedom of press, the first of the hasty additions to the constitution, a guarantee provided for in the 1st Amendment. There had been assaults on freedom of the press before, particularly during wartime but never anything on the scale seen after 9/11. Across the board, not just the news but even movies and television shows, fiction, censored, propaganda, peddling ignorance, fear and screaming “conspiracy theory” at anyone trying to get word out.
America is a dictatorship.
It isn’t just corporate lobbyists or two broken political parties. Elections are rigged, government agencies meant to provide for national security are now doing little but spying on Americans, our military is spread across the planet, tasked with everything but serving the United States. All the while, the “news” is everything but. Americans, to a one, know something is terribly wrong, totally out of control and, even their attempts to get at some semblance of truth are turned against them. The news is censored. With the country embroiled in two failed wars, obviously illegal, proof of war crimes piling up, financial collapse, citizen’s rights trampled on, nary a word is said about any of it.
“The president is a Muslim.” “Healthcare is socialism.” “The rich need their tax breaks, the same ones that pushed the country into 13.5 trillion in debt.”
The real message is always the same if you listen carefully, “be afraid, trust in government.” What are they really saying? “Greed is good.” How is that working out for you?
Ahmadinejad, as of the count yesterday, had 950 stories condemning his “outrageous” statements at the United Nations. Please note that a total of 27 nations walked out, not the people of those nations but representatives of the governments.
What we fail to note is that 163 nations stayed.
A few years ago, Ahmadinejad had a conference to discuss the holocaust. Scholars from around the world came, some openly hostile to Israel, some because they were scholars. It was called “outrageous” and Israel threatened to break up the meeting with a nuclear attack. What happened there, what were the findings? We will never know. Censorship in the American press, the same censorship that prevented evidence proving Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction from reaching the public, the same censorship that should have told Americans that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, was imposed.
The truth never benefits from censorship. Censorship is dictatorship.
Dictatorship is when those in power no longer trust the people. A government that doesn’t trust its own people can’t serve its people, its people serve it. This is the America of today.
9 years of censorship now clouds 9/11.
When President Bush announced that he saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center, live TV, it was shown once and hidden away. TV never showed that, not real TV, not the kind the public sees. Bush may have watched it, but if he is telling the truth, it means he knew in advance. Does this explain why he simply sat there? When Larry Silverstein said that he ordered one of the World Trade Center buildings, number 7, “pulled,” meaning “blown up” did it mean that explosives had been planted in all the buildings? It sure looked like it to me.
How about when Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, said a missile hit the Pentagon? Oh, did he say that? Well, yes he did, live television, you can find the statement on video all over the internet, any normal person can.
The 9/11 Commission couldn’t, however.
Same with Rumsfeld telling us that Flight 93 was shot down. Did he say that? Yes he did, live TV, all over the internet. They couldn’t find that either.
Nobody told the 9/11 Commission anything about Building 7. It is as though it escaped into another dimension.
It isn’t just these statements or Vice President Cheney’s orders to allow the planes to go unhindered, testified to on the video above, that make Ahmadinejad much less than “outrageous.” It is the hard science, the witness testimony and years of intelligence reports that prove conclusively that “no Muslims were involved in the making of this picture.”
What have we proven “conclusively?” One thing for sure, one thing a vast majority of Americans will now consider, that America is a dictatorship.
What they don’t know is how it happened or who is running things. The propaganda machine has 200 million people chasing their own tails, blaming each other.
Maybe Muslims did it.
Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic officer of UN humanitarian groups. Gordon Duff's articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is a regularly on radio and tv.
Veterans Today HERE...
September 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- When President Ahmadinejad announced, before the United Nations that most people in the world believe that the U.S. government was involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, he told the truth. In America, groups have been popping up for years, not “fringe” types, but military and professional organizations, architects, engineers, pilots, intelligence officers.
There is a vast underground that is never reported, never spoken of in the news and continually threatened. The FBI and Homeland Security have infiltrated these groups, illegal surveillance has been on a massive scale and, as the groups have grown and their reach has touched millions of Americans, the government, in the usual whispers, is talking about mass arrests, “unplugging” the internet, all those things the militia movements of the 90′s said would happen.
Outside the United States, not in the Middle East, but Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Far East, finding people who accept the Bush and Obama administration’s “party line” about “box cutters and hijackers” is difficult. No one wants to risk the public scorn of seeming like an imbecile.
However, back here in the “good ole’ USA,” even comedian Jon Stewart, normally an outspoken critic of government insanity, has agreed to lead a march on Washinton to quell “rumors” about 9/11, rumors of wrongdoing by people he despises.
