The Best Time to Be Alive is Right Now – Debunking Religious Myths of Worsening

Conditions

By Kenny Woo

“False bad news about population growth, natural resources, and the
environment is published widely in the face of contradictory evidence.
For example, the world supply of arable land has actually been
increasing, the scarcity of natural resources including food and
energy has been decreasing, and basic measures of U.S. environmental
quality show positive trends. The aggregate data show no long-run
negative effect of population growth upon the standard of living.
Models that embody forces omitted in the past, especially the
influence of population size upon productivity increase, suggest a
long-run positive effect of additional people.” – Julian Simon

"Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western

society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with
unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans
increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live
in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, disease, of crime, of the
environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they
eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular
panic over things they can't even see--germs, chemicals, additives,
pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even
more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire
planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in
witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusion--a global fantasy worthy
of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all
live in fear. Amazing." – Michael Crichton (State of Fear)

"Man's average life span in the Palaeolithic period was about twenty
years, in the Neolithic period about 28 years, and in the Middle Ages
32 years. At the turn of the 20th century, AD 1900, the average life
span of European women was 44 years, and ninety seven years later 82
years. During the past thousand centuries, man's average life span
grew by a factor of four, one-half of this extension occurring over
the last century. The length of life is probably one of the best
descriptors of the conditions in which we live. If so, the natural
paradise of the past is a myth.

The Golden Age never existed. In fact, innumerable past generations

led short and miserable lives, were tormented by hunger and fear,
decimated by tuberculosis, smallpox, pestilence and a host of other
diseases which are now curable, and fought perpetual wars, just like a
few ancient tribes hiding in the jungles of New Guinea still do.
The true Golden Age, the dream of our ancestors, has dawned. Mankind
never had it better. At the turn of the new century, personal safety
is at its highest."
-Global Warming in a Politically Correct Climate by M.Mihkel Mathiesen

"The increase in the world's population represents our victory over

death. In the 19th Century the earth could sustain only one billion
people. Ten thousand years ago, only 1 million could keep themselves
alive. Now, 5 billion people are living longer and more healthily
than ever before, on average. The current gloom-and-doom about a
"crisis" of our environment is all wrong on the scientific facts.
Even the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that U.S.
air and our water have been getting cleaner rather than dirtier in the past
few decades. Every agricultural economist knows that the world's
population has been eating ever-better since World War
II, defying simplistic Malthusian reasoning. Every resource economist
knows that all natural resources have been getting more available
rather than more scarce, as shown by their falling prices over the
decades and centuries. And every demographer knows that the death rate
has been falling all over the world -life expectancy almost tripling
in the rich countries in the past two centuries, and almost doubling
in the poor countries in just the past four decades. This is the most
important and amazing demographic fact -- the greatest human
achievement in history. It took thousands of years to increase life
expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high '20's about
1750. Then about 1750 life expectancy in the richest countries
suddenly rose so that the length of life you could expect for your
baby or yourself in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30
years to perhaps 75 years. Then starting well after World War II, the
length of life you could expect in the poor countries has leaped
upwards by perhaps fifteen or even twenty years since the l950s,
caused by advances in agriculture, sanitation, and medicine. It is
this decrease in the death rate that is the cause of there being a
larger world population nowadays than in former times.
The picture also is now clear that population growth does not hinder
economic development. All the statistical studies show that faster
population growth does not cause slower economic growth. In the 1980s
there was a complete reversal in the consensus of thinking of
population economists about the effects of more people. In 1986, the
National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences
completely overturned its "official" view away from the earlier
worried view expressed in 1971. It noted the absence of any
statistical evidence of a negative connection between population
increase and economic growth. And it said that "The scarcity of
 exhaustible resources is at most a minor restraint on economic growth"."
-The Hoodwinking of a Nation by Julian Simon

This book is the result of many frustrating and hair-pulling moments trying to convince
many I love that this is a good world full of great stories of positive human achievements,
so much so that life, at this very moment, is the closest we have ever come to Utopia.

But, this is not the message many people are getting, as people on a day to day basis are
living in fear of crime, diseases, global warming, famine, bird flu, SARS, school
violence, cell phone cancer, war, artificial sweeteners, earthquakes, hurricanes, anything
nuclear, over-population, powerlines, high cholesterol, and much more.
As the Awake magazine writes: "worsening world conditions are irrefutable evidence that
the dark night of satanic rule is drawing to a close." 6/22 p. 14 1987

BUT, are world conditions actually worsening? Are we living at a time when the world is
indeed going to hell in a handbasket"

Oddly enough, in my dealings with other people, I am constantly amazed that many are
actually hostile to any rebuttals of their negativity. Ad hominem attacks await anyone
who tries to paint this world in a positive light. People cling to their distorted and
poisoned view of the world with a religious fervor that should alarm anyone.

Why? Why do we jealously possess a demonic view of the world clearly out of touch
with reality? I will aver that for some there are monetary gains, for others, their religion
tells them that their time is special, and for some environmentalists, fear seems to be a
motivating factor to propel change.

But fear is a very dangerous thing, especially as we respond to fear. For instance, our
response to the Swine Flu back in 1976 killed more people than the flu itself. But also,
when we fear, we feel stressed and become more prone to irritability, disagreement,
worry, insomnia, anxiety and depression. We are more likely to experience chest pain,
shortness of breath, dizziness and headache. We become more prone to heart disease,
cancer and stroke, our greatest killers. Worry about the wrong things puts us at greater
risk of the diseases that should be concerning us in the first place.

I will start this book off with discussions with those who truly do see modern society as a
demon-haunted world: Christianity.

Fear is the mother of all gods. - Lucretius

Posted online (and distributed by tract) is a Christian document indicating 101 proofs that
we are living in the Last Days. I will not deal with the theological proofs, as anything
pertaining to theology is fluid anyways, and subject to change.
First, it is a fact that Christians in every generation since Jesus Christ have felt that their
time was in fact The End that Jesus predicted in the Olivet Discourse at Matthew 24,
Mark 13 and Luke 21. Here is a sampling of some of these:

Early Church fathers Hilarianus and Hippolytus predicted the end in 500 A.D.(Paula
Fredriksen-Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse)
Irish Bishop James Ussher's prediction was for 1996.
Puritans Issac Watts, Joseph Mede and the Mathers in America were date-setters.
The Father of Protestantism himself, Martin Luther taught Christ would return by 1564.
Does that mean that all Protestants or Lutherans are false prophets? No, of course not, but
they are by the reasoning of a certain few.
German Reformer Philip Melanchton was a date-setter too, as was German theologian
Johann Alsted.
Remember the booklet, "88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988" by Edgar
Whisenant? Also "Christ Returns by 1988: 101 Reasons Why" by Colin Deal.
Or the Korean Christians(Pentecostals) for October 1992?

The most famous one was actually a Baptist....William Miller who predicted 1843.

In the 5th century, the Council of Ephesus decided the millenium had already begun.
Pope Gregory I, 590-604 C.E., predicted the imminent end of the world.
Spanish Monk Beatus predicts it for 800 A.D.
An ecumenical council for the Roman Catholic Church announces Christ's return by
1000.
Aelfric, the Abbott of Eynsham predicts it for the year 1000.
Abbo of Fleury, the French Abbott predicts it for predicts it for 994/996.
Richard of St. Vaast leads a pilgrimage for the predicted end in 1033.
1184 is the target date for the return of the Antichrist according to many...
and again in 1345-1385
Joachim of Fiore(1135-1202) used the New Testament and the Trinity to proclaim the
coming of the anti-christ in 1260 A.D.
1260 is also touted by Brother Arnold (Dominican Monk)
Speaking of the Trinity, the Church Father who first coined the term, Tertullian was a
Montanist(a deeply apocalyptical sect).
Jean de Roquetaillade announced it for 1366
Roman Catholic, Arnald of Villanova, predicted the appearance of the Antichrist in
1378
The Taborites predict it for 1420.
Priest Martinek Hauska announces doom for 1420.
Hans Hut announced the end for1528
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa announced it for 1533
Melchior Hoffman announced it for 1593
The Fifth Monarchists predicted between 1655-57
A Lutheran named Adam Nachenmoser announced it for 1635
Lutheran leader, Andreas Osiander announced it for 1672
 Jan Matthys announced for 1534
Archbishop of York and Primate of England, Edwin Sandys (1519-1588) proclaimed
the imminent end
John Wycliffe announced it for 1379
One of the first Baptist groups, The Anabaptists believed that the Millenium would
occur in 1533
Reformer John Foxe believed the last days would start in 1600. He was shared in
this view by Robert Pont
New England Minister Jonathan Edwards predicts 1866
The Puritans predict it for 1700
Emanuel Swedenborg predicts the end for 1757
Anglican rector Thomas Beverly predict 1697
Anglican rector John Mason for 1694
Pierre Jurie predicts the end for 1689
Sir Walter Raleigh, Hugh Broughton and Thomas Brightman thought it would not be
until 1700
Christopher Columbus said the world was going to end in 1656
Deacon William Aspinwall (General Court) predicts the end for 1673
Feb 28, 1763 Devout Methodist George Bell foresaw the end of the world on this
date.
Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly announced it for 1789
The Shakers announced it for 1792
1790 The Second Coming, according to Irish orator Francis Dobbs.
1792 The end of the world according to the Shakers.
1794 The end of the world according to the Shakers.
Charles Wesley, brother of Methodist Church founder John Wesley, predicted
Doomsday would be in 1794.
Lavater announced it for 1795
Some Christian believers in Russia thought that Peter the Great was the Anti-Christ in
the 1660's.
Historic Jews in the 17th century believed that the Messiah would come in the year
1648.
John Napier announced it for 1688 or 1700
John Cummings of the Scottish National Church, predicted Jesus would return in
1865.
Isaac Newton announced it for about another 90 years in his day
Richard Brothers announced it for 1795
Methodist Church founder John Wesley foresaw the Millennium beginning in 1836,
the same year that the Beast of Revelation was to rise from the sea.
Reverend M. Baxter (Church of England) predicts it for 1868
Scottish National Church official, the "Reverend" John Cumming (1807-1881)
proclaimed "Redemption draweth Nigh" in 1867
In 1832 Pope Gregory XVI indicated that the time of the "plague of locusts
(Revelation 9:3)" had arrived in his Encyclical "Mirari vos arbitramur."
Pat Robertson announced it for 2007(in a novel)
Born-Again, R. Henry Hall for 1998 (AD 1991-The Genesis of Holocaust)
 Hart Armstrong posts the Tribulation for 1989
Chuck Smith, Pastor of Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa proclaimed it for 1981
Tommy Hicks, a noted evangelist, received visions of the end in 1961
Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, predicted the world's end in the 19th. Century.
Elizabeth Claire Prophet announced it for 1989
Pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California predicted the
Rapture in 1981.
Hon-Ming Chen predicted Christ's return on March 31, 1998.
Methodist Joanna Southcott(1750-1814 announced she was the Bride of the Lamb and
began to seal the 144,000
Early in the 20th century, Dr. Isaac M. Haldeman, Pastor of the First Baptist Church
in New York City, predicted that the Antichrist would appear before the Jews return to
Palestine
Assemblies of God official, Thomas M. Chalmers, announced it for the early 1920's
Pentecostal leader, Lester Sumrall predicts 1985
Evangelical prophecy teacher has announced it for 1975, 1976, 1980, 1981, 1982,
1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1989 (see Sooth-Sayers of the Second Advent, Alnor)
September, 1981, Baptist itinerant preacher (a.k.a. an evangelist) in Springfield,
Missouri makes the sure- fire claim that he had determined from Bible study that Christ
absolutely HAD to come back between October, 1981 and September, 1982. (see THE
SCOURGE OF THE "PROPHECY MONGERS" from "AS I SEE IT" Volume 1, Number
3, March, 1998
Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, predicted the Rapture would
occur in 1988.
Nationally syndicated TV show host (Prophecy in the News), J.R. Church predicted
the rapture for 1988.
David Webber and Noah Hutchings of the Southwest Radio Church (SRC) announced
it for "1981 or '88".
Henry Kreysler announces Armageddon for 1995
Author Reginald Dunlop announces the Rapture for 1991.
Mary Stewart Relfe announced the Great Tribulation for 1990.
Salem Kirban - Bible prognosticator, predicted "the Rapture" would take place in
1989.
Benny Hinn predicted the Rapture would occur in 1993.
Dr. Jack van Impe has speculated that the end will come between September 1999 and
2000.
Lester Sumrall for 2000.
Grant Jeffrey predicts it for October 9, 2000
Texe Marrs predicts it for 2000 (Storming toward Armageddon, 1992)
Philip B. Brown has stated that the millennial reign of Christ will begin April 6, 2008.
James McKeever ends his 6000 year theory by at least 2030 (End Times News
Digest).
Dr. Harold Camping, president of Family Radio, expected the end of the world in
1994.
NOTE: "Millenarianism became the general belief of the time." Dr. Bonar
in "Prophetic Land-Marks" writes: "Millenarianism prevailed universally
during the first three centuries." (Giesseler, "Church History," Vol.
1, p.166)

Barnabas (1st Cent.) - "The true Sabbath is the one thousand

years...when Christ comes back to reign."

Beatus (793) "only fourteen years left to complete the sixth millennium
(since creation), and therefore presumably only fourteen years also
until Antichrist's coming" (Commentary on the Apocalypse, 4) ; Beatus,
abbot of Liebana, predicted that the end of the world would occur on
Easter eve (April 6, Julian calendar) of 796. (Weber p.50)

Bernard of Thuringia (992) - Calculated that the end would come in 992.
(Randi p.236)

John Calvin - "Scripture uniformly enjoins us to look with expectation

for the advent of Christ." ("Institutes," 3:25)

Clement (96), Bishop of Rome - "Let us every hour expect the Kingdom of
God...we know not the day." ; "Soon and suddenly shall his will be
accomplished"

Cyprian (200-258), Bishop of Carthage - "The kingdom of God, beloved

brethren, is beginning to be at hand" ; "That wars continue to prevail,
that death and famine accumulate anxiety, that health is shuttered by
raging diseases, that the human race is wasted by the desolation of
pestilence, know that this was foretold; that evils should be
multiplied in the last times, and that misfortunes should be varied;
and that the
day of judgment is drawing nigh" (Treatise 5, An Address to Demetrianus)

Bishop Gregory of Tours (799) - Calculated the End occurring between

799 and 806. (Weber p.48)

Hyppolytus - "predicted a year for the consummation of the ages: AD500"

(Richard Abanes, End Time visions?, p.165)

Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch - "Consider the times and expect Him." ;

"The last times are upon us"

Justin Martyr (150) - "I and all others who are orthodox Christians, on
all points, know there will be...a thousand years in Jerusalem...as
Isaiah and Ezekiel declare."
Irenaeus (175), Bishop of Lyons, companion of Polycarp, John's pupil,
commenting on Jesus' promise to drink again of the fruit of the vine in
His Father's Kingdom - "That this...can only be fulfilled upon our
Lord's personal return on earth."

Julius Africanus (160-240) - Claimed that the End would occur 6000
years after the Creation. Assuming that there were 5531 years between the
Creation and the Resurrection, he expected the Second Coming to take
place no later than 500 AD. (Kyle p.37)

Lactantius (300) - "The righteous dead...and reign with them on

earth...for a thousand years."

St. Martin of Tours (316-397) - "There is no doubt that the Antichrist

has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years,
he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power." (Abanes p.119)

Nicene Creed (325) - "We expect a new heaven and earth...at the
appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, and then, as
Daniel says, the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom."

Papias (116), Bishop of Hierapolis - "There will be one thousand

years...when the reign of Christ personally will be established on
earth."

Tertullian (200) - "We do indeed confess that a Kingdom is promised on

earth." "the end of the world wild come with the seventh persecution.
The Goths will conquer Rome and redeem the Christians; but then Nero
will appear as the heathen Antichrist, reconquer Rome, and rage against
the Christians three years and a half. He will be conquered in turn by
the Jewish and real Antichrist from the East, who, after the defeat of
Nero and the burning of Rome, will return to Judea, perform false
miracles, and be worshipped by the Jews. At last Christ appears, that
is, God himself with the lost Twelve Tribes as his army, which had
lived beyond Persia in happy simplicity and virtue. Under astounding
phenomena of nature he will conquer Antichrist and his host, convert
all nations,
and take possession of the holy city of Jerusalem."

There are many stories of apocalyptic paranoia around the year 1000.
For example, legend has it that a "panic terror" gripped Europe in the
years and months before this date. However, scholars disagree on which
stories are geniune, whether millennial expectations at this time were any
greater than usual, or whether ordinary people were even aware of what
year it was. An excellent article on Y1K apocalyptic expectations can
be found at the Center for Millennial Studies. (Gould, Schwartz, Randi)
Sandro Botticelli (1504)
Wrote a caption in Greek on his painting The Mystical Nativity:

"I Sandro painted this picture at the end of the year 1500 in the
troubles of Italy in the half time after the time according to the
eleventh chapter of St. John in the second woe of the Apocalypse in the
loosing of the devil for three and a half years. Then he will be
chained in the 12th chapter and we shall see him trodden down as in this
picture."

Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-215)

(That Christ was soon to return in the second century)
"Far from us be that which is written, "Wretched are they who are of a
double mind, and of a doubting heart; who say, These things we have
heard even in the times of our fathers; but, behold, we have grown old,
and none of them has happened unto us.."(10) Ye foolish ones! compare
yourselves to a tree: take [for instance] the vine. First of all, it
sheds its leaves, then it buds, next it puts forth leaves, and then it
flowers; after that comes the sour grape, and then follows the ripened
fruit. Ye perceive how in a little time the fruit of a tree comes to
maturity. Of a truth, soon and suddenly shall His will be accomplished,
as the Scripture also bears witness, saying, "Speedily will He come,
and will not tarry;"(11) and, "The Lord shall suddenly come to His temple,
even the Holy One, for whom ye look." (The Epistles to the Corinthians,
ch. 23)

Irenaeus (136-202)
(That the world would end in the sixth thousandth year)
3. For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand
years shall it be concluded. And for this reason the Scripture says: "Thus
the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment. And God
brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that He had made;
and God rested upon the seventh day from all His works."(6) This is an
account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of
what is to come. For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years;(7) and in
six days created things were completed: it is evident, therefore, that
they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year." (Against
Heresies, 5:28:3)

Martin Luther (16th Century)

"I hope the last day of judgment is not far, I persuade myself verily
it will not be absent full three hundred years longer; for God's word
will decrease and be darkened for want of true shepherds and servants of
God. The voice will sound and heard erelong: 'Behold the Bridegroom cometh.'
God neither will nor can suffer this wicked world much longer, He must
strike in with the dreadful day, and punish the contemning of His
word." (Familiar Discourses, pp. 7, 8. )

"Let us not think that the coming of Christ is far off." ; Believed
that the End would occur no later than 1600. (Weber p.66)

Maximilla
"After me there will be no prophecy, but the End will come." (quoted in
Dowley, 36)

OTHERS:

Nostradamus (1503-1566) - "In the year 1999, and seven months, from the
sky will come the great King of Terror" (Century 10,Quatrain 72)

"One faith united the scattered congregations: that Christ was the son of God, that
he would return to establish his kingdom on earth, and that all who believed in
him would at the Last Judgement be rewarded with eternal bliss. But Christians
differed as to the date of the second advent. When Nero died and Titus
demolished the Temple, and again when Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem, many
Christians hailed these calamities as signs of the second coming. When chaos
threatened the Empire at the close of the second century, Tertullian and others
thought that the end of the world was at hand; a Syrian Bishop led his flock into
the desert to meet Christ halfway, and a bishop in Pontus disorganized the life of
his community by announcing that Christ would return within a year. As all signs
failed, and Christ did not come, wiser Christians sought to soften the
disappointment by reinterpreting the date of his return.
He would come in a thousand years, said an epistle ascribed to Barnabas; he
would come, said the most cautious, when the "generation" or race of the Jews
was quite extinct, or when the Gospel had been preached to all gentiles; or said
the Gospel of John, he would send in his stead the Holy Spirit or Paraclete."
(Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume III, 'Ceasar and Christ, Pg. 603,
604)

Even the earliest Christians prepared for the imminent end of the age in their own time:

"That the earliest Church regarded itself as the Congregation of the end of days, is
attested both by Paul, and the synoptic tradition....Further testimony for
eschatological consciousness is the fact that Jesus' disciples after the Easter
experiences in Galilee soon betook themselves to Jerusalem as the focus of the
coming Reign of God."
Theology of the New Testament-Complete in One Volume, by Rudolf Bultmann,
p. 37

When you have Jesus Christ declaring:

"Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see
that the kingdom of God has come with power." (Mark 9:1)

…and

“Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place.”
(Mark 13:30)

…it should be evident that even he assumed the End would happen in his own time.

The declarations from the Last Days pamphlet are indicated by a “Scare”:

Scare: Mankind would be capable of destroying all life (Matthew 24:21-22). Consider
that when Jesus made this prediction the armaments of His day were swords and spears.
But today, with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, it is possible to wipe out all
flesh on planet earth.

Reply: While we may have more destructive capabilities, we also have less benefit to use
them with the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction in place. Most countries that aim
to obtain WMD's do so as a protective deterrence. Whether you agree or not, the numbers
are rather reassuring. Since Hiroshima, western Europe has seen its longest peacetime
EVER. and, since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, there has been a major
decline in armed conflicts, genocides, human rights abuses, military coups, and
international crises, according to the study, Human Security Report 2005.

"In his prescient 1989 book, Retreat from Doomsday, Ohio State
University political scientist John Mueller, in addition to predicting
that the Soviet Union was about to collapse--the Berlin Wall fell just
after the book was published--declared that great-nation war had
become "obsolete" and might never occur again. One reason the Soviet
Union was about to collapse, Mueller wrote, was that its leaders had
structured Soviet society around the eighteenth-century assumption of
endless great-power fighting, but great-power war had become archaic,
and no society with war as its organizing principle can endure any
longer. So far, this theory has been right on the money. It is worth
noting that the first emerging great power of the new century, China,
though prone to making threatening statements about Taiwan, spends
relatively little on its military....First, the numbers. The University of Maryland
studies find the number
of wars and armed conflicts worldwide peaked in 1991 at 51, which may
represent the most wars happening simultaneously at any point in
history. Since 1991, the number has fallen steadily. There were 26
armed conflicts in 2000 and 25 in 2002, even after the Al Qaeda attack
on the United States and the U.S. counterattack against Afghanistan.
 By 2004, Marshall and Gurr's latest study shows, the number of armed
conflicts in the world had declined to 20, even after the invasion of
Iraq. All told, there were less than half as many wars in 2004 as
there were in 1991."
The End of War? by Gregg Easterbrook

"Is war on the increase, as many scholars as well as laymen of our generation
have been inclined to believe? The answer would seem to be a very unambiguous
negative. Whether we look at the number of wars, their severity or magnitude,
there is no significant trend upward or down over the past 150 years. Even if we
examine their intensities, we find that later wars are by and large no different from
those of earlier periods." [J. David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War
1816-1965, New York, 1972, p. 201]

Scare: Chaotic weather would be prevalent. Of course chaotic weather has always
existed, but there are indications that we are witnessing an increase in strange weather.

Reply: I could also make an argument that less people are dying NOW than previously
from "strange weather" (whatever that means).
For instance:

"Busiest hurricane season ever for the United States: The 1886
hurricane season has been analyzed to be the busiest on record for
the continental United States. Seven hurricanes were recorded to have
hit the U.S.—a Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale Category 2 hurricane
into Texas and Louisiana in June, two Category 2 hurricanes into
northwest Florida in June, a Category 1 hurricane into northwest
Florida in July, the Category 4 "Indianola"* hurricane into Texas in
August, a Category 1 hurricane into Texas in September and a Category
3 hurricane into Louisiana in October. The previous busiest hurricane
season for the United States was 1985 with six landfalling hurricanes.

