In our latest podcast, (left to right) editors Henry See, Scott Ogrin, and Joe Quinn chat with guests from the US, UK, and Canada about the differences between the US educational system and those of other countries.

This week, we take a more detailed look at education in the US, and what that system has done to facilitate the current slide of freedom and democracy in the Land of the Free. With the help of our guests, we also get an idea of how the US compares to other countries not only in education, but also in terms of the likelihood that the population can be hoodwinked by the Powers that Be.

If you have any questions for the Signs Team or would like to suggest a topic for future Podcast discussion, you can write us at:

Every parent knows the feeling of seeing one of their children in pain, sick, gazing up with a beseeching look of "Make it stop!" It has been often remarked that it is unnatural for a parent to outlive a child, the gut-wrenching heartache, the visceral screaming from deep within, the anguished cry of "Why!"

Cindy Sheehan is transmuting her agony at the loss of her son by demanding that the culprit, George W. Bush, be held accountable, that he take the time to acknowledge her suffering and answer the simple question of "Why?" She speaks to all parents; we all recognise her pain as it lives in a dark corner of all of our imaginations.

One of the propaganda goals when a country goes to war is the successful transformation of the enemy from human being with hopes and fears, family and friends just like ourselves, into sub-human monsters who eat their young. Brutalised to consider the enemy as wholly other, we no longer care about their losses, about the mothers and fathers weeping at the deaths of their young men and woman. We no longer care when we hear that as many as one million Iraqi children died as a result of the US-backed and UN-imposed sanctions after the first Gulf War. "We think it was worth it," infamously responded Madeleine Albright on CBS in 1996.

When you kill a country's children, you are killing its future.

Every town in France has a cenotaph with the names of the children sacrificed during the First World War. To what?

Yet there is a more subtle killing of our children that goes on every day, the killing of the spirit that happens in school. Curious children, open to the world, are turned into consumers and cogs in the corporate machinery, learning how to sit still, follow orders, respond to bells like Pavlovian dogs, memorise and recite, and refrain from asking questions. What they don't learn how to do is think.

Most people who pass through American schools don't even learn how to read. As John Taylor Gatto points out in his book The Underground History of American Education:

The National Adult Literacy Survey represents 190 million U.S. adults over age sixteen with an average school attendance of 12.4 years. The survey is conducted by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey. It ranks adult Americans into five levels. Here is its 1993 analysis:

1. Forty-two million Americans over the age of sixteen can’t read. Some of this group can write their names on Social Security cards and fill in height, weight, and birth spaces on application forms.
   
   
2. Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth- and fifth-grade level. They cannot write simple messages or letters.
   
   
3. Fifty-five to sixty million are limited to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade reading. A majority of this group could not figure out the price per ounce of peanut butter in a 20-ounce jar costing $1.99 when told they could round the answer off to a whole number.
   
   
4. Thirty million have ninth- and tenth-grade reading proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot understand a simplified written explanation of the procedures used by attorneys and judges in selecting juries.
   
   
5. About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today. This last fact alone should warn you how misleading comparisons drawn from international student competitions really are, since the samples each country sends are small elite ones, unrepresentative of the entire student population. But behind the bogus superiority a real one is concealed.
   
   
6. Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for other people to interpret information for us.

Think about it. "Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned."

That is such an astonishing figure.

What are we doing to our children?

How did it happen?

Gatto offers some insight.

The Makers of Modern [American] Schooling

The real makers of modern schooling weren't at all who we think.

Not Cotton Mather.

Not Horace Mann.

Not John Dewey.

The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like:

Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron...

John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil...

Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty...

and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance...

Men like these, and the brilliant efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor, who inspired the entire "social efficiency" movement of the early twentieth century, along with providing the new Soviet Union its operating philosophy and doing the same job for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; men who dreamed bigger dreams than any had dreamed since Napoleon or Charlemagne, these were the makers of modern schooling.

If modern schooling has a “Fourth Purpose,” there must be an earlier three.

Traditional forms of instruction in America, even before the Revolution, had three specific purposes:

1. To make good people
2. To make good citizens
3. And to make each student find some particular talents to develop to the maximum.

The new mass schooling which came about slowly but continuously after 1890, had a different purpose, a "fourth" purpose.

The fourth purpose steadily squeezed the traditional three to the margins of schooling; in the fourth purpose, school in America became like school in Germany, a servant of corporate and political management.

We should reveal the mechanism of mind control training, habits, and attitudes.

The secret of commerce, that kids drive purchases, meant that schools had to become psychological laboratories where training in consumerism was the central pursuit.

Since bored people are the best consumers, school had to be a boring place, and since childish people are the easiest customers to convince, the manufacture of childishness, extended into adulthood, had to be the first priority of factory schools. Naturally, teachers and administrators weren't let in on this plan; they didn't need to be. If they didn't conform to instructions passed down from increasingly centralized school offices, they didn't last long.

In the new system, schools were gradually re-formed to meet the pressing need of big businesses to have standardized customers and employees, standardized because such people are predictable in certain crucial ways by mathematical formulae. Business (and government) can only be efficient if human beings are redesigned to meet simplified specifications. As the century wore on, school spaces themselves were opened bit by bit to commercialization.

These processes didn't advance evenly. Some localities resisted more than others, some decades were more propitious for the plan than others. Especially during and just after national emergencies like WWI, the Depression, WWII, and the Sputnik crisis, the scheme rocketed forward; in quieter moments it was becalmed or even forced to give up some ground.

But even in moments of greatest resistance, the institutions controlling the fourth purpose—great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism—increasingly centralized in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, kept a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and outwait the competition.

The prize was of inestimable value--control of the minds of the young.

After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as HUMAN RESOURCES. Whenever you hear this term, you are certain to be in the presence of employees of the fourth purpose, however unwitting. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called "The Workplace," even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

This revolution in the composition of the American dream produced some unpleasant byproducts. Since systematic forms of employment demand that employees specialize their efforts in one or another function of systematic production, then clear thinking warns us that incomplete people make the best corporate and government employees.

Earlier Americans like Madison and Jefferson were well aware of this paradox, which our own time has forgotten. And if that is so, mutilation in the interests of later social efficiency has to be one of the biggest tasks assigned to forced schooling.

Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well.

What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!

Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best "police" to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell.

As the twentieth century progressed, and particularly after WWII, schools evolved into behavioral training centers, laboratories of experimentation in the interests of corporations and the government. The original model for this development had been Prussian Germany, but few remembered.

School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent "standardized" exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.

For instance, take the case of Bill Bradley. . .

 and George W. Bush,

two of the four finalists in the 2000 presidential race. Bradley had a horrifying 480 on the verbal part of his own SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a senator; Bush graduated from Yale, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States—with a mediocre 550.

If you can become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?

Perhaps they sort out good scientists from bad? If so, how is it that both the scientists principally involved in the Human Genome Project have strange scholarly backgrounds to say the least!

Francis S. Collins, the head of the public portion, was homeschooled, never followed any type of formal curriculum, and is a born-again Christian.

Craig Venter was a very bad boy in high school, a surfing bum who nearly flunked out, and he didn't go to college after graduation, but into the U.S. Army as an enlisted man before being shipped off to Vietnam!

As you'll learn when you read The Underground History of American Education the new purpose of schooling—to serve business and government—could only be achieved efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another.

Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.

The rationale, history, and dynamics of Fourth Purpose school procedure are carefully examined in The Underground History of American Education.

