50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know

• 1 The Ten Commandments We Always See Aren't the Ten Commandments
• 2 One of the Popes Wrote an Erotic Book
• 3 The CIA Commits Over 100,000 Serious Crimes Each Year
• 4 The First CIA Agent to Die in the Line of Duty Was Douglas Mackiernan
• 5 After 9/11, the Defense Department Wanted to Poison Afghanistan's Food Supply
• 6 The US Government Lies About the Number of Terrorism Convictions It Obtains
• 7 The US Is Planning to Provoke Terrorist Attacks
• 8 The US and Soviet Union Considered Detonating Nuclear Bombs on the Moon
• 9 Two Atomic Bombs Were Dropped on North Carolina
• 10 World War III Almost Started in 1995
• 11 The Korean War Never Ended
• 12 Agent Orange Was Used in Korea
• 13 Kent State Wasn't the Only — or Even the First — Massacre of College Students During the Vietnam Era
• 14 Winston Churchill Believed in a Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy
• 15 The Auschwitz Tattoo Was Originally an IBM Code Number
• 16 Adolph Hitler's Blood Relatives Are Alive and Well in New York State
• 17 Around One Quarter of "Witches" Were Men
• 18 The Virginia Colonists Practiced Cannibalism
• 19 Many of the Pioneering Feminists Opposed Abortion
• 20 Black People Served in the Confederate Army
• 21 Electric Cars Have Been Around Since the 1880s
• 22 Juries Are Allowed to Judge the Law, Not Just the Facts
• 23 The Police Aren't Legally Obligated to Protect You
• 24 The Government Can Take Your House and Land, Then Sell Them to Private Corporations
• 25 The Supreme Court Has Ruled That You're Allowed to Ingest Any Drug, Especially If You're an Addict
• 26 The Age of Consent in Most of the US Is Not Eighteen
• 27 Most Scientists Don't Read All of the Articles They Cite
• 28 Louis Pasteur Suppressed Experiments That Didn't Support His Theories
• 29 The Creator of the GAIA Hypothesis Supports Nuclear Power
• 30 Genetically-Engineered Humans Have Already Been Born
• 31 The Insurance Industry Wants to Genetically Test All Policy Holders
• 32 Smoking Causes Problems Other Than Lung Cancer and Heart Disease
• 33 Herds of Milk-Producing Cows Are Rife With Bovine Leukemia Virus
• 34 Most Doctors Don't Know the Radiation Level of CAT Scans
• 35 Medication Errors Kill Thousands Each Year
• 36 Prescription Drugs Kill Over 100,000 Annually
• 37 Work Kills More People Than War
• 38 The Suicide Rate Is Highest Among the Elderly
• 39 For Low-Risk People, a Positive Result from an HIV Test Is Wrong Half the Time
• 40 DNA Matching Is Not Infallible
• 41 An FBI Expert Testified That Lie Detectors Are Worthless for Security Screening
• 42 The Bayer Company Made Heroin
• 43 LSD Has Been Used Successfully in Psychiatric Therapy
• 44 Carl Sagan Was an Avid Pot-Smoker
• 45 One of the Heroes of Black Hawk Down Is a Convicted Child Molester
• 46 The Auto Industry Says That SUV Drivers Are Selfish and Insecure
• 47 The Word "Squaw" Is Not a Derisive Term for the Vagina
• 48 You Can Mail Letters for Little or No Cost
• 49 Advertisers' Influence on the News Media Is Widespread
• 50 The World's Museums Contain Innumerable Fakes

1 - THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WE ALWAYS SEE AREN'T THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

First Amendment battles continue to rage across the US over the posting of the Ten
Command-ments in public places — courthouses, schools, parks, and pretty much anywhere else
you can imagine. Christians argue that they're a part of our Western heritage that should be
displayed as ubiquitously as traffic signs. Congressman Bob Barr hilariously suggested that the
Columbine massacre wouldn't have happened if the Ten Commandments (also called the
Decalogue) had been posted in the high school, and some government officials have directly,
purposely disobeyed court rulings against the display of these ten directives supposedly handed
down from on high.
Too bad they're all talking about the wrong rules.
Every Decalogue you see — from the 5,000-pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State
Judicial Building to the little wallet-cards sold at Christian bookstores — is bogus. Simply
reading the Bible will prove this. Getting out your King James version, turn to Exodus 20:2-17.
You'll see the familiar list of rules about having no other gods, honoring your parents, not killing
or coveting, and so on. At this point, though, Moses is just repeating to the people what God told
him on Mount Si'nai. These are not written down in any form.
Later, Moses goes back to the Mount, where God gives him two "tables of stone" with rules
written on them (Exodus 31:18). But when Moses comes down the mountain lugging his load, he
sees the people worshipping a statue of a calf, causing him to throw a tantrum and smash the
tablets on the ground (Exodus 32:19).
In neither of these cases does the Bible refer to "commandments." In the first instance, they are
"words" which "God spake," while the tablets contain "testimony." It is only when Moses goes
back for new tablets that we see the phrase "ten commandments" (Exodus 34:28). In an
interesting turn of events, the commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the
ten rules Moses recited for the people, meaning that either Moses' memory is faulty or God
changed his mind.
Thus, without further ado, we present to you the real "Ten Commandments" as handed down by
the LORD unto Moses (and plainly listed in Exodus 34:13-28). We eagerly await all the new
Decalogues, which will undoubtedly contain this correct version:
I. Thou shalt worship no other god.
II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
III.. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep
IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.
V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of
ingathering at the year's end.
VI. Thrice In the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God.
VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.
VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God.
X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid [ie, a young goat] in his mother's milk.