Extremely busy decade for the United States Atlantic seaboard: The
1890s were one of the busiest decades on record for the Atlantic
seaboard of the United States. Four major hurricanes impacted the
coast from Georgia northward—the 1893 Category 3 "Sea Islands
Hurricane" in Georgia and South Carolina, another 1893 Category 3 in
South Carolina and North Carolina, an 1898 Category 4 in Georgia and
a 1899 Category 3 in North Carolina. Only the decade of the 1950s had
more strong hurricanes making landfall along this part of the coast,
going back to 1851.

Cycles of hurricane activity: These records reflect the existence of

cycles of hurricane activity, rather than trends toward more frequent
or stronger hurricanes. In general, the period of the 1850s to the
mid-1860s was quiet. The late 1860s through the 1890s were busy, and
 the first decade of the 1900s was quiet. (There were five hurricane
seasons with at least 10 hurricanes per year in the active period of
the late 1860s to the 1890s and none in the quiet periods.) Earlier
work had linked these cycles of busy and quiet hurricane periods in
the 20th Century to natural changes in Atlantic Ocean temperatures.

Georgia major hurricanes: During the 20th Century, Georgia did not
have even a single major hurricane make a landfall along its coast.
However, it was a different story in the 19th Century. In contrast,
Georgia experienced three major hurricanes in the later half of the
19th Century—a Category 3 in 1854 near Savannah, the Category 3 "Sea
Islands Hurricane" in 1893 that killed 1,000-2,000 people near
Savannah and a Category 4 in 1898 near Brunswick. Knowledge that such
strong hurricanes have impacted this portion of the coast (and will
undoubtedly hit again) is important for residents of Georgia to plan
for the future.

Most hurricanes ever in one day: On August 22, 1893, four hurricanes
were occurring simultaneously. Storm #3 approaching Nova Scotia,
Canada, storm #4 between Bermuda and the Bahamas, storm #6 northeast
of the Lesser Antilles and storm #7 west of the Cape Verde Islands.
Storm #4 would end up making a direct hit on New York City as a
Category 1 hurricane two days later and storm #6 ending up hitting
Georgia and South Carolina as a Category 3 hurricane (the "Sea
Islands Hurricane") and killing 1,000-2,000 people. The only other
known date with four hurricanes occurring at the same time was
September 25, 1998, when hurricanes Georges, Ivan, Jeanne and Karl
were in existence."
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/archives/J/noaa257.html

Roy W. Spencer, the principal research scientist at the University of

Alabama in Huntsville points out that numerous hurricanes devastated
America's Atlantic and Gulf coastlines from the 1930s through the
1950s. The National Hurricane Center, he notes, has "been warning for
many years the U.S. coast has had a long run of relatively good luck"
and that it was only a matter of time before that streak ran out.

and...

Spencer wisely observes that we tend to forget "that unusual weather

is, well, usual."

Scare: Increased interest in vegetarianism anticipated (1 Timothy 4:3-4). The New Age
Movement has swept the globe during the past 40 years popularizing this.
Reply: While not a Vegan myself, there does seem to be alot of evidence in favor of a
healthier meatless diet. Isn't it funny how something as positive as this can be demonized
when the information is placed in the wrong hands.

Scare: The earth would be filled with violence (Luke 17:26; Genesis 6:11-13). In the
United States alone, violent crime has increased nearly 500% since 1960.
Visit:
United States Crime Rates 1960 - 2000 (disaster center)

Reply: I did visit the United States Crime Rates 1960 - 2000 (disaster center), and if you
look at the per 100,000, it tells quite an interesting story. While crime climbed to high
levels in the 80's and early 90's, it has been falling dramatically since then. A recent FBI
report showed that the nation's murder rate dropped to its lowest level in four decades and
that other crime has declined as well. But a new Gallup survey shows public perception
differs from the
new data. More than two-thirds of those polled said they believe there's more crime in the
United States than there was a year ago, up 14 points from this time last year. Twenty-one
percent said there's less crime now, and 9 percent said levels are the same.
http://politicalarguments.blogspot.com/2005/10/that-good-old-disconnect-between-
\crime.html

From the 2006 New York Times Almanac, p.311, all serious crime decreased dramatically
from 1975 to 2003. The numbers from 1994 to 2003 tell an interesting story:
Violent crime decreased 33.4%, with Murder decreasing 36.7%, Forcible rape decreasing
18.2%, robbery decreasing 40.2% aggravated assault decreasing 31%. Property Crime
decreased 23% overall, with burglary decreasing 28.9%, larceny/theft decreasing 20.2%,
and motor vehicle theft decreasing by 26.7%.
From Britannica Almanac 2006, 1981 saw a total of 13,423,800 crimes with 22,520
murders 2003 saw crime decrease to 11,816,782 with 16,503 murders, and all this with a
substantial increase in the population.

"U.S. Murder Rate Hits 40-Year Low

Monday, October 17, 2005 [Associated Press]
WASHINGTON — The nation's murder rate declined last year for the
first time in four years, dropping to the lowest level in 40 years.
Experts said local rather than national trends were mostly responsible.
The rates for all seven major crimes were down and the overall violent
crime rate reached a 30-year low, according to the FBI's annual
compilation of crimes reported to the police.
There were 391 fewer murders nationwide in 2004 than the year before.
The total of 16,137 worked out to 5.5 murders for every 100,000 people.
That's a decline of 3.3 percent from 2003 and the lowest murder rate
since 1965, when it was 5.1.
"The declines are relatively small compared to larger, steady drops in
the 1990s..."
U.S. crime rate holds at 30-year lows
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
Updated: 7:28 a.m. ET Sept. 13, 2004

WASHINGTON - The nation's crime rate last year held steady at the
lowest levels since the government began surveying crime victims in
1973, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

The study was the latest contribution to a decade-long trend in which

violent crime as measured by victim surveys has fallen by 55 percent
and property crime by 49 percent. That has included a 14 percent drop
in violent crime from 2000-2001 to 2002-2003.

"The rates are the lowest experienced in the last 30 years," Justice
Department statistician Shannan Catalona said in the report. "Crime
rates have stabilized."

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Crime is down, pundits are flummoxed

Do you feel safer lately?

Since 9/11, most people would probably say no. But, while we've never
worried more about terrorism, we're living in the safest times in at
least a generation. "Regular" crime, so it seems, appears to be going
out of style.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department released its annual crime
numbers for 2002. The numbers are staggering, in a good way. There
were 23 victims of violent crimes (rape, robbery and assault) per
1,000 people in 2002. Ten years ago there were 50 — more than double
last year's rate. Property crimes (burglary, car theft and the like)
occurred at the rate of 159 per 1,000 people in 2002, down from 319 in
1993 — also a 50 percent drop.

Bottom line: Violent and property crime rates in 2002 were the lowest
since records started being kept 30 years ago. This is great news …
unless, of course, you write for a crime-focused weekly newspaper and
you've got two kids you have to put through college.

Crime is down in cities, suburbs, small towns and the boonies. Fewer
rich people, poor people, minorities, majorities, men, women, dogs and
cats are victims of crime each year. For every O.J., there are more
and more people who really didn't do it.
These latest statistics would be even more exciting if anyone had a
clue as to just what the heck is going on. But, despite as many
theories as there are special interest groups, the consensus is that
there isn't a consensus.

Not that the so-called experts aren't giving it their best shot. And,
surprise, surprise, each group seems to favor the explanation that
forwards its particular agenda. The gun control crowd says, "See, gun
restrictions are starting to work." The NRA militiamen immediately
counter with, "No, it's the new concealed carry laws that are making
thugs think twice about mugging a grandma who might be packing heat."

The Bill O'Reilly "just lock 'em up and throw away the key" types
point to tougher prison sentences, the recent boom in prison
construction and "three strikes and out" laws as taking more criminals
off of the streets and keeping them locked up longer.

Well, there are certainly more people locked up these days — more than
5.6 million adults or one in every 37 adults in the U.S. But the
Justice Policy Institute, which promotes alternatives to prison,
quickly points out that there were more murders in the South and West,
the same areas where prison expansion has been most aggressive.

Then there are the census takers. They say less crime is a result of
having fewer young men ages 15-24 in the population. Baby boomers
aged, leaving their prime "crime-bearing" years behind, and the
smaller generations that came after simply didn't have as many
children who could turn into criminals. But if this were true, then
crime rates should have started increasing again in 2000, as the bulk
of the baby boom "echo" (the boomers' children) reached young
hoodlum-hood. It's not happening, leaving the census takers scratching
their heads.

Economists claim that crime falls as our collective economic fortunes

rise. Thus, the economic boom in the '90s would explain the dramatic
drop in crime during those same years. But, as we all-too-painfully
know, that boom went bust several years ago. Still, crime rates
continue to fall. Yet another theory bites the dust.
Ditto for the raise-the-minimum-wage mob. According to them, more
people earning an actual "living wage" would mean fewer people having
to turn to crime to put food on their families' tables. But the real
purchasing power of the minimum wage, when you take inflation into
account, has fallen to new lows, just like crime. Oops. Back to the
drawing board.

The deeper you dig, the weirder the theories get.

 The University of Chicago's Steven Levitt and Stanford's John Donohue
III recently published a report linking the fall in crime to the rise
of legalized abortions. In a nutshell, they say fewer unwanted babies
equals fewer poorly raised juvenile delinquents and, eventually, fewer
adult criminals. Not only that, because destitute young women could
avoid becoming mothers, they didn't have to turn to crime to try to
support their children.

Not to be outdone, even the Hare Krishna movement is getting into the
act (you know, the bald cultists who hang out in airports). Their
website claims the dramatic drop in crime in New York City is a result
of the increased distribution of Srila Prahupada's (their leader's)
latest transcendental book in the Big Apple. (Hmm, come to think of
it, as Snitch's circulation has climbed, crime in Louisville has
dwindled. Maybe our ever-chanting chums are onto something.)

Finally, there's the Koch Crime Institute, which says the explanation
for falling crime rates "may lie in a renaissance of personal
responsibility." What a great reason that would be, but even the folks
there admit that no one really knows. But they also point out that,
"the reasons it is declining are the same ones that will keep it from
going up again."

So we must be doing something right. If we only knew what it was, we'd

certainly do more of it.
http://www.russmaney.com/falling_crime.htm

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Our hysterical media never tells the middle classes how safe they are.

With a weary sigh those compiling the statistics will don their
battered flak jackets and put up with the annual deluge of newsprint
mendacity. They are well-used to headline shockers bearing no relation
to fact. They are glum that the figures always appear at the worst
time of year - at the frayed end of the summer parliamentary term when
all news is bad news.

If this was just the government getting another drubbing, it would

only be a harmless part of the rough and tumble of politics. A
government so dominant in the polls, with not a whiff of opposition in
the wind (outside its own party), can expect a daily mauling from a
press three-quarters Tory, frustrated beyond endurance at having no
credible party to promote.
 But the damage done is more serious. Crime panic terrorizes people
into staying indoors, avoiding public spaces or public transport, and
it turns children into couch potato captives. A quarter of the
population says it is "very frightened" of violence. Beyond that, it
damages the national psyche, souring general happiness and wellbeing
in a western world grown ever safer and, for most, richer than ever
before. But watch the Tory press (and some not Tory who should know
better) do all they can to make their readers think things always get
worse, on a slippery slope to perdition surrounded by perverts and
muggers in a state of gross moral decline.

The real figures most newspaper readers may never get to see, tucked
away if they appear at all, are likely to show a slight decrease in
overall crime. The British Crime Survey will probably yet again show
there is less chance of being a victim of crime than ever. Burglary is
now lower than ever recorded (with a chance of being burgled once
every 50 years) - despite the reporting of it rising as a wealthier
nation insures more of its goods. Mobile phone thefts are more
recorded than previous street crimes because they are insured. Car
crime has already had a huge drop, mostly due to manufacturers' better
security systems.

Violence is only around 2% of crime and last year it fell, but you
would never have guessed it. Figures look set to be broadly stable
this year, maybe up a bit with more affluent young men drinking and
hitting each other a bit more outside bars. But don't expect to see a
description of what most "violent" crime is: 40% involves zero injury
and in two-thirds of cases the injury was too mild to require any
medical help. Gun crime - terrifying but still rare - will almost
certainly rise, but figures emerge in January: murder has barely changed.

Most crime is inflicted on the poor, hidden away in places others

never venture - yet the middle classes are never told how safe they
are. The press will probably not headline the alarming domestic
violence rate: newsrooms still don't think it counts, not really.

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/7-16-2003-43007.asp

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

When faced with doomsaying reports, we consistently put our capacity

for critical thought on the back-burner. If we have arrived at a
particular view of the present world, many of us naturally look for
news and reports that will confirm this view. We call this
Comformation Bias. Rationally though, we should "make sure of all things."
 "When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to
ask, 'Compared to what?'" --Sydney J. Harris

If we can produce large crime statistics, we should try to deduce how

this compares to previous eras, especially considering the huge
decrease in crime rates.
Let us dwell on this some more, as crime is always trumped as a sure
sign of this present degenerating world.
In the 13 & 14th century, England had 23 homicides per 100,000 people,
in the 16th century it had 7 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 17th
century it had 5 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 18th century it
had 1.5 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 19th century it had 1.7
homicides per 100,000 people, in the 20th century it had 0.85
homicides per 100,000 people.
In the 13 & 14th century, the Netherlands and Belgium had 47 homicides
per 100,000 people, in the 15th they had 45, in the 16th century it
had 25 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 17th century it had 7.5
homicides per 100,000 people, in the 18th century it had 5.5
homicides per 100,000 people, in the 19th century it had 1.6 homicides
per 100,000 people, in the 20th century it had just over 1 homicide
per 100,000 people.
In the 15th century, Scandanavia had 46 homicides per 100,000 people,
in the 16th century it had 21 homicides per 100,000 people, in the
17th century it had 18 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 18th
century it had 1.9 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 19th century
it had 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 20th century it had
just over 1 homicide per 100,000 people.
In the 13 & 14th century, the GErmany and Switzerland had 37 homicides
per 100,000 people, in the 15th they had 16, in the 16th century they
had 11 homicides per 100,000 people, in the 17th century they had 7
homicides per 100,000 people, in the 18th century they had 7.5
homicides per 100,000 people, in the 19th century they had 2.8
homicides per 100,000 people, in the 20th century it had just over 1
homicide per 100,000 people.
In the 13 & 14th century, Italy had 56 homicides per 100,000 people,
in the 15th it had 73, in the 16th century it had 47 homicides per
100,000 people, in the 17th century it had 32 homicides per 100,000
people, in the 18th century it had 10.5 homicides per 100,000 people,
in the 19th century it had 12.6 homicides per 100,000 people, in the
20th century it had just over 1 homicide per 100,000 people.

And of course, in the last decade crime rates have dropped even more
dramatically. Anyone using "increasing crime/homicide rates" in the
last century to make any kind of point is either dishonest or
misinformed. There is no excuse for this type of shoddiness, and it is
criminal to insist on something so dramatically at odds with all the
evidence.

But what of crime in the historical perspective?

Between 1860 and 1890 the crime rate was more than twice the rate of
population growth. The Charleston News and Chronicle reported:
"Murder and violence are the distinguishing marks of our
civilization." In the 1930s, a criminal had a 99 percent chance of
escaping punishment. From 1930 to 1950 Chicago had an estimated 700
hired assassins. Only eight of the assassins were ever convicted. A
much larger ratio of convicted felons go to prison now than 60 years ago.
-The Good Old Days Weren't So Good
by Gary Sloan

"In Britain the incidence of homicide has fallen by a factor of at

least ten to one since the thirteenth century [...] The long-term
declining trend evidently is a manifestation of cultural change in
Western society." (Ted Robert Gurr, Historical Trends in Violent
Crimes, 1981)

"Serious interpersonal violence decreased remarkably in Europe between

the mid-sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries."
(Manuel Eisner, Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime, 2003)
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CJ/039104.pdf

"Personal violence - homicide - has declined in Western Europe from

the high levels of the Middle Ages. Homicide rates fell in the early
modern era and dropped even further in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries." (Eric Monkkonen, Homicide: Explaining America's
Exceptionalism, 2006)
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/monkkonen.html

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Counting Backward, Historians Resurrect Crime Statistics And Find the

Middle Ages More Violent Than Now
By ALEXANDER STILLE

IN 1939, at one of civilization's lowest points, a little-known Swiss

sociologist, Norbert Elias, published a book called "Über den Prozess
der Zivilisation" ("On the Civilizing Process") with a strange and
unlikely thesis: that the gradual introduction of courtly manners —
from eating with a knife and fork and using a handkerchief to not
spitting or urinating in public — had played a major part in
transforming a violent medieval society into a more peaceful modern one.
Hitler invaded Poland that year, and Elias's book was consigned to
obscurity. It was not published in the United States until 1978 (with
the title "The History of Manners"). But since then his seemingly
eccentric thesis has been revived, and Elias has posthumously become
the theoretical guru of a field that did not exist in 1939: the
history of crime. It was then that pioneering historians began to do
what most historians had thought impossible: create crime statistics
for eras that did not systematically keep crime data.

"The Elias theory got revived through the statistical approach to

history," said Elizabeth Cohen, a historian at York University in
Toronto who has written extensively on crime in Renaissance Italy.

Although there were no national statistics centuries ago, some

historians discovered that the archives of some English counties were
intact back to the 13th century. So in the 1970's they began
diligently counting indictments and comparing them with estimated
population levels to get a rough idea of medieval and early modern
crime rates. Historians in Continental Europe followed suit and came
up with findings that yielded the same surprising result: that murder
was much more common in the Middle Ages than it is now and that it
dropped precipitately in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Something
very important changed in Western behavior and attitudes, and it stood
much prevailing social theory on its head. "It was very surprising
because social theory told us that the opposite was supposed to
happen: that crime was supposed to go up as family and community bonds
in rural society broke up and industrialization and urbanization took
hold," said Eric H. Monkkonen, a professor of history at the
University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several
works on the history of criminality. "The notion that crime and cities
go together made emotional sense, particularly in America, where at
least recently crime is higher in cities."

Some scholars argue that many of the prevailing theories about why
crime rises and falls could be further upended as scholars use new
computer models to estimate population figures for past eras more
accurately. "With modern computing we may end up with some very good
estimates in the homicide rates in many nations right back to the 17th
and 16th centuries," said Randall Roth, a historian at Ohio State
University who has recalculated murder rates for the 15th and 16th
centuries in many countries. "The data we are getting doesn't line up
with most theories of either liberals or conservatives about crime.
The theory that crime is determined by deterrence and law enforcement,
by income inequality, by a high proportion of young men in a
population, by the availability of weapons, by cities, most of those
theories end up being wrong."
Historians have offered various explanations for the unexpected fall
in the crime rate. Initially some wondered whether the decline in
early modern crime might be a result of industrialization and
urbanization themselves. But James A. Sharpe, a historian at the
University of York in England, said the big statistical dip in
violence preceded industrialization and urbanization by more than a
century.

Other scholars then theorized that crime had not diminished but only
shifted from bodily assault to crimes of property, reflecting the
change from a world of medieval scarcity to one of greater prosperity
and availability of material goods. But this theory, too, has not
stood the test of time. "The great decline in homicide in the 17th
century was not accompanied by a rise in property offense
prosecutions, but rather by their diminution," Mr. Sharpe noted in a
recent essay.

All these discredited theories helped change "the status of Elias from
curiosity to prescient thinker," Eric A. Johnson (a professor at
Central Michigan University) and Mr. Monkkonen wrote in the recent
book "The Civilization of Crime." That the decrease in crime appears
to have happened independently of industrialization or economic growth
seemed to suggest that an internal, psychological shift had taken
place in attitudes toward crime. Advertisement

So did its changing nature. Widespread evidence indicates that in the

Middle Ages physical violence, even to the point of death, was a
widely accepted way of resolving disputes and defending one's honor.
Most killings occurred in public in front of many witnesses when a
dispute, generally among neighbors, got out of hand.

"People don't yet treat it as a crime and the perpetrator is not a

social outcast," said Dan Smail, a historian at Fordham University in
New York who has studied crime in southern France in the 14th
century." (Still, Mr. Smail said, Elias got it only half right,
arguing that it was the greater resources available in the early
modern period that made it possible for people to get even with their
enemies through law suits and conspicuous consumption rather than with
fists and knives.)

That murder was accepted is reflected in the leniency with which it

was generally treated, said Barbara A. Hanawalt, a historian at Ohio
State University whose work on 14th-century England helped stimulate
the interest in the history of murder. "Only 12 percent of homicides
actually end in conviction," she said. "That's lower than larceny,
 which was 23 percent, and crimes of stealth, burglary and
counterfeit," for which the rate was about 100 percent.

But after the late Middle Ages, Ms. Hanawalt detects a marked shift.
"There is a real change in community tolerance," she said. "The state
is more prominent, the local community has less control."

"I think Elias is onto something: people begin to change their notions
of how people should behave," Ms. Hanawalt continued. "In the 14th
century people are concerned with whether someone is of good or ill
repute; it's a collective, community judgment. When you get into the
15th century, the question is about someone's `governance.' There is a
shift from community reputation to an emphasis on internal control." A
proliferation of tracts and manuals on proper behavior trickle down to
common, illiterate folks in the form of rhymes and ditties.

One recent scholarly book on the history of murder, "Mad Blood

Stirring" by Edward Muir at Northwestern University, describes one way
in which this process may have occurred. In the book Mr. Muir
describes how the Republic of Venice tried to put an end to violent
feuding among unruly nobles as it extended its influence into remote
rural areas in the 17th century. The wars fought over generations by
the area's leading families left the region vulnerable to foreign
invasion. Venice reacted by first meting out stiff punishment, then by
drawing the rural noble families into Venetian aristocratic life. Here
they learned to replace the clan feud with the individual duel, an
important shift from collective violence to individual responsibility
and violence. Finally, the feuding clans, who now prided themselves on
their courtly behavior, fought it out through the publication of
dueling pamphlets, trying to best their rivals through elegant
put-downs and masterly argument.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

As observed by popular writer Colin Wilson, "the history of mankind since about
2500 B.C. is little more than a non-stop record of murder, bloodshed and
violence." Thus he concludes that "human history has been fundamentally a
history of crime." Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind (London, 1985)

Professor John Bellamy at the Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, even says:
"In most modern western countries the level of crime has been so re-duced that
the misdeeds of the few serve rather to provide the ordinary citizen with escapist
entertainment than to instill a sense of fear." John Bellamy, Crime and Public
Order in England in the Later Middle Ages
Scare: Fifty years ago abortion (the violent murder of an unborn child) was illegal in
most countries. Today abortion is legal in most countries and 50 million children are
aborted each year.

Reply: Just because abortion was once illegal, it does not mean it did not happen, in fact,
it has happened for many millennia. In El Salvador, abortion is illegal with a possible 30-
year prison sentence attached to it, and women can still easily obtain cheap black market
abortificients to induce abortion. The unfortunate drawback is that there isn't any medical
supervision. Banning abortion won't put an end to abortion, but it will put women's lives
at risk.