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

 

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

 

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

 

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

 

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

 

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

 

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

 

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

 

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

 

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

 

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

 

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."

 

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

 

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

 

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

 

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

 

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

 

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

 

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

 

There you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

 

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

 

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

 

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

 

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

 

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Nearly 100,000 California 12th graders - or about 20% of this year's senior class - have failed the state's graduation exam, potentially jeopardizing their chances of earning diplomas, according to the most definitive report on the mandatory test, released Friday.

Students in the class of 2006, the first group to face the graduation requirement, must pass both the English and math sections of the test by June

The exit exam - which has come under criticism by some educators, legislators and civil rights advocates - is geared to an eighth-grade level in math and to ninth- and 10th-grade levels in English.

But the report by the Virginia-based Human Resources Research Organization showed that tens of thousands of students, particularly those in special education and others who speak English as a second language, may fail the test by the end of their senior year despite remedial classes, after-school tutoring and other academic help.

Teachers, according to the report, said that many students arrive unprepared and unmotivated for their high school courses and that their grades often reflect poor attendance and low parental involvement.

The group reviewed the test results as part of a report ordered by the Legislature when it instituted the exit exam several years ago.

Among its findings: 63% of African Americans and 68% of Latinos in the class of 2006 have passed both parts of the exam.

By comparison, 89% of Asians and 90% of whites have passed. The report recommended that the state keep the exam but consider several alternatives for students who can't pass.

"Clearly, we need to have some options for these students," said Lauress L. Wise, the firm's president, in a telephone interview with reporters.

The state, for example, could allow seniors to submit portfolios of work that demonstrate mastery of English and math, the report's authors suggested.

The report also proposed that schools allow students to spend an extra year in high school or earn diplomas by completing special summer school programs in lieu of the exam.

Additionally, the state could establish alternate diplomas or graduation certificates for students who pass part of the exit exam, the group said.

But California's superintendent of public instruction, Jack O'Connell, said he opposes any change that would diminish the worth of a high school diploma.

"It's important to keep one core principle front and center: awarding a student a diploma without the skills and knowledge to back it up does the student a disservice," said O'Connell, who added that his staff would study the options outlined in the report.

The exit exam was originally slated for students in the class of 2004. But disappointing passing rates prompted state education officials to push the requirement back two years. The state also shortened the test from three days to two.

Students get several opportunities to pass the exam in high school, and they have to correctly answer only a little more than half of the questions to succeed.

Even so, the exam has come under legal attack by disability rights advocates who fear the effect on special education students; just 35% of such students have passed both parts of the exam so far. [...]

Opponents of the exam said that it penalizes minority students and those in low-income communities whose overcrowded schools often lack experienced teachers and other necessary resources.

"It's unfair to give this test because of the unequal school system we have," said Edgar Sanchez, who teaches U.S. history at Washington Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles. "Every day I see students go through conditions of overcrowding. Sometimes students don't have a desk to sit at." [...]

Springfield, Missouri--I met a man today who did not know the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden; he did not even know the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. But he did know about the War on Terrorism--well, sort of.

"We had to do something when they knocked those buildings down in New York," Joe insisted, his mouth twisted with anger.

I calmly explained to this World War II veteran and former mechanical engineer that it was not Iraqis who flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center towers but al Qaeda, which was based not in Iraq but in Afghanistan, two very different countries.

Joe replied with a look of confusion, and then said, "When they say all those foreign names, I just turn my mind off."

"Turn your mind off?"

"Yeah, turn off my mind" he repeats defiantly.

Missouri is the demographic center of the United States, and some Americans believe it is also the soul of America. "The heart and soul of America," President Bush said on a recent visit, "is found right here in Springfield, Missouri."

But what I found in Springfield, Missouri, was an America where intensely personal politics swamps thoughtful public dialogue, where simplistic slogans like "freedom" are a substitute for understanding the substance of freedom. What I found was an America dominated by intransigent minds and tightly sealed mindsets. What I found was not pretty.

From "Turned Off Mind" to "Kill Them All"

I've seen a humongous amount of stupid nonsense--too often originating from my own twisted thinking--so I'm not surprised by what the turned off mind says. Yet, what Joe said next surprised me. Leaning forward, looking directly at me, he said slowly: "I say kill them all."

Joe is in his 80s and lives in rural southwest Missouri, an area that identifies with the long-time embittered Deep South--Missouri was the northernmost slave state--as opposed to the metropolitan areas of St. Louis and Kansas City that feel more like the moderate North. Joe thinks it was the liberal media, and "those liberal politicians," who lost the Vietnam War, so today he watches Fox News, and only Fox News. Joe doesn't have to learn those strange sounding foreign names because he trusts his basic instincts, or as he says, "his gut feelings," and of course Fox News. Joe's mind can be turned off--Fox is turned on!--and with complete confidence scream, Kill them all!

A turned off mind does not see a four-year-old Iraqi boy with both arms amputated squirming in excruciating pain. A turned off mind does not see a mother's contorted face, a face insane from unbearable horror. A turned off mind does not hear screams or pleas. A turned off mind cannot understand the futility of occupying Iraq; it does not remember Vietnam. A turned off mind just says, Kill them all!

A turned off mind can be informed of everything, yet know nothing. It is the only mind to have when reality is the enemy.

Here in Springfield, Missouri, the hometown of John Ashcroft, there are churches on nearly every corner, bookstores are hardly anywhere, yet turned off minds are everywhere: in the motel lobby, a man handed me a Jesus Saves brochure, insisting my soul was in jeopardy; on my car radio an angry young man screamed, "Those liberals are the devil's work"; sitting in a bar, several locals complained that the Democrats run America (aren't all three branches of the federal government run by Republicans?). But don't even try to have a discussion with Jesus when you're the devil.

This is where I heard Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, as some 40 percent of Americans doggedly insist. In Springfield, the big lie thrives. This is where I heard that we actually found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but that the U.N. stole and destroyed them. This is where I heard we must support our wartime president, yet I never heard we must pay for this war. And this is where I heard that John Kerry is a traitor.

Here in the Show Me State, there is much they don't want to be shown.

From "Kill Them All" to Killed Democracy

Anti-intellectualism has a long tradition in America, a long tradition in every country, yet today in our country it seems stronger and more vicious--a relentless plague wiping out reason in whole sections of our country. Males especially, admiring our inarticulate, dimwitted president, have never been prouder of their own inarticulateness and wear shallow thinking as evidence of their swaggering "manhood." John Kerry not only rubs them the wrong way, he outrages them.

Sometimes I think our advanced technology and great wealth is only a fig leaf for our pathetic primitiveness. Lately I have been thinking that a lot.

Although many of us still cling to the Jeffersonian promise that common citizens in public dialogue can craft thoughtful solutions, we can't hide from the spreading darkness.

Harry Truman lost the presidency because of the Korean War, Lyndon Johnson quit his job--before he could lose it--because of the Vietnam War, yet George Bush is running neck-and-neck with John Kerry although the Iraq War is clearly a disaster. The difference for America could not be greater.

Our ballooning federal deficit has reached a record $445 billion, yet Congress just approved additional tax cuts. We have allocated $200 billion for Iraq, yet in America 77 million Baby Boomers will soon begin retirement and be dependent upon federal money. Health care costs are skyrocketing, rising 36 percent in the last four years, yet government is doing nothing. Where are the plans to pay for all of this? Where are the public debates? Where is our democracy?