2 - ONE OF THE POPES WROTE AN EROTIC BOOK

Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and
rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn't
get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly
publication on literature claims that Historia "was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of
the whole Renaissance." The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: "The
Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German]
Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy]."
It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the
turn of the century, 37 editions had been published. Somewhere around 1553, the short book
appeared in English under the wonderfully old-school title The Goodli History of the Moste
Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye
Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. Despite the obvious historical interest of this archaic
Vatican porn, it has never been translated into contemporary language. (The passages quoted
below mark the first time that any of the book has appeared in
modern English.)
The 1400s being what they were, the action is pretty tame by today's
standards. At one point, Euralius scales a wall to be with Lucres:
"When she saw her lover, she clasped him in her arms. There was
embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and
wearied Venus, now with Ceres, and now with Bacchus was
refreshed." Loosely translated, that last part means that they shagged,
then ate, then drank wine.
His Holiness describes the next time they hook up:
Thus talking to each other, they went into the bedroom, where they had such a night as we
judge the two lovers Paris and Helen had after he had taken her away, and it was so
pleasant that they thought Mars and Venus had never known such pleasure....
Her mouth, and now her eyes, and now her cheeks he kissed. Pulling down her clothes, he
saw such beauty as he had never seen before. "I have found more, I believe," said Euralius,
"than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain. What is more pleasant or
more fair than these limbs?... O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it
you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my
arms?... O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I
am, or more blessed."...
He strained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren't weary. Like Athens,
who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were more desirous of war.
But Euralius isn't just a horndog. He waxes philosophical about love to Lucres' cousin-in-law:
You know that man is prone to love. Whether it is virtue or vice, it reigns everywhere. No
heart of flesh hasn't sometime felt the pricks of love. You know that neither the wise
Solomon nor the strong Sampson has escaped from this passion. Furthermore, the nature
of a kindled heart and a foolish love is this: The more it is allowed, the more it burns, with
nothing sooner healing this than the obtaining of the loved. There have been many, both in
our time and that of our elders, whose foolish love has been the cause of cruel death. And
many who, after sex and love vouchsafed, have stopped burning. Nothing is better when
love has crept into your bones than to give in to the burning, for those who strive against
the tempest often wreck, while those who drive with the storm escape.
Besides sex and wisdom, the story also contains a lot of humor, as when Lucres' husband
borrows a horse from Euralius: "He says to himself, 'If you leap upon my horse, I shall do the
same thing to your wife.'"
Popes just don't write books like that anymore!

3 - THE CIA COMMITS OVER 100,000 SERIOUS CRIMES EACH YEAR

It's no big secret that the Central Intelligence Agency breaks the law. But just how often its does
in is a shocker. A Congressional report reveals that the CIA's spooks "engage in highly illegal
activities" at least 100,000 times each year (which breaks down to hundreds of crimes every
day). Mind you, we aren't talking about run-of-the-mill illegal activities — these are "highly
illegal activities" that "break extremely serious laws."
In 1996, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a
huge report entitled "IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century." Buried amid
hun-dreds of pages is a single, devastating paragraph:
The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence community], indeed of
the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break
extremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated
efforts by foreign governments to catch them. A safe estimate is that several hundred times
every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in
highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment
to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals
and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself.
Amazingly, there is no explanation, no follow-up. The report simply drops this bombshell and
moves on as blithely as if it had just printed a grocery list.
One of the world's foremost experts on the CIA — John Kelly, who uncovered this revelation —
notes that this is "the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes."
He goes on to say:
The report suggested that the CIA's crimes include murder and that "the targets of the CS
[Clandestine Service] are increasingly international and transnational and a global
presence is increasingly crucial to attack those targets." In other words, we are not talking
about simply stealing secrets. We are talking about the CIA committing crimes against
humanity with de facto impunity and con-gressional sanctioning.
Other government documents, including CIA reports, show that the CIA's crimes include
terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights. The documents
also show that these crimes are part and parcel of deliberate CIA policy (the
[congressional] report notes that CIA personnel are "directed" to commit crimes).

4 - THE FIRST CIA AGENT TO DIE IN THE LINE OF DUTY WAS DOUGLAS MACKIERNAN

As of the year 2000, 69 CIA agents had died in the line of duty. Of these, the identities of 40
remain classified. Former Washington Post and Time reporter Ted Gup spent three years hacking
down information about these mysterious spooks who gave their lives for the Agency. (Mm
resulting publication, The Book of Honor, names almost all of them.)
The first to die was Douglas Mackiernan. Undercover as a State Department diplomat, the US
Army Air Corps Major worked in the capital of China's Xinjiang (Sinkiang) province, which
Gup says "was widely regarded as the most remote and desolate consulate on earth." He went
there m May 1947 to keep an eye on China's border with the Soviet Union and to monitor the
Husskies' atomic tests.
In late September 1949, during the Communist takeover of China, Mackiernan left, but it was too
late to use normal routes. Incredibly, he decided to go by foot during winter all the way to India,
which would take him across a desert and the Himalayas. He, three White Russians, and a
Fulbright scholar slogged the 1,000-mile trek in eight months. On April 29, 1950, they managed
lo reach the border of Tibet, but guards there thought the men were commies or bandits, and
opened fire on them.
Hitting the ground, the bedraggled travelers waved a white flag, which stopped the gunfire. They
slowly walked toward the border guards with their hands over their heads, but the Tibetans shot
them, killing Mackiernan and two of the Russians. To add insult to injury, the guards cut the
heads off the corpses. Their remains are buried at that spot.
With documents from the National Archives, Mackiernan's widow, and other sources, Gup
pulled the CIA's first casualty out of the classified shadows. To this day, the Agency refuses to
acknow-ledge Mackiernan's existence.

