A "Heads Up":

From the 12th through the 16th centuries, monks laboring in monasteries would routinely scrap the ink off the ancient manuscripts in their libraries in order to reuse the parchment to copy scripture.  Thusly, untold ancient texts were lost to mankind.

It was an act then of incredible serendipity that in 1417 one Poggio Bracciolini, rummaging through the library of a monastery in Italy, opened and recognized an extraordinary work by the ancient Greek poet Lucretius, a contemporary of Cicero.  In its 1700 plus lines De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) summarized the atomic theory of Democritus and the atheism of Epicurus, as well as laying out an ancient theory of evolution.  Bracciolini obtained permission to copy the text and over the following couple of decades distributed it to other scholars across Europe, giving birth to the Renaissance and its natural offspring, The Enlightenment.  Among thinkers who were influenced by De Rerum Natura were Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Thomas Jefferson.  Oh, and lest I forget, Christopher Hitchens (He included a passage as the very first piece in his book The Portable Atheist.). Quite a fan club.

I mention all this because of a book I recently discovered, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.  In its pages, recently the recipient of a 2012 Pulitzer Prize, Stephan Greenblatt tells the story of the manuscript’s rediscovery and its influence, as well as highlighting some of the work’s more compelling contributions to modern thought and perhaps even the "sexual revolution".

I am loving it, and I highly recommend it.  Get it and read it before the Religious Right hears about it and tries to have it banned.

Incredibly...

Reports out of Afghanistan today indicate that Muslim extremists poisoned the water at a school for girls in order to prevent the girls from being properly educated, causing outrage to erupt among American Christians.

In other news, American Christians today rallied against the teaching of the theories of evolution and the Big Bang in public schools.

Yeah. No shit.

Why I am supporting Gary Johnson

Gary Johnson is NOT the most libertarian candidate seeking the LP presidential nomination.  Lee Wrights, whom I genuinely like and admire, probably fills that bill.  That is not to say that I agree with Lee on every issue, but I can guarantee that whatever the question posited, Mr. Wrights will give the Libertarian answer 100% of the time, and mean it.

Bill Still may have been the most erudite of the candidates.  I say may have been because he appeared to withdraw during the TX LP debates.  The problem with Mr. Still, as with Carl Peterson, another accomplished and dedicated libertarian, is that he was a one-trick pony seeking to lead a nation with more than one problem and thus desperate for more than one answer.

R.J. Harris likewise has withdrawn, which is too bad because he along with Wrights and Johnson was a capable candidate.

That given, of the candidates above why did I choose to support Governor Johnson? 

To be brief I will cite what for me were two overriding factors:

• Though perhaps not the “purest” Libertarian (though I am not sure what that really means and truly do not like so differentiating among Libertarians), Governor Johnson is decidedly and happily a classical liberal. He believes the government which governs least is the government that governs best, a fact he has clearly demonstrated.  I personally gravitate toward constitutional Libertarianism, desiring the smallest government necessary to guarantee my rights to life, liberty, and property, but also recognizing that only a government of political equals can effectuate those ideals.  Therefore calls to eradicate the income tax and replace it with nothing, for instance, while crowd pleasers ring hollow without an accompanying vision for what is to follow.  Governor Johnson supports marriage equality, an end to the war on drugs, ending foreign aid as well as our support of the UN and World Bank, and  an end to the income tax and IRS (But by replacing at least some of that revenue with a consumption tax while we responsibly wind down many of the programs that have brought us to the real possibility of economic implosion.)
• Gravitas.  Governor Johnson is the only of our candidates who can look the American people in the eye and say regarding the downsizing of government, “I have done that successfully, and it is not difficult if it is really what you want to do.”  The authority and authenticity arising out of having left a state government smaller and a state better off economically when he left office than when he first entered government, is something that not only can no other LP candidate say, but that none of the candidates of the two “major” parties can say either.  It could be a game changer.

I understand why some of my friends would choose to support Lee Wrights because it grieves me that I cannot.  For me it comes down to a long-range plan spanning more than one election cycle, and the conviction that our candidates must not appear “radical” to a basically centrist American electorate.  They must identify us with what is best about the American system, and not as a party anxious to throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

Please note:  I am speaking of perception here, not reality. Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines, once famously said that if a customer found a soiled tray top on one of their planes, they were likely to assume that the airline was also sloppy with its engine maintenance.  Likewise, we also need to be aware of such consumer tendencies.

That said, I urge your support for Governor Gary Johnson. Visit his website and see for yourself.

Time to leave the GOP tent?

In the mid-1990s, the Republican Party left me.

I know that sounds trite, but I had been originally attracted to the GOP by Barry Goldwater and a handful of other small-government, classical-liberal politicians.  Of course Senator Goldwater got clobbered in his presidential run, but just twenty years later Ronald Reagan swept to victory on the wings of his proclaimed (small-l) libertarianism.

Unfortunately President Reagan failed to govern as a libertarian, with ever-more bloated government and exploding deficits as well as clandestine wars.  The final straw came with the Gingrich/DeLay betrayal of the Contract with America, an episode which left me no doubt that the Republican Party never had any intention, nor ever would, of returning our nation to real constitutional government.