Joe had not heard about the tax cut, which surprised me since he supports all tax cuts, although don't suggest that government services be cut back for anything that will affect him. He was only vaguely aware of the spiraling deficit, but our national debt doesn't seem important to him. Health insurance is an issue, but Joe has his. In fact, Joe is busy thinking about something else, about "getting those A-rabs." Where is our democracy? It's being swallowed by the politics of illusion that screams kill them all and says little else.

Then Joe dropped another surprise on me, one quite different from wanting to kill them all. After taking a sip of his coffee, he looked at me and with deliberation said, "I know I should vote for Kerry, but I just can't."

It was a confession, a sad confession. Retired and living on a fixed income, Joe knows (yet nearly always represses) that he should vote for John Kerry. Yet the warping rhetoric, his revved-up emotions, and the suffocating unitary culture ensure that he will vote for George Bush. The fig leaf was suddenly gone; it was clear that Joe was not in control. Joe was an advocate against his own self-interests.

"Against his own self-interests"? you ask. Is it in his interest to continue the transfer of funds from his dwindling bank account to a small number of wealthy individuals? For each year that George Bush has been president, the average American family has lost $1,600. Is it in his interest to have more unnecessary wars and more unnecessary dead Americans? Will it be one of his grandchildren next year? Is it in his interest to saddle his children with a record debt, which they will be forced to pay off for many years to come? Is it in his interest to continue under-funding veterans' programs? He needs those Veterans Administration's programs. Yet this is exactly what Joe will be voting for next week by casting his ballot for George Bush.

Freedom for Joe is the opportunity to do what he should not do, and voting is the right to vote for whom he should not. This is not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote about the common sense of common people. This is not what can sustain American democracy.

Although in 2000 Al Gore won St. Louis and Kansas City, the rest of Missouri, including its third largest city, Springfield, went for George Bush and went in a big way: 58 percent to 39 percent. It's not surprising that the Kerry campaign gave up on Missouri; there are too many Joe's here. The question for this election, then, is this: how many Joe's are there in Ohio and Pennsylvania and the other swing states? If many, then the politics of ignorance will win, and George Bush will win the election.

Maybe America is not as dark as I fear, as I have written; maybe Americans will vote with their brains instead of with twisted feelings and stunted thinking. We shall know soon.

United States President George Bush says at least 10 serious al-Qaeda terrorist plans have been detected and disrupted by the U.S. and its allies since the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In a major speech on terrorism Thursday, Bush said three of the planned attacks were against the U.S.

"We've stopped at least five more al-Qaeda efforts to case targets in the U.S. or infiltrate operatives in our country."

Bush strongly defended the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. He said progress is being made in Iraq and that the U.S. will remain committed in the fight against terrorism.

Support for the continuing campaign in Iraq has dropped in the U.S., with recent polls showing as much as 60 per cent of the population now believing the war was a mistake.

The president also has faced intense recent criticism on domestic issues, especially for what many called inadequate preparation for and a slow response to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

Bush drew parallels between the war on terrorism and the earlier fight against communism.

"Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes multiply.

"Defeating a militant network is difficult because it thrives like a parasite on the suffering and frustration of others."

The Bush speech Thursday is against a backdrop of increased daily violence in Iraq, which threatens to disrupt the Oct.15 referendum on a proposed new constitution for the country.

Deep religious and political differences have set the majority Shia in Iraq, with support of the Kurdish minority, against the Sunni Arabs, the displaced ruling faction that supported former president Saddam Hussein.

The New York City police department and the FBI said Thursday they have received information that the New York City transit system may be the target of terrorism in the coming days and they are on high alert.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the NYPD is taking the threat seriously but so far it is uncorroborated. Bloomberg and NY Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a news conference Thursday the threat is the most specific they have received to date.

A law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the threat is "specific to place, time and method" and involves a bombing.

Neither the Mayor, the Police Chief nor the FBI would provide any details on the nature of the threat.

Mayor Bloomberg asked New Yorkers to be vigilant and alert. He said "If they see something, they should say something". He also said people should live their lives and have faith in New York's finest. He said he himself would take the subway at the end of his day.

Kelly said there are more uniformed and undercover police officers on the transit system. More random searches are also being conducted.

NEW YORK (AP) - A newly disclosed terror threat against the New York subway has raised the specter of an attack with explosives concealed in a baby stroller and prompted an underground show of force by the nation's largest police department.

Officials in New York revealed the threat Thursday, saying an FBI source warned that terrorists had plotted to bomb the subway in coming days. But Homeland Security officials in Washington downplayed the threat, saying it's of "doubtful credibility." Mayor Michael Bloomberg called it the most specific terrorist threat that New York officials had received to date, and promised to flood the subway system with uniformed and undercover officers.

"We have done and will continue to do everything we can to protect this city," Bloomberg said at a nationally televised news conference. "We will spare no resource, we will spare no expense."

Comment: Uh, so is it a real threat, as Bloomberg is stating, or is it of "doubtful credibility"? Those mixed messages are so disconcerting!

The New York Police Department boosted existing measures to search for bombs in commuters' bags, brief cases and luggage. The threat also involved the possibility that terrorists would pack a baby stroller with a bomb, a law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

The official said the threat was "specific to place," and that the window for the attack was anywhere from Friday through at least the weekend.

In Washington, Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke said "the intelligence community has concluded this information to be of doubtful credibility. We shared this information early on with state and local authorities in New York." Knocke did not elaborate.

A counterterror official, who was briefed about the threat by Homeland Security authorities and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intelligence did not reflect "on-the-ground, detailed, pre-surveillance" methods consistent with credible information. Rather, the official said, the intelligence was similar to "what can be found on the Internet and a map of New York City."

Some commuters took the threat in stride.

"I'll think about it, but I'm not scared, really," commuter Leila Fullerton said as she was about to board a subway for Brooklyn after work.

But she added that since the London train bombings in July, she has found herself scanning the car at times looking for suspicious characters.

"It's a terrible feeling going down there sometimes," she said, gesturing at the subway stairwell.

The law enforcement official in New York said that city officials had known about the threat at least since Monday, but held the information until two or three al-Qaida operatives were arrested in Iraq within the past 24 hours. Once the arrests were made, officials felt they could go public, the official said.

Authorities are concerned, the official said, that there might be al-Qaida operatives in New York City connected to the plot. They have no hard evidence of that, but are investigating.

The U.S. military spokesman's office in Baghdad had no information on the arrests. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he had seen no indication of a U.S. military operation to round up al-Qaida operatives.

On Thursday, a television station said it held off on reporting about the subway threat for two days because officials in New York and Washington voiced concerns that public safety could be affected and ongoing operations jeopardized.

WNBC reporter Jonathan Dienst, who covers security and terrorism issues, said he started making calls about the threat on Tuesday. Local and federal officials then got in touch, expressing concern that airing the story would do damage.

The station decided to hold off, citing "the intensity of the level of the request," said Dan Forman, vice president of news.

An estimated 4.5 million passengers ride the New York subway on an average weekday. The system has more than 468 subway stations. In July, the city began random subway searches following the London train bombings.

Gov. George Pataki said Thursday the state would call up hundreds of National Guard troops and ask Connecticut and New Jersey to patrol commuter trains.

New York's security level remained at orange, the same level it has stayed at since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Bloomberg said there was no indication that the threat was linked to this month's Jewish holidays.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An intercepted letter from Osama bin Laden's deputy to the al Qaeda leader in Iraq complains that the terrorist network is short of cash and faces defeat in Afghanistan, a Pentagon spokesman says.