What is the difference? Why do those outside the United States see things do differently? The answer is freedom of press, the first of the hasty additions to the constitution, a guarantee provided for in the 1st Amendment. There had been assaults on freedom of the press before, particularly during wartime but never anything on the scale seen after 9/11. Across the board, not just the news but even movies and television shows, fiction, censored, propaganda, peddling ignorance, fear and screaming “conspiracy theory” at anyone trying to get word out.
America is a dictatorship.
It isn’t just corporate lobbyists or two broken political parties. Elections are rigged, government agencies meant to provide for national security are now doing little but spying on Americans, our military is spread across the planet, tasked with everything but serving the United States. All the while, the “news” is everything but. Americans, to a one, know something is terribly wrong, totally out of control and, even their attempts to get at some semblance of truth are turned against them. The news is censored. With the country embroiled in two failed wars, obviously illegal, proof of war crimes piling up, financial collapse, citizen’s rights trampled on, nary a word is said about any of it.
“The president is a Muslim.” “Healthcare is socialism.” “The rich need their tax breaks, the same ones that pushed the country into 13.5 trillion in debt.”
The real message is always the same if you listen carefully, “be afraid, trust in government.” What are they really saying? “Greed is good.” How is that working out for you?
Ahmadinejad, as of the count yesterday, had 950 stories condemning his “outrageous” statements at the United Nations. Please note that a total of 27 nations walked out, not the people of those nations but representatives of the governments.
What we fail to note is that 163 nations stayed.
A few years ago, Ahmadinejad had a conference to discuss the holocaust. Scholars from around the world came, some openly hostile to Israel, some because they were scholars. It was called “outrageous” and Israel threatened to break up the meeting with a nuclear attack. What happened there, what were the findings? We will never know. Censorship in the American press, the same censorship that prevented evidence proving Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction from reaching the public, the same censorship that should have told Americans that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with 9/11, was imposed.
The truth never benefits from censorship. Censorship is dictatorship.
Dictatorship is when those in power no longer trust the people. A government that doesn’t trust its own people can’t serve its people, its people serve it. This is the America of today.
9 years of censorship now clouds 9/11.
When President Bush announced that he saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center, live TV, it was shown once and hidden away. TV never showed that, not real TV, not the kind the public sees. Bush may have watched it, but if he is telling the truth, it means he knew in advance. Does this explain why he simply sat there? When Larry Silverstein said that he ordered one of the World Trade Center buildings, number 7, “pulled,” meaning “blown up” did it mean that explosives had been planted in all the buildings? It sure looked like it to me.
How about when Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, said a missile hit the Pentagon? Oh, did he say that? Well, yes he did, live television, you can find the statement on video all over the internet, any normal person can.
The 9/11 Commission couldn’t, however.
Same with Rumsfeld telling us that Flight 93 was shot down. Did he say that? Yes he did, live TV, all over the internet. They couldn’t find that either.
Nobody told the 9/11 Commission anything about Building 7. It is as though it escaped into another dimension.
It isn’t just these statements or Vice President Cheney’s orders to allow the planes to go unhindered, testified to on the video above, that make Ahmadinejad much less than “outrageous.” It is the hard science, the witness testimony and years of intelligence reports that prove conclusively that “no Muslims were involved in the making of this picture.”
What have we proven “conclusively?” One thing for sure, one thing a vast majority of Americans will now consider, that America is a dictatorship.
What they don’t know is how it happened or who is running things. The propaganda machine has 200 million people chasing their own tails, blaming each other.
Maybe Muslims did it.
Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic officer of UN humanitarian groups. Gordon Duff's articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is a regularly on radio and tv.
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A Great Thomist is Gone
Dr. Raphael Waters (Rest in Peace)
By John Vennari
Catholic Family News HERE...
August 27, 2010
“If the Lord takes me soon, be assured that I will be praying for you.” Dr. Waters said this to us, a group of his students, who visited him at his home on Friday evening, August 20.
We would not see him again. He died the following Thursday, on August 26 at 4:30 am in St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, NY, at age 86.
His death is an incalculable loss.
Apart from being an internationally recognized scholar who was a member of several prestigious scholarly associations, he was also a lively and humorous professor whose intense love of philosophy was as contagious as it was exhilarating.
He died in the saddle, continually planning new courses to teach as he was slowly consumed by cancer and other painful maladies.
A Unique Pedigree
Dr. Waters was buried on September 1, 2010, one hundred years to the day from St. Pius X’s promulgation of the Oath Against Modernism, in which St. Pius X taught, “In the future the doctorate in theology or Canon Law must never be conferred on anyone who has not first of all made the regular course in scholastic [Thomistic] philosophy. If such a doctorate is conferred, it is to be held as null and void.”