Luckily for me I found the Libertarian Party.  I am under no delusions the LP will enjoy massive electoral success anytime soon, it is too weighted down with an anarchical wing that is simply not reality-based, along with archaic rules that make it impossible to effectively build a party capable of actually winning majority support.  But still we soldier on, if for no other reason than the LP is the only political party in the U.S. that still stands for government confined by constitutional limits and the individual as supreme per the classical-liberal philosophy of our Founders.

What is intriguing to me is the number of liberty-leaning folks, some of them friends, who doggedly stick with the Republican Party.  One only has to review the history of state legislatures and Congresses when they have been controlled by the GOP over the past twenty years.  The drumbeat is always the same, the people’s business, not to mention the Constitution, is a distant second to an undeniably anti-science, theocratic, misogynous, interventionist, and militaristic agenda.  It is as if the Islamic Parties of God occupied the very soul of this once-proud party.

The time has come, it seems to me, to permit the GOP to collapse under the weight of its own self-righteous arrogance. Rick Santorum?  Michelle Bachman?  Newt Gingrich?  Twenty-first century America does not need a flat-earth political party any more than, I would say even less than, a fascist-corporatist party under the guise of liberal-socialism.  No real lover of liberty can, in good conscience, remain any longer within their bronze-age tent.

A Question for Mr. Romney:

Rick Santorum is kaput, leaving open the possibility, however minute, that there is a just god.

So now our attention turns to Mitt Romney.  It would be interesting of course to corner Mr. Romney with a question or two about magic undies, or the baptism of long-deceased folks of other-than-Mormon persuasion.  The hell with the minor weirdness of the religion he espouses however, I say let's cut to the core of Mormon Moronic silliness.  Let's ask Mitt "Where in the hell is the steel mill?"

The following will explain in detail what I mean, and why it is a question every Mormon, and particularly every Mormon who would be president, should have to answer.  It was written several years ago by Frank Zindler.  Mr. Zindler is a linguist, and a member of the Board of Directors of American Atheists.

HOW DO YOU LOSE A STEEL MILL?

 By Frank R. Zindler

The next time Mormon missionaries come calling at your door, invite them in.  You have an obligation to educate them. But before you can bring them to understand the error of their ways, it is necessary to get their attention - I mean really get their attention. This you can do by asking them, as you help them remove their coats, if they are wearing their magic underwear - their so-called "temple endowments." Ask them to explain the theory behind their magic unmentionables; especially ask for the reason why up until 1923 they were made with open crotches - and then ask them if their long johns can protect them against logic and science.

The missionaries will probably be a bit surprised to hear that they need protection against logic and science, so you will have to show them some of the ways in which Mormonism is falsified by science. For example, the Book of Mormon implies that Jews fleeing from Jerusalem shortly before and after 600 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) made their way to South or Central America and turned into Indians. Of course, the magical aspects of this story lie outside the scope of science. Nevertheless, if Jews were transformed into Amerindians just a few millennia ago, there are ways in which scientific methods could be used to falsify or verify the fact.

Recently it has been possible to work out the genetic relations of all the major human populations in the world by comparing the DNA molecules carried in the mitochondria of human cells. Mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, and they are inherited only along the maternal line. In a seminal paper published in the British journal Nature, Rebecca Cann and her coworkers analyzed the mitochondrial DNA from all major groups of humans on the planet and found that all human mitochondrial DNAs could be derived from just a single woman living in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago. (Of course, this does not mean that all humans living today had only one ancestor alive at that time; it simply means that all mitochondria, as a result of hazards of transmission, are derived from just one female of that prehistoric generation.) Although it is difficult to identify all the twigs on the genealogical tree in the article cited, it is clear that the authors did not find any surprising link between American Indians and Jews. They refer to "Asians or American Indians," and Jews aren't even mentioned - presumably because they do not differ significantly from other Caucasians. Mormon apologists are invited to do their own DNA comparisons. Until they do, we may consider the transmogrification of Jews into Amerindians mere fantasy.

Archaeology is another science that has much to say about the Mormon idea that Mesopotamians and Israelites came to America around 3000 and 600 B.C.E., respectively, and originated the cultures and populations of the New World. When Joseph Smith saw how easy it was to pull people's legs, he made up an incredible story about Jaredites escaping from the Tower of Babel in Mesopotamia, building barrels which were more barrels than boats, and floating to America in these sealed vessels - after "the Lord caused stones to shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness" (Ether 6:3).

When Smith's disciples swallowed this story without a smile, Smith stretched their legs further. The kingdom founded by the Jaredites - I'm not making this up - was known as "the land of Moron."

In addition to the Jaredites, Smith created Nephites and Mulekites to help populate ancient America and take part in a drama so taut and exciting that Mark Twain referred to their history as "chloroform in print." (Twain seems to be confused in the area of anesthesiology. Readers will note from the Book of Mormon quote above that Smith's book contains Ether in print, not chloroform.) The Nephites are supposed to have escaped Jerusalem shortly before the destruction of the city in 587 B.C.E., the Mulekites shortly thereafter. The Nephites sailed east from Palestine and came ashore in South or Central America. The Mulekites are inferred to have crossed the Atlantic and landed on the Caribbean coast of Central America. Just what it was about the American environment that caused all these Caucasians to turn into Amerindians is unclear, but most Mormons will tell you it was "sin" that did it.