The United States obtained a recent letter that appears to be from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 figure, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, outlining both the strategy and concerns of the terrorist network, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.

In the letter, al-Zawahiri warns that some of the tactics currently employed by the insurgency, including the slaughtering of hostages and the suicide bombings of Muslim civilians, may risk alienating the "Muslim masses," Whitman said Thursday.

Comment: Yeah, it is the resistance that are killing the Muslim civilians! Right! The ones who are disguising themselves as British SAS disguised as Arabs. Pretty damn clever.

Reading from a summary of the letter, Whitman said al-Zawahiri concedes that al Qaeda has lost many key leaders, is resigned to defeat in Afghanistan, and that its lines of communication and funding sources have been seriously disrupted. Al-Zawahiri includes a plea for financial support, indicating he is strapped for money, Whitman said.

Comment: Is this convenient or what! Just as Bush tells us things are going so well in Iraq, we get this letter from al-Zawahiri moaning about al Qaeda's woes! See, the war on terror is working! Really!!!

He could not say when the letter was intercepted or when authorities believe it might have been written.

The lengthy communication was said to detail the strategy of Muslim extremists to push the United States out of Iraq and establish an Islamic state that could expand its form of governance to neighboring countries, Whitman said.

Senior U.S. officials told CNN that the 6,000-word letter is believed to have been written within days of the July 7 terror attacks in London. Only parts of the letter have been made public, the officials said.

The decision to confirm the existence of the letter came after an incomplete and partially inaccurate version was leaked to news organizations, the senior officials said.

Earlier Thursday, President Bush made similar points about the terror network in what aides billed as a "major speech" on the war on terrorism, which was launched after al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Comment: No! Really! What a coincidence!

Bush repeated his long-standing contention that Iraq had become the central front in that conflict, and said a U.S. withdrawal from that currently unpopular conflict would leave behind a country ruled by bin Laden and al-Zarqawi.

"We will not stand by as a new set of killers dedicated to the destruction of our own country seizes control of Iraq by violence," Bush said.

You might think that reading about a podunk university's English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we're about to embark on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance.

"I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's easier than philosophy--she thinks.

The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focussed essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work--which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende.

Geography, history, philosophy, and political science--all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Education of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny.

Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are about to wage--an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water will be murder--and a war crime. And it will signal the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions.

Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-etchelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.

This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has something to answer for--especially to our youth.

But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.

Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for my revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the arts--areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry-- vocational training schools, which in reality is what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics-- a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations.

Meanhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board for all departments in the state--including education.

1945:

Project Paperclip is initiated. The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence, and the CIA recruit Nazi scientists and offer them immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top secret government projects in the United States. In other words, while other American agencies are hunting down Nazi war criminals for arrest, the U.S. intelligence community is smuggling them into America, unpunished, for their use against the Soviets. The most important of these is Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's master spy who had built up an intelligence network in the Soviet Union. With full U.S. blessing, he creates the "Gehlen Organization," a band of refugee Nazi spies who reactivate their networks in Russia. These include SS intelligence officers Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg (who massacred Jews in the Holocaust), Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon"), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked with Eichmann) . The Gehlen Organization supplies the U.S. with its only intelligence on the Soviet Union for the next ten years, serving as a bridge between the abolishment of the OSS and the creation of the CIA. However, much of the "intelligence" the former Nazis provide is bogus.

"Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.

Human plutonium injection experiments. The Manhattan Project was asked to inject a hospital patient at either Rochester or Chicago with 1 to 10 micrograms of plutonium and send the excreta to Los Alamos for analysis. The first human plutonium injection took place on April 10, 1945, without the informed consent of the patient.

1947:

CIA created - President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, creating the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. The CIA is accountable to the president through the NSC - there is no democratic or congressional oversight. Its charter allows the CIA to "perform such other functions and duties. As the National Security Council may from time to time direct."

Control of US atomic energy passes from the US Military to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.

Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission issues a secret document (Document 07075001, January 8, 1947) stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects.

The CIA begins its study of LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) are used with and without their knowledge.

Paper clip scientist Kurt Rahr. Rahr was a convicted criminal with an extensive Nazi past. In September 1947, he conducted mind control experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, where such experiments flourished until at least 1966.

1949:

The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S.

Operation MOCKINGBIRD - The CIA begins recruiting American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda. Frank Wisner, Allan Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham head the effort. Graham is publisher of The Washington Post, which becomes a major CIA player. Eventually, the CIA's media assets will include ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and more. By the CIA's own admission, at least 25 organizations and 400 journalists will become CIA assets.

The Army began widespread spraying of 239 U.S. cities with bacteria and pathogens as part of the secret testing of biological weapons.

1950:

Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates.

The CIA initiated studies in mind control programs "in 1950, with Project BLUEBIRD, rechristened ARTICHOKE in 1951. To establish a ' cover story' for this research, the CIA funded a propaganda effort designed to convince the world that the Communist Bloc had devised insidious new methods of re-shaping the human will; the CIA's own efforts could therefore, if exposed, be explained as an attempt to ' catch up' with Soviet and Chinese work. The primary promoter of this ' line' was one Edward Hunter, a CIA contract employee operating under-cover as a journalist, and, later, a prominent member of the John Birch society."

"Hunter offered 'brainwashing' as the explanation for the numerous confessions signed by American prisoners of war during the Korean War and (generally) UN-recanted upon the prisoners' repatriation. These confessions alleged that the United States used germ warfare in the Korean conflict, a claim which the American public of the time found impossible to accept. Many years later, however, investigative reporters discovered that Japan's germ warfare specialists (who had wreaked incalculable terror on the conquered Chinese during WWII) had been mustered into the American national security apparatus -- and that the knowledge gleaned from Japan's horrifying germ warfare experiments probably WAS used in Korea, just as the 'brainwashed' soldiers had indicated.

Thus, we now know that the entire brainwashing scare of the 1950s constituted a CIA hoax perpetrated upon the American public: CIA deputy director Richard Helms admitted as much when, in 1963, he told the Warren Commission that "Soviet mind control research consistently lagged years behind American efforts."

1965:

CIA and Department of Defense begin Project MKSEARCH, a program to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs.

Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia are subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange used in Vietnam. The men are later studied for development of cancer, which indicates that Agent Orange had been a suspected carcinogen all along.

1966:

CIA initiates Project MKOFTEN, a program to test the toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.

U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.

MK-Search reactivates previously abdandoned projects under Richard Helms, new Director of Central Intelligence. One such project was Spellbinder. Its goal was to create a "sleeper killer," someone who could be turned loose after receiving a key word planted in his mind under hypnosis. According to Gordon Thomas, the project was a failure.

The American media contributed toward maintaining a rigid status quo, almost obsequious in its compliance to the national security community. Senator William Fullbright commented about this on August 13, 1966, during Senate hearings on government and media. He said it was very interesting that so many prominent newspapers did not contest or even raise questions about government policy.

1968:

Dr. Gordon J. F. MacDonald, science advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote, "Perturbation of the environment can produce changes in behavioural patterns." He was referring to low frequency EM waves in the ionosphere affecting human brain wave patterns. (From his book, Unless Peace Comes, a Scientific Forecast of New Weapons, cited in "New World Order ELF Psychotronic Tyranny", a paper by C. B. Baker.)

CIA experiments with the possibility of poisoning drinking water by injecting chemicals into the water supply of the FDA in Washington, D.C.

