New Quaker Notebook

Once again the courageous Rep Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has brought articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney. Watch and listen to the amazing video of his presentation yesterday before the US House of Representatives:

... The Vice President subverted the national security interests of the United States by setting the stage for the loss of more than 3800 United States service members; the loss of more than 1 million innocent Iraqi citizens since the United States invasion; the loss of approximately $500 billion in war costs which has increased our Federal debt; the loss of military readiness within the United States Armed Services due to overextension, lack of training and lack of equipment; the loss of United States credibility in world affairs; and the decades of likely blowback created by the invasion of Iraq.

In all of this, Vice President Richard B. Cheney has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as Vice President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office....

[ READ MORE » ]

After listening to the collected lies of the Vice President (in three long articles), the House agreed to send the resolution to the John Conyers' Judiciary Committee for real consideration.

On this subject, then, let us recall some pertinent quotes:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - Abraham Lincoln¹

"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." - President Bush²

1. There is dissent as to whether this famous quote, usually attributed to one of Lincoln's 1858 speeches in Clinton, IL, is accurate. See this CNN article for a source for dissent. But see the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Volume 3) on how this quotation was handled over a hundred years ago: "In 1905 testimony was gathered by the Chicago Tribune and Brooklyn Eagle to prove that Lincoln used the epigram at Clinton. The testimony was conflicting and dubious in some particulars, but the epigram has remained a favorite in popular usage. Neither the report in the Pantagraph which provides the text of the Clinton speeches, nor any other contemporary Lincoln reference located by the present editors, makes any reference to the epigram." It should be noted that the saying has also been attributed both to P.T. Barnum and to Bob Marley.
2. "Remarks by the President on Teaching American History and Civic Education," White House News Release, September 17, 2002. The best version of this still has to be Andy Dick's Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist.

Watson Gets a Crick

James Watson's recent disgrace, including his forced resignation from Long Island's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he served as Chancellor and was a member of its trustees for the past 43 years, is the pathetic culmination of unique modern media events. What happened shouldn't have happened—or what did happen should have had a different result.

In the past year, as bee populations in the US and Europe began disappearing through what has been called Colony Collapse Disorder, a reputed quote by Einstein was making the rounds: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left." Aside from the fact that it is probably not something Einstein ever said, one still wants to know whether Einstein had an expertise in this area.¹ Was this something he studied? This now seems doubtful. In The Technological Society Jacques Ellul was bothered by the naivete of our modern scientists and their propensity for emitting "a quantity of down-at-the-heel platitudes" when they speak outside of their scientific specialty. Says Ellul:

It makes one think back on the collection of mediocrities accumulated by Einstein when he spoke of God, the state, peace, and the meaning of life. It is clear that Einstein, extraordinary mathematical genius that he was, was no Pascal; he knew nothing of political or human reality, or, in fact anything at all outside his mathematical research. The banality of Einstein's remarks in matters outside of his specialty is as astonishing as his genius within it.²

Ellul thought that "the specialized application of all one's faculties in a particular area inhibits the consideration of things in general." Perhaps, but we also have a media system that encourages the kind of intellectual-credentials trading that we see not only in Einstein's case, but also as it is applied to sales of automobiles, recuperative-sleep beds, fried chicken, Coca-Cola, and term life insurance. If not intellectuals, then sports and thespian geniuses—somehow the possession of advanced talent in one area is sufficient qualification for expert pronouncements in another area. It's encouraged, because it's a workable marketing strategy, and somehow expected, and we often don't have a problem with that unless the "expert" crosses the invisible line dividing what can be said in public and what can't. This happened to Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder in 1988 when he was fired, after 12 years as a CBS sports analyst, for voicing his opinion as to why he thought black athletes were more successful in sport than white athletes.