5 - AFTER 9/11, THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT WANTED TO POISON AFGHANISTAN'S FOOD SUPPLY

One of the strangest things the media do is to bury huge revelations deep in the bowels of a
larger story. A perfect example occurs in "10 Days in September," an epic eight-day series that
ran in the Washington Post. In part six, Bob Woodward and Dan Balz are recounting the Bush
Administration's activities on September 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks. Bush and
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have headed to the Pentagon to be briefed on action
against Afghanistan by a two-star general from the Special Operation Command:
Rice and Frank Miller, the senior NSC staffer for defense, went with the president to the
Pentagon. Before the briefing, Miller reviewed the classified slide presentation prepared
for Bush and got a big surprise.
One slide about special operations in Afghanistan said: Thinking Outside the Box —
Poisoning Food Supply. Miller was shocked and showed it to Rice. The United States
doesn't know how to do this, Miller reminded her, and we're not allowed. It would
effectively be a chemical or biological attack — clearly banned by treaties that the United
States had signed, including the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
Nice took the slide to Rumsfeld. "This slide is not going to be shown to the president of the
United States," she said.
Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said.
Pentagon officials said later that their own internal review had caught the offending slide
and that it never would have been shown to the president or to Rumsfeld.

6 - THE US GOVERNMENT LIES ABOUT THE NUMBER OF TERRORISM CONVICTIONS IT OBTAINS

Naturally enough, the Justice Department likes to trumpet convictions of terrorists. Besides
garnering great publicity and allowing the citizenry to sleep snugly at night, this means more
money for the department. The problem is that the numbers are a sham.
The story broke when the Philadelphia Inquirer examined convictions that the Justice
Depart-ment said involved terrorism during the five year-period ending September 30, 2001.
They found ludicrous examples of misclassification:
In one vivid example, an assistant US attorney in San Francisco asked US District Judge
Marilyn H. Patel on Monday to stiffen a sentence against an Arizona man who got drunk
on a United Airlines flight from Shanghai, repeatedly rang the call button, demanded more
liquor, and put his hands on a flight attendant. Justice Department records show the case
as "domestic terrorism."
In another case: "A tenant fighting eviction called his landlord, impersonated an FBI agent, and
said the bureau did not want the tenant evicted. The landlord recognized the man's voice and
called the real FBI."
Other "terrorist" incidents included prisoners rioting for better food, "the former court employee
who shoved and threatened a judge," and "[s]even Chinese sailors [who] were convicted of
taking over a Taiwanese fishing boat and sailing to the US territory of Guam, where they hoped
to win political asylum."
After this chicanery was exposed, Republican Congressman Dan Burton asked the General
Accounting Office — a nonpartisan governmental unit that investigates matters for Congress —
to look into the Justice Department's claims of terrorist convictions. Sure enough, the GAO
reported that the situation isn't nearly as rosy as we've been told.
In the year after 9/11 — from September 30, 2001, to that date the following year — the Justice
Department maintained that 288 terrorists had been convicted in the US of their heinous crimes.
But the GAO found that at least 132 of these cases (approximately 42 percent) had nothing to do
with terrorism. Because of the GAO's methodology, it didn't verify every one of the remaining
166 convictions, so it refers to their accuracy as "questionable."
The deception is even worse when you zoom in on the cases classified as "international
terrorism," which are the most headline-grabbing of all. Out of 174 such convictions, 131 (an
amazing 75 percent) weren't really about terror.
After all of this humiliation, the Justice Department must've cleaned up its act, right? That's what
it told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Well, the paper did a follow-up on "terrorism" cases for the first
two months of 2003. Out of the 56 federal cases supposedly involving terrorism, at least 41 were
bogus. Eight of them involved Puerto Ricans protesting the Navy's use of Vieques as a bombing
range. The prosecutor who handled these cases says she doesn't know why they were classified
as terrorism. Similarly, 28 Latinos were arrested for working at airports with phony ID, and a
spokesman for the US Attorney says they weren't even suspected of being involved in terrorism.
The most ridiculous example: "A Middle Eastern man indicted in Detroit for allegedly passing
bad checks who has the same name as a Hezbollah leader."

7 - THE US IS PLANNING TO PROVOKE TERRORIST ATTACKS

Perhaps the government won't need to inflate its terrorism-arrest stats after it implements the
Defense Science Board's recommendation. This influential committee inside the Pentagon has
proposed a terrifying way to fight evil-doers: Goad them into making terrorist attacks. Yes, you
read correctly. Instead of waiting for a plot to be hatched and possibly executed, go out and make
it happen.
In summer 2002, the Defense Science Board outlined all kinds of ways to fight the war on
terrorism around the world. The scariest suggestion involves the creation of a new 100-man,
$100-million team called the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG.
This combination of elite special forces soldiers and intelligence agents will have "an entirely
new capability to proactively, pre-emptively provoke responses from adversary/terrorist groups,"
according to the DSB's report.
Just how the P2OG will "provoke" terrorists into action is not specified, at least in the
unclassified portions of the report. United Press International — which apparently has access to
the full, classified version of the report — says that techniques could include "stealing their
money or tricking them with fake communications." The Moscow Times offers further
possibilities, such as killing family members and infiltrating the groups with provocateurs, who
will suggest and even direct terrorist strikes.
Once the terrorists have been provoked, what then? UPI says that by taking action, the terrorists
would be "exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by US forces." In other words, the
plan is to hit the hornet's nest with a stick, while waiting nearby with a can of bug spray. The
flaws in this approach are obvious. Although not spelled out in the UPI article or the report itsef,
the idea seems to be that the P2OG will cause terrorists to make an attack but supposedly stop
them light before the attack actually occurs. Will the P2OG always be able to prevent terrorism it
creates from taking place? Will it always be able to "neutralize" all of the terrorists during that
crucial window after a plan has been put into motion but before it's been carried out? I wouldn't
want to bet lives on it. But that's exactly what's happening.
Whenever any future terrorist attack occurs — an embassy is truck-bombed, a nightclub is
blown to smithereens, prominent buildings are hit with hijacked passenger jets — we'll never be
100 percent sure that this wasn't an operation the P2OG provoked but then was unable to stop in
time.