"Abortion has been performed for thousands of years, and in every society that
has been studied. It was legal in the United States from the time the earliest
settlers arrived. At the time the Constitution was adopted, abortions before
"quickening" were openly advertised and commonly performed....Criminalization
of abortion did not reduce the numbers of women who sought abortions. In the
years before Roe v. Wade, the estimates of illegal abortions ranged as high as 1.2
million per year. Although accurate records could not be kept, it is known that
between the 1880s and 1973, many thousands of women were harmed as a result
of illegal abortion."
http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/history_abortion.html

"In the 18th and 19th centuries, clergymen routinely advised parents
not to get too close to their children. Male adolescents were often
sent away to live with other families. Many couples lived in sin.
Today, proportionately more Americans marry than ever before. In the
1880s, the divorce rate in America exceeded that in all other
industrialized countries. In the 1800s, there was one abortion for
every six births. In the 1920s, one in four pregnancies ended in
abortion."
-The Good Old Days Weren't So Good
by Gary Sloan

"In recent years, America has become a more hopeful nation. Violent
crime rates have fallen to their lowest levels since the 1970s.
Welfare cases have dropped by more than half over the past decade.
Drug use among youth is down 19 percent since 2001. There are fewer
abortions in America than at any point in the last three decades, and
the number of children born to teenage mothers has been falling for a
dozen years in a row."
-Bush, in his State of the Union address 2006

Also, abortion is not the violent murder of an unborn child according to the Bible:

"What has been so clearly demonstrated by the passage in Exodus - the fact that
God does not consider a fetus a human person - can also be seen in a variety of
 other Bible verses. In Leviticus 27:6 a monetary value was placed on children, but
not until they reached one month old (any younger had no value). Likewise, in
Numbers 3:15 a census was commanded, but the Jews were told only to count
those one month old and above - anything less, particularly a fetus, was not
counted as a human person. In Ezekiel 37:8-10 we watch as God re-animates dead
bones into living soldiers, but the passage makes the interesting note that they
were not alive as persons until their first breath. Likewise, in Genesis 2:7, Adam
had a human form and a vibrant new body but he only becomes a fully-alive
human person after God makes him breathe. And in the same book, in Genesis
38:24, we read about a pregnant woman condemned to death by burning. Though
the leaders of Israel knew the woman was carrying a fetus, this was not taken into
consideration. If indeed the Jews, and the God who instructed them, believed the
fetus to be an equal human person to the mother, then why would they let the
fetus die for the mother's crimes? The truth is simple. A fetus is not a human
person, and its destruction is not a murder. Period."
Why Abortion is Biblical - By Brian Elroy McKinley

Abortion is not a crime, it is an emotional political tool used to empower those against it
and give them a cloak of moral superiority, and horrible passages in the Bible promoting
infanticide (Psalms 137:9) makes it clear that the scriptures are not on the side of those
using them in this debate.

Scare: Jesus also predicted that there would be fearful sights (Luke 21:11). The Greek
word translated fearful is phobetron, which can also be translated terror. According to
the U.S. State Department, between 1981 and 2000, there were 9,179 international
terrorist attacks.

Reply: As the saying goes, one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. Take
God's people in the past. Christians like to make waves in regard to the abortion of fetal
tissue, but the God of the people actually promoted the mass murder of live babies:

"Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!"
Psalms 137:9 New Revised Standard Bible

Isn't the mass killings of babies an act of terror? Consider also that about 20 percent of
pregnancies end in natural abortions (miscarriages), yet no one calls God a terrorist.
Yes, terrible things happen in the world, but we are no longer living in cities that have to
be fortified and walled due to constant terror attacks in the past.

Scare: Despite an increase in scientific knowledge, deadly diseases (which the Bible calls
"pestilences") would be prevalent (Matthew 24:7).
Emerging diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, Hanta virus, Dengue, West Nile, SARS, etc.,
underscore this fact. Ironically, just a few decades ago, some scientists were forecasting
that advances in medicine might soon eradicate deadly diseases.
Also: *** Watchtower 1997 4/1 p. 7 Are These Really the Last Days?: "Today, cancer
and heart disease claim millions of lives each year—veritable pestilences."
Reply: The fact that more people are getting cancer and heart disease is actually a good
sign, as it means that more people are living long enough to get it. Whereas in times past
people lived short miserable lives,

"But overall cancer rates have not been rising, and lots of cancers, like stomach,
uterine, and colorectal cancer, are on the decline.
We think there's a cancer epidemic because we hear more about cancer. Cancer is
a disease of an aging population, and fortunately, more people now live long
enough to get cancer. More talk about it too. Many years ago people who got
cancer were secretive about it."
MYTHS, LIES, AND DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY by John Stossel

As for Ebola, Hanta virus, Dengue, West Nile, SARS, how many people do you know
that actually died of this?
"Unfortunately, public health alarms are sounded too often and too
soon. SARS was broadcast as a new global killer to which we had zero
immunity, and yet it petered out long before it killed a single
person in the United States. SARS was something to be taken
seriously, but the real lessons of SARS, smallpox, West Nile virus,
anthrax and mad cow disease weren't learned by our leaders — that
potential health threats are more effectively examined in the
laboratory than at a news conference."
An epidemic of overreaction
10-11-05
By Marc Siegel, MARC SIEGEL is an internist and associate professor
at the New York University School of Medicine. He is the author
of "False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear" (Wiley, 2005).

What of AIDS?
AIDS has killed about one half of one percent for the world’s population, whereas, in
previous eras, pestilences had a much more profound impact on the world’s population.
The Justinian Plague killed about 1/5 of the world’s population, and the Black Death of
the 14th century is considered on the truer turning points in world history.

The impact of the Black Death, the greatest ecological upheaval, has
been compared to that of the two world wars of the twentieth
century. To a degree this is true. But the Black Death... wrought
even more essential change.... The effects of this natural and human
disaster changed Europe profoundly, perhaps more so than any other
series of events. For this reason, alone, the Black Death should be
ranked as the greatest biological-environmental event in history,
and one of the major turning points of Western Civilization. [Robert
S. Gottfried, The Black Death, 1983, p. 163]
AIDS, in contrast, is largely a preventable disease, and is making headway with newer
science and medicine:

Promising news on AIDS

The drug cocktails used to suppress HIV and AIDS are now so effective
that many more patients are living long enough to die of other causes,
says a new study. Statistics on nearly 70,000 New York City residents
who were infected with HIV show that of those who died between 1999
and 2004, 26 percent succumbed to causes associated with old age-such
as heart disease and cancer-and not from causes related to the virus.
That's encouraging news, Dr. Judith Aberg of New York University tells
Scientific American, and doctors should take note. "Physicians
everywhere must remember," Aberg said, "that most of their
HIV-infected patients will survive to develop the diseases that plague
the rest of us."
-The Week Magazine

The fact is that epidemic disease and pestilences plays a minor role in recent times
compared to what it did in earlier centuries. The news of a ever prolonged lifespan and
the booming population this past century is testament to the fact that, for much of the
world, we have gained an enormous victory over an early death.

Scare: Despite technological advancements, famines would be common (Luke 21:11;

Revelation 6:5-8).

Reply: Famines abound, but they are decreasing dramatically:

“If we take caloric consumption as an indicator of how

well fed the nations of the world are, we see some dramatic changes.
In 1964-66 only 59 countries (42 percent of the world's total)
recorded an average daily caloric consumption of at least 100 percent
of requirements. Ten years later, in 1974-76, this was true of 72
countries (52 percent) and by 1982-84 this had increased again to 92
countries, or 66 percent. Economist Jacqueline Kasun notes that

world food production has increased considerably faster than

population in recent decades. The increase in per capita food output
between 1950 and 1977 amounted to either 28 percent or 37 percent,
depending on whether United Nations or United States Department of
Agriculture figures are used.... More recent United Nations or United
States Department of Agriculture data show that world food output has
continued to match or outstrip population growth in the years since
1977. Some of the most dramatic increases have occurred in the poorest
countries, those designated for "triage" by the apostles of doom. For
example, rice and wheat production in India in 1983 was almost
three-and-a-half times as great as in 1950. This was considerably more
 than twice the percentage increase in the population of India for the
same period.”
Jim Person "The Myth of Famine." In Exploding Population Myths.
Vancouver, B.C.: The Fraser Institute, 1995.

Also:

“As with the claim of pestilence, it is not difficult to show that famines have
decreased greatly in the 20th century compared to prior ones. Four famines struck
China in 1810, 1811, 1846 and 1849, and killed at least 45 million. Cannibalism
was reported to be rampant. All told, some 100 million people starved to death in
China alone in the 19th century. What about the 20th century? In 1958-1961 a
severe famine struck China, in which anywhere from 8 to 30 million died.
Perhaps another 5 million in China have died in the 20th century. So China,
whose population in the 20th century is more than double what it was in the 19th,
has experienced significantly less famine in both absolute and relative terms in the
20th century. In almost every country of Europe and the Americas, famine became
almost unknown by the mid-20th century. In much of the rest of the world it is the
same as it has always been. The most severe famines in nearly every part of the
world occurred before 1914. While malnutrition is certainly a problem and
famines still occur, the situation was well described in 1975 by one food expert:
"We might be inclined to deduce from the pictorial evidence of famine that we
have seen recently on television, in newspapers, and in magazines that the world
is more prone to famine now than it used to be. But the evidence is clearly to the
contrary.... There has been a rather substantial reduction in the incidence of
famine during the past century." For this reason, when famine does strike it is big
news.” Unassailable Proofs by Alan Feuerbacher

Scare: Earthquakes occurring in diverse places predicted

(Matthew 24:7).
For updated news & links visit:
EarthQuakes (harpazo network)

Reply: The harpazo network includes a link from USGS (U.S. Geological Survey). What
do they have to say about modern quakes?

“Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of

magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant throughout this century
and, according to our records, have actually seemed to decrease in recent years. A
partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have
definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to
locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of
seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global
communications.”
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/faq.php?categoryID=6&faqID=110
Others, like the Watchtower have used the statistics from the National Geophysical Data
Center to try and prove an increase in earthquakes, but this is wrong also:

"Erroneous statistical conclusions can be drawn from the numbers of

earthquakes taken from Catalog of Significant Earthquakes, 2150 B.C.
to the present. The reporting of large or destructive earthquakes is not
homogeneous in space or time, particularly for periods prior to the 1900s.
Because this publication mainly lists those earthquakes that have caused death or
damage, the number of earthquake reports is dependent on the written history
available for a particular region, as well as on the rate of development of
population centers and related structures. Therefore, it is misleading to use the
numbers of significant earthquakes in that publication to suggest statistically that
there has been an increase in worldwide seismic activity since 1900 or for any
time period. that "apparent" increase in activity:

Instrumental seismology is a young science. The first calibrated

instruments to measure seismic waves traveling through the earth did
not appear until the late 1800s. At that time, seismologists became aware of the
vast numbers of earthquakes occurring throughout the world, but because of the
insensitivity of their instruments they were able to locate only the large magnitude
events.

The 1960s saw two major advances. First, a network of seismological

observatories, the Worldwide Standardized Seismograph Network (WWSSN),
was installed by the United States Government, principally to monitor
underground nuclear tests. These sensitive instruments could detect and identify
earthquakes anywhere in the world from about magnitude 4.5.

Second computers became available in the late 1960s. Computers allowed

seismologists to leave inaccurate and cumbersome graphical methods of
locating earthquakes, and to process the increasing volume of new network data
more rapidly than ever before. Prior to 1962, only hundreds of earthquake
epicenters were determined each year by Government and academic institutions,
but the number increased to the thousands using computerized location methods.
In some special local studies, more than 100,000 earthquakes per year were
identified and located.

In summary, using the data in Catalog of Significant Earthquakes, 2150 B.C. to

the present to suggest that there has been an increase in worldwide earthquake
activity is misleading and erroneous. The above observations and reporting factors
must also be considered when making statistical studies based on that historical
data report."
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/hazard/sigintro.shtml
Scare: Marriage would be forbidden by many (1 Timothy 4:3). The Bible states that
marriage is honorable among all (Hebrews 13:4). Despite this, the Catholic Church
forbids their 400,000 priests and numerous bishops, cardinals, nuns, and monks from
marrying. The Orthodox Church, as well as Hindus, Buddhists, and other religious groups
also impose mandatory celibacy for certain orders.
Visit:
* The End of Marriage in Scandinavia (weekly standard)

Reply: Marriage is alive and well, despite warnings to the contrary. We now have more
couples celebrating their 40th and 50th wedding anniversaries than ever before in history.
For more on this, feel free to read The Way We Never Were: American Families and the
Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz

Lower divorce rates in previous generations are misleading. "Lots of

marriages in the 19th Century ended in desertion, not divorce," Grooms
said. - Greg Garrison, "Baptist Lead in Divorce," The Birmingham News,
12/30/1999

Scare: Youth would become increasingly rebellious

(2 Timothy 3:2-3; Mark 13:12).

Reply: I could argue that youth have become decreasingly rebellious, after all:

"Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2005," a recent joint study

by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, reports statistics
about crime incidences occurring in school as well as on the way to
and from school. Major findings include:
* In the most recent federally reported data there were 17
homicides and 5 suicides of school youth at school, less than 1 per
million students enrolled.
* The number of school-associated violent deaths has decreased in
a decade by 40 percent, from 43 to 26 last year, in a population of 52
million U.S. students.
* The violent crime victimization rate at school declined from 48
per 1,000 students in to 28 over a decade.
* Less than 1 percent of students reported serious violent
victimization (such as rape, sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated
assault).
* Theft, bullying, drugs, and weapons are still widespread, but in
the last decade reports of physical fights fell 14 percent, reports of
students being injured in fights dropped 20 percent, and the number of
students who reported having carried a weapon in the past 30 days
decreased by 30 percent.

“The youth crime rate has decreased over the past decade.
The media's tendency to focus on violent youth crime stories can
contribute to a distortion of youth crime facts. An Ontario study
found that 94%of youth crime stories in the media were about violent
offences when less than 25% of Ontario's youth court cases actually
involved violent crime. Minor assaults account for more than half of
the violent crimes committed by youth.

A similar American study conducted in 2000 by the advocacy group

Building Blocks for Youth found that crime news on network TV
increased 83% from 1990 to 1998. The crime rate dropped 20% during
that period to its lowest level in 25 years. Yet polling showed
two-thirds of people believed it was still on the rise.

Between 1991-92 and 2002-03, the total number of youth crime cases in
Canada dropped by 20%. In that same period, the number of crimes
against property committed by youth fell a total of 47% to its lowest
level in more than 25 years.” –John Stossel

Complaining about youth is an age old practice:

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise
[disrespectful] and impatient of restraint" (Hesiod, 8th century BC).

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L.
Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277
(1953)."

"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of

today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for
parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as
if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is
foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest
and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress."
-Peter the Hermit in A.D. 1274!

"Our young men have grown slothful. There is not a single honourable
 occupation for which they will toil night and day. They sing and dance
and grow effeminate and curl their hair and learn womanish tricks of
speech; They are as languid as women and deck themselves out with
unbecoming ornaments. Without strength, without energy, they add
nothing during life to the gifts with which they were born - then they
complain of their lot" (Seneca, first century AD).

"So the water has been wholesome to this day, according to the word
which Elisha spoke.
He went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way,
some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, "Go
up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!"
And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name
of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore
forty-two of the boys."
2 Kings 2:22

"Times are bad [also seen as: The world is going to hell]: children no
longer obey their parents, and
everyone is writing a book..."
-- attributed to Cicero

There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end: Bribery
and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents, and
everyone is writing a book.
-- from Assyrian tablet, 2800 B.C.E.

"The world is passing through troublesome times. The young people of

today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for
parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint; they talk as
if they alone know everything...."
~ Matthew Paris (13th Century A.D.)

Also:

"....violent youth have always been with us. "An Army of six million
men are being mobilized against us, an army of delinquents. Juvenile
delinquency has increased at an alarming rate eating at the heart of
America," a juvenile court judge warned in earlier in
nineteenth-century America, hordes of teens and pre-labeled "predatory
beasts" by police and the press, ran wild in streets, dodging
authorities, "gnawing away at the foundations" as a commentator put it
at the time. In 1850 alone New York recorded more than 200 gang wars
fought largely by adolescent in 1868, in San Francisco a gang of
 teenagers robbed a Chinese man then beat him, sliced up his face, and
branded him with hot irons. Violence by teens against Chinese
immigrants was In during this period in U.S. history."
-Barry Glassner

Scare: The rise of anti-Semitism worldwide anticipated (Joel 3:2; Zechariah 12:2-3). In
the 1940s, Hitler tried to exterminate every Jew. And in the final 3 ½ years of the
Tribulation, Antichrist will turn on the Jews and attempt the same.

Reply: Anti-Semitism has been with us for millennia. One can certainly make a very
strong case for a much more rampant anti-semitism in times past.
From wikipedia:

37-41
Thousands of Jews killed by mobs in Alexandria (Egypt), as recounted by Philo of
Alexandria in Flaccus.

50
Jews ordered by Roman Emperor Claudius "not to hold meetings", in the words of
Cassius Dio (Roman History, 60.6.6). Claudius later expelled Jews from Rome, according
to both Suetonius ("Lives of the Twelve Caesars", Claudius, Section 25.4) and Acts 18:2.

66-73
Great Jewish Revolt against the Romans is crushed by Vespasian and Titus Flavius.
Titus refuses to accept a wreath of victory, as there is "no merit in vanquishing people
forsaken by their own God." (Philostratus, Vita Apollonii). The events of this period were
recorded in detail by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus. His record is largely
sympathetic to the Roman view, and hence is considered a controversial source. Josephus
describes the Jewish revolt as being led by "tyrants," to the detriment of the city, and of
Titus as having "moderation" in his escalation of the Siege of Jerusalem

1st century
Fabrications of Apion in Alexandria, Egypt, including the first recorded blood libel.
Juvenal writes anti-Jewish poetry. Josephus picks apart contemporary and old anti-
Semitic myths in his work Against Apion. (e-text at Project Gutenberg)

Late 1st–early 2nd century

Tacitus writes anti-Jewish polemic in his Histories (book 5). He reports on several old
myths of ancient anti-Semitism (including that of the donkey's head in the Holy of
Holies), but the key to his view that Jews "regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred
of enemies" is his analysis of the extreme differences between monotheistic Judaism and
the polytheism common throughout the Roman world.

115-117
 Thousands of Jews are killed during civil unrest in Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica, as
recounted by Dio Cassius' History of Rome (68.31), and Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica
(4.2), and papyrii.

c. 119
Roman emperor Hadrian bans circumcision, making Judaism de facto illegal.

c. 132-135
Hadrian constructs a pagan temple to Jupiter at the site of the Temple in Jerusalem,
builds Aelia Capitolina among ruins of Jerusalem and crushes the Bar Kokhba's revolt.
Judea is wiped off the map and renamed into Palestine; Jews are left dispersed and
stateless.

167
Claimed to be the first recorded accusation of deicide. A sermon, attributed to Melito
of Sardis, titled On the Passover (Peri Pascha), blames the Jews for following King Herod
and Caiaphas to execute Jesus, despite their calling as God's people (57, 93). Melito says,
"you did not know, O Israel, that this one was the firstborn of God." (82) Melito does not
attribute particular blame to Pontius Pilate, but only mentions that Pilate washed his
hands of guilt (92). Melito wrote this sermon in Greek, so does not use the Latin word for
deicide, deicida. (According to the Latin Dictionary of Charleton Lewis and Charles
Short, the latin word deicidas is used by the 4th century, by Peter Chrystologus in his
sermon #172.) At a time when Christians were widely persecuted, Melitos speech was an
appeal to Rome to spare Christians.

4th century
Part of a series of articles on
Jews and Judaism

306
The Synod of Elvira bans intermarriage between Christians and Jews. Other social
intercourses, such as eating together, are also forbidden.

315-337
Constantine I enacts various laws regarding the Jews: Jews are not allowed to own
Christian slaves or to circumcise their slaves. Conversion of Christians to Judaism is
outlawed. Congregations for religious services are restricted, but Jews are also allowed to
enter the restituted Jerusalem on the anniversary of the Temple's destruction.

325
First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. The Christian Church separates the calculation of
the date of Easter from the Jewish Passover: "We desire, dearest brethren, to separate
ourselves from the detestable company of the Jews... How, then, could we follow these
Jews, who are almost certainly blinded."

361-363
 Roman Emperor Julian, a pagan, allows the Jews to return to "holy Jerusalem which
you have for many years longed to see rebuilt" and to rebuild the Temple.

386
John Chrysostom of Antioch writes eight homilies Adversus Judaeos (lit: Against the
Judaizers). See also: Christianity and anti-Semitism#The Church Fathers.

388
A Christian mob incited by the local bishop plunders and burns down a synagogue in
Callinicum. Theodosius I orders punishment for those responsible, and rebuilding the
synagogue at the Christian expense. Ambrose of Milan insists in his letter that the whole
case be dropped He interrupts the liturgy in the emperor's presence with an ultimatum
that he would not continue until the case was dropped. Theodosius complies.

399
The Western Roman Emperor Honorius calls Judaism superstitio indigna and
confiscates gold and silver collected by the synagogues for Jerusalem.

5th century

415
Jews are accused of ritual murder during Purim.[2] Christians in Antioch, and Magona
confiscate or burn synagogues. Bishop Cyril of Alexandria forces his way into the
synagogue, expels the Jews and gives their property to the mob. Prefect Orestes is stoned
almost to death for protesting.

418
The first record of Jews being forced to convert or face expulsion. Severus, the Bishop
of Minorca, claimed to have forced 540 Jews to accept Christianity upon conquering the
island.

419
The monk Barsauma (subsequently the Bishop of Nisibis) gathers a group of followers
and for the next three years destroys synagogues throughout the Palestine.

429
The East Roman Emperor Theodosius II orders all funds raised by Jews to support
schools be turned over to his treasury.

439 Jan 31
The Codex Theodosianus, the first imperial compilation of laws. Jews are prohibited
from holding important positions involving money, including judicial and executive
offices. The ban against building new synagogues is reinstated. The anti-Jewish statutes
apply to the Samaritans. The Code is also accepted by Western Roman Emperor,
Valentinian III.
451
Sassanid ruler Yazdegerd II of Persia's decree abolishes the Sabbath and orders
executions of Jewish leaders, including the Exilarch Mar Nuna.

465
Council of Vannes, Gaul prohibited the Christian clergy from participating in Jewish
feasts.

6th century

519
Ravenna, Italy. After the local synagogues were burned down by the local mob,
Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great orders the town to rebuild them at its own expense.

529-559
Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great publishes Corpus Juris Civilis. New laws
restrict citizenship to Christians. These regulations determined the status of Jews
throughout the Empire for hundreds of years: Jewish civil rights restricted: "they shall
enjoy no honors". The principle of Servitus Judaeorum (Servitude of the Jews) is
established: the Jews cannot testify against Christians. The emperor becomes an arbiter in
internal Jewish matters. The use of the Hebrew language in worship is forbidden. Shema
Yisrael ("Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one"), sometimes considered the most important
prayer in Judaism, is banned as a denial of the Trinity. Some Jewish communities are
converted by force, their synagogues turned into churches.

535
The First Council of Clermont, Gaul prohibits Jews from holding public office.

538
The Third Council of Orléans, Gaul forbids Jews to employ Christian servants or
possess Christian slaves. Jews are prohibited from appearing in the streets during Easter:
"their appearance is an insult to Christianity". A Merovingian king Childebert approves
the measure.

576
Clermont, Gaul. Bishop Avitus offers Jews a choice: accept Christianity or leave
Clermont. Most emigrate to Marseille.

589
The Council of Narbonne, Septimania, forbids Jews from chanting psalms while
burying their dead. Anyone violating this law is fined 6 ounces of gold. The third Council
of Toledo, held under Visigothic King Reccared, bans Jews from slave ownership and
holding positions of authority, and reiterates the mutual ban on intermarriage.[3]
Reccared also rules children out of such marriages to be raised as Christians.

590
 Pope Gregory I defends the Jews against forced conversion.

7th century

610-620
Visigothic Hispania After many of his anti-Jewish edicts were ignored, king Sisebur
prohibits Judaism. Those not baptized fled. This was the first incidence where a
prohibition of Judaism affected an entire country.

614
Fifth Council of Paris decrees that all Jews holding military or civil positions must
accept baptism, together with their families.

615
Italy. The earliest referral to the Juramentum Judaeorum (the Jewish Oath): the concept
that no heretic could be believed in court against a Christian. The oath became
standardized throughout Europe in 1555.