The Fauna Of The Book Of Mormon

When Smith published his "golden bible " in 1830, he gave elephants to his Jaredite actors, along with asses, cows, oxen, and horses. While this may seem startling to readers today, in upstate New York in the 1930s there was nothing odd about this. Thomas Jefferson had discovered the remains of an extinct mammoth, and it was probably widely assumed that ancient Amerindians had domesticated elephants in the way that modern Indians have done. I doubt that many rural New Yorkers then knew that the Amerindians had had no horses or cows until they got them from the Spaniards.

Although horses originated in North America, they - along with the various American species of "elephants" - went extinct many thousands of years before anything that could be called civilization had evolved in Central or South America. At no time were cows present before the advent of Hispanic culture. No certain remains of pre-Columbian horses, asses, or cows have ever been found in the Americas. Even in the improbable event that rare, relict populations of wild horses in the remote regions of South America or elsewhere managed to survive the mass extinction of the American mega-fauna that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, it is an archaeological certainty that no horses ever pulled the chariots of Jewish Aztecs or Babylonian Mayas - or should it be Babylonian Aztecs and Jewish Mayas?

No animal-drawn wheeled vehicles were ever used in pre-Columbian America. No chariots. The reason is that there were no suitable draft animals to pull them. Despite Joseph Smith's claim that his ancient American Christians had cows and oxen, none existed in America before the Spaniards brought them. With only the exception of the bison and the reindeer - notably scarce in Mexico where the major Book of Mormon civilizations are alleged to have existed - no animals existed in America suitable for pulling chariots or wagons. The closest thing to an American draft animal is the llama, but during the entire domestication history of this Andean animal it was used to carry packs, not to pull vehicles.

It goes without saying that this problem worries Mormon apologists a great deal. Arguments both ingenious and specious have been constructed to deal with it. In his book An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, John Sorenson, one of the most imaginative of the apologists to deal with this problem, argues that it is very difficult to know exactly what the ancients actually meant by such words as horse, cow, or chariot. Typical of his modus operandi is his attempt to explain away the fact that no pre-Columbian cows have ever been discovered in America:  But isn't it obvious that the "cow" of the Book of Mormon was our familiar bovine, straight out without all this hedging?

No, it is not at all obvious. First, we are trying to find out what the Book of Mormon really means by the words we have in English translation; we are not trying either to simplify or to complicate the matter, but only to be correct. In the effort to learn the truth, nothing can be assumed obvious. Second, there is a lack of reliable evidence - historical, archaeological, zoological, or linguistic - that Old World cows were present in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. The same is true of some of the other creatures mentioned in the Nephite record, where modern readers may feel they are already familiar with the animals on the basis of the translated names. In these cases we have to find another way to read the text in order to make sense of it.

So what might the Nephite term translated by Joseph Smith as cow actually have signified?

Sorenson goes on to suggest that the "cows" to which his prophet referred might actually have been deer, bison, alpacas, or llamas. Stretched out over the space of many pages, this type of argument is effectively seductive. But it suffers from a most serious defect. If we were dealing with ordinary translations done by ordinary scholars, his point would be very important. But we are not dealing with an ordinary translation done by someone with nothing more than a doctorate from Oxford. We are told on the title page itself that the Book of Mormon is "an account written by the hand of Mormon upon plates taken from the plates of Nephi ... To come forth by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof Sealed by the hand of Moroni, and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by way of the Gentile - The interpretation thereof by the gift of God,"

Several pages later, in the "Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith," we are told: There were two stones in silver bows - and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim deposited with the plates; and the possession and use of these stones were what Constituted Seers in ancient or former times; and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.

If Sorenson is correct in his suggestion that the cows and horses referred to in the Book of Mormon aren't really cows and horses - even though the book not only was translated with the aid of Urim and Thummim, but interpreted "by the gift and power of God" - Mormons are on the horns of a terrible dilemma. If god told Joseph Smith to translate deer or llama as cow, he is either incompetent or a liar. If god lies about llamas, why wouldn't he fib about faith? Of course, the Thummim may have blown a transistor, or the angel Moroni may have forgotten to provide the batteries for the Urim. On the other hand, it might all be the fault of the typesetter!

Returning to the subject of chariots, we may observe that chariots tend to be possessed of wheels. Contrary to the divine revelation claimed by Joseph Smith, the Amerindians never made any practical use of the wheel. The only native wheels known to archaeology are the great stone wheels used for calendars and the wheels found in children's toys. If delicate wheeled toys have survived the centuries, should not full-fledged chariots and carts have survived also? If the societies in question had wheeled vehicles for a period of more than three millennia, would we not expect to find wall paintings of them in Mexican temples and tombs? Wouldn't we find proud murals of Aztec kings driving their chariots in triumphal parades? Would we not see pictures of humble farmer-serfs tilling the king's fields with horse-drawn ploughs and hauling produce to the king in oxcarts? Once again, we see the falseness of the Mormon prophet's "inspiration."