It was Pius X who taught in his magisterial decrees that scholasticism is a central component in the combat with Modernism. Some of those at the funeral remarked that it appeared to be one of those ironies of Providence that Dr. Waters, one of the last of the great Thomists, should be buried on this significant anniversary.
Dr. Raphael Waters was a Master of Thomistic philosophy who possessed a pedigree that few others could boast. Born in Australia, and years later starting his career as a pharmacist, he became a student of the eminent Father Austin Woodbury at the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, a unique institution in the world. The school could not grant any degrees, yet people from all walks of life flocked to it because of the genius of its founder and instructor.
Father Woodbury, widely-known as “Doc” Woodbury, was trained by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, arguably the greatest Thomist of the 20th Century. Raphael Waters studied at the feet of Father Woodbury for decades. He took all the courses at the Aquinas Academy twice, and later became Father Woodbury’s co-teacher.
Dr. Waters traveled to Canada to further his studies, where he received three canonical and civil degrees in Philosophy from the University of Montreal. These degrees established him as qualified to teach in any Catholic seminary in the world.
In Canada, he studied under world-renowned masters such as Fathers Louis-Marie Regis and Louis-Bertrand Geiger. He said repeatedly, however, that the best of all his masters who towered head and shoulder above the rest was the “boy from the bush,” Father Woodbury.
For seven years he served as assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. In 1976 he accepted a position at Niagara University in Lewiston NY, where he served as Professor of philosophy until he resigned in 2004.
In 2005, he founded the Aquinas School of Philosophy. This was the last great project of his life to which he devoted all of his time and energy.
He lectured every Friday night, first at a parish church hall in Niagara Falls, then at the Education Room in St. Mary’s hospital in Lewiston. The classes were free and open to all.
Dr. Dennis Bonnette, retired professor of philosophy from Niagara University and long-time colleague, who also teaches at the Aquinas School of Philosophy, said in tribute to Dr. Waters the day after his death, “Dr. Waters’ entire life was devoted to what he called the Apostolate of Scholarship… nobody was more dedicated to his students, spending many hours with them.”
The love Dr. Waters nursed towards his students was evident from the tributes they voiced after his death.
One former student drove from North Carolina to attend the funeral. Others wrote touching tributes on his webpage obituary. One reads, “I was a student on Dr. Waters at Niagara University. I remember Dr. Waters fondly. He was a dedicated teacher who cared deeply for his students. Thank you, Dr. Waters, for courageously teaching the truth.”
Father Francis DeRosa, a former student of Dr. Waters, drove from Virginia to celebrate the Funeral Mass in Niagara Falls. In his homily, Father DeRosa said that apart from his parents, Dr. Waters was the single most determining factor in his decision to become a priest: “It was through the teaching of Dr. Waters that I truly came to understand the Catholic Church as the one true Church established by Christ.”
Dr. Waters’ dedication to scholarship is demonstrated by the fact that upon retirement at age 80, when many a man is ready to “take it easy”, he went on to found his own school: The Aquinas School of Philosophy. He did this to keep alive the vital philosophical teachings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas so woefully neglected in our time.
Indeed, he embodied 2500 years of the best of Western philosophical thought, and believed himself duty-bound to continue transmitting these great truths to others for as long as God gave him life.
Thomism Scorned
Dr. Waters was appalled at the state of education, and especially at the state of philosophy taught in Catholic colleges and universities. Thomistic scholasticism is out of fashion among Catholic academics, and has been so for decades.
Even prior to Vatican II, the progressivist proponents of the “New Theology” scorned scholasticism, claiming it too difficult for modern man to understand, and propounded new philosophical systems such as existentialism that would allegedly speak to modern man in his own language.
As early as 1950, keen Thomists such as Father David Greenstock warned against this new development: “We are asked to accept, in exchange for this solid foundation [of Thomism], the fluid concepts of a new philosophy, destined to change with time – we are told – like everything else in this fluid world. This, to our way of thinking, is not merely unreasonable, but also very dangerous.”
This new approach lacked the clarity and precision of Thomistic philosophy and introduced much mischief. It also cut the Catholic from his past, making the centuries-old Catholic language of scholasticism a foreign language to him.
This new approach was also the basis for progressive bishops and theologians at Vatican II to insist that Council documents be drafted in so-called pastoral (ambiguous) language. For example, the Decree on Ecumenism never defines ecumenism. The Council lays stress on “human dignity”, but never defines human dignity, etc.