8 - THE US AND SOVIET UNION CONSIDERED DETONATING NUCLEAR BOMBS ON THE MOON

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this is an unused scene from Dr. Strangelove, but the United
States and the Soviet Union have seriously considered exploding atomic bombs on the Moon.
It was the late 1950s, and the Cold War was extremely chilly. Someone in the US government
got the bright idea of nuking the Moon, and in 1958 the Air Force Special Weapons Center
spearheaded the project (labeled A119, "A Study of Lunar Research Flights").
The idea was to shock and awe the Soviet Union, and everybody else, with a massive display of
American nuclear might. What better demonstration than an atomic explosion on our closest
celestial neighbor? According to the project's reports, the flash would've been visible to the
naked eye on Earth. (It's been suggested that another motivation may have been to use the Moon
as a test range, thus avoiding the problems with irradiating our home planet.)
Carl Sagan was among the scientists lending his intellectual muscle to this hare-brained scheme.
The project's leader was physicist Leonard Reiffel, who said: "I made it clear at the time there
would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force
were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on earth."
When a reporter for Reuters asked him what had happened to Project A119, Reiffel replied,
"After the final report in early- to mid-1959, it simply went away, as things sometimes do in the
world of classified activities."
Astoundingly, this wasn't the only time that a nuclear strike on the Moon was contemplated.
Science reporter Keay Davidson reveals that "in 1956, W.W. Kellogg of RAND Corporation
considered the possibility of launching an atomic bomb to the Moon." In 1957, NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory put forth Project Red Socks, the first serious proposal to send spacecraft
to the Moon. One of its lesser suggestions was to nuke the Moon in order to send lunar rocks
hurtling back to Earth, where they could be collected and studied. The following year, the
leading American astronomer of the time, Gerard Kuiper, coauthored a memo which considered
the scientific advantages of nuking the Moon. The creator of the hydrogen bomb, physicist
Edward Teller, similarly mused about dropping atomic bombs on the Moon in order to study the
seismic waves they would create.
The Soviet Union got in on the act, also in the late 1950s. Project E-4 would've used a probe
armed with an A-bomb to blast the Moon, apparently as a display of one-upmanship. The idea
reached the stage of a full-scale model but was aborted for fear of the probe falling back to Earth.

9 - TWO ATOMIC BOMBS WERE DROPPED ON NORTH CAROLINA

Fortunately, no atomic bombs were dropped on the Moon, but the same can't be said of North
Carolina. The Tar Heel State's brush with nuclear catastrophe came on January 24, 1961, about
half past midnight. A B-52 with two nukes on-board was cruising the skies near Goldsboro and
Faro when its right wing leaked fuel and exploded. The jet disintegrated. Five crewmen survived,
while three died.
The two MARK 39 thermonuclear bombs disengaged from the jet. Each one had a yield of two
to tour megatons (reports vary), up to 250 times as powerful as the bomb that decimated
Hiroshima. The parachute opened on one of them, and it drifted to the earth relatively gently. But
the parachute failed to open on the other, so it plowed into a marshy patch of land owned by a
farmer.
The nuke with the parachute was recovered easily. However, its twin proved much more difficult
to retrieve. Because of the swampiness of the area, workers were able to drag out only part of the
bomb. One of its most crucial components — the "secondary," which contains nuclear material
— is still in the ground, probably around 150 feet down.
The federal government bought rights to this swatch of land to prevent any owners from digging
more than five feet under the surface. To this day, state regulators test the radiation levels of the
ground water in the area every year. The head of the North Carolina Division of Radiation
Protection has said that they've found only normal levels but that "there is still an open question
as to whether a hazard exists."
The big question is whether or not North Carolina's own Fat Man and Little Boy could've
actually detonated. Due to the technicalities of nuclear weapons — and the ambiguous nature of
the terms "unarmed," "armed," and "partially armed" — it's hard to give a definitive answer. We
do know this: The Defense Department said that the ill-fated B-52 was part of a program (since
discontinued) that continuously kept nuclear bombs in the air, ready for dropping. So, the answer
is yes, that jet was fully capable of unleashing its A-bombs in completely armed mode, with all
that this implies — mushroom clouds, vaporized people, dangerous radiation levels for decades,
etc.
According to the late Chuck Hansen — one of the world's leading authorities on nuclear
weapons — the pilot of the B-52 would've had to throw a switch to arm the bombs. Since he
didn't, the bombs couldn't have gone off. Hansen mentions the possibility that the switch
could've been activated while the jet was breaking apart and exploding. Luckily this didn't
happen, but it was a possibility.
That switch apparently was the only thing that stopped the bombs from turning part of North
Carolina into toast. The government's own reports show that for both bombs, three of the four
arming devices had activated. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara further
corroborated this during a press conference, saying that the nukes "went through all but one" of
the necessary steps.
Hansen told college students researching this near-miss:
This was a very dangerous incident and I suspect that steps were taken afterwards to
prevent any repetition of it. I do not now know of any other weapon accident that came this
close to a full-scale nuclear detonation (which is not to say that any such incident did not
occur later).