629 Mar. 21
Byzantine Emperor Heraclius with his army marches into Jerusalem. Jewish
inhabitants support him after his promise of amnesty. Upon his entry into Jerusalem the
local priests convince him that killing Jews is a good deed. Hundreds of Jews are
massacred, thousands flee to Egypt.

Frankish King Dagobert I, encouraged by Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, expels all

Jews from the kingdom.

632
The first case of officially sanctioned forced baptism. Emperor Heraclius violates the
Codex Theodosianus, which protected them from forced conversions.

681
The Twelfth Council of Toledo, Spain orders burning of the Talmud and other "heretic"
books.

682
Visigothic king Erwig begins his reign by enacting 28 anti-Jewish laws. He presses for
the "utter extirpation of the pest of the Jews" and decrees that all converts must be
registered by a parish priest, who must issue travel permits. All holidays, Christian and
Jewish, must be spent in the presence of a priest to ensure piety and to prevent the
backsliding.

692
Quinisext Council in Constantinople forbids Christians on pain of excommunication to
bathe in public baths with Jews, employ a Jewish doctor or socialize with Jews.
694
17th Council of Toledo. King Ergica believes rumors that the Jews had conspired to
ally themselves with the Muslim invaders and forces Jews to give all land, slaves and
buildings bought from Christians, to his treasury. He declares that all Jewish children
over the age of seven should be taken from their homes and raised as Christians.

8th century

717
Possible date for the Pact of Umar, a document that specified restrictions on Jews and
Christians (dhimmi) living under Muslim rule. However, academic historians believe that
this document was actually compiled at a much later date.

722
Byzantine emperor Leo III forcibly converts all Jews and Montanists in the empire into
mainstream Byzantine Christianity.

9th century

807
Abbassid Caliph Harun al-Rashid orders all Jews in the Caliphate to wear a yellow
belt, with Christians to wear a blue one.

820
Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, declares in his essays that Jews are accursed and
demands a complete segregation of Christians and Jews. In 826 he issues a series of
pamphlets to convince Emperor Louis the Pious to attack "Jewish insolence", but fails to
convince the Emperor.

898-929
French king Charles the Simple confiscates Jewish-owned property in Narbonne and
donates it to the Church.

11th century

1008-1013
Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah issues severe restrictions against Jews in the
Land of Israel. All Jews are forced to wear a "golden calf" (made of wood) around their
necks. On Oct. 18 1009 he destroys the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but the French
"historian" Raoul Glaber blames the Jews. As a result, Jews were expelled from Limoges
and other French towns.

1012
One of the first known persecutions of Jews in Germany: Henry II, Holy Roman
Emperor expels Jews from Mainz.
1016
The Jewish community of Kairouan, Tunisia is forced to chose between conversion and
expulsion.

1032
Abul Kamal Tumin conquers Fez, Morocco and decimates the Jewish community,
killing 6,000 Jews.

1050
Council of Narbonne, France forbids Christians to live in Jewish homes.

1066 Dec 30
The entire Jewish community of Granada came under the riotous siege resulting in
4,000 deaths and the destruction of most property. The community quickly recovered,
only to fall again at the hands of the Almoravides lead by Iban Iashufin in 1090, bringing
the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain to end.

1078
Council of Gerona decrees Jews to pay taxes for support of the Catholic Church to the
same extent as Christians.

Jews (identifiable by Judenhut) are being massacred by Crusaders.

1096
The First Crusade. Three hosts of crusaders pass through several Central European
cities. The third, unofficial host, led by Count Emicho, decides to attack the Jewish
communities, most notably in the Rhineland, under the slogan: "Why fight Christ's
enemies abroad when they are living among us?" Eimicho's host attacks the synagogue at
Speyers and kills all the defenders. Another 1,200 Jews commit suicide in Mayence to
escape his attempt to forcibly convert them; see German Crusade, 1096. Attempts by the
local bishops remained fruitless. All in all, 5,000 Jews were murdered. St. Bernard
attempts to stop further atrocities: "Whoever makes an attempt on a life of a Jew, sins as
if he had attacked Jesus himself."

12th century

1107
Moroccan Almoravid ruler Yoseph Ibn Tashfin orders all Moroccan Jews to convert or
leave.

1143
150 Jews were killed in Ham, France.

1144 March 20 (Passover)

 The first blood libel in which the Jews of Norwich, England were accused of ritual
murder after a Christian boy (William of Norwich) is found dead. It was claimed that the
Jews had tortured and crucified their victim. From this time forward, similar charges were
levelled against Jews in all quarters of Europe. The believers of these accusations
reasoned that the Jews, having crucified Jesus, continued to thirst for pure and innocent
blood and satisfied their thirst at the expense of innocent Christian children. In
accordance with this logic, the season of such charges was typically in Spring around the
time of Passover which approximately coincides with the time of Jesus' death. [Ben-
Sasson, H.H., Editor; (1969). A History of The Jewish People. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-674-39731-2 (paper).] The legend of William of
Norwich became a cult, and the child acquired status of martyr saint. In 1189, Jewish
deputation attending coronation of Richard the Lionheart is attacked by the crowd.
Pogroms in London follow and spread around England. On Feb 6 1190 all the Norwich
Jews found in their houses were slaughtered, except few who found refuge in the castle.

1148-1212
The rule of the Almohads. Only Jews who had converted to Christianity or Islam are
allowed to live in Granada. One of the refugees was Rambam (AKA Maimonides) who
settled in Fez and later in Fustat near Cairo.

1165
forced mass conversions in Yemen

1171
Blois, France: 31 Jews burned at the stake for blood libel.

1179
The Third Lateran Council, Canon 26: Jews are forbidden to be plaintiffs or witnesses
against Christians in the Courts. Jews are forbidden to withhold inheritance from
descendants who had accepted Christianity.

1180
Philip Augustus of France after four months in power, imprisons all the Jews in his
lands and demands a ransom for their release. In 1181 he annuls all loans made by Jews
to Christians and takes a percentage for himself. A year later, he confiscates all Jewish
property and expels the Jews from Paris. He readmits them in 1198, only after another
ransom was paid and a taxation scheme was set up to procure funds for himself.

1189
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa orders priests not to preach against Jews.

1190 Mar. 16
500 Jews of York massacred after 6-day siege by departing Crusaders, backed by a
number of people indebted to Jewish money-lenders. York Masssacre

1190
 Saladdin takes over Jerusalem from Crusaders and lifts the ban for Jews to live there.

1198 Aug
Saladdin's nephew al-Malik, caliph of Yemen, summons all the Jews and forcibly
converts them.

13th century
Germany. Appearance of Judensau: obscene and dehumanizing imagery of Jews,
ranging from etchings to Cathedral ceilings. Its popularity lasted for over 600 years.

1215
The Fourth Lateran Council headed by Pope Innocent III declares: "Jews and Saracens
of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes
of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress." (Canon 68). See
Judenhut. The Fourth Lateran Council also noted that the Jews' own law required the
wearing of identifying symbols. Pope Innocent III also reiterated papal injunctions
against forcible conversions, and added: "No Christian shall do the Jews any personal
injury...or deprive them of their possessions...or disturb them during the celebration of
their festivals...or extort money from them by threatening to exhume their dead."

1222
Council of Oxford: Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton forbids Jews from
building new synagogues, owning slaves or mixing with Christians.

1232
forced mass conversions in Marrakesh.

1235
The Jews of Fulda, Germany were accused of ritual murder. To investigate the blood
libel, Emperor Frederick II held a special conference of Jewish converts to Christianity at
which the converts were questioned about Jewish ritual practice. Letters inviting
prominent individuals to the conference still survive. At the conference, the converts
stated unequivocally that Jews do not harm Christian children or require blood for any
rituals. In 1236 the Emperor published these findings and in 1247 Pope Innocent IV, the
Emperor's enemy, also denounced accusations of the ritual murder of Christian children
by Jews. In 1272, the papal repudiation of the blood libel was repeated by Pope Gregory
X, who also ruled that thereafter any such testimony of a Christian against a Jew could
not be accepted unless it is confirmed by another Jew. Unfortunately, these proclamations
from the highest sources were not effective in altering the beliefs of the Christian
majority and the libels continued. [Ben-Sasson, H.H., Editor; (1969). A History of The
Jewish People. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-674-
39731-2 (paper).]

1236
Crusaders attack Jewish communities of Anjou and Poitou and attempt to baptize all
the Jews. Those who resisted (est. 3,000) were slaughtered.
1240
Duke Jean le Roux expels Jews from Brittany.

1240
Disputation of Paris. Pope Gregory IX puts Talmud on trial on the charges that it
contains blasphemy against Jesus and Mary and attacks on the Church. In 1242 24 cart-
loads of hand-written manuscripts were burned in the streets of Paris.

1242
James I of Aragon orders Jews to listen to conversion sermons and to attend churches.
Friars are given power to enter synagogues uninvited.

1244
Pope Innocent IV orders Louis IX of France to burn all Talmud copies.

1250
Zaragoza: death of a choirboy Saint Dominguito del Val prompts ritual murder
accusation. His sainthood was revoked in the 20th century but reportedly a chapel
dedicated to him still exists in the Cathedral of Zaragoza.

1254
Louis IX expels the Jews from France, their property and synagogues confiscated.
Most move to Germany and further east, however, after a couple of years, some were
readmitted back.

1255
King Henry III of England, protector of the Jews, sells his rights to the Jews to his
brother Richard for 5,000 marks.

c. 1260
Thomas Aquinas publishes Summa Contra Gentiles, a summary of Christian faith to be
presented to those who reject it. The Jews who refuse to convert are regarded as
"deliberately defiant" rather than "invincibly ignorant".

1263
Disputation of Barcelona.

1264
Pope Clement IV assigns Talmud censorship committee.

1267
In a special session, the Vienna city council forces Jews to wear Pileum cornutum (a
cone-shaped headdress, prevalent in many medieval illustrations of Jews). This
distinctive dress is an addition to Yellow badge Jews were already forced to wear.
Christians are not permitted to attend Jewish ceremonies.
1267
Synod of Breslau orders Jews to live in a segregated quarter.

1275
King Edward I of England passes anti-Jewish statute forcing Jews over the age of
seven to wear an identifying Yellow badge, and making usury illegal (linked to
blasphemy), in order to seize their assets. Scores of English Jews are arrested, 300
hanged and their property goes to the Crown. In 1280 he orders Jews to be present at
Dominicans preaching conversion. In 1287 he arrests heads of Jewish families and
demands their communities to pay ransom of 12,000 pounds.

1278
The Edict of Pope Nicholas III requires compulsory attendance of Jews at conversion
sermons.

1279
Synod of Ofen: Christians are forbidden to sell or rent real estate to or from Jews.

1282
John Pectin, Archbishop of Canterbury, orders all London synagogues to close and
prohibits Jewish physicians from practicing on Christians.

1283
Philip III of France causes mass migration of Jews by forbidding them to live in the
small rural localities.

1285
Blood libel in Munich, Germany results in the death of 68 Jews. 180 more Jews are
burned alive at the synagogue.

1287
A mob in Oberwesel, Germany kills 40 Jewish men, women and children after a ritual
murder accusation.

1289
Jews are expelled from Gascony and Anjou.

1290 July 18
Edict of Expulsion: Edward I expels all Jews from England, allowing them to take only
what they could carry, all the other property became the Crown's. Official reason:
continued practice of usury.

1291
Philip the Fair publishes an ordinance prohibiting the Jews to settle in France.
1298
During the civil war between Adolph of Nassau and Albrecht of Austria, German
knight Rindfleisch claims to have received a mission from heaven to exterminate "the
accursed race of the Jews". Under his leadership, the mob goes from town to town
destroying Jewish communities and massacring about 100,000 Jews, often by mass
burning at stake. Among 146 localities in Franconia, Bavaria and Austria are Röttingen
(April 20), Würzburg (July 24), Nuremberg (August 1). [4]

14th century

1305
Philip IV of France seizes all Jewish property (except the clothes they wear) and expels
them from France (approx. 100,000). His successor Louis X of France allows French
Jews to return in 1315.

1320
Shepherds' Crusade attacks the Jews of 120 localities in southwest France.

1321
King Henry II of Castile forces Jews to wear Yellow badge.

1321
Jews in central France falsely charged of their supposed collusion with lepers to poison
wells. After massacre of est. 5,000 Jews, king Philip V of France admits they were
innocent.

1322
King Charles IV expels Jews from France.

1333
forced mass conversions in Baghdad

1336
Persecutions against Jews in Franconia and Alsace led by lawless German bands, the
Armleder.

1348
European Jews are blamed for the Black Death. Charge laid to the Jews that they
poisoned the wells. Massacres spread throughout Spain, France, Germany and Austria.
More than 200 Jewish communities destroyed by violence. Many communities have been
expelled and settle down in Poland.

1348
Basel: 600 Jews burned at the stake, 140 children forcibly baptized, the remaining
city's Jews expelled. The city synagogue is turned into a church and the Jewish cemetery
is destroyed.
1359
Charles V of France allows Jews to return for a period of 20 years in order to pay
ransom for his father John II of France, imprisoned in England. After few extensions, on
Nov 3, 1394 his son Charles VI of France expels all Jews from France.

1386
Wenceslaus, Holy Roman Emperor, expels the Jews from Swabian League and
Strasbourg and confiscates their property. On March 18, 1389, a Jewish boy is accused of
plotting against a priest. The mob slaughters approx. 3,000 of Prague Jews, destroys the
city's synagogue and Jewish cemetery. Wenceslaus insists that the responsibility lay with
the Jews for going outside during the Holy Week.

1391
Violence incited by Archdeacon of Ecija Ferrand Martinez, results in over 10,000
murdered Jews. The Jewish quarter in Barcelona is destroyed. The campaign quickly
spreads throughout Spain (except for Granada) and destroys Jewish communities in
Valencia and Palma De Majorca.

1399
Blood libel in Posen.

15th century

1411
Oppressive legislation against Jews in Spain as an outcome of the preaching of the
Dominican friar Vicente Ferrer.

1413
Disputation of Tortosa, Spain, staged by the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII, is followed
by forced mass conversions.

1420
All Jews are expelled from Lyon.

1421
Persecutions of Jews in Vienna, known as Wiener Gesera (Vienna Edict), confiscation
of their possessions, and forced conversion of Jewish children. 270 Jews burned at stake.
Expulsion of Jews from Austria.

1422
Pope Martin V issues a Bull reminding Christians that Christianity was derived from
Judaism and warns the friars not to incite against the Jews. The Bull was withdrawn the
following year on allegations that the Jews of Rome attained it by fraud.

1434
 Council of Basel, Sessio XIX: Jews are forbidden to obtain academic degrees and to
act as agents in the conclusion of contracts between Christians.

1435
Massacre and forced conversion of Majorcan Jews.

1438
Establishment of mellahs (ghettos) in Morocco.

1447
Casimir IV renews all the rights of Jews of Poland and makes his charter one of the
most liberal in Europe. He revokes it in 1454 at the insistence of Bishop Zbigniew.

1449
The Statute of Toledo introduces the rule of purity of blood discriminating Conversos.
Pope Nicholas V condems it.

1463
Pope Nicholas V authorizes the establishment of the Inquisition to investigate heresy
among the Marranos. See also Crypto-Judaism.

1473-1474
Spain. Massacres of Marranos of Valladolid, Cordoba, Segovia, Ciudad Real.

1475
A student of the preacher Giovanni da Capistrano, Franciscan Bernardino de Fletre,
accuses the Jews in murdering an infant, Simon. The entire community is arrested, 15
leaders are burned at the stake, the rest are expelled. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V confirmed
Simon's cultus. Saint Simon was considered a martyr and patron of kidnap and torture
victims for almost 500 years. In 1965, Pope Paul VI declared the episode a fraud, and
decanonized Simon's sainthood.

1481
The Spanish Inquisition is instituted.

1487-1504
Bishop Gennady exposes the heresy of Zhidovstvuyushchiye (Judaizers) in Eastern
Orthodoxy of Muscovy.

1490
Tomás de Torquemada burns 6,000 volumes of Jewish mansucripts in Salamanca.

1491
The blood libel in La Guardia, Spain, where the alleged victim Holy Child of La
Guardia became revered as a saint.
1492 Mar. 31
Ferdinand II and Isabella issue General Edict on the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain:
approx. 200,000. Some return to the Land of Israel. As many localities and entire
countries expel their Jewish citizens (after robbing them), and others deny them entrance,
the legend of the Wandering Jew, a condemned harbinger of calamity, gains popularity.

1492 Oct. 24
Jews of Mecklenburg, Germany are accused of stabbing a consecrated wafer. 27 Jews
are burned, including two women. The spot is still called the Judenberg. All the Jews are
expelled from the Duchy.

1493 Jan. 12
Expulsion from Sicily: approx. 37,000.

1496
Forced conversion and expulsion of Jews from Portugal. This included many who fled
Spain four years earlier.

1498
Prince Alexander of Lithuania forces most of the Jews to forfeit their property or
convert. The main motivation is to cancel the debts the nobles owe to the Jews. Within a
short time the trade grounds to a halt and the Prince invites the Jews back in.

16th century
Jews from Worms, Germany wear the mandatory yellow badge. A moneybag and garlic
in the hands are an anti-semitic stereotype. 16th century drawing
Enlarge
Jews from Worms, Germany wear the mandatory yellow badge. A moneybag and garlic
in the hands are an anti-semitic stereotype. 16th century drawing

1505
Ten Ceské Budejovice Jews are tortured and executed after being accused of killing a
Christian girl; later, on deathbed, shepherd confesses to fabricating the accusation.

1506 April 19
A marrano expresses his doubts about miracle visions at St. Dominics Church in
Lisbon, Portugal. The crowd, led by Dominican monks, kills him, then ransacks Jewish
houses and slaughters any Jew they could find. The countrymen hear about the massacre
and join in. Over 2,000 marranos killed in three days.

1509 August 19
A converted Jew Johannes Pfefferkorn receives authority of Maximilian I, Holy Roman
Emperor to destroy the Talmud and other Jewish religious books, except the Hebrew
Bible, in Frankfurt.
1510 July 19
Forty Jews are executed in Brandenburg, Germany for allegedly desecrating the host;
remainder expelled. November 23. Less-wealthy Jews expelled from Naples; remainder
heavily taxed. 38 Jews burned at the stake in Berlin.

1511 June 6
Eight Roman Catholic converts from Judaism burned at the stake for allegedly
reverting.

1516
The first ghetto is established, on one of the islands in Venice.

1519
Martin Luther leads Protestant Reformation and challenges the doctrine of Servitus
Judaeorum "... to deal kindly with the Jews and to instruct them to come over to us".
February 21. All Jews expelled from Ratisbon/Regensburg.

1520
Pope Leo X allows Jews print Talmud in Venice

1527 June 16
Jews are ordered to leave Florence, but the edict is soon rescinded.

1528
Three judaizers are burned at the stake in Mexico City's first auto da fe.

1535
After Spanish troops capture Tunis all the local Jews are sold into slavery.

1543
In his pamphlet On the Jews and Their Lies Martin Luther advocates an eight-point
plan to get rid of the Jews as a distinct group either by religious conversion or by
expulsion:
"...set fire to their synagogues or schools..."
"...their houses also be razed and destroyed..."
"...their prayer books and Talmudic writings... be taken from them..."
"...their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb..."
"...safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews..."
"...usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be
taken from them..." and "Such money should now be used in ... the following [way]...
Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed [certain amount]..."
"...young, strong Jews and Jewesses [should]... earn their bread in the sweat of their
brow..."
"If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we
have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country" and "we must
drive them out like mad dogs."
 Luther "got the Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them
from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from
Brandenburg in 1543. His followers continued to agitate against the Jews there: they
sacked the Berlin synagogue in 1572 and the following year finally got their way, the
Jews being banned from the entire country."[5] (See also Martin Luther and the Jews)

1540
All Jews are banished from Prague.

1546
Martin Luther's sermon Admonition against the Jews contains accusations of ritual
murder, black magic, and poisoning of wells. Luther recognizes no obligation to protect
the Jews.

1547
Ivan the Terrible becomes ruler of Russia and refuses to allow Jews to live in or even
enter his kingdom because they "bring about great evil" (quoting his response to request
by Polish king Sigismund).

1550
Dr. Joseph Hacohen is chased out of Genoa for practicing medicine; soon all Jews are
expelled.

1553
Pope Julius III forbids Talmud printing and orders burning of any copy found. Rome’s
Inquisitor-General, Cardinal Carafa (later Pope Paul IV) has Talmud publicly burnt in
Rome on Rosh Hashanah, starting a wave of Talmud burning throughout Italy. About
12,000 copies were destroyed.

1554
Cornelio da Montalcino, a Franciscan Friar who converted to Judaism, is burned alive
in Rome.

1555
In Papal Bull Cum nimis absurdum, Pope Paul IV writes: "It appears utterly absurd and
impermissible that the Jews, whom God has condemned to eternal slavery for their guilt,
should enjoy our Christian love." He renews anti-Jewish legislation and installs a locked
nightly ghetto in Rome. The Bull also forces Jewish males to wear a yellow hat, females -
yellow kerchief. Owning real estate or practicing medicine on Christians is forbidden. It
also limits Jewish communities to only one synagogue.

1557
Jews are temporarily banished from Prague.

1558
 Recanati, Italy: a baptized Jew Joseph Paul More enters synagogue on Yom Kippur
under the protection of Pope Paul IV and tries to preach a conversion sermon. The
congregation evicts him. Soon after, the Jews are expelled from Recanati.

1559
Pope Pius IV allows Talmud on conditions that it is printed by a Christian and the text
is censored.

1563 February
Russian troops take Polotsk from Lithuania, Jews are given ultimatum: embrace
Russian Orthodox Church or die. Around 300 Jewish men, women and children were
thrown into ice holes of Dvina river.

1564
Brest-Litovsk: the son of a wealthy Jewish tax collector is accused of killing the
family's Christian servant for ritual purposes. He is tortured and executed in line with the
law. King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland forbids future charges of ritual murder,
calling them groundless.

1565
Jews are temporarily banished from Prague.

1566
Antonio Ghislieri elected and, as Pope Pius V, reinstates the harsh anti-Jewish laws of
Pope Paul IV. In 1569 he expels Jews dwelling outside of the ghettos of Rome, Ancona,
and Avignon from the Papal States, thus ensuring that they remain city-dwellers.

1567
Jews are reauthorised to live in France

1586
Pope Sixtus V forbids printing of the Talmud.

1590
Jewish quarter of Mikulov burns to ground and 15 people die while Christians watch or
pillage. King Philip II of Spain orders expulsion of Jews from Lombardy. His order is
ignored by local authorities until 1597, when 72 Jewish families are forced into exile.

1593 Feb. 25
Pope Clement VIII confirms the Papal bull of Paul III that expels Jews from Papal
states except ghettos in Rome and Ancona and issues Caeca et obdurata ("Blind
Obstinacy"): "All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and
deceit. ... Then as now Jews have to be reminded intermittently anew that they were
enjoying rights in any country since they left Palestine and the Arabian desert, and
subsequently their ethical and moral doctrines as well as their deeds rightly deserve to be
exposed to criticism in whatever country they happen to live."
17th century

1603
Frei Diogo Da Assumpacao, a partly Jewish friar who embraced Judaism, burned alive
in Lisbon.

1608
The Jesuit order forbids admission to anyone descended from Jews to the fifth
generation, a restriction lifted in the 20th century. Three years later Pope Paul V applies
the rule throughout the Church, but his successor revokes it.

1612
The Hamburg Senate decides to officially allow Jews to live in the city on the
condition there is no public worship.

Expulsion of the Jews from Frankfurt on August 23, 1614: "1380 persons old and young
were counted at the exit of the gate"
Enlarge
Expulsion of the Jews from Frankfurt on August 23, 1614: "1380 persons old and young
were counted at the exit of the gate"

1614
Vincent Fettmilch, who called himself the "new Haman of the Jews", leads a raid on
Frankfurt synagogue that turned into an attack which destroyed the whole community.