Even Father Joseph Ratzinger, a young progressive theologian at Vatican II who was an adherent of the New Theology, rejoiced that the Council documents would not be drafted in scholastic terminology, as has been documented in past issues of Catholic Family News.
This lack of precision of Vatican II documents was alluded to by Bishop Thomas Morrow, a prelate who attended the Council. Catholic World News reported Bishop Morrow’s statement, “I was relieved when we were told that this Council was not aiming at defining or giving final statements on doctrine, because a statement of doctrine has to be very carefully formulated, and I would have regarded the Council documents as tentative and liable to be reformed.”
The chaos resulting from these documents is well attested by the present ruinous state of the Church throughout the world. The very fact it is commonly held that Vatican II documents can have both a liberal interpretation and a conservative interpretation (the hermeneutic of discontinuity/hermeneutic of continuity dichotomy) testifies to the want of scholastic precision in the documents themselves. No one even pretends the Decrees of Trent or Vatican I can be interpreted in any other manner than the precise language in which they are written.
The wholesale abandonment of scholasticism quickly spread throughout Catholic universities, where the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas was ignored, and a confused modern approach put in its place.
The Science of philosophy is replaced with the “History of Philosophy”, which introduces the student to hundreds of conflicting thinkers, but never teaches the student how to think. This results in the belief that philosophy is nothing more than a contradictory jumble of personal ideas and ideals.
“The ‘History of Philosophy’ is the worst way to teach or study philosophy”, insisted Dr. Waters. A History of Philosophy course has its place for students who already have years of solid philosophical instruction, and whose minds are trained in the true science that gives them the ability to recognize errors of deceptive systems.
It is akin to attending a school of architecture where the student is taught a history of the various styles of structures from ancient Greece to modern New York, but never learns how to build a building.
The disorder in philosophy is worse, as it necessarily flows into confusion in Ethics, and to a grand perversion of the way Ethics is taught. The modern instructor does not teach the student the sound objective principles of Aristotle and Aquinas by which to judge moral actions. A contemporary Ethics course often consists of a text book that is merely a collection of essays from various authors presenting conflicting views. On Abortion, two essays in favor, two essays against; Euthanasia: two essays in favor, two essays against; Capital Punishment: two essay in favor, two essays against.
The student, who is not taught any firm principles by which to judge, is then told to make up his own uninformed mind. In the end, the student will be swayed in moral matters either by gut feeling, or by personal interests, or by popular liberal sentiment. The deformed student will also come to accept the prevailing error taught in modern universities: that there is no objective moral law.
This is not education, but deformation. One can only pity students and their parents who spend vast sums of money, and go into debt for years, to receive this perverse de-education.
Philosophy is a Science
By contrast, Dr. Waters, along with Father Woodbury and St. Thomas Aquinas, rightly teach that philosophy is a science that gives certitude to the mind. Dr. Waters defined philosophy as “certain knowledge of all things through their ultimate causes in the light of the principles of reason.”
By “certain knowledge”, he means “sure knowledge”.
Dr. Waters’ mentor, Father Woodbury, spends a remarkable nine pages in his unpublished Introduction to Philosophy, demonstrating with pitiless logic: “Philosophy is knowledge of all things through highest causes, proceeding under the natural light of human reason.” Here, both Dr. Waters and Father Woodbury simply reiterate the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas: “Wisdom [i.e. philosophy] is the science which studies first and universal causes; wisdom considers the first cause of all causes.”
Philosophy differs from the experimental sciences as it studies the ultimate cause of all things.
For example, as the philosopher Brother Benignus noted, the science of physics formulates the laws of motion, but it does not answer the question “Why is there motion in the universe”? Biology sets out to explain the functions, likeness and unlikeness of living things, but it cannot answer the origin, principle and purpose of life. Experimental psychology seeks to describe the behavior of man, but it cannot answer the questions: “What is man?” or “what is the reason of man’s existence?”
“The philosopher is above all the guardian of the principles of reason”, Dr. Waters taught. Principles of reason are so fundamental that they cannot be proved, only defended. Some of these principles of reason include.
• Nothing can both be and not be at the same time and under the same circumstances (this is the principle of non-contradiction which is the most fundamental principle of reason).
• Whatever undergoes movement is moved by another;
• Every agent acts for the sake of an end;
• The whole is greater than its part;
• It is never lawful to do an evil act for the sake of a good end.
These and other principles of reason are the tools of the philosopher by which he forms solid judgments about the world around him.
The principles of reason are employed in every branch of true philosophy: Logic; Cosmology; Philosophical Psychology; Metaphysics; Poietics; Ethics, and the rest. All of these sciences, properly taught according to the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition, form a magnificent whole that support and complete one another.