10 - WORLD WAR III ALMOST STARTED IN 1995

What were you doing on January 25, 1995? Whatever it was, it was almost the last thing you
ever did. On that day, the world came within minutes of a nuclear war between the US and
Russia.
Norway and the United States had launched a research rocket (for charting the Arctic) from a
Norwegian island. Following standard protocol, Norway had alerted Russia in advance about the
firing, but the message never made its way to the right people. In the middle of the night,
Russian radar detected what looked like a nuclear missile launched toward Moscow from a US
submarine.
The military immediately called President Boris Yeltsin, awakening him with the news that the
country appeared to be under attack (no word on whether Yeltsin had been in a vodka-induced
drunken slumber). The groggy president, for the first time ever, activated the infamous black
suitcase that contains the codes for launching nuclear missiles. He had just a few minutes to
decide whether to launch any or all of the country's 2,000 hair-trigger nukes at the US.
Luckily for the entire world, while Yeltsin was conferring with his highest advisors, Russia's
radar showed that the missile was headed out to sea. The red alert was cancelled. World War III
was averted.
What makes this even more nerve-racking is that Russia's early-warning systems are in much
worse shape now than they were in '95. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
explains that while Russia needs 21 satellites to have a complete, fully-redundant network
capable of accurately detecting missile launches, as of 1999 they have only three. Heaven help us
if some Russian bureaucrat again forgets to tell the command and control center that a nearby
country is launching a research rocket.

11 - THE KOREAN WAR NEVER ENDED

Better not tell Hawkeye Pierce and the rest of the gang from M*A*S*H, but the Korean War is
technically still happening. This comes to us from no less an authority than Howard S. Levie, the
I man who drafted the Korean Armistice Agreement. At the time, this law professor was a
captain in the Office of the Judge Advocate General (JAG). He explains:
An armistice is not a peace treaty. While its main objective is to bring about a cease-fire, a
halt to hostilities, that halt may be indefinite or for a specified period of time only. An
armistice agreement does not terminate the state of war between the belligerents. A state of
war continues to exist with all of its implications for the belligerents and for the neutrals.
The Korean Armistice itself even specifies that it is only a stop-gap measure "until a final
peaceful settlement is achieved." To date, this settlement — otherwise known as a peace
treaty — has never occurred. One attempt was made, at the Geneva Convention of 1954, but
nothing came of it.
Interestingly, the Armistice wasn't signed at all by South Korea but rather by the head honchos in
the United Nations Command, North Korea's army, and China's army. It should also be noted
that the conflict in Korea wasn't technically a "war," because — like so many other post-WWII
hostilities — there was no formal declaration of war. As The Korean War: An Encyclopedia
trenchantly observes: "Since the war had never been declared, it was fitting that the should be no
official ending, merely a suspension of hostilities."
North Korea has more than once denounced the Armistice, threatening to press the "play" button
on the long-paused Korean War. Most recently, in February 2003, Kim Jong-il's government said
that because of repeated US violations, the Armistice is merely "a blank piece of paper without
any effect or significance."