When one reads works of fiction such as the Bible or the Book of Mormon, it is absolutely necessary to play the what-if / then / what game. One should ask questions like, "What if Caesar Augustus really did proclaim a census where everyone had to return to an ancestral home to be counted? What would have happened then?"

In the case of the Book of Mormon, we may ask "What if the ancient Amerindians did have horses and chariots? What are the implications?" For one thing, we would expect to find the remains of stone bridges and highways - not footpaths - all over the continents of North and South America (or at least all over Central America, if the Mormon revisionist geographers are to be considered). To be sure, we do know of the great highways that the Incas built. But alas for the Book of Mormon, the Inca highways were built a thousand years after the close of the Mormon story. Moreover, we know that it was runners and llamas carrying packs that traveled these highways, not horses with chariots or oxen with carts.

If horses and chariots were a common part of Amerindian life in ancient times, we should find words for horses and chariots in all the native languages - especially if they are all corrupt forms of Hebrew and Sumerian, as implied by the Book of Mormon! We should find words for bit, bridle, harness, wagon, headstall, snaffle, martingale, etc. If the Amerindians had plows to go with their horses and oxen, as Smith's novel clearly implies, we should find some - including steel ones (see discussion of steel in last section of this article). We need to know, moreover, why the only tilling tools we have ever found in the Maya territory are fire-hardened digging sticks and stone axes. Why would people so on making stone tools if they had access to iron and steel ones? As we shall see, all archaeological evidence of pre-Columbian agriculture paints a picture which is totally incompatible with the European-style agriculture implied by the Mormon stories.

Mormon Agriculture

When Joseph Smith concocted the Book of Mormon, he just assumed that the ancient Amerindians had the same kind of agriculture as that which he knew in upstate New York. Consequently, he had his ancient characters growing wheat, barley, corn, and flax, and planting vineyards for wine, and being able to understand the symbolism of the olive and trees. Now, of course, Smith was right about the corn - that is, maize. But is there anyone of Smith's day who had not heard of "Indian corn," or did not know that corn had come from the Indians? What Smith did not know, however, was that corn was but one of three staple crops raised by the Indians of Central America - the region in which the discovery of ruined civilizations had triggered enormous amounts of speculation in the time of Smith's youth. The other two major crops were squash and beans. These were supplemented by such things as avocados, amaranth, etc. You can search all you want in the Book of Mormon, but you won't find any mention, apart from corn, of the crops actually raised in ancient America. Incidentally, we have numerous cases where these crops have been preserved in archaeological sites and are easily identifiable.

What does archaeology tell us of the presence or absence of the crops Smith claimed were the staples of ancient America? No remains of wheat or domesticated barley have ever been found. In fact, the one possible pre-Columbian specimen of barley discovered at a site in Arizona is of a species different from the species of domesticated barley allegedly brought from the Near East. And what of flax? No dice, again. Fortunately for lovers of truth, the Mormon apologists cannot simply say we haven't been looking in the right place, or that the remains of these plants have all perished with the passage of time. The reason for our good fortune is the fact that these domestic plants are all flowering plants. As such, they produce pollen - in great abundance. If the so-called Mormonic civilizations had been growing these crops for even a few decades - let alone the thousands of years allegedly chronicled by the Book of Mormon - every soil coring taken in Central America should show traces of wheat, barley, and flax pollen. Pollen is one of the most indestructible natural objects known.

An example of the type of research that shows Book of Mormon agriculture to be nineteenth century fantasy is David J. Rue's 1987 paper in Nature titled "Early Agriculture and Early Postclassic Maya Occupation in Western Honduras." By studying soil corings from Lake Yojoa and Petapida Swamp, both in western Honduras, Rue was able to reconstruct the agricultural history of the area from a time 4770 years before the present up to modem times. He could tell from pollen when the region was forested, when the forest was cut and burned for agriculture, what crops were grown and for how long. Although he found clear records of pollen from corn (maize) and amaranth - two Amerindian staples - he makes no mention of wheat, barley, or flax pollen. Perhaps the Mormon Church would like to pay him to go through his cores again, looking more carefully for the mythical motes that should be in them if the Book of Mormon be true!

"Silks And Linens"

When Smith created the costuming for the characters in his unhistorical novel (that was quite a while before god told him he should be sleeping with more than one woman), he had no knowledge of the types of cloth known to the ancient Amerindians. So he saw no problem in having his ancient Mexicans wearing linens and silks. Now linen is made from the fibers of the flax plant, specifically the species known as Linum usitatissimum. This species is native to the Old World and was unknown in America before the coming of the Spaniards. It is quite certain that this species of plant did not grow in America during the three-thousand-year period allegedly chronicled by the Book of Mormon. The reason we can be so certain is that flax pollen of this species has never been found in any soil corings. It is unthinkable that flax for linen could have been grown commercially and not have contributed its pollen to the spore library yearly accumulating at the bottoms of lakes, swamps, and ponds. Ordinary soils unearthed by archaeologists should contain it, along with the pollens of wheat and barley, as we have already noted.