In Watson's case, his offending remarks came in an interview with the UK's Sunday Times:

He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really," and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true." He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level." He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

Now this isn't the first time his mouth has gotten him into trouble. He aroused controversy in 2000 when he suggested a link between skin color and sex drive,³ and he's made other comments that certainly appear to have scientific backing, but probably not: "If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," he said in a UK documentary in 2003.⁴ "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Well, back to Africa. Watson tried to take back his remarks, but that didn't work. Reported the Times:

Last night, at a book launch at the Royal Society, Dr Watson withdrew the words attributed to him. "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly," he said.

"That is not what I meant. More importantly, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

He claimed to be baffled at the words attributed to him by The Sunday Times Magazine. "I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people reading those words have reacted in the ways they have," he added.

A spokesman for The Sunday Times said that the interview with Dr Watson was recorded and that the newspaper stood by the story.

That was October 18. In the evening the trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him.⁵ He resigned in the following week, on October 25.⁶ He gets to keep his house and apparently he also gets to go to the office every day,⁷ but now he has to live on his investments, annuities, book royalties, including those from his new memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, and whatever else Nobel-prize scientists live on in their retirement.

It's interesting, I think, that Dr Watson has been condemned also for folding so quickly. This is what columnist and political pundit Pat Buchanan thinks.⁸ In this Buchanan is joined by Nigerian Idang Alibi in a spirited, two-part defense of Watson.⁹ While Buchanan thinks Watson's statement is correct as expressing a truth of genetics, Alibi is convinced that Watson's statement is correct as expressing an exceptional, abstract fact about the miserable state of the people of the African continent. Both come to the conclusion that the intelligence of the African people is not the same as that of non-African people. Alibi, the Nigerian, says it's "self-evident" that "Black people are less intelligent than the White people," and uses his own country as "a prime example of the inferiority of the black race when compared to other races." But he doesn't attribute this to mere genetics (he's not a geneticist, after all), pointing instead to "the five Ds: disorderliness, debts, diseases, deaths and disasters."

Alibi appears to be a lone voice in this wilderness. Alas, this controversy will die along with all others that begin and end with the cry "Racist!" and the long-standing suffering of the people of the African continent will go on until the many conditions that affect intelligence are empirically explored within the broader context of the social, political, health, and economic environment of people of any color and race. I suspect we will find intelligence to be far more diversified among people of all colors and effectively changeable with the alterations of those physical and moral conditions that collectively make up the determinants of so-called intelligence. At least we may then have a broader shield to protect us from the "down-at-the-heel platitudes" Ellul warned us about, like those from the "snowflakes" of Donald Rumsfeld, who even suggested that "Muslims are against physical labor."¹⁰

1. Snopes.com can't find a reputable source for the bee quote as even likely attributable to Einstein. See also the message thread there.
2. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage Books, 1967), 435.
3. See "Agent provocateur pursues happiness," British Medical Journal, July 1, 2000, BMJ 321:12.
4. "Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer," New Scientist, February 28, 2003, 18:13.
5. "Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees and President Bruce Stillman, Ph.D. Regarding Dr Watson's Comments in The Sunday Times on October 14, 2007," Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Release, October 18, 2007.
6. "Controversial Nobel winner resigns," CNN, October 25, 2007. See also "James Watson Quits Post After Remarks on Races," New York Times, October 26, 2007. Watson's letter is posted at the Great Beyond blog at Nature.com.
7. On this see "James Watson Cold Springs Harbor Hostage?" at Old Atlantic Lighthouse blog, October 30, 2007.
8. "The Recantation of Dr Watson," American Cause, October 30, 2007. Buchanan reads Watson as saying: "From a long life and his own reading of IQ test scores, he believes that intelligence is not distributed equally among the races. That conclusion was also reached by social scientists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in the 1990s best-seller 'The Bell Curve.' The SAT scores seem to bear them out."
9. "I Agree with Dr Watson," Daily Trust, October 25, 2007; and "I Agree with Dr Watson (2)," Daily Trust, November 1, 2007.
10. "From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld ...," Washington Post, November 1, 2007, A01.

Impeach Cheney Redux

Watson Gets a Crick