12 - AGENT ORANGE WAS USED IN KOREA

"Agent Orange" is practically synonymous with the Vietnam War. The Dow Chemical defoliant
was used to de-junglize large areas, exposing enemy troops, supplies, and infiltrators. It has been
linked, though never definitively, to a number of nasty health problems such as Hodgkin's
disease and adult-onset diabetes, plus spina bifida in offspring. The Veterans Administration
compensates sick veterans who were exposed in Vietnam.
But it turns out that 'Nam wasn't the only place to get doused with this super-herbicide. From
April 1968 to July 1969, 21,000 gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed along a strip of land
abutting the southern border of the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. During that time
period, mound 80,000 US military personnel served in South Korea, although not all of them
would've been in the vicinity of the DMZ. The VA contradicts itself regarding who did the
spraying, claiming at one point that it was South Korea but saying at another that the Department
of Defense did it.
In September 2000, the VA quietly sent letters to veterans who served in Korea during the
spraying, letting them know that they may have been dosed with Agent Orange. Since these
letters were sent over 30 years after the exposure, the Pentagon must've just found out about it,
light? Actually, even if you buy the story that the South Koreans were responsible, the US
military knew about the spraying at the time it happened but kept quiet about it for decades. It
was only when news reports began citing declassified documents in 1999 that the government
decided to do something.
Possibly exposed vets can get tested for free by the Veterans Administration. The catch is, if
they're sick with Hodgkin's or some other horrible disease, they — unlike their Vietnam
compatriots — aren't eligible for compensation or additional health care. However, for their
agony, Korean vets will receive a free newsletter, the same one that Vietnam vets get.
13
KENT STATE WASN'T THE ONLY — OR EVEN THE FIRST — MASSACRE OF
COLLEGE STUDENTS DURING THE VIETNAM ERA
It's one of the defining moments of the Vietnam era and, more than that, twentieth-century US
history in general. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed Kent State
University students protesting the war. Four were killed, eight were wounded, and another was
left paralyzed. It's so ingrained in the country's psyche that it even appears in American history
textbooks, and the anniversary is noted each year by the major media.
Yet this wasn't the only time the authorities slaughtered unarmed college kids during this time
period. It happened on at least two other occasions, which have been almost completely
forgotten.
A mere ten days after the Kent State massacre, students at the historically black Jackson State
University in Mississippi were protesting not only the Vietnam War and the recent killings at
Kent, but racism as well. On the night of May 14, 1970, during the protests, a small riot broke
out when a false rumor swept the campus: The black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, was said to
have been assassinated. As at Kent State, some students or provocateurs threw bricks and stones
and set fires. Firefighters trying to put out a blaze in a men's dorm were hassled by an angry
crowd, so they called for police protection. The campus was cordoned off.
Jackson State's Website devoted to the incident says: "Seventy-five city policemen and
Mississippi State Police officers armed with carbines, submachine guns, shotguns, service
revolvers and some personal weapons, responded to the call." After the fire had been
extinguished, the heavily armed cops marched down the street, herding students towards a
women's dorm. As the notes: "No one seems to know why."
Seventy-five to 100 students were pushed back until they were in front of the dorm, where they
began yelling and throwing things at the police. "Accounts disagree as to what happened next.
Some students said the police advanced in a line, warned them, then opened fire. Others said the
police abruptly opened fire on the crowd and the dormitory. Other witnesses reported that the
students were under the control of a campus security officer when the police opened fire. Police
claimed they spotted a powder flare in the Alexander West Hall third floor stairwell window and
fire in self-defense on the dormitory only. Two local television news reporters present at the
shooting agreed that a shot was fired, but were uncertain of the direction. A radio reporter
claimed to have seen an arm and a pistol extending from a dormitory window."
Two people — both outside the dorm — were killed in over 30 seconds of sustained gunfire
from the cops. Jackson student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs was shot in the head, and a bystander —
high-school senior James Earl Green — took it in the chest. A dozen students were nonfatally
shot, and many more were injured by flying glass. Over 460 rounds had hit the dorm. No
member of law enforcement was injured.
Aim the carnage, Inspector "Goon" Jones radioed the dispatcher, saying that "nigger students"
been killed. When the dispatcher asked him about the injured, he said: "I think there are about
three more nigger males there.... There were two nigger gals — two more nigger gals from over
there shot in the arm, I believe."
Even less known is the Orangeburg massacre, which took place two years earlier. Students at
South Carolina State University in Orangeburg —joined by students from another black college,
Claflin University — were protesting the failure of the town's only bowling alley to racially
integrate. February 8,1968, was the fourth night of demonstrations, and students had lit a bonfire
on campus. Police doused it, but a second one was started. When the cops tried to extinguish this
one, the crowd — in a scene to be replayed at Kent and Jackson — started throwing things at
them. One highway patrolmen fired warning shots into the air, and all hell broke loose as the
assembled police opened fire on the unarmed crowd.
After a barrage of weapons-fire, three people were dead — eighteen-year-olds Henry Smith and I
Samuel Hammond, and high-school student Delano Middleton. Twenty-seven other
demonstrators were wounded. The vast majority of them had been shot in the back as they ran
away.
South Carolina's Governor praised the police for their handling on the situation, giving all of
them promotions. Nine patrolmen were eventually tried on federal charges, and all were
acquitted. It! was only 33 years later — on the 2001 anniversary of the carnage — that a
Governor of the state admitted the heinous nature of what happened that night. Governor Jim
Hodges said, "We deeply regret" the mass-shooting, but he stopped short of apologizing for it.

13 - KENT STATE WASN'T THE ONLY — OR EVEN THE FIRST — MASSACRE OF COLLEGE STUDENTS DURING THE VIETNAM ERA

It's one of the defining moments of the Vietnam era and, more than that, twentieth-century US
history in general. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed Kent State
University students protesting the war. Four were killed, eight were wounded, and another was
left paralyzed. It's so ingrained in the country's psyche that it even appears in American history
textbooks, and the anniversary is noted each year by the major media.
Yet this wasn't the only time the authorities slaughtered unarmed college kids during this time
period. It happened on at least two other occasions, which have been almost completely
forgotten.
A mere ten days after the Kent State massacre, students at the historically black Jackson State
University in Mississippi were protesting not only the Vietnam War and the recent killings at
Kent, but racism as well. On the night of May 14, 1970, during the protests, a small riot broke
out when a false rumor swept the campus: The black mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, was said to
have been assassinated. As at Kent State, some students or provocateurs threw bricks and stones
and set fires. Firefighters trying to put out a blaze in a men's dorm were hassled by an angry
crowd, so they called for police protection. The campus was cordoned off.
Jackson State's Website devoted to the incident says: "Seventy-five city policemen and
Mississippi State Police officers armed with carbines, submachine guns, shotguns, service
revolvers and some personal weapons, responded to the call." After the fire had been
extinguished, the heavily armed cops marched down the street, herding students towards a
women's dorm. As the notes: "No one seems to know why."
Seventy-five to 100 students were pushed back until they were in front of the dorm, where they
began yelling and throwing things at the police. "Accounts disagree as to what happened next.
Some students said the police advanced in a line, warned them, then opened fire. Others said the
police abruptly opened fire on the crowd and the dormitory. Other witnesses reported that the
students were under the control of a campus security officer when the police opened fire. Police
claimed they spotted a powder flare in the Alexander West Hall third floor stairwell window and
fire in self-defense on the dormitory only. Two local television news reporters present at the
shooting agreed that a shot was fired, but were uncertain of the direction. A radio reporter
claimed to have seen an arm and a pistol extending from a dormitory window."
Two people — both outside the dorm — were killed in over 30 seconds of sustained gunfire
from the cops. Jackson student Phillip Lafayette Gibbs was shot in the head, and a bystander —
high-school senior James Earl Green — took it in the chest. A dozen students were nonfatally
shot, and many more were injured by flying glass. Over 460 rounds had hit the dorm. No
member of law enforcement was injured.
Aim the carnage, Inspector "Goon" Jones radioed the dispatcher, saying that "nigger students"
been killed. When the dispatcher asked him about the injured, he said: "I think there are about
three more nigger males there.... There were two nigger gals — two more nigger gals from over
there shot in the arm, I believe."
Even less known is the Orangeburg massacre, which took place two years earlier. Students at
South Carolina State University in Orangeburg —joined by students from another black college,
Claflin University — were protesting the failure of the town's only bowling alley to racially
integrate. February 8,1968, was the fourth night of demonstrations, and students had lit a bonfire
on campus. Police doused it, but a second one was started. When the cops tried to extinguish this
one, the crowd — in a scene to be replayed at Kent and Jackson — started throwing things at
them. One highway patrolmen fired warning shots into the air, and all hell broke loose as the
assembled police opened fire on the unarmed crowd.
After a barrage of weapons-fire, three people were dead — eighteen-year-olds Henry Smith and I
Samuel Hammond, and high-school student Delano Middleton. Twenty-seven other
demonstrators were wounded. The vast majority of them had been shot in the back as they ran
away.
South Carolina's Governor praised the police for their handling on the situation, giving all of
them promotions. Nine patrolmen were eventually tried on federal charges, and all were
acquitted. It! was only 33 years later — on the 2001 anniversary of the carnage — that a
Governor of the state admitted the heinous nature of what happened that night. Governor Jim
Hodges said, "We deeply regret" the mass-shooting, but he stopped short of apologizing for it.