Instead of weaving flax fibers into linen, the ancient Americans wove cotton into cloth. In fact, the ancient Mexicans were weaving cotton fabrics by the year 5000 B.C.E. - at least two millennia before the time of the Jaredites, the mythical escapees from the Tower of Babel, who Smith claimed had floated to America in a barrel! Will readers be surprised to learn that the Book of Mormon makes no mention at all of cotton? Neither god nor Joseph Smith seems to have known what the Mexicans were substituting for fig leaves.

Smith's imposture in the Book of Mormon goes even further, however. He has many of his characters wearing silk - some as early as 600 B.C.E.! Now this is funnier than is immediately apparent. The manufacture of silk began in China and was kept as a trade secret for several thousand years. Although silk fabrics had found their way from China to the Mediterranean world by the time of Aristotle, no one in the West knew how silk was made. It was not until the year 552 C.E. that two Nestorian monks, who had lived in China, smuggled a small number of silkworm eggs out of China and brought them, together with the method for making silk, to Constantinople. This means that the Mormon prophet Lehi, who allegedly escaped from Jerusalem more than a thousand years before this date, before the Exile, could not have brought a knowledge of sericulture to the New World. Although remains of ancient fabrics have been found all over the Americas, no one has ever found remains of pre-Columbian silk. The closest thing to silks made by the Amerindians were fabrics spun from rabbit hair or the fibers of ceiba pods. Although moths of the silkworm family (Saturnidae) do exist in the Americas, it is all but impossible to unwind the agglutinated and tangled silk fibers from their cocoons. Smith could not have been more off base if he had written that the Jaredites were selling nylons on the black market.

Nephite Money

The Book of Mormon assumes a money economy existed in ancient America and gives names and values for a variety of gold and silver coins:   Now these are the names of the different pieces of their gold, and of their silver, according to their value ...

Leaving the Mormons to worry about how to make change for a "limnah," we note simply that although the ancient Americans had gold and silver in abundance, they never made coins or evolved a money economy. They used jade beads, obsidian blades, and even cacao beans as media of exchange. Never did they mint coins or create a standardized system of metal money.

Any single one of the archaeological impossibilities we have pointed out thus far should be enough to convince an unbiased scientist that the Book of Mormon is a fiction. All the more so, if we combine all the individually convincing evidences together, we must see that the fraudulence of the Book of Mormon is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt. Remember this the next time youthful "elders" knock on your front door.

Moronic And Mormonic Metallurgy

According to the Book of Ether, the Jaredites knew how to make steel: And it came to pass that Shule was angry with his brother ... Wherefore, he came to the hill Ephraim, and he did molten out of the hill, and made swords out of steel for those whom he had drawn away with him; and after he had armed them with swords he returned to the city Nehor, and gave battle unto his brother Corihor ... (Ether 7:8-9)

According to Mormon apologist David A. Palmer, this steel making occurred around the year 2500 B.C.E.!  This precedes by more than a millennium the time at which ironworking (let alone steel making!) came to Mesopotamia, the region whence the Jaredites allegedly had come!  Despite the fact that the "Morons" possessed weapons of steel, they didn't do too well. According to Paimer, in the year 2430 B.C.E. the "Moron population (was] reduced to 30 by wars." (There is no evidence that Palmer snickered when he penned the quoted line.)

But Morons were not the only ancient Americans alleged to have worked in steel. Nephites also, before they were transformed from Jews into Indians, worked in steel and other metals around the year 575 B.C.E.:  And I [Nephi] did teach my people to build buildings, and to work in all manner of wood, and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores, which were in great abundance. (2 Nephi 5:15)

As we have seen, the Book of Mormon story covers a period of time stretching from 3000 B.C.E. to 400 C.E. During that period, many millions of people possessed of steel and brass technology are alleged to have lived and died somewhere in the Americas. It is strange, therefore, to note that no one has ever found any steel artifact datable to Pre-Columbian times. Although a few ancient objects made of meteoric iron have been discovered in America as well as in Eurasia, no objects made of smelted iron have ever been found in America - even though billions of such things should have been made if the Book of Mormon story were true.

Now, of course, the defenders of the Mormon kingdom might say we just haven't been looking in the right place. Alas for the apologists, the Book of Mormon tells us precisely where to look for such artifacts. It claims that between one-half and one million steel-owning people died all  at once, in one spot, around the year 400 C.E., in a climactic battle at "Hill Cumorah." According to Mormon tradition, Hill Cumorah is a glacial drumlin situated near the upstate New York town of Palmyra. It is the site of an annual "Mormon Pageant." Mormon revisionist geographers, however, place the hill in the Tuxtla Mountains, in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

If the Book of Mormon were true, either the hill in New York or the hill in Mexico should be one enormous pile of rusted iron (from the swords and other steel objects) and phosphate (from the bones of all the people slain). It would be a valuable source of scrap iron and phosphate fertilizer!