For example, one cannot have sound notion of what is proper human behavior (Ethics) unless one has a correct understanding of what is human nature (Philosophical Psychology), or of the existence of God as our last end (Metaphysics).
Another advantage of sound philosophy is that it prevents one from bowing down before the altar of experimental science. Professor Stephen Hawking and his bogus claim that the universe can be explained without God do not intimidate a man familiar with the metaphysical teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas.
In his new book The Grand Design – which as of mid-September has sold over 36,000 copies – Hawking claims, “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists,” and it is not necessary to invoke God as the source of all creation.
In other words, Hawking says that the entire universe came from nothing, that we have a magnificent effect without a cause, that nothing produced everything. This absurdity, which we see nowhere else in all of creation, is what Hawking invokes to explain all of creation.
As philosopher Dr. Bonnette remarked when he heard Hawking’s assertion, “This is what happens when a physicist tries to do metaphysics. He’s speaking outside his field.” The modern world in its godless ignorance prostrates itself before the scientist Hawking. The true philosopher regards Hawking as an object to be pitied.
The Aquinas School of Philosophy
Dr. Raphael Waters taught the true science of scholastic philosophy at his Aquinas School of Philosophy. Between 2005 and 2007, he delivered courses in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics. I was privileged to start attending his classes in spring 2007, and recorded a series of stand-alone lectures on various topics, a full course on Metaphysics, and a full course on Philosophical Psychology.
In fact, at the time he was teaching Philosophical Psychology, he had an accident at home that laid him up for 10 months. On a Sunday night in winter at about 9:30, he fell in his bathroom, crushed his ribs when he hit the bathtub, and lay there all night unable to move.
Providentially, a driver from the cancer institute, who had come the next morning to take him to hospital, called the police when Dr. Waters did not answer the door. The entire time he was hospitalized from this accident, wracked in pain, his only thought was returning to his students.
On September 11, 2009, Dr. Waters began his course on Ethics, which would alas remain unfinished. While giving this course, he was in an out of the hospital, and was also undergoing cancer treatment at Roswell Park Institute in Buffalo.
On Friday January 22, 2010 when we were about halfway through the Ethics course, he opened the class with a special thank you to all of us who came to the school, supported it, and spread word about it (it is actually we who owed thanks to him). He told some of us privately that he was scheduled for a special meeting at Roswell Cancer Institute the following Monday, and they had bad news for him.
The next night, January 23, he experienced such strong pains in his legs (due to another malady unrelated to his cancer) he was rushed to the hospital. He would never return to class.
Above all, he was concerned for the future of his school. As I have recorded his lectures and have them on audio CD, the class continued to meet each Friday night in Lewiston to listen to his recorded talks and continue the study of philosophy.
In April, his long-time friend and colleague Dr. Dennis Bonnette was able to return and resume teaching. The school thus continues. Dr. Bonnette has delivered a brief course on points of Metaphysics, and is now conducting his own course on the Philosophy of Human Nature. He is a superb teacher.
All of these classes are being recorded and will be released through Oltyn Library Services at www.aquinasphilosophy.com (see page 7). Dr. Waters’ unfinished Ethics course will also be released before the end of the year.
In the Saddle
I will close with a consideration that indicates the remarkable character of Dr. Waters; his determination to carry on. Throughout his final months, even though he would never return to class, he did not give up his plans to continue.
One day last February, when I visited him at the hospital, he laid out four other courses he was planning to teach: Logic, Epistemology, a course on Dr. Woodbury’s Introduction to Philosophy, and a fourth that I don’t remember. This was apart from his determination to complete his unfinished Ethics course.
It was edifying and humbling to see this 86-year-old man, literally dying from cancer, steadfast in his resolve to teach in the future.
His article against the fallacy of homosexual “marriage”, on page 5 of this issue, is something he wrote and sent to me only two weeks before his death. Even in the last days of his life on earth, he was still working out a new Prospectus for the school.
He always kept going. He never gave up. He never said, “I’ve done enough”. He never said, “I’m too old or too sick to continue”. In this and in his lifelong dedication to truth, he is model for us all.
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Dr. Raphael Waters. May he rest in peace.
By John Vennari
Catholic Family News HERE...
August 27, 2010
“If the Lord takes me soon, be assured that I will be praying for you.” Dr. Waters said this to us, a group of his students, who visited him at his home on Friday evening, August 20.
We would not see him again. He died the following Thursday, on August 26 at 4:30 am in St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, NY, at age 86.
His death is an incalculable loss.
Apart from being an internationally recognized scholar who was a member of several prestigious scholarly associations, he was also a lively and humorous professor whose intense love of philosophy was as contagious as it was exhilarating.