1615
King Louis XIII of France decrees that all Jews must leave the country within one
month on pain of death.

1615
The Guild led by Dr. Chemnitz, "non-violently" forced the Jews from Worms.

1619
Shah Abbasi of the Persian Sufi Dynasty increases persecution against the Jews,
forcing many to outwardly practice Islam. Many keep practicing Judaism in secret.

1624
Ghetto established in Ferrara, Italy.

1632
King Ladislaus IV of Poland forbids Anti-Semitic print-outs.

1648-1655
The Ukrainian Cossacks lead by Bohdan Chmielnicki massacre about 100,000 Jews
and similar number of Polish nobles, 300 Jewish communities destroyed.
1655
Oliver Cromwell readmits Jews to England.

1664 May
Jews of Lvov ghetto organize self-defense against impending assault by students of
Jesuit seminary and Cathedral school. The militia sent by the officials to restore order,
instead joined the attackers. About 100 Jews killed.

1670
Jews expelled from Vienna.

1678
forced mass conversions in Yemen.

18th century

1711
Johann Andreas Eisenmenger writes his Entdecktes Judenthum ("Judaism
Unmasked"), a work denouncing Judaism and which had a formative influence on
modern anti-Semitic polemics.

1712
Blood libel in Sandomierz and expulsion of the town's Jews.

1727
Edict of Catherine I of Russia: "The Jews... who are found in Ukraine and in other
Russian provinces are to be expelled at once beyond the frontiers of Russia."

1734
1736: The Haidamaks, paramilitary bands in Polish Ukraine, attack Jews.

1742 Dec
Elizabeth of Russia issues a decree of expulsion of all the Jews out of Russian Empire.
Her resolution to the Senate's appeal regarding harm to the trade: "I don't desire any
profits from the enemies of Christ". One of the deportees is Antonio Ribera Sanchez, her
own personal physician and the head of army's medical dept.

1744
Frederick II The Great (a "heroic genius", according to Hitler) limits Breslau to ten
"protected" Jewish families, on the grounds that otherwise they will "transform it into
complete Jerusalem". He encourages this practice in other Prussian cities. In 1750 he
issues Revidiertes General Privilegium und Reglement vor die Judenschaft: "protected"
Jews had an alternative to "either abstain from marriage or leave Berlin" (Simon
Dubnow).
1744 Dec
Archduchess of Austria Maria Theresa orders: "... no Jew is to be tolerated in our
inherited duchy of Bohemia" by the end of Feb. 1745. In Dec. 1748 she reverses her
position, on condition that Jews pay for readmission every ten years. This extortion was
known as malke-geld (queen's money). In 1752 she introduces the law limiting each
Jewish family to one son.

1762
Rhode Island refuses to grant Jews Aaron Lopez and Isaac Eliezer citizenship stating
"no person who is not of the Christian religion can be admitted free to this colony."

1768
Haidamaks massacre the Jews of Uman, Poland.

1771
Voltaire calls Jews "deadly to the human race", promotes racial antisemitism.

1775
Pope Pius VI issues a severe Editto sopra gli ebrei (Edict concerning the Jews).
Previously lifted restrictions are reimposed, Judaism is suppressed.

1782
Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II abolishes most of persecution practices in
Toleranzpatent on condition that Yiddish and Hebrew are eliminated from public records
and judicial autonomy is annulled. Judaism is branded "quintessence of foolishness and
nonsense". Moses Mendelssohn writes: "Such a tolerance... is even more dangerous play
in tolerance than open persecution".

1790 May 20
Eleazer Solomon is quartered for the alleged murder of a Christian girl in Grodno.

1790
"To Bigotry No Sanction, to Persecution No Assistance" (George Washington's Letter
to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island)

1790-1792
Destruction of most of the Jewish communities of Morocco.

1791
Catherine II of Russia confines Jews to the Pale of Settlement and imposes them with
double taxes. Pale of Settlement

19th century

1805
Massacre of Jews in Algeria.
1815
Pope Pius VII reestablishes the ghetto in Rome after the defeat of Napoleon.

1819
A series of anti-Jewish riots in Germany that spread to several neighboring countries:
Denmark, Poland, Latvia and Bohemia known as Hep-Hep Riots, from the derogatory
rallying cry against the Jews in Germany.

1827 August 26
Compulsory military service for the Jews of Russia: Jewish boys under 18 years of
age, known as the Cantonists, were placed in preparatory military training establishments
for 25 years. Cantonists were encouraged and sometimes forced to baptize.

1835
Oppressive constitution for the Jews issued by Czar Nicholas I of Russia.

1840
The Damascus affair: false accusations cause arrests and atrocities, culminating in the
seizure of sixty-three Jewish children and attacks on Jewish communities throughout the
Middle East.

1844
Karl Marx praises Bruno Bauer's essays containing demands that the Jews abandon
Judaism, and publishes his work On the Jewish Question: "What is the worldly cult of the
Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money... Money is the jealous God of Israel,
besides which no other god may exist... The god of the Jews has been secularized and has
become the god of this world", "In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the
emancipation of mankind from Judaism."

1853
Blood libels in Saratov and throughout Russia.

1858
Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish boy whom a maid had baptised during an
illness, is taken from his parents in Bologna, an episode which aroused universal
indignation in liberal circles.

1862
Polish Jews are given equal rights. Old privileges forbidding Jews to settle in some
cities are abolished.

1871
Speech of Pope Pius IX in regard to Jews: "of these dogs, there are too many of them
at present in Rome, and we hear them howling in the streets, and they are disturbing us in
all places."
1878
Adolf Stoecker, German anti-Semitic preacher and politician, founds the Social
Workers' Party, which marks the beginning of the political anti-Semitic movement in
Germany.

1879
Heinrich von Treitschke, German historian and politician, justifies the anti-Semitic
campaigns in Germany, bringing anti-Semitism into learned circles.

1879
Wilhelm Marr coins the term Anti-Semitism to distinguish himself from religious Anti-
Judaism.

1881-1884
Pogroms sweep southern Russia, propelling mass Jewish emigration: about 2 million
Russian Jews emigrated in period 1880-1920.

The Russian word "pogrom" becomes international.

1882
The Tiszaeszlár blood libel in Hungary arouses public opinion throughout Europe.

1882
First International Anti-Jewish Congress convenes at Dresden, Germany.

1882 May
A series of "temporary laws" by Tsar Alexander III of Russia (the May Laws), which
adopted a systematic policy of discrimination, with the object of removing the Jews from
their economic and public positions, in order to "cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate,
one-third to accept baptism and one-third to starve" (according to a remark attributed to
Konstantin Pobedonostsev)

1887
Russia introduces measures to limit Jews access to education, known as the quota.

1891
Blood libel in Xanten, Germany.

1891
Expulsion of 20,000 Jews from Moscow, Russia. The Congress of the United States
eases immigration restrictions for Jews from the Russian Empire. (Webster-Campster
report)

1893
 Karl Lueger establishes anti-Semitic Christian Social Party and becomes the Mayor of
Vienna in 1897.

The treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus.

Enlarge
The treason conviction of Alfred Dreyfus.

1894
The Dreyfus Affair in France. In 1898 Émile Zola publishes open letter J'accuse!

1895
A. C. Cuza organizes the Alliance Anti-semitique Universelle in Bucharest, Romania.

1899
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, racist and anti-Semitic author, publishes his Die
Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts which later became a basis of National-Socialist
ideology.

1899
Blood libel in Bohemia (the Hilsner case).

20th century
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church adhered to a
distinction between "good anti-Semitism" and "bad anti-Semitism". The "bad" kind
promoted hatred of Jews because of their descent. This was considered un-Christian
because the Christian message was intended for all of humanity regardless of ethnicity;
anyone could become a Christian. The "good" kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies
to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of
wealth, etc. Many Catholic bishops wrote articles criticizing Jews on such grounds, and,
when accused of promoting hatred of Jews, would remind people that they condemned
the "bad" kind of anti-Semitism.

1903
The Kishinev pogrom: 49 Jews murdered.

1903
The first publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax in St. Petersburg,
Russia (by Pavel Krushevan).

1909
Salomon Reinach and Florence Simmonds refer to "this new Anti-Semitism,
masquerading as patriotism, which was first propagated at Berlin by the court chaplain
Stöcker, with the connivance of Bismarck." [7] Similarly, Peter N. Stearns comments that
"the ideology behind the new anti-Semitism [in Germany] was more racist than
religious." [8]
1911
The Blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev.

1915
The World War I prompts expulsion of 250,000 Jews from Western Russia.

Scare: Jesus said Christians would be hated for His name's sake (Luke 21:17; Revelation
6:9-11; 20:4). The banning of the Bible, prayer, the Ten Commandments, nativity scenes,
Christmas songs, etc., reflects this trend. Also consider that more Christians were
martyred during the past century than during any other period in history.

Reply: I would have to see some per capita statistics on the martyrdom issue, and the rest
of the above diatribe simply does not jibe with the numbers.
The Bible is the bestselling book of all time, with most of those sales happening in this
past century. You can hear Christmas songs everywhere, there is a church on practically
every corner where I live, God is on my money, etc. However, we should keep church
and state separate, so therefore we don’t religious symbolism in politics and state-run
schools.

Scare: Humanity would become increasingly materialistic and lovers of pleasure (2

Timothy 3:1-5).

Reply: Humanity has also become more altruistic, more charitable, and the sacrifices
made by many recently has led us to live longer, healthier lives. Are you a “glass is half-
empty” kind of person?

Scare: Homosexuality would be flaunted at the end of the age (Luke 17:28-30; Genesis
19).
Ask your grandparents if there were such things as Gay Pride parades in their day.

Reply: My grandparents lived in an age where wife-beating, open prejudice against

blacks and McCarthy Era persecutions were commonplace. I wouldn’t want to live back
then. There is also nothing in those Scriptures that indicate what you are stating, and I
certainly don’t think we need to go back in history to a time when gays were openly
persecuted and shunned. If you don’t want to watch Will & Grace, turn the channel.

Scare: Despite increases in wealth, disparity between the wealthy and poor would
continue to increase (Revelation 6:6). In Scripture, oil and wine often denote luxurious
abundance (Proverbs 21:17; Joel 2:24; Revelation 18:13). Therefore this prophecy
indicates that the wealthy will continue to flourish while the poor can scarcely afford
bread.

Reply: Where can people scarcely afford bread? While there are areas of the world that
still experience famine, but overall:
 "Fewer and fewer people are starving, and there will be more and more food per
person in the future. Poverty has been reduced in virtually every country. Fewer
people worldwide are starving: In 1970, 35 percent of those living in developing
countries were starving; in 1996, it was down to 18 percent. The United Nations
expects this to fall to 12 percent by 2010."

Just check your local supermarket. Walk the aisles. You'll see rows and rows of
groceries of all types. Prices are generally low. Western countries, especially the
United States, are far more worried about overeating than starving. As Bjorn
Lomborg explains in The Skeptical Environmentalist,
"Although there are now twice as many of us as there were in 1961, each of us
has more to eat, in both developed and developing countries. Fewer people are
starving. Food is far cheaper these days and food-wise the world is quite simply a
better place for far more people."

To the extent that starvation still exists in Africa and elsewhere, the fault lies with
shortsighted and selfserving (and generally hard-Left) political leaders, rather than
with the world's supposed scarcity of natural resources. After all, people were
malnourished in Saddam Hussein's Iraq not because of a lack of food (even during
the embargo), but because of selfish opportunism, political Jockeying, and
outright theft by Saddam and his cronies.
....People are living longer and better lives and the world is getting cleaner every
day, thanks to the technological advancements, wealth accumulation, and
economic growth inherent in free market economies."
The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, Mark W.
Smith (Trial Lawyer, former Professor of Law), pp. 168,9

Scare: Epidemic drug use predicted (Revelation 9:21). The Greek word translated
sorceries is pharmakeia which refers to drug use, both illegal drugs and mind-altering
drugs.

Reply: Revelation 9:21 says “nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or
their immorality or their thefts.” This is a prediction of “Epidemic drug use?”

Scare: Environmental devastation of the planet foreseen (Revelation 11:18). Our

generation has done more to ravage the environment than any previous generation.

Reply: “We often assume air pollution is a new phenomenon that has got worse
and worse - in truth it is an old phenomenon, that has been getting
better and better. Air pollution has been a major nuisance for most of
civilisation, and the air of the western world has not been as clean
as it is now for a long time

In 1257, when Henry III's wife visited Nottingham, she found the
stench of smoke from coal burning so intolerable that she left for
fear of her life, and in 1285 London's air was so polluted that Edward
I established the world's first air pollution commission. Shelley
wrote: 'Hell must be much like London, a smoky and populous city.'
London has been renowned for centuries for its thick fog, the infamous
London smog. The consequences were many. In the 18th century it had 20
foggy days a year, but this had increased to almost 60 by the end of
the 19th century: this meant that London got 40% less sunshine than
the surrounding towns, and the number of thunderstorms doubled in
London from the early-18th to the late-19th century.
The last severe smog of December 1952 killed about 4,000 Londoners in
just seven days.
London air has not been as clean as it is today since the Middle Ages.”
Bjorn Lomborg

"Harvesting is measured by area (acres/hectares) or the volume of wood

and not the number of trees. The fact that 1.6 billion trees are
planted each year in North America doesn't even tell half the story,
because harvested areas are often seeded or allowed to regenerate
naturally, depending on the characteristics of the site.

A better way to determine the success of reforestation is by comparing

forest growth to the amount of timber harvested. Satellite tracking
shows that North American forests have grown in volume of timber by 20
percent since 1970 and cover about the same area now as they did 100
years ago. There are two reasons for this. The amount of timber
harvested has been consistently less than forest growth and there has
been no net expansion of farmland during the past century."
-Dr. Patrick Moore has been a leader of the environmental movement for
more than 30 years. A co-founder of Greenpeace, he holds a PhD in
ecology and a BSc in forest biology.

“The Real State of the World

The fact is, as we have seen, that this civilization has over the last
400 years brought us fantastic and continued progress. Through most of
the couple of million years we have been on the planet we had a life
expectancy of about 20-30 years. During the course of the. past
century we have more than doubled our life expectancy, to 67 years.

Infants no longer die like flies - it is no longer every other child

that dies but one in twenty, and the mortality rate is still falling.
We are no longer almost chronically ill, our breaths stinking of
rotting teeth, with festering sores, eczema, scabs, and suppurating
boils. We have far more food to eat - despite the fact that the Earth
is home to far more people: the average inhabitant in the Third World
now has 38 percent more calories. The proportion of people starving
has fallen dramatically from 35 percent to 18 percent, and by the year
2010 this share will probably have fallen further to 12 percent. By
that time, we will feed more than 3 billion more people adequately.

We have experienced unprecedented growth in human prosperity. In the

course of the last 40 years, everyone - in the developed as well as
the developing world - has become more than three times richer. Seen
in a longer perspective this growth has been quite overwhelming.
Americans have become 36 times richer over the past 200 years.

We have gained access to far more amenities, from clean drinking water
to telephones, computers and cars. We are better educated; in the
Third World, illiteracy has fallen from 75 percent to less than 20
percent, and the standard of education in the developing and the
developed world has increased tremendously - as regards university
education in the developing countries by almost 400 percent in 30 years.

We have more leisure time, greater security and fewer accidents, more
education, more amenities, higher incomes, fewer starving, more food
and a healthier and longer life. This is the fantastic story of
mankind, and to call such a civilization "dysfunctional" is quite
simply immoral. In the developing world there are still many who lack
the basic necessities and for whom growth and development are not an
inconsequential experience of plastic flowers, microwaved food,
alcohol and drugs, but a chance to live a decent life with the
possibilities of choices, reaching beyond the concerns of getting
enough to eat.

For the industrialized world, growth and progress have given us a life
that is so much better that we at last have enough time and resources
to consider how we want to make the most of life. Ironically, Al
Gore's dressingdown of our society is only possible because growth has
liberated us (and him) sufficiently from our physical limitations to
give us the possibility to choose - even if this choice is to turn
one's back on present-day society.

In so far as Gore simply wants us to consider whether we would not be

happier shopping less and living more (leave the mall and visit
friends, go for a hike in the wilderness, take up painting, etc.), his
commentary is naturally sympathetic and serves as a reasonable
reminder. But Gore goes much further and tells us that we live
superficial and phony lives, that our civilization and our parents'
generation have indoctrinated us into living this dysfunctional life
and that we cannot see the prison walls that surround us. We are
repressed without being aware of it. This kind of supercilious
attitude is a challenge to our democratic freedom and contests our
basic right to decide for ourselves how we lead our lives, so long as
doing so does not bring us into collision with others.

But for both Al Gore and Lester Brown the argument goes much deeper.
Because the actual justification of their criticism of civilization is
not that we are doing better, but that we are doing better to an
increasing extent at the cost of Earth's ecosystem. This is why in
reality we should put a stop to the insane collision with Earth's limits.

Al Gore thus joins the long list of cultural pessimists who have
experienced the modern world but have also seen the seeds of its
destruction. From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, our technical
ingenuity is seen as catastrophically exceeding our expectations,
creating a world that has spun out of control. ironically, Al Gore
believes that the way to escape this dysfunctionality is by means of
"the harsh light of truth." And as we have seen throughout the book,
the light of truth does have a harsh edge, especially on the core
myths of the Litany.

Because our food production will continue to give more people more and
cheaper food. We will not lose our forests; we will not run out of
energy, raw materials or water. We have reduced atmospheric pollution
in the cities of the developed world and have good reason to believe
that this will also be achieved in the developing world. Our oceans
have not been defiled, our rivers have become cleaner and support more
life, and although the nutrient influx has increased in many coastal
waters like the Gulf of Mexico, this does not constitute a major
problem - in fact, benefits generally outweigh costs. Nor is waste a
particularly big problem. The total US waste throughout the
twenty-first century could be deposited in a single square landfill,
less than 18 miles on the side - or 26 percent of Woodward County,
Oklahoma.

Acid rain did not kill off our forests, our species are not dying out
as many have claimed, with half of them disappearing over the next 50
years - the figure is likely to be about 0.7 percent. The problem of
the ozone layer has been more or less solved. The current outlook on
the development of global warming does not indicate a catastrophe -
rather, there is good reason to believe that our energy consumption
will change towards renewable energy sources way before the end of the
century. Indeed, the catastrophe seems rather in spending our
resources unwisely on curbing present carbon emissions at high costs
instead of helping the developing countries and increasing non-fossil
fuel research. And finally, our chemical worries and fear of
pesticides are misplaced and counterproductive. First, phasing out
pesticides will probably waste resources and actually cause more
cancer. Second, the main causes of cancer are not chemicals but our
own lifestyle.”
Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist

Scare: Men would mock the warning signs of the end of the age saying,
"These signs have always been around" (2 Peter 3:3-4).
The Bible even reveals their motivation, they love lust.

Reply: Actually most people amazingly enough share a pessimistic view of the world. It
is what Gregg Easterbrook calls the Progress Paradox (see book on amazon.com)
I however do not say “everything has remained exactly the same since the world was first
created” (2 Peter 3:3-4), what I am saying is that many things have actually improved. I
am very happy and lucky to be born at this time in history, but I am saddened that many
will not appreciate this because they need to uphold a certain theology.

Doesn’t the Bible speak against such ones?

"Be careful that you are not deceived," he replied. "There will be many coming in my
name, saying 'I am he' and 'The time is very near now.' Never follow men like that.” Luke
21:7 JB Phillips Translation

“Do not say, "Why is it that the former days were better than these?" For it is not from
wisdom that you ask about this.” Eccl. 7:10 NASB

More Religious Lunacy

In the November 2004 Awake magazine, the people over at the Watchtower
several times quote the UN in describing bad conditions in big 3rd
world cities. This gives the impression that there is no progress
anywhere, and no hope can be placed in human efforts to help the
situation.

But what else does the United Nations say about their efforts over-all?

"A 13-year effort by the World Health Organization resulted in the

complete eradication of smallpox from the planet in 1980. The
eradication has saved an estimated $1 billion a year in vaccination
and monitoring, almost three times the cost of eliminating the scourge
itself. WHO also helped wipe out polio from the Western hemisphere,
with global eradication expected by the year 2000.

Pressing for universal immunization - Polio, tetanus, measles,

whooping cough, diphtheria and tuberculosis still kill more than eight
million children each year. In 1974, only 5 per cent of children in
developing countries were immunized against these diseases. Today, as
a result of the efforts of UNICEF and WHO, there is an 80 per cent
immunization rate, saving the lives of more than 3 million childrean
each year.

Reducing child mortality rates - Through oral rehydration therapy,

water and sanitation and other health and nutrition measures
undertaken by UN agencies, child mortality rates in the developing
countries have been halved since 1960, increasing the life expectancy
from 37 to 67 years.

Fighting parasitic diseases - Efforts by UN agencies in North Africa

to eliminate the dreaded screw worm, a parasite that feeds on human
and animal flesh, prevented the spread of the parasite, which is
carried by flies, to Egypt, Tunisia, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. A
WHO programme also has saved the lives of 7 million children from
going blind from the river blindness and rescued many others from
guinea worm and other tropical diseases."

We can also add the following comments by Jim Peron:

"in general the standard of living in the Third World is consistently

improving. I believe that lifespan, the most basic statistic, is the
most important for comparing the welfare of nations. People who are
subjected to progressively worsening conditions don't live as long as
those that have the benefit of steadily improving living conditions.

Lifespan improvements are consistently better in the Third World than

they were a century ago – or even half a century ago. In 1906 the life
expectancy in India was 25 years; today it is around 64. As recently
as 1930 the average life span in China was only 24 years, while today
it is 69 for men and 73.5 for women.

Bjorn Lomborg, in The Skeptical Environmentalist, notes that in France

in 1800 the average life span was 30 years, whilst it was 45 years in
Denmark in 1845. The vast majority of the Third World's people are
doing much better than that. According to the UN, life expectancy in
Africa is the lowest of all the regions of the world, with an average
life expectancy of about 51 years. This was the approximate average
life expectancy of the French in 1913 and better than that of
Americans a century ago.

A good deal of this improvement is due to the massive decline in

infant mortality. It is believed that half of all infants died in
Europe as late as 1400. And Lomborg notes that the infant mortality
rate for 16th century English nobility – who presumably lived better
than most – was about one in four. He also notes that Sweden, which
has the oldest records on infant mortality rates, shows a decline from
one in five in 1800 to one in ten around 1900 to one in 280 today. The
Third World has also shown massive improvement. According to the UN
the current African average infant mortality rate is 83 per 1,000.
That's slightly better than it was in Sweden in 1900.

Of course none of this says things are as good as they could become.
But things are never as good as they could be. Life is a process and
so is economic development and its benefits. On average the Third
World today is about where the Western world was at the turn of the
last century. Improving life spans and lower infant mortality rates
would seem to indicate rising levels of wealth. And, in fact, that is
exactly what is happening. If we look at world economic progress over
the last two centuries it has been nothing short of miraculous. The
capitalist nations of the world saw wealth expand 13 times in that
period, Latin America expanded its wealth seven-fold and even Africa
had a fourfold increase in wealth No wonder the United Nations has
said that poverty worldwide has decreased more in the last 50 years
than in the previous 500."
http://www.freemarketfoundation.com

Sometimes we need to dig deeper to get a fuller picture.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Month after month the Watchtower Society produces yet another magazine proclaiming
bad conditions in one place after another. We feed on this bad news, but are we giving a
false impression of the world at large? I believe we are. It would be like me walking into
a public library and walking straight to the Murder Mystery section, and leave only to
erroneously conclude that the library is filled with only Violence and Crime. I would not
be giving a full and accurate picture. When you write of global warming, or deforestation,
or crimes etc., why do you only quote writers that agree with one limited outlook. Over
the years, and even in their new book, they have no problem quoting from the
Worldwatch Institute or Paul Ehrlich.
Tell me, when have these two ever been right?
In the new book you quote the Worldwatch Institute as saying:
"Three times as many people--110 million--fell victim to war in this century as in all the
wars from the first century AD to 1899."