As crazy as all this may seem, there's more to the Mormon story which is even crazier. According to the Book of Ether, there was an earlier battle in which even more people were slain at one spot:

And it came to pass when Coriantumr had recovered of his wounds - . . He saw that there had been slain by the sword [more steel!] already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children ... (Ether 15: 1-2)

Assuming that "mighty men" would comprise from one-third to one-fifth of a population, we must conclude that six to ten million Jaredites deposited their steel and their bones at the site of the battle in question. If the Mormon writer David Palmer is correct in his belief that Hill Ramah (where the Jaredites died) and Hill Cumorah (where most everyone else died) are the same hill, and that both are to be identified with Cerro El Vigia in the Tuxtla Mountains, it would seem that satellites equipped with magnetometers should be able to verify the fact easily.

But neither iron nor phosphate is found at Hill Cumorah in New York, nor will it be found - I am prophesying - in the volcanic Tuxtla Mountains in Veracruz. Not surprisingly, the Mormon Church conducts no mining operations at the Palmyra site. The only thing of importance occurring there is the annual falsification of American history.

In concluding our discussion of how Mormon mythology has fallen on its own (steel) sword, we must make one final observation. If millions and millions of people made and used weapons and tools of steel for a period spanning more than three millennia, not only should archaeologists find plentiful remains of swords, chariot axles, anvils, sickles, and many other iron-based artifacts, they should be finding the remains of steel mills all over the territory covered by Smith's cast of characters!  It is perfectly conceivable that one might lose a steel sword.

But how in hell can you lose a steel mill?

Ask the missionaries the next time they call. 

Thank you god...

One of my favorite parts of the recent Reason Rally was the performance of Tim Minchin.  Other than his cynical comment about the reason for the Rally, "It's amazing really, that 300 years after the Enlightenment, we have to have a rally for the fucking obvious", perhaps my favorite part of Mr. Minchin's performance was his piece "Thank you god (for fixing the cataracts of Sam's mum)".  Following are some of the lyrics:

"Thank you, Sam, for showing how my point of view has been so flawed.

I assumed there was no God at all but now I see that’s cynical.

It’s simply that his interests aren’t particularly broad.

He’s largely undiverted by the starving masses,

or the inequality between the various classes.

He gives out strictly limited passes,

redeemable for surgery or two-for-one glasses.

I feel so shocking for historically mocking.

Your interests are clearly confined to the ocular.

I bet given the chance, you’d eschew the divine

and start a little business selling contacts online.

Fuck me Sam, what are the odds that of history’s endless parade of gods

that the God you just happened to be taught to believe in

is the actual one and he digs on healing,

but not the AIDS-ridden African nations,

the victims of the plague or the flood-addled Asians,

but healthy, privately-insured Australians

with common and curable corneal degeneration?

This story of Sam’s has but a single explanation:

a surgical God who digs on magic operations.

It couldn’t be mistaken attribution of causation,

born of a coincidental temporal correlation,

exacerbated by a general lack of education 


vis-a-vis physics in Sam’s parish congregation.

And it couldn’t be that all these pious people are liars.

It couldn’t be an artifact of confirmation bias,

a product of groupthink, a mass delusion,

an Emperor’s New Clothes-style fear of exclusion.

No, it’s more likely to be an all-powerful magician

than the misdiagnosis of the initial condition,

or one of many cases of spontaneous remission,

or a record-keeping glitch by the local physician.

No, the only explanation for Sam’s mum’s seeing:

they prayed to an all-knowing superbeing,

to the omnipresent master of the universe,

and he liked the sound of their muttered verse.

So for a bit of a change from his usual stunt

of being a sexist, racist, murderous cunt,

he popped down to Dandenong and just like that,

used his powers to heal the cataracts

of Sam’s mum – of Sam’s mum!"

You gotta wonder...

I spent 10 years living  in Gainesville, FL (Go Gators!) before settling at least temporarily just north of Dallas, TX.  Occasionally however, our of morbid curiosity I suppose, I like to check out the latest news on the Gainesville Sun website.  This morning I was not to be disappointed.

Item the First: Apparently the pizza wars have heated up, at least in Lake City, FL. It seems two former managers of the area Domino's franchise are in the local jail awaiting trial on arson charges.  You guessed it, when the local Papa John's began to cut into their sales (and bonuses) they decided the best approach would be to, ah, eliminate the competition.  Gas cans with finger prints left at the scene are just some of the evidence involved.

And Number Two:  A Gainesville area man's body has been pulled from an underwater cave in one of the many natural springs that dot the Gainesville area.  Friends and family said that the diver "died doing what he loved most".  Which, it seems from the number of similar deaths that occur every year from the same pursuit, was being incredibly stupid.

A Little Easter Quiz...

As we approach the date of what is unquestionably Christendom's most immoral, grotesque, and disgusting holiday, I would posit a few questions for the consideration of its celebrants:

• On what day was the "Last Supper"; Passover or the Day of Preparation?
• If, as the Gospels agree, the disciples fell asleep when with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, how is it the Gospels still can report everything Jesus said and did?
• How is it possible, do you suppose, that during Jesus' crucifixion a great earthquake would occur, renting the curtains in the Temple, opening graves, and leading to the dead walking around Jerusalem and talking to people, and yet not a single government official, scribe, or startled resident recorded such an incredible event for posterity?  Not a single, contemporaneous account to corroborate the claims of accounts written three generations later? And lastly
• Who went to visit Jesus' tomb on what is now called Easter Sunday, what did they find, and what did they do?