CIA continued its work on mind control. Dr. Robert Keefe, a neurosurgeon at Tulane University, conducted work in Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The experiments involved implanting electrodes into the brain and body, with the result that the subjects' memory, impulses, and feelings could all be controlled. ESB could also evoke hallucinations, fear, and pleasure. "It could literally manipulate the human will, at will," said Keefe.

George Estabrooks, another scientist, stated to the Providence Evening Bulletin that the key to creating an effective spy or assassin is by creating a multiple personality with the aid of hypnosis, a procedure he described as "child's play." Estabrooks suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby could have been controlled in this manner.

Operation CHAOS - The CIA has been illegally spying on American citizens since 1959, but with Operation CHAOS, President Johnson dramatically boosts the effort. CIA agents go undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. They are searching for Russian instigators, which they never find. CHAOS will eventually spy on 7,000 individuals and 1,000 organizations.

1981:

Eldon Byrd who worked for Naval Surface Weapons, Office of Non-Lethal Weapons, was commissioned in 1981 to develop electromagnetic devices for purposes including 'riot control', clandestine operations and hostage removal."

"Byrd also wrote of experiments where behavior of animals was controlled by exposure to weak electromagnetic fields. 'At a certain frequency and power intensity, they could make the animal purr, lay down and roll over.'" (Keeler, Anna, "Remote Mind Control Technology")

"Between 1981 and September 1982, the Navy commissioned me to investigate the potential of developing electromagnetic devices that could be used as non-lethal weapons by the Marine Corp for the purpose of 'riot control', hostage removal, clandestine operations, and so on." Eldon Byrd, Naval Surface Weapons Center, Silver Spring MD. (From "Electromagnetic Pollution" by Kim Besly, p 12.)

1990:

RF MEDIA, 1990, CIA:

Electronic, multi-directional subliminal suggestion and programming
Location: Boulder, Colorado (Location of main cell telephone node, national television synchronization node)
Targeting: national population of the United States
Frequencies: ULF VHF HF Phase modulation
Power: Gigawatts
Implementation: Television and radio communications, the "videodrome" signals
Purpose: Programming and triggering behavioral desire, subversion of psychic abilities of population, preparatory processing for mass electromagnetic control
Pseudonym: "Buzz Saw" E.E.M.C.

TOWER, CIA, NSA:

Electronic cross country subliminal programming and suggestion
Targeting: Mass population, short-range intervals, long-range cumulative
Frequencies: Microwave, EHF SHF
Methodology: Cellular telephone system, ELF modulation
Purpose: Programming through neural resonance and encoded information
Effect: Neural degeneration, DNA resonance modification, psychic suppression
Pseudonym: "Wedding Bells"

More than 1500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.

According to Harry V. Martin and David Caul, authors of the following excerpt about "Dr. Delgado," he is clearly an "insider" of the "Consortium." A large portion of the following material from "Mind Control: The Current Situation" is concerned with the experimental us of chemical mind alteration for various purposes. It is worth reading in its entirety.

Mind Control: The Current Situation -
By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright © FreeAmerica and Harry V. Martin, 1995 Copyright © Napa Sentinel, 1991.

In Part II we find the following regarding a Dr. Jose Delgado,

Doctor Jose Delgado: "Man does not have the right to develop his own mind." (Congressional Record, New York Times)

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

"The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.

"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."

These were the remarks of Dr. Jose Delgado as they appeared in the February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional Record, No. 262E, Vol. 118.

Despite Dr. Delgado's outlandish statements before Congress, his work was financed by grants from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Aero-Medical Research Laboratory, and the Public Health Foundation of Boston.

Dr. Delgado was a pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The New York Times ran an article on May 17, 1965 entitled "Matador With a Radio Stops Wild Bull". The story details Dr. Delgado's experiments at Yale University School of Medicine and work in the field at Cordova, Spain. The New York Times stated:

"Afternoon sunlight poured over the high wooden barriers into the ring, as the brave bull bore down on the unarmed matador, a scientist who had never faced fighting bull. But the charging animal's horn never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Delgado pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand and the bull braked to a halt. Then he pressed another button on the transmitter, and the bull obediently turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying commands in his brain that were being called forth by electrical stimulation by the radio signals to certain regions in which fine wires had been painlessly planted the day before."

According to Dr. Delgado, experiments of this type have also been performed on humans. While giving a lecture on the Brain in 1965, Dr. Delgado said, "Science has developed a new methodology for the study and control of cerebral function in animals and humans." […]

Herein is the lecture by D.C.Hammond, originally entitled "Hypnosis in MPD: Ritual Abuse," but now usually known as the "Greenbaum Speech," delivered at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality, Thursday June 25, 1992, at the Radisson Plaza Hotel, Mark Center, Alexandria, Virginia.

Sponsored by the Center for Abuse Recovery & Empowerment, The Psychiatric Institute of Washington, D.C. Both a tape and a transcript were at one time available from Audio Transcripts of Alexandria, Virginia (800-338-2111). Tapes and transcripts of other sessions from the conference are still being sold but -- understandably -- not this one. The transcript below was made from a privately made tape of the original lecture.

The single most remarklable thing about this speech is how little one has heard of it in the two years since its original delivery. It is recommended that one reads far enough at least until one finds why it's called "the Greenbaum speech."

In the introduction the following background information is given for D. Corydon Hammond:B.S. M.S. Ph.D (Counseling Psychology) from the University of Utah,
- Diplomate in Clinical Hypnosis, the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis,
- Diplomate in Sex Therapy, the American Board of Sexology,
- Clinical Supervisor and Board Examiner, American Board of Sexology,
- Diplomate in Marital and Sex Therapy, American Board of Family Psychology,
- Licensed Psychologist,
- Licensed Marital Therapist,
- Licensed Family Therapist, State of Utah,
- Research Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Utah School of Medicine,
- Director and Founder of the Sex and Marital Therapy Clinic, University of Utah.
- Adjunct Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Utah Abstract
- Editor, The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis
Advising Editor and Founding Member, Editorial Board, The Ericsonian Monograph
- Referee, The Journal of Abnormal Psychology
- 1989 Presidential Award of Merit, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis
- 1990 Urban Sector Award, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis
- Current President, American Society of Clinical Hypnosis

THE GREENBAUM SPEECH of D.C. HAMMOND

We've got a lot to cover today and let me give you a rough approximate outline of the the things that I'd like us to get into. First, let me ask how many of you have had at least one course or workshop on hypnosis? Can I see the hands? Wonderful. That makes our job easier.

Okay. I want to start off by talking a little about trance-training and the use of hypnotic phenomena with an MPD dissociative-disorder population, to talk some about unconscious exploration, methods of doing that, the use of imagery and symbolic imagery techniques for managing physical symptoms, input overload, things like that. Before the day's out, I want to spend some time talking about something I think has been completely neglected in the field of dissociative disorder, and that's talking about methods of profound calming for automatic hyper-arousal that's been conditioned in these patients.

We're going to spend a considerable length of time talking about age-regression and abreaction in working through a trauma. I'll show you with a non-MPD patient -- some of that kind of work -- and then extrapolate from what I find so similar and different with MPD cases. Part of that, I would add, by the way, is that I've been very sensitive through the years about taping MPD cases or ritual-abuse cases, part of it being that some of that feels a little like using patients and I think that this population has been used enough. That's part of the reason, by choice, that I don't generally videotape my work.