He died in the saddle, continually planning new courses to teach as he was slowly consumed by cancer and other painful maladies.
A Unique Pedigree
Dr. Waters was buried on September 1, 2010, one hundred years to the day from St. Pius X’s promulgation of the Oath Against Modernism, in which St. Pius X taught, “In the future the doctorate in theology or Canon Law must never be conferred on anyone who has not first of all made the regular course in scholastic [Thomistic] philosophy. If such a doctorate is conferred, it is to be held as null and void.”
It was Pius X who taught in his magisterial decrees that scholasticism is a central component in the combat with Modernism. Some of those at the funeral remarked that it appeared to be one of those ironies of Providence that Dr. Waters, one of the last of the great Thomists, should be buried on this significant anniversary.
Dr. Raphael Waters was a Master of Thomistic philosophy who possessed a pedigree that few others could boast. Born in Australia, and years later starting his career as a pharmacist, he became a student of the eminent Father Austin Woodbury at the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, a unique institution in the world. The school could not grant any degrees, yet people from all walks of life flocked to it because of the genius of its founder and instructor.
Father Woodbury, widely-known as “Doc” Woodbury, was trained by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, arguably the greatest Thomist of the 20th Century. Raphael Waters studied at the feet of Father Woodbury for decades. He took all the courses at the Aquinas Academy twice, and later became Father Woodbury’s co-teacher.
Dr. Waters traveled to Canada to further his studies, where he received three canonical and civil degrees in Philosophy from the University of Montreal. These degrees established him as qualified to teach in any Catholic seminary in the world.
In Canada, he studied under world-renowned masters such as Fathers Louis-Marie Regis and Louis-Bertrand Geiger. He said repeatedly, however, that the best of all his masters who towered head and shoulder above the rest was the “boy from the bush,” Father Woodbury.
For seven years he served as assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. In 1976 he accepted a position at Niagara University in Lewiston NY, where he served as Professor of philosophy until he resigned in 2004.
In 2005, he founded the Aquinas School of Philosophy. This was the last great project of his life to which he devoted all of his time and energy.
He lectured every Friday night, first at a parish church hall in Niagara Falls, then at the Education Room in St. Mary’s hospital in Lewiston. The classes were free and open to all.
Dr. Dennis Bonnette, retired professor of philosophy from Niagara University and long-time colleague, who also teaches at the Aquinas School of Philosophy, said in tribute to Dr. Waters the day after his death, “Dr. Waters’ entire life was devoted to what he called the Apostolate of Scholarship… nobody was more dedicated to his students, spending many hours with them.”
The love Dr. Waters nursed towards his students was evident from the tributes they voiced after his death.
One former student drove from North Carolina to attend the funeral. Others wrote touching tributes on his webpage obituary. One reads, “I was a student on Dr. Waters at Niagara University. I remember Dr. Waters fondly. He was a dedicated teacher who cared deeply for his students. Thank you, Dr. Waters, for courageously teaching the truth.”
Father Francis DeRosa, a former student of Dr. Waters, drove from Virginia to celebrate the Funeral Mass in Niagara Falls. In his homily, Father DeRosa said that apart from his parents, Dr. Waters was the single most determining factor in his decision to become a priest: “It was through the teaching of Dr. Waters that I truly came to understand the Catholic Church as the one true Church established by Christ.”
Dr. Waters’ dedication to scholarship is demonstrated by the fact that upon retirement at age 80, when many a man is ready to “take it easy”, he went on to found his own school: The Aquinas School of Philosophy. He did this to keep alive the vital philosophical teachings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas so woefully neglected in our time.
Indeed, he embodied 2500 years of the best of Western philosophical thought, and believed himself duty-bound to continue transmitting these great truths to others for as long as God gave him life.
Thomism Scorned
Dr. Waters was appalled at the state of education, and especially at the state of philosophy taught in Catholic colleges and universities. Thomistic scholasticism is out of fashion among Catholic academics, and has been so for decades.
Even prior to Vatican II, the progressivist proponents of the “New Theology” scorned scholasticism, claiming it too difficult for modern man to understand, and propounded new philosophical systems such as existentialism that would allegedly speak to modern man in his own language.
As early as 1950, keen Thomists such as Father David Greenstock warned against this new development: “We are asked to accept, in exchange for this solid foundation [of Thomism], the fluid concepts of a new philosophy, destined to change with time – we are told – like everything else in this fluid world. This, to our way of thinking, is not merely unreasonable, but also very dangerous.”