Don't rush...we wouldn't want you to get anything wrong, and be especially certain when answering the first and last questions above that you consult all four Gospels.

A note to Ron Paul supporters....

It's over folks. Congressman Paul has once again been shunted aside by Republican insiders and the lamestream media.  Any further investment of your time or money will end up accomplishing nothing of lasting importance.  I am sorry to be so blunt, but the facts are the facts.

How then to keep the message of Liberty alive through the general election?  The only answer to that is Gary Johnson. With the money and breadth of volunteer help that RP has enjoyed, Governor Johnson would be able to participate in the Presidential Debates and have a real, and potentially long-lasting, effect on American politics.

You need to choose now whether the message you care so much about reaches the maximum number of people possible, at the time they will be paying the most attention to politics and America's future.  Unfortunately Ron Paul will not be in a position to deliver that message.  Governor Johnson will.

Please visit the Gary Johnson website today, and make a donation and pledge some of your time.  The future of Liberty depends on it.

Sandra Fluke, The Ninth Amendment, and the Definition of a Right

Item the first:  I seldom listen to Rush Limbaugh.  He can be funny at times, caustic at others, but is generally entertaining.  His remarks about Sandra Fluke however were tasteless at best, and wrong-headed for reasons I will try to make clear.  Now for my rant:

Both wings of America’s Big Government Party¹ have their undies in a wad over Sandra Fluke and the issue she has come to personify. Both are horrifically wrong. The Ninth Amendment, and a proper definition of “Rights”, hold the key.

The Puritanical Right views Ms Fluke’s whining about not being provided birth control as part of the Student Health Services where she attends law school as proof positive she, somehow overlooking the vast majority of Americans who have, are, or will use birth control as a tool of family planning, is emblematic of a moral decay inflicting our nation.  Birth control, the sanctimonious wail, enables the wed as well as the unwed to be promiscuous, having sex for sheer enjoyment rather than the God-given purpose of procreation within marriage.  Thus self-proclaimed “small-government conservatives” seem not to notice one whit the irony in claiming for government the power to control the personal sexual activities of more than two hundred million people.

The Always Outraged Left on the other hand is apoplectic over the fact that the university Ms Fluke attends demurs from providing the benefit in question because it is affiliated with a religious organization which considers birth control to be immoral.² The Left’s hypocrisy is shameless, as is generally the case, as its constituent parts appear oblivious to the principle that a government once given the power to command a benefit for some also has the power to command its denial to all.

The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution is central to this discussion, and ought to provide guidance to both sides.  It states, as I am sure you all remember: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  What does this mean, and how does it apply to condom-gate?

The Bill of Rights enumerates a list of basic rights resident in all humans: Speech, press, assembly, trial by jury, and so on.  Most would recognize that those are not the only rights we possess however.  For example, most would agree we have the right to earn a living, marry, have children, and travel, to name but a few more.  The Ninth Amendment reminds us that just because these and others are not mentioned in the Constitution does not mean we do not enjoy them³. 

It does not require any leap at all to conclude that the private sexual activities of consenting adults is fully covered by the Ninth Amendment – particularly in light of the Declaration’s “…Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…” clause – and is no business of a government, Federal or otherwise. Checkmate, Puritanical Right. 

Ms Fluke and her Leftist sympathizers are equally wrong, however.  Not to say Ms Fluke does not have the right to enjoy a hearty roll in the hay whenever she so wishes; she certainly does.  What she does not have however is a right to force someone else to finance her choice.  Natural (or Human) Rights are those inalienable civil and political entitlements we all enjoy as humans, and which require neither permission to exercise nor a diminution of another’s equal rights.  Any claim which infringes upon the rights of others by compelling them to provide a good or service for another person is by definition not a right, and thereupon is the important basic principle of Enlightenment thought on which Ms Fluke’s argument fails⁴.

1. Only someone who has been traveling beyond our planet can pretend that we still enjoy a two-party system.  Rather, we have one big-government party with two wings who disagree not on the size or scope of government power, but only on which part of our lives government should impose the most.      
2. One can but marvel at an organization which considers limiting family size a mortal sin, but the raping of children an occupation prerogative.   
3. I have always felt that SCOTUS erred and missed a great opportunity to strengthen individual liberty by deciding Roe v. Wade on the 4^th Amendment’s inferred privacy provision rather than the broader protections  proffered by the 9^th.
4. Examples may make this case a bit easier to understand:  No one could reasonably claim he/she cannot enjoy freedom of the press sans their ability to compel someone else to buy them a printing press, nor that we cannot enjoy our Second Amendment rights unless taxpayers provide us with ammunition. This is, by the way, why healthcare is not a right.