I also want to talk a bunch about hypnotic relapse-prevention strategies and post- integration therapy today. Finally, I hope to find somewhere in our time-frame to spend on hour or so talking specifically about ritual abuse and about mind-control programming and brainwashing -- how it's done, how to get on the inside with that -- which is a topic that in the past I haven't been willing to speak about publicly, have done that in small groups and in consultations, but recently decided that it was high time that somebody started doing it. So we're going to talk about specifics today.

[Applause]

In Chicago at the first international congress where ritual abuse was talked about I can remember thinking, "How strange and interesting." I can recall many people listening to an example given that somebody thought was so idiosyncratic and rare, and all the people coming up after saying, "Gee, you're treating one, too? You're in Seattle"...Well, I'm in Toronto...Well, I'm in Florida...Well, I'm in Cincinnati." I didn't know what to think at that point.

It wasn't too long after that I found my first ritual-abuse patient in somebody I was already treating and we hadn't gotten that deep yet. Things in that case made me very curious about the use of mind-control techniques and hypnosis and other brainwashing techniques. So I started studying brainwashing and some of the literature in that area and became acquainted with, in fact, one of the people who'd written one of the better books in that area.

Then I decided to do a survey, and from the ISSMP&D [International Society for the Study of Mulptiple Personality and Dissociation] folks I picked out about a dozen and a half therapists that I though were seeing more of that than probably anyone else around and I started surveying them. The interview protocol, that I had. got the same reaction almost without exception. Those therapists said, "You're asking questions I don't know the answers to. You're asking more specific questions than I've ever asked my patients." Many of those same therapists said, "Let me ask those questions and I'll get back to you with the answer." Many of them not only got back with answers, but said, "You've got to talk to this patient or these two patients." I ended up doing hundred of dollars worth of telephone interviewing.

What I came out of that was a grasp of a variety of brainwashing methods being used all over the country. I started to hear some similarities. Whereas I hadn't known, to begin with, how widespread things were, I was now getting a feeling that there were a lot of people reporting some similar things and that there must be some degree of communication here.

Then approximately two and a half years ago I had some material drop in my lap. My source was saying a lot of things that I knew were accurate about some of the brainwashing, but it was telling me new material I had no idea about. At this point I took and decided to check it out in three ritual-abuse patients I was seeing at the time. Two of the three had what they were describing, in careful inquiry without leading or contaminating. The fascinating thing was that as I did a telephone-consult with a therapist that I'd been consulting for quite a number of months on an MPD case in another state, I told her to inquire about certain things. She said, "Well, what are those things?" I said, "I'm not going to tell you, because I don't want there to be any possibility of contamination. Just come back to me and tell me what the patient says."

She called me back two hours later, said, "I just had a double session with this patient and there was a part of him that said, 'Oh, we're so excited. If you know about this stuff, you know how the Cult Programmers get on the inside and our therapy is going to go so much faster.'"

Many other patients since have had a reaction of wanting to pee their pants out of anxiety and fear rather than thinking it was wonderful thing.

But the interesting thing was that she then asked, "What are these things?" They were word perfect -- same answers my source had given me. I've since repeated that in many parts of the country. I've consulted in eleven states and one foreign country, in some cases over the telephone, in some cases in person, in some cases giving the therapist information ahead of time and saying, "Be very careful how you phrase this. Phrase it in these ways so you don't contaminate." In other cases not even giving the therapist information ahead of time so they couldn't.

When you start to find the same highly esoteric information in different states and different countries, from Florida to California, you start to get an idea that there's something going on that is very large, very well coordinated, with a great deal of communication and sytematicness to what's happening. So I have gone from someone kind of neutral and not knowing what to think about it all to someone who clearly believes ritual abuse is real and that the people who say it isn't are either naive like people who didn't want to believe the Holocaust or -- they're dirty.

[Applause]

Now for a long time I would tell a select group of therapists that I knew and trusted, information and say, "Spread it out. Don't spread my name. Don't say where it came from. But here's some information. Share it with other therapists if you find it's on target, and I'd appreciate your feedback." People would question -- in talks -- and say, you know, they were hungry for information. Myself, as well as a few others that I've shared it with, were hedging out of concern and out of personal threats and out of death threats. I finally decided to hell with them. If they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me. It's time to share more information with therapists. Part of that comes because we proceeded so cautiously and slowly, checking things in many different locations and find the same thing. So I'm going to give you the way in with ritual-abuse programming. I certainly can't tell you everything that you want to know in forty-five or fifty minutes, but I'm going to give you the essentials to get inside and start working at a new level.

I don't know what proportion, honestly, of patients have this. I would guess that maybe somewhere around at least fifty percent, maybe as high as three-quarters, I would guess maybe two-thirds of your ritual-abuse patients may have this. What do I think the distinguishing characteristic is? If they were raised from birth in a mainstream cult or if they were an non-bloodline person, meaning neither parent was in the Cult, but Cult people had a lot of access to them in early childhood, they may also have it. I have seen more than one ritual-abuse patient who clearly had all the kind of ritual things you hear about. They seemed very genuine. They talked about all the typical things that you hear in this population, but had none of this programming with prolonged extensive checking. So I believe in one case I was personally treating that she was a kind of schizmatic break-off that had kind of gone off and done their own thing and were no longer hooked into a mainstream group.

[Pause]

Here's where it appears to have come from. At the end of World War II, before it even ended, Allen Dulles and people from our Intelligence Community were already in Switzerland making contact to get out Nazi scientists. As World War II ends, they not only get out rocket scientists, but they also get out some Nazi doctors who have been doing mind-control research in the camps.

They brought them to the United States. Along with them was a young boy, a teenager, who had been raised in a Hasidic Jewish tradition and a background of Cabalistic mysticism that probably appealed to people in the Cult because at least by the turn of the century Aleister Crowley had been introducing Cabalism into Satanic stuff, if not earlier. I suspect it may have formed some bond between them. But he saved his skin by collaborating and being an assistant to them in the death-camp experiments. They brought him with them.

They started doing mind-control research for Military Intelligence in military hospitals in the United States. The people that came, the Nazi doctors, were Satanists. Subsequently, the boy changed his name, Americanized it some, obtained an M.D. degree, became a physician and continued this work that appears to be at the center of Cult Programming today. His name is known to patients throughout the country.

[Pause]

What they basically do is they will get a child and they will start this, in basic forms, it appears, by about two and a half after the child's already been made dissociative. They'll make him dissociative not only through abuse, like sexual abuse, but also things like putting a mousetrap on their fingers and teaching the parents, "You do not go in until the child stops crying. Only then do you go in and remove it."

They start in rudimentary forms at about two and a half and kick into high gear, it appears, around six or six and a half, continue through adolescence with periodic reinforcements in adulthood.

Basically in the programming the child will be put typically on a gurney. They will have an IV in one hand or arm. They'll be strapped down, typically naked. There'll be wires attached to their head to monitor electroencephalograph patterns. They will see a pulsing light, most often described as red, occasionally white or blue. They'll be given, most commonly I believe, Demerol. Sometimes it'll be other drugs as well depending on the kind of programming. They have it, I think, down to a science where they've learned you give so much every twenty- five minutes until the programming is done.

They then will describe a pain on one ear, their right ear generally, where it appears a needle has been placed, and they will hear weird, disorienting sounds in that ear while they see photic stimulation to drive the brain into a brainwave pattern with a pulsing light at a certain frequency not unlike the goggles that are now available through Sharper Image and some of those kinds of stores. Then, after a suitable period when they're in a certain brainwave state, they will begin programming, programming oriented to self-destruction and debasement of the person.