If we do the math here 110 million divided by three is almost 37 million people. Is this
statement really true then?
The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) alone claimed about 40 million lives according to some
estimates, and that is only one war! The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) about 11 million
people, Manchu-Chinese War 1644-1690s 25 million, Napoleonic Wars 1792-1815, about
6 million, Genghis Khan filled about 40 million people. In just 5 conflicts I have
managed to come up with a total of about 122 million deaths. Keep in mind that history
prior to the 20th century is filled hundreds, if not thousands of other conflicts. War was
an everyday reality in times gone by. We also have to factor in the lower populations in
previous times to truly consider the magnitude of these massacres. When the Taiping
Rebellion occurred, we had 1 billion people on earth, we now have 6 billion. So this
would be equivalent to 240 million deaths in modern terms. Clearly, the numbers used by
the Worldwatch Institute, and ergo, the Watchtower are incorrect on many levels, and are
meant to be sensationalistic.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Questions from End-Timers

Q: Aren't there are more Earthquakes, proving that the end is near?

"and there shall be earthquakes in divers places" Mark 13:8 KJV

A: Determining such with accuracy is next to impossible, as Seismology, a science that

deals with earthquakes, is a fairly new science, and the lack of historical data from
Southeast Asia where many earthquakes are confined to makes definitive statements in
this area fruitless. It was not until the late 19th century that this new science was
implemented, so naturally, we are bound to have more numbers now. But we can still
make cerrtain determinations.

However, on page 7 of the April, 1986, issue of its monthly The Good News of the World
Tomorrow, Norman L. Shoaf, a spokesman of the Worldwide Church of God, confidently
asserted:

"Did you know that from 1901 to 1944, during more than four decades, only three
earthquakes measured magnitude 7 or over? . . . Then, in just 10 years from 1945 to 1954,
the number leaped to 21 quakes measuring 7 or over. From then on, large earthquakes
have increased dramatically. From 1955 to 1964 – in just one decade – 87 earthquakes
measured 7 or over; from 1965 to 1974, 136; from 1975 to 1984, 133."
This is certainly not true, but even if it was, Seismologist F. M. Walker in his _Report of
the Eighteenth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science_,
London 1912, pages 38 and 39, found that between 1899 and 1909 there was 976 very
large earthquakes, and this only in Europe and Asia.

No Seismologist today worth his salt would make any grandiose statement that
earthquakes having increased lately and such an individual would be quickly exposed.

Frenchman, Count F. Montessus de Ballore from 1885 to 1922 devoted all his time to
studying and cataloging earthquakes and collected information on about 171,434
earthquakes inhistorical times. His manuscript is stored in the library of the Geographical
Society in Paris, where it occupies 26 metres (over 84 feet) of bookshelves.

"There is no indication that seismic activity has increased or diminished appreciably

throughout historic time." – Seismologists J. Milne and A. W Lee, Earthquakes and Other
Earth Movements, seventh edition (London, 1939), p. 155.
"Certain religious groups have picked this rather unfortunate time to insist that the
number of earthquakes is increasing. In part they are misled by the increasing number of
small earthquakes that are being catalogued and listed by newer, more sensitive stations
throughout the world. It is worth remarking that the number of great earthquakes from
1896 to 1906 was greater than in any ten-year interval since." – Professor Charles Richter
in National History, December 1969, p. 44.

The Number of Magnitude 7.0 and Greater Earthquakes per Year, Since 1900 is listed at
http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/eqlists/7up.html
So according to the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program the decade prior to 1914 saw
256 earthquakes, while the decade following 1914 saw 177 quakes. The previous decade
from 1995-2004 saw only 155 earthquakes. The 1940's though seems to have been the
worse.
Their conclusion:

"We continue to be asked by many people throughout the world if earthquakes are on the
increase. Although it may seem that we are having more earthquakes, earthquakes of
magnitude 7.0 or greater have remained fairly constant."
If anyone is interested, the National Geophysical Data center has:
"A two-CDROM compilation of seismicity catalogs from NOAA's National Geophysical
Data Center and U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center is
available online or for purchase. The two-volume CD-ROM collection contains data on
over four million earthquakes dating from 2100 B.C. to 1995 A.D."
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/fliers/se-0208.shtml

Q: Aren't there more divorces now?

A: If we are looking backward to colonial or Victorian times to construct the perfect

family we quickly find out that the average marriage back then lasted less than 12 years,
with one spouse succumbing to death thanks to higher mortality rates. In the South, more
than one half of all children 13 and under lost at least one parent. If partnerships were
dissolved by
death rather than divorce this can hardly have been a less traumatic experience for the
children.
When this is factored in with the news that women NOW enjoy greater happiness in
marriage due to the fact that they can remarry at will without the societal recriminations
of yesteryear, do we really want to turn that clock back?
Interestingly, "a couple marrying today is more likely to celebrate a fortieth wedding
anniversary than were couples around the turn of the century." The Way We Never Were
by Stephanie Coontz p.16

50 percent divorce statistic untrue? The 50% projection was not erroneous at the time it
was made, but it was only a prediction and projection of what would happen to people
getting married at that time if current trends continued. In 1993, the Census Bureau
revised the projection down to 40%. This, too, is only a projection based on current
trends. --John Crouch
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Pollster Louis Harris has written, "The idea that half of American marriages are doomed
is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever perpetuated in modern
times."
"It all began when the Census Bureau noted that during one year, there were 2.4 million
marriages and 1.2 million divorces. Someone did the math without calculating the 54
million marriages already in existence, and presto, a ridiculous but quotable statistic was
born. "Harris concludes, "Only one out of eight marriages will end in divorce. In any
single year, only about 2 percent of existing marriages will break up."
--J. Allan Petersen in Better Families, quoted on the Christianity.Net home page,
"Preaching Resources," Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity
Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP journal -- Summer 1996 Vol.XVII, No.3, Page 69

Jeanne Hinds (jmhinds@nando.net) wrote:

"That divorce stastitic (50% of marriage end in divorce) has been debunked by legitimate
researchers due to its poor data analysis.
When divorces are tracked by *year* in which the couple married, the divorce rate is
closer to 18- 22%. And the reason why combined divorce
statistics have risen over the years is due to the advent of no-fault divorces. Marriages
had a tendency of staying together when alimony was more of a reality but with no-fault
divorces, divorce became much more easier to acquire and many people exited long-
standing
marriages. [Note- this "debunking" has itself been debunked. Probably more than 22% of
people have _already_ been divorced]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot." --The Hon. W. Richard Walton, Sr

Q: Isn't there more crime now than ever before?

Mat 24:12 "And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold."

A: NOT TRUE, Crime is actually down, according to U.S. Department of Justice ·

Office of Justice Programs
Bureau of Justice Statistics
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/gvc.htm

Violent crime trends

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Violent crime rates have declined since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever recorded in
2003.
Homicide rates recently declined to levels last seen in the late 1960s.
Rape rates declined after 1991.
Robbery rates declined from 1994 through 2002 and then stabilized.
Assault rates declined since 1994.
The proportion of serious violent crimes committed by juveniles has generally declined
since 1993.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Firearm crime trends
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nonfatal firearm crime rates have declined since 1994, reaching the lowest level ever
recorded in 2002 and 2003.
After 1994, the proportion of nonfatal violent incidents involving a firearm declined.
After falling throughout the 1990's, gun crime reported to the police stabilized.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Property crime trends
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After many years of declining, burglary rates have stabilized.
After many years of declining, theft rates stabilized in recent years.
After declining since 1992, motor vehicle theft rates leveled off after 2000.

“Every major type of crime measured, rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault,
simple assault, burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft, decreased significantly between
1993 and 1998. Violent crime affected 8.1 million Americans in 1997, the lowest number
reported since the Justice Department began tracking figures in 1973 - Cassandra Burrell,
"U.S. Crime Numbers on Decline," Associated Press [online],
www.beachbrowser.com/Archives/News-and-Human-Interest/july99/US-Crime-
Numbers-on-Decline.htm [July 19,1999].The rate at which women were attacked or
threatened with violence by husbands and boyfriends dropped 21 percent during the mid-
1990s; the number of men murdered by wives and girlfriends dropped 60 percent from
1976 through 1998.19 - U.S. Department of Justice, "Intimate Partner Violence," Bureau
of Justice Statistics Special Report, prept. no. NCJ 178247, May 2000.A survey of 6,529
teens, aged thirteen to eighteen, conducted in 1999 by the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America found that drug use among teens is leveling off. Trial use of most drugs,
including marijuana, crack, LSD, inhalants, cocaine, and methamphetamines were all
down. - Larry McShane, "Study: Teen Drug Use Leveling Off," Associated Press
[online], wire.ap.org [November 22,1999].

[Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear - Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong
Things]“Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as
crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were
soaring? How did it come about that by mid-decade 62 percent of us described ourselves
as "truly desperate" about crime-almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime
rates were higher? Why, on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a
half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with the statement "This
country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem"?In the
late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier;
almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even
marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to
America's youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and
only one in six believe the country was making progress?Give us a happy ending and we
write a new disaster story.
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian
"Crime is the best reason why politicians often well deserve the deepest distrust. They
use it shamelessly to frighten the living daylights out of voters. They do it worst in
opposition - Labour was shameless too - but they are scarcely better in office. The Tories
this week were at their most unscrupulous: “Crime is out of control!” Howard said, lying
through his teeth and knowing it. (But note how this barrister weaselled the truth: he
didn’t actually say “crime is rising”).

It wouldn’t matter much if this were just ordinary ya-boo political mendacity, part of
the game. But in stirring up crime panics, politicians are reckless of the real unhappiness
they spread. It’s not just fear, but that wretched, life-sapping sense that society is beyond
saving, all is decay and sadness. It makes people depressed and pessimistic; it is the
wicked thing that politicians do quite routinely. And then they wonder where “trust”
went. If they want trust, they should agree the base line on crime figures and call a truce
on scaring the public witless.

And witless the public is, through no fault of its own. Two-thirds of people think crime
increased in the last two years, half of them think it increased “a lot”, according to the
British Crime Survey.

As attentive Guardian readers should know by now, nationally the risk of being a
victim of a crime has fallen by 40% since 1995 - the longest continuous fall in crime
since 1898. Burglary has fallen by 39% and car crime by 31%. Violence has
dropped too, by 24%.

The media and opposition parties get away with pretending it is not so, by quoting the
police recorded figures, which have been rising due to improvements requiring the police
to record more, not less, crime. All reputable, non-partisan crime experts think that the
British Crime Survey findings are the ones that more accurately measure the way things
are moving, even if no figures ever catch the whole truth. (The BCS asks a sample more
than 30 times the size of an ordinary opinion poll if they suffered from crime in the last
year: that picks up a far larger total number of crimes than a reliance on the vagaries that
determine which crimes get reported to the police.)

Of course the arch villain is the media. Newspaper sales and television ratings thrive
on fear of crime: the wilful misleading of the public knows no bounds. As a prank the
Sun has just sent a removal van to the high court to remove Lord Woolf, in protest at new
punishments set out by the Sentencing Guidelines Council. How are Sun readers to know
that this council - on which sits Victim Support and other lay members - is bringing not
leniency but consistency and transparency to sentencing? Yet again the public is
encouraged to think nothing works, the law is mad, and criminals go unpunished in this
most punitive of nations."

"Please don't be alarmed, but almost everything about American and European life is
getting better for almost everyone. Public health is improving by nearly every
measure,including rising longevity and falling rates of most diseases; even many forms of
cancer are in decline. Doomsday claims to the contrary, environmental trends are nearly
all positive, with all forms of pollution except greenhouse gases in steady decline in
theUnited States and the European Union. Drinking, smoking, and most forms of drug
use are declining. Teen pregnancy is declining. Welfare rolls are shrinking without
increase in poverty. Women, immigrants, and minority group members are acquiringever
larger slices of national pies. The divorce rate has stopped increasing. Personal freedom
has neverbeen greater. Book sales hit new records almost every year. Movies and
television may at times beexcruciating, but otherwise art and culture have never been
more active, interesting, or diverse. Nearly all forms of deaths due to accident are
declining. Crime has declined so rapidly that the fall has been almost eerie.
Education levels keep rising, while test scores and public-school performance show
guarded improvement. Despite what evening-news carnage suggests, armed conflicts and
combat deaths worldwide are in a cycle of decline. Global democracy is rising, military
dictatorship and communism are on the run. Each year the number of nuclear warheads in
the world declines. The single worst threat to the world-the Cold War-has ended, with
complete victory for the West and the hand of friendship extended to former
adversaries. -The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook
"On May 17, 1999, an evangelical Christian friend of mine insisted that we are in the
"end times" because the Bible prophesied an increase in
immorality and malfeasance. Since everyone knows crime is an epidemic problem in
America that worsens by the year ("just look at the recent Columbine shooting," he
enthused), the end is nigh. I remember the date because it was the same day the FBI
released its findings that we are in the midst of the longest decline in crime rates since the
bureau began collecting data in 1930. In other words, we are confronted with the paradox
of being more fearful than we have ever been at the same time that things have never
been so safe. "In the late 1990's the number of drug users had decreased by half compared
to a decade earlier," Glassner explains, yet the "majority of adults rank drug abuse as the
greatest danger to America's youth." Ditto the economy, where "the unemployment rate
was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. Yet pundits warned of
imminent economic disaster." In this century alone modern medicine and social hygiene
practices and technologies have nearly doubled our life span and improved our health
immeasurably, but Glassner points out that if you tally up the reported disease statistics,
out of 280 million Americans, 543 million of us are seriously ill!

How can this be? Benjamin Disraeli had an answer: lies, damn lies, and statistics. We
may be good storytellers, but we are lousy statisticians. Glassner shows, for example, that
women in their forties believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, but
their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. He notes that some "feminists helped
popularize the frightful but erroneous statistic that two of three teen mothers had been
seduced and abandoned by adult men" when in reality it "is more like one in ten, but
some feminists continued to cultivate the scare well after the bogus stat had been
definitively debunked." The bigger problem here is the law of large numbers, where
million-to-one odds happen 280 times a day in America, and of those the most
sensational dozen make the evening news, especially if captured on video. Stay tuned-
film at eleven!
Herein lies the problem for our moral sensibilities. We are fed numbers daily that we
cannot comprehend about threats to our security we cannot
tolerate. Better safe than sorry, right? Not necessarily. Pathological fear takes a dramatic
toll on our psyches and wallets. "We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours
every year," Glassner notes, "on largely mythical hazards like road rage, on prison cells
occupied by people who pose little or no danger to others, on programs designed to
protect young people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for
victims of metaphorical illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel-which is
already safer than other means of transportation-safer Still."

Of all the institutions feeding our fears, the media takes center stage for sensationalism
("if it bleeds, it leads"). An Emory University study revealed that the leading cause of
death in men-heart disease received the same amount of coverage as the eleventh=ranked
vector: homicide. Not surprising, drug use, the lowest-ranking risk factor assoclated with
serious illness and death, received as much attention as the second-ranked risk factor,
poor diet and lack of exercise. From 1990 to 1998, America's murder rate decreased by
20 percent while the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased by an
incredible 600 percent (and this doesn't count 0. J. Simpson stories). The fact is, there is
no evidence that secondhand smoke causes cancer or that cell-phone use generates brain
tumors; likewise, Gulf War Syndrome appears to be a chimera, television does not cause
violence,
Satanic cults are phantasmagorical, most recovered memories of childhood abuse are
nothing more than false memories planted by bad
therapists, silicon breast implants cause nothing more than metastatic litigation, the drug
war was lost decades ago, and the drug emperor has
no clothes-he's butt naked and it's high time someone said it. We would be well-advised
to remember the law of large numbers, and to keep in
mind that we have selective memory of the most egregious events and that most of our
fears are illusory-the vaporous product of a culture of fear of which we are both creators
and Victims." The Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer

"The truth is in 2004 crime, disease and all types of violence are DOWN, not up, and you
are alot safer and healthier that you would have been 50 years ago.
Violent is the lowest it has been since 1973, and property crime is down 50% in the last
10 years. But that is not the message we are getting." -Penn & Teller's BS
Why is this so? While crime is down everywhere, the media reporting of crime has
increased 500%.
"Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of
attention to the
nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly—a graph plotting the crime rate in
any American
city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile—and it seemed now to herald
the end of the
world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become
commonplace. So too had
carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant
companion.
And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so.
..........And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall
and fall some more.
The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of
crime falling
in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year.
And it was
entirely unanticipated—especially by the very experts who had been predicting the
opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising
100 percent or
even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five
years. By 2000 the
overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five
years. So had the
rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft."
FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything:
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Media and Fear by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian
Crime is the best reason why politicians often well deserve the deepest distrust. They use
it shamelessly to frighten the living daylights out of voters. They do it worst in opposition
- Labour was shameless too - but they are scarcely better in office. The Tories this week
were at their most unscrupulous: “Crime is out of control!” Howard said, lying through
his teeth and knowing it. (But note how this barrister weaselled the truth: he didn’t
actually say “crime is rising”).

It wouldn’t matter much if this were just ordinary ya-boo political mendacity, part of
the game. But in stirring up crime panics, politicians are reckless of the real unhappiness
they spread. It’s not just fear, but that wretched, life-sapping sense that society is beyond
saving, all is decay and sadness. It makes people depressed and pessimistic; it is the
wicked thing that politicians do quite routinely. And then they wonder where “trust”
went. If they want trust, they should agree the base line on crime figures and call a truce
on scaring the public witless.

And witless the public is, through no fault of its own. Two-thirds of people think crime
increased in the last two years, half of them think it increased “a lot”, according to the
British Crime Survey.

As attentive Guardian readers should know by now, nationally the risk of being a
victim of a crime has fallen by 40% since 1995 - the longest continuous fall in crime
since 1898. Burglary has fallen by 39% and car crime by 31%. Violence has dropped too,
by 24%.
 The media and opposition parties get away with pretending it is not so, by quoting the
police recorded figures, which have been rising due to improvements requiring the police
to record more, not less, crime. All reputable, non-partisan crime experts think that the
British Crime Survey findings are the ones that more accurately measure the way things
are moving, even if no figures ever catch the whole truth. (The BCS asks a sample more
than 30 times the size of an ordinary opinion poll if they suffered from crime in the last
year: that picks up a far larger total number of crimes than a reliance on the vagaries that
determine which crimes get reported to the police.)

Of course the arch villain is the media. Newspaper sales and television ratings thrive
on fear of crime: the wilful misleading of the public knows no bounds. As a prank the
Sun has just sent a removal van to the high court to remove Lord Woolf, in protest at new
punishments set out by the Sentencing Guidelines Council. How are Sun readers to know
that this council - on which sits Victim Support and other lay members - is bringing not
leniency but consistency and transparency to sentencing? Yet again the public is
encouraged to think nothing works, the law is mad, and criminals go unpunished in this
most punitive of nations.

Q: What About All the School Violence?

A: "Forget what you’ve seen, read, or heard to the contrary. School violence is down,
way down."
http://www.millennialsrising.com/survey.shtml

"NAESP members from 41 states surveyed last summer have no doubts that their schools
are safe. The U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, the Centers for Disease Control,
and theJustice Policy Institute tend to agree. Culling some of their recent reports, you'll
find that children are safer in school than at home or in their communities; youth crime is
down; fewer guns are coming to schools; and school violence is down."
http://www.naesp.org/ContentLoad.do?contentId=237

"The percentage of students who said they had been in a fight in the preceding year
dropped from 42.5
percent in 1991 to 33 percent in 2003. Only a little more than 6 percent of students said
they had carried
a weapon onto school grounds in 2003, down from 11.8 percent in 1993."
DANIEL YEE, Associated Press Writer

School Districts Report Across-the-board Decreases

in Incidents of Violence, Vandalism and Substance Abuse

Violence, Vandalism And Substance Abuse In New Jersey Public Schools, 2001-2002

School districts throughout New Jersey reported a decline in the incidents of violence,
vandalism and substance abuse in New Jersey public schools for the 2001-02 school year.
Commissioner of Education William L. Librera today publicly released the Department
of Education’s annual report on Violence, Vandalism and Substance Abuse in New Jersey
Public Schools. In addition to containing statistics reported to the state by local school
districts, the report details 30 state-level initiatives designed to promote safe schools for
New Jersey’s 1.3 million public school students.

"It is significant that local educators have reported an across-the-board decrease in all
major reporting categories," said Commissioner of Education William L. Librera. "It is
particularly gratifying to report that two-thirds of our schools reported five or fewer
incidents in 2001-02 and more than three schools in eight reported no incidents at all."

Commissioner Librera noted that the schools have special incentives to report all
incidents of violence, vandalism and substance abuse in the public schools. The federal
No Child Left Behind Act requires the states to develop systems of identifying
persistently dangerous schools, and new state regulations to be adopted later this year set
penalties for falsifying annual district violence and vandalism reports. He noted that
2001-02 was the third year in which educators used the state’s Electronic Violence and
Vandalism Reporting System (EVVRS), and that the system helps to standardize the
reporting categories and simplify the reporting process for educators.

"I hope we continue to show similar declines in future years," Dr. Librera said. "Schools
have demonstrated their commitment to create safe learning environments for our
students. Governor McGreevey and I will continue to work with appropriate state
agencies and local educators to continue to find effective ways to keep our schools safe."

The total number of incidents reported by school districts in 2001-02 was 22,744, a nine
percent decrease from incidents reported in 2000-01. Summary highlights in the major
reporting categories are as follows:

Violence, down 8 percent, primarily as the result of a 22 percent reduction in the number
of threats and an 8 percent reduction in the number of fights reported;
Vandalism, down 14 percent, producing the fewest number of incidents ever recorded
Weapons, down 7 percent; and
Substance abuse, down 6 percent, with moderate declines in the three sub-categories of
use, possession and sale/distribution.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

HARRISBURG: The total number of violent incidents and weapons possessions in

Pennsylvania schools have decreased by more than 15 percent, according to a report
released Monday by the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE).

The Annual Report on School Violence and Weapons Possession is a summary of data
reported by the state’s 501 school districts, 29 intermediate units (IU), 73 area vocational-
technical schools and 101 charter schools. The report covers reported incidents that
occurred in Pennsylvania’s public schools between July 1, 2003, and June 30, 2004.

“This is the first Violence and Weapons Report created with our new, improved reporting
system,” said Secretary of Education, Francis V. Barnes. “School district administrators
now have very clear directions of what incidents should or should not be included in the
annual report, which has led to greater accuracy.”

The information in the report is provided to PDE using locally developed collection and
reporting procedures. The responsibility to accurately report incidents of violence and
weapons possession rests with school administrators. School district superintendents,
charter school administrators, and AVTS and IU executive directors must electronically
certify that the information provided is true and correct.

During the 2003-04 school year, public schools reported 22,831 separate incidents of
violence and weapons possession, which represents a decrease of 15.4 percent over the
previous year. The number of offenders also decreased by 16.4 percent.
www.post-gazette.com/pg/05158/516890.stm

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

WASHINGTON - Violent crime against students in schools fell by 50 percent between

1992 and 2002, with young people more often targeted for violence away from school.

There were about 24 crimes of rape, sexual assault, robbery and physical assault for every
1,000 students in 2002, down from 48 per 1,000 a decade earlier, according to a report
Monday from the Education and Justice departments.

The reduction mirrored the trend found outside classrooms - overall crime is at a 30-year
low across the nation.