In Defense of the FairTax:

Chuck Moulton, whom I count as a friend, recently wrote to Governor Johnson regarding his support for the FairTax.  It seems to me that chuck either misunderstands or misstates a number of issues. For instance:

1) The prebate is definitively not an entitlement any more than a refund on your income taxes is an entitlement. It is a refund of taxes up to the poverty level, effectively untaxing the truly poor while at the same time building a modicum of progressivity into the tax;

2) First of all, seniors still pay income taxes on much of their retirement savings, and this expense will be a thing of the past. Additionally as to seniors, in as much as the compliance costs and taxes of the present system presently add on average a bit more than 22% to the price of everything that seniors (indeed everyone) purchase, and since we can expect to see substantive price reductions at least approaching that figure as the new regimen becomes entrenched, seniors cost of living will be dramatically reduced, amounting to a wash at worst for them;

3) The possibility of ending up with both an income tax and the FairTax is a red herring. Congress diddles with the tax code every year, increasing taxes, adding fees, eliminating deductions, etc. Of course there can be no guarantee that a future Congress will not attempt to reinstitute an income tax. Then again there is no guarantee that a future Congress will not institute a VAT on top of our present income taxes. To stick with an obviously broken and unfair system of taxation because of something that might happen down the road is myopic, at best;

4) The FairTax site adequately addresses Chuck’s 23% – 30% conundrum. In essence they are very forthcoming about the 30% figure, but use the 23% when comparing it to our present income tax rates. (If one pays an effective income tax rate of 22%, we don’t then back that out and then define it as a 28% rate on what he has left. Apples and apples Chuck;

5) The competitive issue is just the opposite of what chuck describes. The FairTax will make U.S. manufacturers more competitive when selling their goods overseas, and thus eliminate a large incentive to offshore American jobs. Further, the FairTax will encourage economic growth two ways: First by offering foreign manufacturers who wish to sell into the U.S. an incentive to locate factories on American soil, and Secondly by enabling the repatriation of up to $100 trillion of funds belonging to American citizens and companies that are now trapped overseas because of the adverse tax costs of bringing them home; finally

6) Frankly, we cannot allow a handful of radicals, or otherwise uninformed Libertarians, to block us from advocating and taking the bold steps necessary to turn around our economy and begin the process of restoring freedom to America. I can state without fear of contradiction that most LP radicals already oppose the governor because of his foreign policy positions, and a change in his advocacy for the FairTax will not swing a single vote nor produce another dollar in contributions.

If the FairTax achieved nothing but the abolition of the IRS, it would still count as the greatest single step forward for liberty since the Declaration of Independence. The opposition by some Libertarians is incredibly short-sighted and does nothing to advance the goals we all share.

Reflections on "Life at the Moment of Conception"

Recently, much as the Grinch, I have been puzzling so much that my puzzler is sore.  Folks like the Ricks Santorum and Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and others have made a big deal out of the “life begins at conception” premise.   I must note that this hypothesis is a social conservative, Christian construct, quite often accompanied by a corresponding claim that it is also at this self-same moment of conception that a soul attaches to the new physical being, making them the property of the Christian god for eternity.  The two beliefs are inseparable.

Interesting, but puzzling.  For the time being let us accept as fact both claims, and examine the consequences of so doing.

As to the first premise, if life truly begins at conception, the Christian god becomes at once a prolific abortionist.  From the blastocyst through the early fetal stages, somewhere between forty and fifty percent of all pregnancies will spontaneously abort.  Is that new life not important to their god?  Is he somehow so utterly incompetent that he screws up fully half of his creations?  Or is it simply that he likes his mini-unborns scrambled for breakfast?  Tongue in cheek perhaps, but a question no “pro-life” warrior has ever bothered answer, nor even ponder I suspect.

Why do the believing families of spontaneously-aborted “children” not hold funeral services for their dearly-departed, with match-box sized coffins and burials in the family plot?  I am not being flippant here; merely inquisitive.

The second claim is even more mind-numbing. 

I will ignore the obvious – that “souls” have neither biblical basis, nor any scientific evidence for their existence – and confine myself to the rather confusing logistics of soulhood itself.

The claim is that at conception a soul appears; from whence is unclear.  Is a new soul created from thin air at the time the sperm penetrates the ovum?  Is there a (heavenly?) pool of souls waiting to swoop in, much as a spouse in a cell-phone lot at a busy airport?  Are they assigned to particular blastocysts based on some set criteria, or is it first come, first served?

Are souls provided to the spawn of Hindus, Muslims, non-believers and the like, or is the supply limited only to Christians?

As to the aforementioned rate of spontaneously-aborted conceptions, what becomes of those souls?  Do they head back to the waiting area and get in line to be reassigned, do they evaporate into thin air, or are they immediately ushered into heaven to spend eternity praising the cantankerous Yahweh without ever having the opportunity to spend at least a short time enjoying normal existence?

Those who bother to think about these things can in all likelihood offer additional questions, consequences, and inconsistencies to my lists.  Those who believe in these things, having never bothered to question them before, cannot in all honesty be expected to begin now.

If believers in and advocates for such theses wish to enshrine them in law however, shouldn’t they be forced to confront these and similar questions and offer plausible answers before the entire nation is forced to worship at their alter?

Just asking.  Now I need to go rub my puzzler with some dry ice.