This new approach lacked the clarity and precision of Thomistic philosophy and introduced much mischief. It also cut the Catholic from his past, making the centuries-old Catholic language of scholasticism a foreign language to him.
This new approach was also the basis for progressive bishops and theologians at Vatican II to insist that Council documents be drafted in so-called pastoral (ambiguous) language. For example, the Decree on Ecumenism never defines ecumenism. The Council lays stress on “human dignity”, but never defines human dignity, etc.
Even Father Joseph Ratzinger, a young progressive theologian at Vatican II who was an adherent of the New Theology, rejoiced that the Council documents would not be drafted in scholastic terminology, as has been documented in past issues of Catholic Family News.
This lack of precision of Vatican II documents was alluded to by Bishop Thomas Morrow, a prelate who attended the Council. Catholic World News reported Bishop Morrow’s statement, “I was relieved when we were told that this Council was not aiming at defining or giving final statements on doctrine, because a statement of doctrine has to be very carefully formulated, and I would have regarded the Council documents as tentative and liable to be reformed.”
The chaos resulting from these documents is well attested by the present ruinous state of the Church throughout the world. The very fact it is commonly held that Vatican II documents can have both a liberal interpretation and a conservative interpretation (the hermeneutic of discontinuity/hermeneutic of continuity dichotomy) testifies to the want of scholastic precision in the documents themselves. No one even pretends the Decrees of Trent or Vatican I can be interpreted in any other manner than the precise language in which they are written.
The wholesale abandonment of scholasticism quickly spread throughout Catholic universities, where the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas was ignored, and a confused modern approach put in its place.
The Science of philosophy is replaced with the “History of Philosophy”, which introduces the student to hundreds of conflicting thinkers, but never teaches the student how to think. This results in the belief that philosophy is nothing more than a contradictory jumble of personal ideas and ideals.
“The ‘History of Philosophy’ is the worst way to teach or study philosophy”, insisted Dr. Waters. A History of Philosophy course has its place for students who already have years of solid philosophical instruction, and whose minds are trained in the true science that gives them the ability to recognize errors of deceptive systems.
It is akin to attending a school of architecture where the student is taught a history of the various styles of structures from ancient Greece to modern New York, but never learns how to build a building.
The disorder in philosophy is worse, as it necessarily flows into confusion in Ethics, and to a grand perversion of the way Ethics is taught. The modern instructor does not teach the student the sound objective principles of Aristotle and Aquinas by which to judge moral actions. A contemporary Ethics course often consists of a text book that is merely a collection of essays from various authors presenting conflicting views. On Abortion, two essays in favor, two essays against; Euthanasia: two essays in favor, two essays against; Capital Punishment: two essay in favor, two essays against.
The student, who is not taught any firm principles by which to judge, is then told to make up his own uninformed mind. In the end, the student will be swayed in moral matters either by gut feeling, or by personal interests, or by popular liberal sentiment. The deformed student will also come to accept the prevailing error taught in modern universities: that there is no objective moral law.
This is not education, but deformation. One can only pity students and their parents who spend vast sums of money, and go into debt for years, to receive this perverse de-education.
Philosophy is a Science
By contrast, Dr. Waters, along with Father Woodbury and St. Thomas Aquinas, rightly teach that philosophy is a science that gives certitude to the mind. Dr. Waters defined philosophy as “certain knowledge of all things through their ultimate causes in the light of the principles of reason.”
By “certain knowledge”, he means “sure knowledge”.
Dr. Waters’ mentor, Father Woodbury, spends a remarkable nine pages in his unpublished Introduction to Philosophy, demonstrating with pitiless logic: “Philosophy is knowledge of all things through highest causes, proceeding under the natural light of human reason.” Here, both Dr. Waters and Father Woodbury simply reiterate the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas: “Wisdom [i.e. philosophy] is the science which studies first and universal causes; wisdom considers the first cause of all causes.”
Philosophy differs from the experimental sciences as it studies the ultimate cause of all things.
For example, as the philosopher Brother Benignus noted, the science of physics formulates the laws of motion, but it does not answer the question “Why is there motion in the universe”? Biology sets out to explain the functions, likeness and unlikeness of living things, but it cannot answer the origin, principle and purpose of life. Experimental psychology seeks to describe the behavior of man, but it cannot answer the questions: “What is man?” or “what is the reason of man’s existence?”
“The philosopher is above all the guardian of the principles of reason”, Dr. Waters taught. Principles of reason are so fundamental that they cannot be proved, only defended. Some of these principles of reason include.
• Nothing can both be and not be at the same time and under the same circumstances (this is the principle of non-contradiction which is the most fundamental principle of reason).