The report found instances of school violence involving students have dropped steadily
since a string of fatal shootings in the 1990s, notably the 1999 killings of 13 people at
Columbine High School in Colorado by two heavily armed students.
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/media/paper410/news/2004/11/30/TopStories/Schools.
Decrease.In.Crime.Mirrors.Nations-816699.shtml

Q: What about the New Crime of Identity Theft?

A: "The scourge known as identify theft has been wildly overstated, said Ira Carnahan in
Forbes.
A drumbeat of media reports has left the impression that identity theft is "the fastest
growing crime in
America." Many articles unquestioningly tout a Federal Trade Commission finding that
there are an
eye-popping 10 million identity-theft victims a year, based on a review of complaints in
2002. But a financial
services consulting company, TowerGroup, has taken a closer look at that number and
discovered that there's
less there than meets the eye. It turns out that only 160,000 people reported that their
identities
were actually appropriated by criminals, who used the purloined information to
systematically commit
fraudulent transactions. The remaining 9.9 million cases were garden-variety instances of
check
fraud, credit card theft, and other practices that are hardly new. "In these cases, it makes
more sense to
speak of the swiping of someone's credit card number than the swiping of their identity."
Moreover, of
those 10 million "identity theft" victims, 63 percent reported no out-of-pocket losses at
all, while 64 percent
said they fixed the problem in less than 10 hours. Identity theft, it turns out, is less
"rampant" than the hype that has surrounded it."
Q: Isn't there more famine and pestilence now than ever before?

"There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful
events and great signs from heaven." Luke 21:11 NIV

A: Think about this for just a moment. If all of the above were really true, then why don't
historians come out and pronounce that this past generation or 2, or 3, has had an increase
in earthquakes, crime, famine and disease etc. Because, it is not true.
The population boom, the rise in life expectancy, and the lowest infant mortality EVER
all bear testament to the fact that the opposite is quite true...even in poorer countries.
Take India for instance. The average life expectancy in India before 1914 was about 40
years of age, Presently, it is 62.
The major problem back then was Malaria, which in 1914 had affected 800 million
people. It is still a problem, but major efforts have helped tremendously.

Moving on to China:

"Chinese Life Expectancy Rises by 41 Years in One Century

The Chinese average life expectancy has risen to 71 from just over 30 years old at the
beginning of this century, said an expert on demography. This can be attributed to the
advancement of science and technology, especially in medical science, said Zhao Baohua,
vice-director of China Association for Aged People, at a seminar being held in the port
city of Qingdao. At the beginning of 18th century, there were no countries with an
average lifespan over 35 years old, he said. In the 19th century, however, people's life
expectancy in some countries was extended to 40 years old thanks to the invention of a
vaccination against smallpox. The worldwide lifespan average kept rising after the
invention of penicillin and a number of other antibiotics. The lifespan worldwide average
is 66 at present. With the development of gene technology, people may have an average
lifespan of 100 years old by the end of the 21st century, he said."
http://fpeng.peopledaily.com.cn/200010/20/print20001020_53183.html
Russia:
"Yes, Russia managed (with a little help) to pull itself back from the brink, and now
exists as a startling contrast to what it was only some 15 years before. The average life
expectancy of Russian newborns and mature adults now roughly matches the average for
other developed nations, and per capita income is rapidly approaching parity with other
developed nations. Average Russian living standards, once so bleak, have been steadily
rising in the past decade."
http://www.jrmooneyham.com/rssia.html

"The United Nations estimated that in 1950/55 the world life expectancy rate was 46.4
years, with the developed regions having a life expectancy of 66.0 years and less
developed regions having a life expectancy of only 40.7 years. By 1998 world life
expectancy increased to 63.0 years with more developed regions increasing to an average
of 75.0 years and less developed regions increasing to 62 years (McDevitt 1999, p.A49)."

Even Mexico city has a life expectancy rate now of 72 years. The infant mortality rate is
now half of what it used to be in Latin America.
"At the dawn of agriculture, about 8000 B.C., the population of the world was
somewhere on the order of 5 million. (Very rough figures are given in the table below;
these are averages of an estimate of ranges given by the United Nations and other
sources.) The slow growth of population over the 8,000-year period, from an estimated 5
million to 300 million in 1 A.D., results in a very low growth rate - only 0.0512 percent
per year. It is difficult to come up with an average world population size over this period.
In all likelihood, human populations in different regions grew or declined in response to
famines, the vagaries of animal herds, hostilities, and changing weather and climatic
conditions.
In any case, life was short. Life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about 10
years for most of human history. Estimates of average life expectancy in Iron Age France
have been put at only 10 or 12 years. Under these conditions, the birth rate would have to
be about 80 per 1,000 people just for the species to survive. Today, a high birth rate
would be about 45-50 per 1,000 population, observed in only a few countries of Africa
and in several Middle Eastern states that have young populations.
Our birth rate assumption will greatly affect the estimate of the number of persons ever
born. Infant mortality in the human race's earliest days is thought to have been very high -
perhaps 500 infant deaths per 1,000 births, or even higher. Children were probably an
economic liability among hunter-gatherer societies, a fact that is likely to have led to the
practice of infanticide. Under these circumstances, a disproportionately large number of
births would be required to maintain population growth, and that would raise our
estimated number of the "ever born."
By 1 A.D., the world may have held about 300 million people. One estimate of the
population of the Roman Empire, from Spain to Asia Minor, in 14 A.D. is 45 million.
However, other historians set the figure twice as high, suggesting how imprecise
population estimates of early historical periods can be.
By 1650, world population rose to about 500 million, not a large increase over the 1 A.D.
estimate. The average annual rate ofgrowth was actually lower from 1 A.D. to 1650 than
the rate suggested above for the 8000 B.C. to 1 A.D. period. One reason for this
abnormally slow growth was the Black Plague. This dreaded scourge was not limited to
14th century Europe. The epidemic may have begun about 542 A.D. in Western Asia,
spreading from there. It is believed that half the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in the
6th century, a total of 100 million deaths."
Rand McNally Universal World Atlas, New Revised Edition_; 1987; p. 229
_Encyclopedia Americana_; 1994; Vol. 22; p. 403
_World Book Encyclopedia_; 1993; Vol. 15; p. 672
_Encyclopedia Britannica, Macropedia_; 1993; Vol. 25; p. 1041
Online Encyclopedia Britannica, "Trends in world population", 25-Feb-2002
http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0762181.html ,Source: U.S. Census Bureau,
International Database.
From _Encyclopedia Britannica, Macropedia_; 1993; Vol. 25; p. 1041-2:
"For the first time ever, a society is possible in which poverty can be abolished and with
it, misery and hunger. The eradication of hunger is no longer a utopian scheme; it is a
perfectly available objective." Josue de Castro in The Geopolitics of Hunger (New York,
1977), pp. 447, 448.

"In every age and in every land people have starved.... yet the fact seems to be that man,
on the average, is steadily achieving a better diet.... certainly the people today are, on the
average, somewhat better fed than they were 100 years ago." The Biology of Human
Starvation by A. Keys, J. l3ozek, A. Henschel, O. Michelsen and H. Longstreet Taylor
(St. Paul, 1950), pp. 3, 12.

"A world which regards hunger as a wrong ... finds it somewhat difficult to understand
that want and hunger were the lasting conditions under which previous generations
lived.... It is hard for persons living under modern conditions to realize even inadequately
what life was ... during those long ages when want was universal." E. Parmalee Prentice,
Hunger and History. The Influence of Hunger on Human History (Caldwell, Idaho,
1951), pp. 10, 137.

"Famine over the centuries has been a frequent phenomenon and has tended to be
regarded as a more or less normal calamity... But there is every indication that the
incidence (in earlier times] was considerably greater than it is today in nearly all
inhabited areas of the world." Bruce F. Johnston in his article on "Famine" in Colliers
Encyclopedia, Editorial Director William D. Halsey, Vol. 9 (New York, 1979), pp. 552,
553.

"We might be inclined to deduce from the pictorial evidence of famine that we have seen
recently on television, in newspapers, and in magazines that the world is more prone to
famine now than it used to be. But the evidence is clearly to the contrary... There has been
a rather substantial reduction in the incidence of famine during the past century." -Food
expert Professor D. Gale Johnson, World Food Problems and Prospects (Washington, D.
C., 1975), p. 17.

"Consumption of food per person in the world is up over the last 30 years.... Famine
deaths have decreased in the past century even in absolute terms, let alone relative to
population. World food prices have been trending lower for decades and centuries ... and
there is strong reason to believe that this trend will continue." Julian L. Simon and
Herman Kahn in The Resourceful Earth (London, 1984), p. 16.
Let's look at pestilences:

"The creation ... of a 'common market' of microbes, passed through a particularly intense,
rapid, dramatic, one might even say apocalyptic phase, during the period roughly 1300-
1600. The sacrifice of human
lives resulting from the global spread of pathogenic agents during these three centuries
has had no parallel before or since. -French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The
Mind and Method of the Historian (Brighton, Sussex, England, 1981), page 30.

"We who live in civilized countries where medicine has made such tremendous advances,
and hygiene is preached and practised, know nothing of such plagues as swept across
whole continents in the Middle Ages. Leo Huberman, Man's Worldly Goods. The Story
of the Wealth of Nations (New York and London, 1968), page 50.

"Infectious diseases, which only one or two generations ago formed the largest group in
our statistics on morbidity and mortality, have been driven back by the advance of
medicine. Professor Folke Henschen, The History of Diseases (London, 1966), page 1.

"In many ways one can think of the middle of the twentieth century as the end of one of
the most important social revolutions in history, the virtual elimination of infectious
disease as a significant factor in social life.
Sir MacFarlane Burnet, Natural History of Infectious Disease (Cambridge, 1962), page 3.

"In most places epidemic diseases have become unimportant, and many kinds of infection
have become rare where they were formerly common and serious. The net increment to
human health and cheerfulness is hard to exaggerate; indeed, it now requires an act of
imagination to understand what Infectious disease formerly meant to mankind, or even to
our own grandfathers.
Professor William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), page 287.

"The subjugators of pestilences have won the greatest victory that ever has been gained
during six thousand years of world history: the victory over a premature death.
Herbert L. Schrader, Und dennoch siegie das Leben (Stuttgart, 1954), page 278.

"The most remarkable achievement of the twentieth century may be the eradication of the
great pandemics that once swept over entire nations-and continents-crippling, maiming,
scarring, and killing millions.
James Cornell, The Great International Disaster Book (New York, 1979), page 182.

"Child deaths, although still a problem today, were an incredible scourge of the 19th
century. In 1870, with 4,000 deaths in the 0-4 age group, a Chicago child had a 50%
chance of reaching the age 5. Accurate statistics are not available for earlier years, but
conditions were probably worse. By 1900 there were over 8,000 annual deaths of 0-4
year-olds, but the odds of surviving to the age 5 had increased to 75%. Today the odds are
better than 98%. The infant death rate (0-365 days) has fallen dramatically, but even more
pronounced is the decline in the death rates for 1-4 year-olds.
Children in the 19th century were subject to cholera, smallpox, measles and all of the
other adult diseases, but childhood diarrheal diseases were the most terrifying. Infants
would become diarrheal, then dehydrated, and die. These deaths were directly related to
poor sanitary conditions. Deaths were much higher in summer, after rainfalls and in low
lying areas, all of which were related to contamination from the sewage filled Chicago
River."
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/disasters/infant_mortality.html

AIDS killed 2.3 million adults in 1999, and while that may be growing, it is extremely
marginal compared to the devastation in past centuries where entire areas were
decimated.

Q: Aren't We Losing our Forests?

A: "Harvesting is measured by area (acres/hectares) or the volume of wood and not the
number of trees. The fact that 1.6 billion trees are planted each year in North America
doesn't even tell half the story, because harvested areas are often seeded or allowed to
regenerate naturally, depending on the characteristics of the site.

A better way to determine the success of reforestation is by comparing forest growth to

the amount of timber harvested. Satellite tracking shows that North American forests
have grown in volume of timber by 20 percent since 1970 and cover about the same area
now as they did 100 years ago. There are two reasons for this. The amount of timber
harvested has been consistently less than forest growth and there has been no net
expansion of farmland during the past century."
-Dr. Patrick Moore has been a leader of the environmental movement for more than 30
years. A co-founder of Greenpeace, he holds a PhD in ecology and a BSc in forest
biology.

Q: What About Climate Change and the Depletion of the Ozone Layer?

A: "Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental correspondent, fresh
from yet another international confabulation on climate change, wrote
that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to have increased recently, no one knows
whether this is good or bad. Is the heat-trapping by the clouds' water
vapor greater or less than the sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?
Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly
more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on
computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is
occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous-- or
perhaps beneficial.
One of the good guys in ]Michael Crichton's] "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom:
"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is why 30 years ago
the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975)
reported "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine
(Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued
rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971)
could herald "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian
Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating
south from the cooling.
Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline in Alaska's
porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange prothonotary warbler
back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond a day earlier for nearly two decades.
Or since global cooling stopped. Maybe.
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying":
Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away --
soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong.
Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will
be wholesomely skeptical of today's."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20998-2004Dec22.html

Warmer earth might be welcome trend by Thomas Gale Moore

Thomas Gale Moore Thomas Gale Moore is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and
the author of Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry about Global Warming, recently
published by the Cato Institute.

Pundits, politicians and the press have argued that global warming will bring disaster to
the world, but there are good reasons to believe that, if it occurs, we will like it. Where do
retirees go when they are free to move? Certainly not to Duluth.

People like warmth. When weather reporters on TV say, "It will be a great day," they
usually mean that it will be warmer than normal. The weather can, of course, be too
warm, but that is unlikely to become a major problem if the globe warms. Even though it
is far from certain that the temperature will rise, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (the U.N. body that has been studying this possibility for more than a decade) has
forecast that, by the end of the next century, the world's climate will be about 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit warmer than today and that precipitation worldwide will increase by about 7
percent.

The scientists who make up this body also predict that most of the warming will occur at
night and during the winter. In fact, records show that, over this century, summer highs
have actually declined while winter lows have gone up. In addition, temperatures are
expected to increase the most towards the poles. Thus Minneapolis should enjoy more
warming than Dallas; but even the Twin Cities should find that most of their temperature
increase will occur during their coldest season, making their climate more livable.

Warmer winters will produce less ice and snow to torment drivers, facilitating commuting
and making snow shoveling less of a chore. Families will have less need to invest in
heavy parkas, bulky jackets, earmuffs and snow boots. Department of Energy studies
have shown that a warmer climate would reduce heating bills more than it would boost
outlays on air conditioning. If we currently enjoyed the weather predicted for the end of
the next century, expenditures for heating and cooling would be cut by about $12.2
billion annually.

Most economic activities would be unaffected by climate change. Manufacturing,

banking, insurance, retailing, wholesaling, medicine, educational, mining, financial and
most other services are unrelated to weather. Those activities can be carried out in cold
climates with central heating or in hot climates with air conditioning.

Certain weather-related or outdoor-oriented services, however, would be affected.

Transportation would benefit generally from a warmer climate, since road transport
would suffer less from slippery or impassable highways. Airline passengers, who often
endure weather-related delays in the winter, would gain from more reliable and on-time
service.

The doomsayers have predicted that a warmer world would inflict tropical diseases on
Americans. They neglect to mention that those diseases, such as malaria, cholera and
yellow fever, were widespread in the United States in the colder 19th century. Their
absence today is attributable not to a climate unsuitable to their propagation but to
modern sanitation and the American lifestyle, which prevent the microbes for getting a
foothold.

It is actually warmer along the Gulf Coast, which is free of dengue fever, than on the
Caribbean islands where the disease is endemic. My own research shows that a warmer
world would be a healthier one for Americans and would cut the number of deaths in the
U.S. by about 40,000 per year, roughly the number killed on the highways.

According to climatologists, the villain causing a warmer world is the unprecedented

amount of carbon dioxide we keep pumping into the atmosphere. As high school biology
teachers emphasize, plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen.

Researchers have shown, moreover, that virtually all plants will do better in an
environment enriched with carbon dioxide than in the current atmosphere, which contains
only trace amounts of their basic food. In addition, warmer winters and nights would
mean longer growing seasons. Combined with higher levels of CO2, plant life would
become more vigorous, thus providing more food for animals and humans. Given a rising
world population, longer growing seasons, greater rainfall, and an enriched atmosphere
could be just the ticket to stave off famine and want.

A slowly rising sea level constitutes the only significant drawback to global warming.
The best guess of the international scientists is that oceans will rise about 2 inches per
decade. The cost to Americans of building dikes and constructing levees to mitigate the
damage from rising seas would be less than $1 billion per year, an insignificant amount
compared to the likely gain of over $100 billion for the American people as a whole.

Let's not rush into costly programs to stave off something that we may like if it occurs.
Warmer is better; richer is healthier; acting now is foolish.
This article originally appeared in The Harrisburg Patriot.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There Is NO Man-Made Global Warming
From http://www.canadafreepress.com/2004/deweese121404.htm

American Policy Center

December 14, 2004

"There is no scientific evidence to back claims of man-made global warming. Period.

Anyone who tells you that scientific research shows warming trends--be they teachers,
newscasters, Congressmen, Senators, Vice Presidents or Presidents--is wrong. In fact,
scientific research through U.S. government satellite and balloon measurements shows
that the temperature is actually cooling--very slightly--.037 degrees Celsius.

A little research into modern-day temperature trends bears this out. For example, in 1936
the Midwest of the United States experienced 49 consecutive days of temperatures over
90 degrees. There were another 49 consecutive days in 1955. But in1992 there was only
one day over 90 degrees and, in 1997, only 5 days. Because of modern science and
improved equipment, this "cooling" trend has been most accurately documented over the
past 18 years. Ironically, that's the same period of time the hysteria has grown over dire
warnings of "warming."

Changes in global temperatures are natural. In fact, much of the recent severe weather has
been directly attributed to a natural phenomenon that occurs every so often called El
Nino. It causes ocean temperatures to rise as tropical trade winds actually reverse for a
time. The resulting temperature changes cause severe storms, flooding, and even drought
on every continent on earth. It's completely natural. El Nino has been wreaking its havoc
across the globe since long before man appeared.

How about the reports that the polar ice cap is melting? On Election Day the Financial
Times of London carried the hysterical headline: Arctic Ice Cap Set to Disappear by the
Year 2070. The article stated that the Arctic ice cap is melting at an unprecedented rate.
The article is based on a report titled: Impacts of a Warming Arctic, submitted by a group
of researchers called the Arctic Climate Impact Assessement (ACIA).

It must be understood just who makes up this so-called group of researchers. The report is
not unbiased scientific data. Rather, it is propaganda from political groups who have an
agenda. The report was commissioned by the Arctic Council, which is comprised of a
consortium of radical envionmentalists from Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Finland,
Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. All are nations that possess land within
the Arctic Circle. Many of these countries, through the Kyoto Protocol, have a financial
stake in pushing the global warming agenda. One of the groups providing “scientists” to
the ACIA “researchers” is the World Wildlife Fund, one of the leading chicken-little
scaremongers who create junk science at the drop of a news release to terrify us all into
proper environmental conduct.
.....................
Scientists are Not on the Global Warming Bandwagon
And so too is it an outrage for the news media to tell you that most true scientists now
agree that man-made global warming is a fact. What it doesn't tell you is that roughly 500
scientists from around the world signed the Heidleburg Appeal in 1992, just prior to the
Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, expressing their doubts and begging the delegates not to
bind the world to any dire treaties based on global warming. Today that figure has grown
to over 4,000 scientists. Americans aren’t being told that a 1997 Gallop Poll of prominent
North American climatologists showed that 83 percent of them disagreed with the man-
made global warming theory.

And the deceit knows no bounds. The United Nations released a report at the end of 1996
saying global warming was a fact, yet before releasing the report, two key paragraphs
were deleted from the final draft. Those two paragraphs, written by the scientists who did
the actual scientific analysis, said:

1. "[N]one of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the
observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases."

2. "[N]o study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to…man-
made causes."

Obviously, those two paragraphs aren’t consistant with the political agenda the UN is
pushing. So, science be damned. Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on
the people of the world--bar none."

From Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us by

Benjamin Radford:

"When NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw reported a school shooting in Fort
Gibson, Oklahoma, on. the December 6, 1999, telecast, he duly noted that
overall school violence was down. This is how he put it: "Overall teenage violence may
be down, but the exceptions are coming all too often." The first six words of his
introduction were quickly drowned out in the hundreds of alarmist words and images that
followed. A 1993 article on the ozone controversy further illustrates the way the press
(and the public) treat good news. Boyce Rensberger, a respected veteran science reporter
for the Washington Post, wrote an article that appeared in
that paper on April 15, 1993. The article came out amid heated public debate about the
threat of Earth's ozone depletion. Rensberger gave both sides of the issue, including the
rarely heard, optimisticviews of many knowledgeable scientists. He quoted, for example,
an atmospheric scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, who opined, "The current
and projected levels of ozone depletion do not appear to represent a catastrophe." Many
other scientists agreed, pointing out that ozone is a renewable resource, reliable data are
sparse, and that the changes measured may well simply reflect normal fluctuations in
ultraviolet light. Overall, the article could be taken as good news: The sky was not
falling, and there was no need to panic.
Rensberger described the reaction to his story in an article in Skeptical Inquirer
magazine:
The reaction to my ozone story was swift. Some readers were perplexed because they
were under the impression that the amount of ozone depletion was approaching alarming
proportions. My story didn't square with the prevailing public image of the problem....
There were letters, phone calls, and clippings of articles in environmentalist advocacy
publications branding me an enemy of the planet....[The Congressional environment
caucus] was so startled by my story that they summoned a prominent atmospheric
scientist at NASA to come in and please tell them what gives.... Well, the NASA scientist
said (and I paraphrase): Rensberger's story is basically correct on the facts, but there is a
problem with his tone. I was to hear the "tone" complaint many times. It puzzled me that
a story could be factually correct and written in what I thought was a straight,
unemotional style but be considered wrong in "tone." Eventually I figured it out, I think.
Environment stories are usually written in an alarmist tone. That is to say, the stories deal
with purportedly alarming developments and the sources are often people who wish to
sound an alarm. A species is endangered. A chemical is toxic. The Earth is in peril. That's
just the way this kind of story is usually written in the news business. And, often enough,
the facts are truly alarming. But it's become the norm in much environment writing to
state things in this alarmist tone even if the facts are not well established.

As a science writer, coming out of a somewhat different journalistic tradition, I try to

write my stories in a neutral, purely informational tone-and also to highlight the facts that
strike me as posing the greatest challenge to conventional thinking. I suspect that people
had become so used to alarmist stories on ozone depletion that my neutral story appeared,
by contrast, to be unduly optimistic."

All modern environmentalist thought stems from one man - Paul Ehrlich. The only
problem for Ehrlich is he has been wrong about absolutely everything. In the early 60s
Ehrlich predicted the Big Freeze (go ask people about the impending Ice Age of the 70s
and 80s that they were constantly told about), which he was absolutely right about. Every
year it does indeed get alot colder around about Winter time. He also famously predicted
that almost
all resources would be exhausted - he even placed a famous bet which he lost by an
enormous degree. Or try Ehrlich's Acid Rain scares of the 80s. Or his most
famous disatser - The 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he predicted that the
US population would "starve back" to 22 million. Since 1961, world
population has more than doubled, food production has more than doubled, and Paul
Ehrlich has become even more trusted. The are 290 million people in
the US alone and yet Ehrlich and his progeny are trusted as fonts of knowledge.

Ehrlich has never been accurate about one of his predictions. For this the MacArthur
Foundation bestowed its "genius" award along with a a chunk of money for Ehrlich's
"promoting greater public understanding of environmental problems." Lester Brown,
who's been predicting global starvation for 40 years, also received the MacArthur
"genius" award.
Environmentalists have the ability to continue to say they are right in spite of never once
being so. Charges such as urban sprawl is paving overvital cropland - farmland lying
fallow in the United States and Argentina alone could feed 1.4 billion people.
Environmentalists have been predicting that the world's going to run out of coal, oil, gas,
food, arable land, and you name it, for decades. If anything, the world's known supply of
things environmentalists said we're running out of has increased.