In a patient at this point in time about eight years old who has gone through a great deal early programming took place on a military installation. That's not uncommon. I've treated and been involved with cases who are part of this original mind-control project as well as having their programming on military reservations in many cases. We find a lot of connections with the CIA. This patient now was in a Cult school, a private Cult school where several of these sessions occurred a week.

She would go into a room, get all hooked up. They would do all of these sorts of things. When she was in the proper altered state, now they were no longer having to monitor it with electroencephalographs, she also had already had placed on her electrodes, one in the vagina, for example, four on the head. Sometimes they'll be on other parts of the body. They will then begin and they would say to her, "You are angry with someone in the group." She'd say, "No, I'm not" and they'd violently shock her. They would say the same thing until she complied and didn't make any negative response.

Then they would continue. "And because you are angry with someone in the group," or "When you are angry with someone in the group, you will hurt yourself. Do you understand?" She said, "No" and they shocked her. They repeated again, "Do you understand?" "Well, yes, but I don't want to." Shock her again untill they get compliance. Then they keep adding to it. "And you will hurt yourself by cutting yourself. Do you understand?" Maybe she'd say yes, but they might say, "We don't believe you" and shock her anyway. "Go back and go over it again." They would continue in this sort of fashion. She said typically it seemed as though they'd go about thirty minutes, take a break for a smoke or something, come back. They may review what they'd done and stopped or they might review what they'd done and go on to new material. She said the sessions might go half an hour, they might go three hours. She estimated three times a week.

Programming under the influence of drugs in a certain brainwave state and with these noises in one ear and them speaking in the other ear, usually the left ear, associated with right hemisphere non-dominant brain functioning, and with them talking, therefore, and requiring intense concentration, intense focusing. Because often they'll have to memorize and say certain things back, word-perfect, to avoid punishment, shock, and other kinds of things that are occurring. This is basically how a lot of programming goes on.

Some of it'll also use other typical brainwashing kinds of techniques. There will be very standardized types of hypnotic things done at times. There'll be sensory deprivation which we know increases suggestibility in anyone. Total sensory deprivation, suggestibility has significantly increased, from the research. It's not uncommon for them to use a great deal of that, including formal sensory- deprivation chambers before they do certain of these things. [...]

Fluoride in tap water can cause bone cancer in boys, a disturbing new study indicates, although there is no evidence of a link for girls.

New American research suggests that boys exposed to fluoride between the ages of five and 10 will suffer an increased rate of osteosarcoma - bone cancer - between the ages of 10 and 19.

In the UK, fluoride is added to tap water on the advice of bodies such as the British Dental Association. The Department of Health maintains that it is a cost-effective public health measure that helps prevent tooth decay in children.

About 10 per cent of the population, six million people, receive fluoridated water, mainly in the Midlands and north-east, and the government plans to extend this, with Manchester expected to be next. About 170 million Americans live in areas with fluoridated water.

The increased cancer risks, identified in a newly available study conducted at the Harvard School of Dental Health, were found at fluoride exposure levels common in both the US and Britain. It was the first examination of the link between exposure to the chemical at the critical period of a child's development and the age of onset of bone cancer.

Although osteosarcoma is rare, accounting for only about 3 per cent of childhood cancers, it is especially dangerous. The mortality rate in the first five years is about 50 per cent, and nearly all survivors have limbs amputated, usually legs.

The research has been made available by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a respected Washington-based research organisation. The group reports that it has assembled a 'strong body of peer-reviewed evidence' and has asked that fluoride in tap water be added to the US government's classified list of substances known or anticipated to cause cancer in humans.

'This is a very specific cancer in a defined population of children,' said Richard Wiles, the group's co-founder. 'When you focus in and look for the incidence of tumours, you see the increase.

'We recognise the potential benefits of fluoride to dental health,' added Wiles, 'but I've spent 20 years in public health, trying to protect kids from toxic exposure. Even with DDT, you don't have the consistently strong data that the compound can cause cancer as you now have with fluoride.'

Half of all fluoride ingested is stored in the body, accumulating in calcifying tissue such as teeth and bones and in the pineal gland in the brain, although more than 90 per cent is taken into the bones.

MPs who have recently voted against fluoridation proposals in Parliament include Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

Anti-fluoride campaigners argue that the whole issue has become highly politically sensitive. If health scares about fluoride were to be recognised in the courts, the litigation, especially in the US, could be expected to run for decades. Consequently, scientists have been inhibited from publicising any adverse findings.

The new evidence only emerged by a circuitous process. It was contained in a Harvard dissertation by Dr Elise Bassin at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. The dissertation, completed in April 2001, obviously had merit because Bassin was awarded her doctorate.

However it has not been published. Environmental organisations were repeatedly denied access to it, and even bodies such as the US National Academy of Sciences could not get hold of a copy. Eventually two researchers from the Fluoride Action Network were allowed to read it in the rare books and special collections room at Harvard medical library.

Bassin told The Observer her work was still going through the peer-review process, and she hopes that it will then be published.

Dr Vyvyan Howard, senior lecturer in toxico-pathology at the University of Liverpool, has studied the new material.

'At these ages the bones of boys are developing rapidly,' he said, 'so if the bones are being put together abnormally because fluoride is altering the bone structure, they're more likely to get cancer. It's biologically plausible, and the epidemiological evidence seems pretty strong - it looks as if there's a definite effect.'

There is at present no understanding as to why males should be affected rather than females.

A Department of Health spokesman said that the latest evaluation of research in the UK had identified no ill effects of fluoride.

Is your teenager depressed? Throwing things? Sulking like she hates you and only speaking in monosyllabic grunts and playing her Staind or Avril Lavigne or Hoobastank MP3s way too loud? Sure she is. Damn kids.

Are they slouching way too much and wearing low-slung clothes and locking the door to their bedrooms and masturbating chronically, and then racking up huge cell-phone bills as they complain endlessly to their best friend about their unrequited loves and horrible parents and how much they hate life and how they're always despondent and put upon and pimply and miserable?

Solution: You need to give them drugs. Lots of drugs. Expensive ones with nice little corporate logos on them. This is the only way.

Haven't you been reading the papers? Watching the commercials? Drugs are in. Drugs are the new black. Drugs rain down from the sky like pretty purple Skittles. Drugs are mandatory and the most important advancement in child rearing since the invention of the cane and the padlock and the Catholic priest.

No, not the bad drugs. Not the drugs that cool people take and that make your kids party hard and dance all night and that make their eyes all red and mushy and makes colors swirl and skin feel like honey and makes them horny or hungry or feel really really good for awhile, until they don't. Not the ones that are cheaply produced and impossible to regulate and as easy to get as degrading sexual misinformation in public schools is. Not those.

No, your kid needs the other kind of drugs. The good kind. The kind prescribed by overpaid shrinks after the kid's umpteenth $300 visit. The kind that run about seven bucks a pop and are made by Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline or maybe Eli Lilly, and which are roughly three times more toxic and 10 times more synthetic and a thousand times more spiritually debilitating than the "evil" street stuff, given how they're totally legal and corporate sponsored and therefore radiate this sinister venomous aura of happy culturally approved doom.

Behavioral modifiers. Prozac. Paxil. Zoloft. Effexor. Xanax. Et al. You name it, your kids can have it, and probably should. Millions are already addicted. Millions more will be by the end of this year, if not by the end of this column. Maybe you're one of them, yourself. Hi. Isn't the sky lovely today? Yes, it sure is.