• Whatever undergoes movement is moved by another;
• Every agent acts for the sake of an end;
• The whole is greater than its part;
• It is never lawful to do an evil act for the sake of a good end.
These and other principles of reason are the tools of the philosopher by which he forms solid judgments about the world around him.
The principles of reason are employed in every branch of true philosophy: Logic; Cosmology; Philosophical Psychology; Metaphysics; Poietics; Ethics, and the rest. All of these sciences, properly taught according to the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition, form a magnificent whole that support and complete one another.
For example, one cannot have sound notion of what is proper human behavior (Ethics) unless one has a correct understanding of what is human nature (Philosophical Psychology), or of the existence of God as our last end (Metaphysics).
Another advantage of sound philosophy is that it prevents one from bowing down before the altar of experimental science. Professor Stephen Hawking and his bogus claim that the universe can be explained without God do not intimidate a man familiar with the metaphysical teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas.
In his new book The Grand Design – which as of mid-September has sold over 36,000 copies – Hawking claims, “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists,” and it is not necessary to invoke God as the source of all creation.
In other words, Hawking says that the entire universe came from nothing, that we have a magnificent effect without a cause, that nothing produced everything. This absurdity, which we see nowhere else in all of creation, is what Hawking invokes to explain all of creation.
As philosopher Dr. Bonnette remarked when he heard Hawking’s assertion, “This is what happens when a physicist tries to do metaphysics. He’s speaking outside his field.” The modern world in its godless ignorance prostrates itself before the scientist Hawking. The true philosopher regards Hawking as an object to be pitied.
The Aquinas School of Philosophy
Dr. Raphael Waters taught the true science of scholastic philosophy at his Aquinas School of Philosophy. Between 2005 and 2007, he delivered courses in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics. I was privileged to start attending his classes in spring 2007, and recorded a series of stand-alone lectures on various topics, a full course on Metaphysics, and a full course on Philosophical Psychology.
In fact, at the time he was teaching Philosophical Psychology, he had an accident at home that laid him up for 10 months. On a Sunday night in winter at about 9:30, he fell in his bathroom, crushed his ribs when he hit the bathtub, and lay there all night unable to move.
Providentially, a driver from the cancer institute, who had come the next morning to take him to hospital, called the police when Dr. Waters did not answer the door. The entire time he was hospitalized from this accident, wracked in pain, his only thought was returning to his students.
On September 11, 2009, Dr. Waters began his course on Ethics, which would alas remain unfinished. While giving this course, he was in an out of the hospital, and was also undergoing cancer treatment at Roswell Park Institute in Buffalo.
On Friday January 22, 2010 when we were about halfway through the Ethics course, he opened the class with a special thank you to all of us who came to the school, supported it, and spread word about it (it is actually we who owed thanks to him). He told some of us privately that he was scheduled for a special meeting at Roswell Cancer Institute the following Monday, and they had bad news for him.
The next night, January 23, he experienced such strong pains in his legs (due to another malady unrelated to his cancer) he was rushed to the hospital. He would never return to class.
Above all, he was concerned for the future of his school. As I have recorded his lectures and have them on audio CD, the class continued to meet each Friday night in Lewiston to listen to his recorded talks and continue the study of philosophy.
In April, his long-time friend and colleague Dr. Dennis Bonnette was able to return and resume teaching. The school thus continues. Dr. Bonnette has delivered a brief course on points of Metaphysics, and is now conducting his own course on the Philosophy of Human Nature. He is a superb teacher.
All of these classes are being recorded and will be released through Oltyn Library Services at www.aquinasphilosophy.com (see page 7). Dr. Waters’ unfinished Ethics course will also be released before the end of the year.
In the Saddle
I will close with a consideration that indicates the remarkable character of Dr. Waters; his determination to carry on. Throughout his final months, even though he would never return to class, he did not give up his plans to continue.
One day last February, when I visited him at the hospital, he laid out four other courses he was planning to teach: Logic, Epistemology, a course on Dr. Woodbury’s Introduction to Philosophy, and a fourth that I don’t remember. This was apart from his determination to complete his unfinished Ethics course.
It was edifying and humbling to see this 86-year-old man, literally dying from cancer, steadfast in his resolve to teach in the future.
His article against the fallacy of homosexual “marriage”, on page 5 of this issue, is something he wrote and sent to me only two weeks before his death. Even in the last days of his life on earth, he was still working out a new Prospectus for the school.
He always kept going. He never gave up. He never said, “I’ve done enough”. He never said, “I’m too old or too sick to continue”. In this and in his lifelong dedication to truth, he is model for us all.
Please pray for the repose of the soul of Dr. Raphael Waters. May he rest in peace.
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