The next time an environmentalist warns us of disaster, someone ask "When was the last
time your prediction was right?"

Go read University of Maryland Professor Julian Simon's book "State Of Humanity" in

which he presents every popular enviromentalist claim of the
last 100 years and tears them to shreds. Simon got so cheesed off with Ehrlich and his
colleagues that in 1980 he issued a challenge to the environmentalists. Since increased
scarcity would mean higher prices, he bet $10,000 that any given raw material - to be
picked by his opponents - would have dropped in price at least one year later. Stanford
University environmentalists Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John Holdren, stating that "the
lure of easy money can be irresistible", took him on.

The environmentalists put their money on chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten,
and they picked a time frame of 10 years. By September 1990,
each of the raw materials had dropped in price: chromium by 5%, tin by a whopping
74%. The doom-mongers had lost. Ehrlich and co would have lost whatever
they had bet on - petroleum, foodstuffs, sugar, coffee, cotton, wool, minerals, phosphates
- they had all become cheaper. Every prediction they had made had
been proven to be totally incorrect.

The biggest doom story of enviro's is oil. Since oil was discovered, we have been running
out of oil. Everyman and his dog has uttered the sky-is-falling view of oil. In 1914, the
US Bureau of Mines estimated that supplies would last only 10 more years. In 1939 the
US Dept of the Interior predicted that oil would last only 13 more years. When the 13
years were up, they made exactly the same prediction again! Hell even last month the
Swedish University of Upssala said we have only a few years left. This despite that
known reserves of oil have more than quadrupled inthe last 10 years alone.

Not only does this make enviros look silly, it shows how dull the "war for oil" argument
is. Not only are we not running out, it would help if the allegedly oil-ungry US relied
overly on it. Or invaded Saudi Arabaia and proved the nutcases right.

WERE THE "GOOD OLD DAYS" REALLY GOOD?

"There has been more hope for the poor during the last twenty-five years than ever before
in the history of our country. We too easily forget the incredibly immoral neglect of the
needy that was so evident in the early part of the twentieth century. As a case in point,
nothing in the history books that our children read in school describes the tens of
thousands of homeless, orphaned children on city streets during the first three decades of
the 1900s.

So severe was the problem of homeless children that at one point, the Society of Friends
(Quakers) chartered trains to take them out to the farm belt for adoption. The trains
stopped at rural railroad stations where the children disembarked and lined up for
inspection. Then farmers picked out and adopted any of the children they thought would
be good farm workers. In retrospect, this sounds like a shocking practice, but given the
conditions of the time, it was probably one of the more humane options available. We
forget what America was like during the Gilded Age. It was an immoral time
characterized by the story of some millionaires who mocked the poor by literally lighting
their cigars with dollar bills, Less than a mile away from where they did this, people were
on the verge of starving to death."
-Speaking my Mind by Tony Campolo

Children as young as six years old during the industrial revolution worked hard hours for
little or no pay. Children sometimes worked up to 19 hours a day, with a one-hour total
break. This was a little bit on the extreme, but it was not common for children who
worked in factories to work 12-14 hours with the same minimal breaks. Not only were
these children subject to long hours, but also, they were in horrible conditions. Large,
heavy, and dangerous equipment was very common for children to be using or working
near. Many accidents occurred injuring or killing children on the job. Not until the
Factory Act of 1833 did things improve. Children were paid only a fraction of what an
adult would get, and sometimes factory owners would get away with paying them
nothing. Orphans were the ones subject to this slave-like labor. The factory owners
justified their absence of payroll by saying that they gave the orphans food, shelter, and
clothing, all of which were far below par. The children who did get paid were paid very
little.
The treatment of children in factories was often cruel and unusual, and the children's
safety was generally neglected. The youngest children, who were not old enough to work
the machines, were commonly sent to be assistants to textile workers. The people who the
children served would beat them, verbally abuse them, and take no consideration for their
safety. Both boys and girls who worked in factories were subject to beatings and other
harsh forms of pain infliction. One common punishment for being late or not working up
to quota would be to be "weighted." An overseer would tie a heavy weight to worker's
neck, and have them walk up and down the factory aisles so the other children could see
them and "take example." This could last up to an hour. Weighting could lead to serious
injuries in the back and/or neck. Punishments such as this would often be dispensed
under stringent rules. Boys were sometimes dragged naked from their beds and sent to
the factories only holding their clothes, to be put on there. This was to make sure the boys
would not be late, even by a few minutes.
 The Media

In the 1950’s, readership of Newspapers was over 100 percent (many households
subscribed to 2 or more daily newspapers. Today, it is less than one half of that. With the
advent of the internet and 24 hours cable news services, regular television news casting
has had to share its piece of the pie also. So how did the news media respond to this ever-
growing competition? By scaring us to death! Media outlets now need to get our
attention, and scaring us exactly the way to do that. As Lex Luthor stated in Superman:
“The more fear you make, the more loot you take.” For instance, in the same period that
crime decreased dramatically from the early 90’s to the 21st century, news reporting of
crime increased by 700%. Strangely, the liberal media has made a strange friendship with
right-wing conservative Christians, who rely on the media for proofs of a declining
modern age. When discussing my optimistic view of modern life with Seventh Day
Adventists, I would always get the same response: “Don’t believe us? Just look at the
news!”
John Stossel had this to say about the news media:

“Where are the bodies?

For years, reporters have been alerting America to one scare after
another. Chemicals, cell phones, SARS -- everything is going to kill
us! You would think by now we'd be doing nothing but digging graves.

Instead, Americans are living longer than ever. Not that you'd ever
know that from the mainstream media.

So let's grab a shovel to clear away the nonsense and dig out the
truth: Myths, lies and stupidity are often the basis of today's scary
news stories.

Reports that motorists using cell phones were triggering explosions at

gas stations sent fear at gas stations through the roof (where gas
prices, adjusted for inflation, haven't gone). But there is no
evidence that cell phones are much of a threat.

The media keeps pumping out the stories. In 2004, the Poughkeepsie
[N.Y.] Journal ran this scary headline: "Cell Phone Ring Starts Fire
at Gas Station."

The story quoted the local fire chief, Pat Koch, as saying gas vapors
were ignited by the ringing of a cell phone. But -- stop the presses
and start shoveling -- just days later, Koch said: "After further
investigation . . . I have concluded that the source of ignition was
from some source other than the cell phone . . . most likely static
discharge from the motorist himself." The truth is that anything that
involves static or sparks can ignite gasoline fumes, including rubbing
your rear end against a cloth car seat on a dry winter day.

At the University of Oklahoma, there's a "Center for the Study of

Wireless Electromagnetic Compatibility," which researches the effects
of electronic devices on our lives. The center examined incident
reports and scientific data, and concluded that there was "virtually
no evidence to suggest that cell phones pose a hazard at gas
stations." The researchers went even further: "The historical
evidence," it said, "does not support the need for further research."
You're about as likely to be toasted by a dragon. To its credit, the
Poughkeepsie Journal gave its follow-up story as much play as the
original. The media rarely do that. Usually, the alarmist and
scientifically clueless media just keep churning out the scares.

A persistent media myth holds that chemicals are responsible for "the
cancer epidemic." The truth is, there is no cancer epidemic. In fact,
the cancer death rate has been declining for more than a decade. If
you're tempted to argue that fewer die from cancer today simply
because there are better treatments, look at the cancer incidence
rates.

The incidence of prostate and breast cancer is up, but that's only
because there's more early detection. Lung cancer increased in women
because more women took up cigarettes, and skin cancer increased
because of lunatic sunbathing. But overall, cancer rates are flat, and
lots of cancers, like stomach, uterine, and colorectal cancer, are on
the decline.

We think there's a cancer epidemic because we hear more about cancer.

It's a disease of an aging population, and fortunately, more people
now live long enough to get cancer. More talk about it, too. Many
years ago, people who got cancer were secretive about it.

But the main reason we think there is an epidemic is that the media,
suspicious of technology, hype dubious risks.

Almost every week, there is another story about a potential menace.

Reporters credulously accept the activists' scares: While I've been a
reporter, I've been asked to do alarmist reports about hair dye, dry
cleaning, coffee, chewing gum, saccharin, cyclamates, NutraSweet,
nitrites, Red No. 2 dye, electric blankets, video display terminals,
dental fillings, cellular phones, vaccines, potato chips, farmed
salmon, Teflon, antiperspirants and even rubber duckies.

I refused to do most of those stories. If one-tenth of what the

reporters suggested was happening did happen, there would be mass
death. The opposite is true: Despite exposure to radiation and all
those nasty new chemicals, Americans today live longer than ever.

So grab a bar of chocolate (it's healthier than you think, if you eat
the right kind) and a copy of my new book, just out this week.

Everything you know is wrong -- and that's very good news.”

David Altheide, Regents Professor of criminal justice at Arizona State University adds
this to the marketing of fear by the media:

"The Problem" is also

the way in which the information is presented. He calls the
presentation technique a "news frame" or "problem frame."

The results from lots of opinion polls indicate that many Americans
remain fearful despite clear evidence that most citizens are
healthier, safer, and happier than ever before.

Why the fear?

Altheide's interpretive studies of the mass media are well known among
scholars. His answer is based on a variant of a technique called frame
analysis. Researchers use the method to study the content of news
reports and popular culture. Altheide argues that the media have
become both an information source as well as a source of entertainment.

"The blending of news/information values and entertainment values has

gotten us to where we are today," he explains. "New programs and news
papers are big business. They make a lot of money for corporations. At
their core, these groups are profit driven. To make a larger profit,
you have to attract a larger audience. To attract larger audiences to
news programs, media outlets are adopting an entertainment format as
part of news programming."

The difference is easy to see. Altheide suggests looking at the

contrast between past and current television newscasts. Baby boomers
grew up watching relatively simple newscasts dominated by anchormen
such as Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley. Today's newscasts place a
much larger emphasis on entertainment. Perfectly coiffed news readers
laugh and giggle as they provide the latest gossip about celebrities.
They also devote lots of time to stories about food preparation, hot
new restaurants, or updates on the latest fashions and fads.

"The entertainment elements are now dominant," Altheide says. "The

effect overwhelms even what can be considered the `serious news'
segments on radio and television. It also is eroding the hard news
sections of many newspapers."

News stories are often presented in what Altheide describes as a

"problem format." The format allows reporters a platform on which to
present news stories and attract and entertain an audience at the same
time.
"In an effort to attract larger and larger audiences, media people
have gone back into our cultural history and adopted a format that is
time proven—the morality play. Many religions used the morality play
format to teach concepts of right and wrong." Altheide explains.

The current "War on Terrorism" is a good example of how leaders use

the morality play to generate fear-inspired news reports. President
Bush speaks about "evil ones" and "evil doers." The nation remains on
"alert." The next attack could come at any time.

"The morality play is simple. It is based on the idea that a problem

exists," Altheide adds. "The problem can be solved through the use of
a moral principle."

The "problem frame" does not suffer a political bias to either the
left or right. The process is used to identify a problem, and then
suggests one or more solutions.

"The problem frame gets incorporated into news because of the way news
is covered in our fast-moving information society," Altheide
continues. "It is now built into the very structure of how news is
reported and presented in America ."

"The news business has an accepted way of doing things," he says. "The
most successful and profitable news programs tend to be those that use
the news frame as a way to attract an audience. News is a business.
Businesses tend to copy what works. As a result, the news or problem
frame has become the standard way of reporting. The new generation of
reporters has been raised on the problem frame. It seems natural to them."

Fear sells. Media outlets appear to thrive on finding new ways to

scare their viewers or readers. However, Altheide thinks that the
problem extends well beyond the news room. We experience more of our
lives through a lens of fear.The sense and use of the word "fear" is
greater in American life today than it was even a decade ago,
according to the ASU scholar.

"Much of the promotional material for the news product uses an element
of fear to generate readers or viewers," he explains. "That's why you
see promos such as `Tonight at 10 p.m., find out the secret ingredient
in women's perfume that's destroying their sex lives.' Or, `Learn
three things you can do to protect your family from skin cancer.'

"The teaser format is also popular: `Organization X has made a major

announcement. We'll have all the details at 5 p.m.' These promotional
advertisements attempt to get you to watch or read by creating fear
 that you might miss an important piece of information for yourself or
your family."

The problem frame often acts much like a magnifying glass.

"Over time, the constant use of the problem frame results in an

accumulation of fear among members of the general public," Altheide
says. "Crime news is an easy example. The media pay a great deal of
attention to violent crime and murder. People have become fearful
about the prospects of becoming a victim of crime, despite the fact
that if you are not involved in drugs or gangs, your chances of
becoming a victim of violent crime are some of the lowest in American
history. The actual number of violent crimes in the United States has
been dropping, but the amount of fear has increased."
Altheide says the same model can be seen in the mass media's coverage
of schools and education in America .

"The stories usually focus on the problems in the schools, and what we
need to do to fix those problems," he continues. "People are concerned
that the quality of schools has dramatically declined over time. Yet,
at the very same time, we have record numbers of students entering
colleges and universities across the nation. The problem frame tends
to shift the focus and alter the perception of what is really going
on. Over time, the problem frame creates its own reality."

David Altheide's newest book about the news media is called Creating
Fear: News and the Construction of Crises (Social Problems and Social
Issues) published by Aldine De Gruyter.

“As much as the public complains about media scares, they will continue to occur. Why?
Because fear sells. Whether we admit it or not, we love the thrill these scares give us,
probably because in most cases – as in watching a horror movie or riding a heart-stopping
roller coaster – we know the threat they project is almost certainly a phantom menace.”
-Michael Fumento

Fear Sells
"To be afraid is to have more faith in evil than in God."---Emmet Fox

Researchers in how the brain functions have found that our forebrains
(the thinking part that makes us humans) shut down when we are angry
or frightened and the midbrain (which resembles the brain of animals)
takes over. The only programming that works for the midbrain is the
same type of training that works for dogs, which is classical and
operant conditioning. This type of conditioning is simply
stimulus-response, such as IF fire bell--THEN walk the fire escape
exit plan. 7: THE SCIENCE OF STRUCTURING Deeper Insights into the
Illuminati Formula

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed

-- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."-- H.L. Mencken

"Beware of emotions. The emotional person is turned off sensually.

His body is a churning robot. Emotions are addictive, narcotic, and
stupefacient (non-thinking). "—T. Leary

"People will let themselves be led by someone who is in the next level
up on the scale. Therefore, all of the gullible souls in the Fear band
can be easily influenced and pushed into action by the 1.5."--Ruth
Minshull (How to choose your people p119)

"Propaganda Techniques: Special Appeals--Fear: When a propagandist

warns members of her audience that disaster will ensue if they do not
follow a particular course of action, she is using the fear appeal. By
playing on the audience's deep-seated fears, practitioners of this
technique hope to redirect attention away from the merits of a
particular proposal and toward steps that can be taken to reduce the
fear." http://carmen.artsci.washington.edu/propaganda/fear.htm

"The usual first step in religious or political brainwashing is to

work on the emotions of an individual or group until they reach an
abnormal level of anger, fear, excitement, or nervous tension......He
induces fear and increases the tension by talking about "the devil,"
"going to hell," or the forthcoming Armegeddon."---Dick Sutphen (The
Battle for Your Mind: Brainwashing Techniques Being Used On The
Public) http://www.whale.to/w/mind.html

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a

continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national
emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some
monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not
blindly rally behind it ..." -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"For the public ever to break command science it must first understand
the basis of its enormous powers.......Traditionally, the power of
medical sciences has been based on the fear of disease, particularly
infectious disease."--Peter Deusberg (Inventing The AIDS Virus).
http://www.duesberg.com/
"First, the stricken cancer victim and their family members have been
so deceived by the Establishment that they are completely brainwashed
and put in overwhelming fear."----Dr Kelly DDS

"[The CDC's] disease-control mission was increasingly being regarded

as obsolete, prompting serious discussions about abolishing the CDC
altogether."----Duesberg's Inventing The AIDS Virus (1996) (Source:
http://www.geocities.com/harpub/pol_all.htm

"The British Medical Journal ran a very revealing article recently,

entitled Selling Sickness. In it, the authors stated:

"Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the

definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and
consumers. The social construction of illness is being replaced by the
corporate construction of disease. Although some sponsored
professionals or consumers may act independently and all concerned may
have honourable motives, in many cases the formula is the same: groups
and/or campaigns are orchestrated, funded, and facilitated by
corporate interests, often via their public relations and marketing
infrastructure. A key strategy of the alliances is to target the news
media with stories designed to create fears about the condition or
disease and draw attention to the latest treatment. Company sponsored
advisory boards supply the `independent experts' for these stories,
consumer groups provide the `victims' and public relations companies
provide media outlets with the positive spin about the latest
`breakthrough' medications." (Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, David Henry,
'Selling Sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease-mongering',
British Medical Journal online, BMJ, 13th April 2002 )--Steve Ransom

"[T]here's fame, fortune, and big budgets in sounding the `emerging

infection' alarm and warning of our terrible folly in being
unprepared."-------Michael Fumento, National Post, March 28, 2003

"A perusal of the abstracts of papers presented at the 23rd annual

meeting of the Society for Epidemiological Research … made me wonder
whether epidemiology, in the absence of epidemics, is not a misnomer
for scaremongering made respectable by the use of sophisticated
statistical methods, and whether one of the reasons for this state of
affairs is not a high prevalence of epidemiologists when the incidence
of problems solvable by epidemiological methods is low."---Hilary
Butler quoting Petr Skrabanek http://www.whale.to/m/butler4.html
"The CDC would be the last place in the world to go for information
regarding health. The CDC is a government bureacracy funded by theft
(taxation that has reached confiscatory levels) and run by white
collar criminals who regularly misinform and misdirect the public
while creating pandemonium in the marketplace (unnecessary destruction
of livestock, recalls etc) and conspiring to incite public panic on an
almost daily basis, in violation of the constitution of the United
States ."--Dr Duffy DC

" So, let's all pretend it's ( West Nile virus) a deadly virus and
endure a ritual of mind-numbing fear, dramatized by occasional
unscheduled pesticide sprayings by helicopters over crowded streets
and parks."--Jim West www.geocities.com/noxot

"Severe constraints are placed on the media in the name of

"responsible journalism" with the result that the American public very
seldom hears both sides of the vaccination story, and comes to have an
unquestioning faith in vaccinations as our greatest hope against
future imagined disease plagues. In this fear-based scenario, the
questioning voice of reason is drowned out amid the hysteria
surrounding the emerging "killer infections" which are such a favorite
media topic. This propagation of fear by the media and by its sources
in the public health industry has resulted in a growth of power of
this industry far beyond the usual checks and balances of our
democracy."---Incao's Hepatitis B Vaccination Testimony

"To magnify their own importance CDC allowed a climate of fear

(Legionnaire disease)."--Dr Anthony Morris

"The mysterious new respiratory ailment (SARS) that has terrified

people around the globe has extended its reach to the Capitol, where
Senate Republicans are using the disease to press their case that
vaccine manufacturers should be shielded from lawsuits."--Media

"A lot of issues need to be swept under the carpet---and poof, along
comes SARS. Whether or not its appearance was coordinated, up front,
to coincide with these scandals and tragedies in Iraq , one thing is
for sure. SARS has been used as a smokescreen to keep the global
public diverted and in fear."--- JON RAPPOPORT

"I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world
ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I
don't think it's possible under capitalism." [Environmentalism equals replacing capitalism
with socialism.]
-- Judi Bari, Earth First! member.
"The environmentalist's dream is an egalitarian society based on: rejection of economic
growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and
sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally."
-- Aaron Wildavsky, political scientist and professor. [Environmentalism equals making
everybody equal; that is, it's communism.]

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. . ,
[C]limate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the
world." [Environmentalism equals changing the world.]
-- Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister.

"We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. .
. . We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing
dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of
presently settled land." [Environmentalism equals a return to primitive living.]
-- David Foreman, Earth First! member.

"We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is
wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental
policy." [Environmentalism equals changing policy by claiming -- even without
substantiation -- it's necessary to save the world's environment.]
-- Timothy Wirth, Clinton Administration U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global
Affairs, and one of a number of politicians (including Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank, Al
Gore, John Kerry, Christopher Shays, and others) who were designated as "Green
Leadership for the '90s."

"[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios [about global warming and destruction of the
environment}, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any
doubts one might have. . . . Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between
being effective and being honest." [Environmentalism equals lies "if necessary".]
-- Stephen Schneider, Stanford University environmentalist.

"We routinely wrote scare stories about the hazards of chemicals, employing words like
'cancer,' and 'birth defects' to splash a little cold water in reporters' faces. . . . Our press
reports were more or less true. . . . Few handouts, however, can be completely honest, and
ours were no exception . . . . We were out to whip the public into a frenzy about the
environment." [Environmentalism equals government-sponsored deception.]
-- Jim Sibbison, former EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) press officer.

"Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have
to say about global warming. They have a responsibility not to report what these
scientists say." [Environmentalism equals silencing debate and stifling contrary opinions.]
-- Ross Gelbspan, former editor of the Boston Globe.

"I would freely admit that on [global warming] we have crossed the boundary from news
reporting to advocacy." [Environmentalism equals indoctrination.]
-- Charles Alexander, "Time" magazine science editor.

Writer John Meredith summarizes: "The radical environmental movement is destroying

America. It is turning our society, once based on individual freedom and responsibility,
into little more than mindless followers of regulations established at the whim of
unelected special-interest groups."

Walter Williams has the last word: "While the Soviet Union has collapsed, communism is
not dead. It has [been] repackaged under a new name: environmentalism. Communism is
about extensive government regulation and control by elites, and so is
environmentalism."

The activists' biggest weapon is fear. Without fear, they'd be out of business. Without fear,
there would be no headlines, no celebrities, no funds. Without fear, they'd be out of work.
And environmentalists would be out of a mission (and a paycheck), which is to rescue the
Earth from the sins and wickedness of mankind.

"The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with
the increase in global air pollution associated with
industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding
population." -- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a
rational strategy for Man", (1971)

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will
undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to
death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population
control is the only answer -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000
-- Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.
Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the
stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in

which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing
depletion -- Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the

rest of the century -- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun
to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic
decline in food production - with serious political implications for
just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could
begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has
now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are
hard-pressed to keep up with it. -- Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it

continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine,
world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the
year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976

If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees

colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees
colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to
put us in an ice age. -- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global
cooling, Earth Day (1970)
 Conclusion

The one thing that Christianity has been consistently wrong about is its predictions of The
End. Generation after Generation, for 2000 years, one man of faith after another has
stepped up to the plate to declare an imminent End to present conditions. It should be
apparent after so long a time that we were not meant to prognosticate such a dire
outcome, and perhaps our literal way of looking at certain Biblical passages are simply
WRONG! Author Margaret Truman, in an interview mentioned that an apocalyptic
outlook tapped into the worst of human traits: Gloating and Revenge!
What is so healthful about believing that God will kill 6 billion people but save only you
and your group of "true believers"? How is that loving? How is it constructive? How
does it benefit your fellow man to desire his demise?

I say, "Carpe Diem: Sieze the Day!" You, the reader, have the fortune of being born in the
most exciting time in human history. The reason we are living longer and healthier is due
to the magnificent sacrifices and intellects of those who have come before us. We can
now marry for love instead of necessity. We can pursue occupations we enjoy instead of
long hours of back breaking labor. Our children can be educated instead of laboring in
factories. Our new found prosperity helps us to help others. The amount of time and
money we contribute to charity is staggering.
YOU are better than the doomsayers. YOU are kinder, more loving, and more selfless,
and I salute you.

Your Friend

Kenny Woo