Just look at them, the well-drugged teens of America, all calm and happily narcotized, walking around with their eyes glazed over and their shirts untucked and their souls drained of all vital juices. God bless America at its world-record 25 percent mood-disorder rate! The most-drugged nation on the planet! We're No. 1! So proud.

Don't you want your child happy and well-adjusted and violently, chemically torqued, his or her entire body ravaged by enough synthetic compounds and serotonin reuptake inhibitors and mood enhancers to numb a horse? Of course you do.

Hey, they've done studies. Studies that finally prove once and for all that Prozac is much more effective on your depressed miserable slouchy door-slammin' punkass teen than merely talking to him and loving him well and teaching him to appreciate life and sex and spirituality and fine artisan cheeses. So you know it must be true.

And do you know why? Why the Prozac is more effective? Because it's a potent chemical narcotic, silly! It rewires their brains and poisons their little juvenile blood vessels and kills any pesky burgeoning testosteroned sex drive once and for all!

Imagine! No more worries! No more teen pregnancy! It's just like neutering your dog! Or getting a catalytic converter on the car! Or laying down beige shag carpeting everywhere! Everything calm and soft and nonirritating, all edges filed right down. Isn't pharmacology fabulous?

Never you mind the pesky lawsuits. Like the one just filed by the New York attorney general against Glaxo over how they supposedly suppressed a bunch of studies that proved how their beloved zim-zammer brain-slammer Paxil made a bunch of kids even more twitchy and despondent and, whoops, suicidal.

Shhh. Hey, it was only a handful of kids, all right? Maybe, like, 10. Or 50. Who knows? "Acceptable losses," as they say in military parlance. Small price to pay for a whirling nation of numb smiling partially lobotomized teens who will open the door for you and say yes sir and no ma'am and wash your car for a dollar. Am I right? Goddamn right.

Never you mind, furthermore, that we have become a nation of sweetly drug-addled automatons begging at the hand of the giant pharmcos, and that only a fraction of the kids whose parents now have them sucking down behavioral meds like M&Ms actually need them, actually has severe enough brain issues and chemical imbalances and psychoemotional traumas that these drugs are small miracles.

Nossir, never you mind that the rest of those millions of nubile doe-eyed Prozac/Zoloft/Xanax teen addicts are merely being medicated to death for no viable reason whatsoever, other than the fact that they're just a bunch of angry depressed miserable angst-ridden teens and their parents are sick of trying to cope with it.

But, wait, isn't the angry-teen thing a part of life? Isn't that a mandatory stage for just about every kid nationwide, right before they evolve past it and their skin clears up and they finally get laid and then get old enough to drink and buy a minivan and have kids and finally join AA like good Christian adults?

And is it worth noting, again, that most of our drug-happy nation is merely seeking sad, silver-bullet relief from what has become a truly staggering and vicious array of social and government-sponsored ills, and are merely poisoning their bodies and numbing their minds simply because they're stressed and bored and overworked and undersexed?

Whoops, sorry. Got carried away there. Let's stay focused on the kids. Happy, happy kids. Let's not get away from the frightening fact that the U.S. now harbors millions -- millions! -- of Prozac-addicted teens and no one blinks an eye, and yet one kid ODs on ecstasy at a rave due to rampant insulting misinfo put out by the CDC and suddenly it's furrowed brows and pointing fingers and scrunched imbecilic senators railroading the moronic RAVE Act through Congress as they suck down another fistful of Vicodin with their fourth martini. The simpering hypocrites.

Whoops, sorry again. No name-calling. That never gets us anywhere. Guess I'm just getting a bit angry. Maybe a little frustrated at the rampant wholesale corporate-sponsored government-enhanced parentally condoned drugging of kids in this country, and what that means for our future, and theirs, and the future of their attitudes and perspectives and the deterioration of their brains, penises, souls, karmas, love lives, vibration, evolutionary status.

Maybe I'm just getting a little too goddamn depressed by it all. Maybe I just need a pill. And a drink. Ahhh, there now. Much better. Thank you, Eli Lilly. We're No. 1!

Devastated by their son's suicide during his sophomore year in college, Donna and Phillip Satow channeled their grief into reaching other students who have contemplated taking their own lives. Now, three years later, the Jed Foundation is working with 120 colleges and universities around the country, providing resources that include Ulifeline, a free Web site linking students to mental health centers and confidential help. [...]

Second only to automobile accidents, suicide is the leading killer of college students - claiming the lives of an estimated 1,100 each year, according to the Jed Foundation.

The American Association of Suicidology reports on its Web site that the suicide rate for 15-to-25 year olds is 300 percent higher than it was in the 1950s. [...]

Just about every newspaper and TV station in America reported August 18 that a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed Prozac and cognitive behavior therapy, in combination, to be the most effective treatment of depression in adolescents. Here are some of the headlines with which we were bombarded: "Drugs and therapy aid depressed kids, study says." "Drug + Therapy Combo Best for Teen Depression." "Combined Approach Better Than Drugs or Therapy Alone." "Depressed Teens Need Drug + Therapy." Etc., Etc.

The research, conducted over three years at 12 medical centers, was funded and coordinated by the National Institute of Mental Health at a cost to US taxpayers of $17 million. A total of 439 adolescents aged 12-17 were given Prozac, Prozac plus cognitive behavior therapy, placebo plus CBT, or placebo alone. After 12 weeks, 71% of those treated with Prozac and CBT showed improvement (defined by the therapists and the subjects' responses to questionnaires). Improvement was reported by 60% of those taking Prozac without CBT, 43% getting CBT alone, and 35% taking placebo alone.

NIMH Director Thomas Insel told the media it was a "landmark study" because "it's the largest publicly funded study and the only study this size that doesn't have pharmaceutical funding." Insel would have been accurate if he'd said the NIMH study didn't get direct funding from the pharmaceutical industry. But lead investigator John March of Duke University Medical Center is on the Eli Lilly payroll, and five of his10 co-authors also get drug-company grants.

Data to which March et al did not draw attention -and few stories about the study even mentioned- showed a higher incidence of harmful behavior among teens taking Prozac (11.9%) compared to those on placebo (5.4%) and CBT alone (4.5%). Few stories mentioned that teenagers to whom suicidal thoughts had occurred had been excluded from the study before it began. A summary of the study by Jeanne Lenzer in the British Medical Journal pointed out a structural flaw: two"arms" were blinded (neither subject nor investigator knew whether Prozac or placebo was being given), but the two arms involving CBT were not. The BMJ also quoted a succinct criticism of the study by David Antonuccio of the University of Nevada School of Medicine: "The authors' value judgment is that the benefit of a few extra improved patients is worth the cost of a few extra harmed patients."

Reports in the popular media failed to mention the ominous bottom-line conclusion of the NIMH study:"the identification of depressed adolescents and provision of evidence-based treatment should be mandatory in health care systems." In other words, if Lilly has its way, screening by a doctor or a school, followed by mandatory Prozac (with a few hours of talk therapy thrown in for the Colin Powell effect), may be coming soon to a teenager near you. [...]

On the fourth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Laura Knight-Jadczyk announces the availability of her latest book:

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books have sought to explore the truth behind the official version of events that day - yet to date, none of these publications has provided a satisfactory answer as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately responsible for carrying them out.

Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11: The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks played out.

9/11: The Ultimate Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September 11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to keep us confused and distracted to the reality of the man behind the curtain.

Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the present day.

For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover their tracks, 9/11: The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's true implications are for the future of mankind.

Published by Red Pill Press

Scheduled for release in October 2005, readers can pre-order the book today at our bookstore.