14 - WINSTON CHURCHILL BELIEVED IN A WORLDWIDE JEWISH CONSPIRACY

Like Henry Ford, Britain's larger-than-life wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, believed
that a group of "international Jews" was striving to take over the world. On February 8, 1920, the
Illustrated Sunday Herald (published in London) ran an article by Churchill. Its title: "Zionism
Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." At the time, Winnie was
Secretary of State for War and Air and had already been a prominent Member of Parliament.
Churchill didn't slam all Jews; rather, he painted them as a people of two extremes. "The conflict
between good and evil which proceeds unceasingly in the breast of man nowhere reaches such an
intensity as in the Jewish race. The dual nature of mankind is nowhere more strongly or more
terribly exemplified.... It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of
Antichrist ware destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious
race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical."
He identifies three strains of political thought among the world's Jews: Nationalism, in which a
Jewish person identifies first and foremost with the country in which he or she lives. Zionism, in
j which a Jewish person wants a country specifically for Jews (Israel would be formed 28 years
after Winnie's essay). These are both honorable, says Churchill, unlike the third option — the
terrorism and atheistic communism of "International Jews." He writes:
International Jews
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International
Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the
unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race.
Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from
their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not
new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky
(Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman
(United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the
reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and
impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs.
Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French
Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the
Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the
underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by
the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that
enormous empire.
Terrorist Jews
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and In the
actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution, by these international and for the most
part atheistical Jews, it is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With
the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the
principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin,
a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of
Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or
of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd) or of Krassin or Radek — all
Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the
prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the
Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews,
and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in
the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon
has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been
allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all
these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish
revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the
population is astonishing.
Naturally, Churchill's admirers aren't exactly proud of this essay, which has led some of them to
question its authenticity. However, the leading Churchill bibliographer, Frederick Woods, has
pronounced the article genuine, listing it in his authoritative A Bibliography of the Works of Sir
Winston Churchill.

15 - THE AUSCHWITZ TATTOO WAS ORIGINALLY AN IBM CODE NUMBER

The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps
have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a
dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.
These numbers obviously weren't chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with
each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.
Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the
Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the "Final Solution" and the
jackbooted takeover of Europe. Worse, he showed that the top levels of the company either knew
or willfully turned a blind eye.
A year and a half after that book gave Big Blue a black eye, the author made more startling
discoveries. IBM equipment was on-site at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Furthermore:
Thanks to the new discoveries, researchers can now trace how Hollerith numbers assigned
to inmates evolved into the horrific tattooed numbers so symbolic of the Nazi era. (Herman
Hollerith was the German American who first automated US census information in the late
19th century and founded the company that became IBM. Hollerith's name became
synonymous with the machines and the Nazi "departments" that operated them.) In one
case, records show, a timber merchant from Bendzin, Poland, arrived at Auschwitz in
August 1943 and was assigned a characteristic five-digit IBM Hollerith number, 44673. The
number was part of a custom punch-card system devised by IBM to track prisoners in all
Nazi concentration camps, including the slave labor at Auschwitz. Later in the summer of
1943, the Polish timber merchant's same five-digit Hollerith number, 44673, was tattooed
on his forearm. Eventually, during the summer of 1943, all non-Germans at Auschwitz
were similarly tattooed.
The Hollerith numbering system was soon scrapped at Auschwitz because so many inmates died.
Eventually, the Nazis developed their own haphazard system.

16 - ADOLPH HITLER'S BLOOD RELATIVES ARE ALIVE AND WELL IN NEW YORK STATE

Adolph Hitler never had kids, so we tend to take for granted the idea that no one alive is closely
related to him. But historians have long known that he had a nephew who was born in Britain
and moved to the United States. Alois Hitler, Jr., was Adolph's older half-brother (their common
parent was Alois Sr). Alois Jr. — a waiter in Dublin — married an Irish woman, and, after
moving to Liverpool, they had a son, William Patrick Hitler.
Pat, as he was called, moved to Germany as a young adult to take advantage of his uncle's rising
political stature, but Adolph just gave him minor jobs and kept him out of the limelight. After
being subtly threatened by Rudolph Hess to become a German citizen, and having gotten tired of
being dissed by Adolph, Pat came to America in 1939 and went on a lecture tour around the US,
denouncing his uncle. (For his part, Adolph referred to his nephew as "loathsome.") While
World War II was raging, Pat joined the US Navy, so he could fight against Uncle Adolph.
Afterwards, he changed his last name, and this is where the trail goes cold.
That is, until US-based British reporter David Gardner was assigned to track down and interview
William Patrick. Originally given two weeks to file the story, Gardner realized that finding
Hitler's long-lost nephew was tougher than it first appeared. He worked on the story during his
spare time for several years, unearthing old news clippings, filing requests for government
documents, interviewing possible relatives, and chasing a lot of dead ends.
He finally discovered that William Patrick had ended up in a small town in Long Island, New
York. Pat had died in 1987, but Gardner showed up unannounced on the doorstep of his widow,
Phyllis, who confirmed that her late husband was Adolph Hitler's nephew. She also mentioned
that she and Pat had sons, but she quickly clammed up and asked Gardner to leave. The two
never spoke again.
After more legwork, Gardner found that Pat and Phyllis produced four children, all sons. The
eldest, born in 1949, is named Alexander Adolph. (Just why Pat would name his firstborn after
his detested uncle is one of many mysteries still surrounding the Hitler kin.) Then came Louis in
1951, Howard (1957), and Brian (1965). Howard — a fraud investigator for the IRS — died in a
car crash w 1989, and Louis and Brian continue to run a landscaping business in the small New
York community. Alex lives in a larger Long Island city. He twice spoke to Gardner but didn't
reveal very much, saying that the family's ancestry is "a pain in the ass." Alex said that his
brothers made a pact never to have children, in order to spare their progeny the burden of being
related to a monster. He denied having made such a vow himself, despite the fact that he is still
childless.
Gardner sums it up: "Although there are some distant relations living equally quiet lives in
Austria, the three American sons are the only descendants of the paternal line of the family. They
are, truly, the last of the Hitlers."

17 - AROUND ONE QUARTER OF "WITCHES" WERE MEN

The word "witch" has become synonymous with "woman accused of working magic," and the
consensus tells us that the witch trials in Europe and Colonial America were simply a war against
women (ie, "gendercide"). Most popular works on the subject ignore the men who were accused
and executed for supp-osedly practicing witchcraft. Academic works that don't omit male
witches usually explain them away, as if they were just a few special cases that don't really
count.
Into this gap step Andrew Gow, an associate professor of history at the University of Alberta,
and one of his grad students, Lara Apps. Their book Male Witches in Early Modern Europe
scours the literature and finds that, of the 110,000 people tried for witchcraft and the 60,000
executed from 1450 to 1750, some-where between 20 to 25 percent were men.
This is an average across Europe, the British Isles, and the American Colonies; the gender ratios
vary widely from place to place. The lowest percentages of males were persecuted in the Basel
region of Switzerland (5 percent) and in Hungary (10 percent). Places that hovered around the
50/50 mark were Finland (49 percent) and Burgundy (52 percent). Men were the clear majority
of "witches" in Estonia (60 percent) and Norway (73 percent). During Iceland's witch craze, from
1625 to 1685, an amazing 110 out of 120 "witches" were men, for a percentage of 92. As for
America, almost a third of those executed during the
infamous Salem witch trials (six out of nineteen) were men.
Besides bringing these numbers to light, professor Gow and
pupil Apps present serious challenges to the attempts to erase
male witches from the picture. For example, some writers
claim that the men were caught up in the hysteria solely
because they were related to accused women. In this
scenario, the men were only "secondary targets" ("collateral
damage," perhaps?). But in numerous instances men were
persecuted by themselves. In other cases, a woman became a
secondary target after her husband had been singled out as a
witch.
Although women were the overall majority of victims, the
"burning times" were pretty rough for men, too.

18 - THE VIRGINIA COLONISTS PRACTICED CANNIBALISM

During the harsh winter of 1609-1610, British subjects in the famous colony of Jamestown,
Virginia, ate their dead and their shit. This fact doesn't make it into very many US history
textbooks, and the state's official Website apparently forgot to mention it in their history section.
When you think about it rationally, this fact should be a part of mainstream history. After all, it
demonstrates the strong will to survive among the colonists. It shows the mind-boggling
hardships they endured and overcame. Yet the taboo against eating these two items is so
over-powering that this episode can't be mentioned in conventional history.
Luckily, an unconventional historian, Howard Zinn, revealed this fact in his classic A People's
History of the United States. Food was so nonexistent during that winter, only 60 out of 500
colonists survived. A government document from that time gives the gruesome details:
Driven thru insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh
and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian, digged by some out of his
grave after he had lain buried three days and wholly devoured him; others, envying the
better state of body of any whom hunger has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait
and threatened to kill and eat them; one among them slew his wife as she slept in his
bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts
saving her head.

19 - MANY OF THE PIONEERING FEMINISTS OPPOSED ABORTION

The idea that feminism equals the right to an abortion has become so ingrained that it -.iiems
ludicrous to think otherwise. "Prolife feminism" appears to be an inherent contradiction in terms.
Yet more than 20 founding mothers of the feminist movement — who helped secure women's
rights to vote, to own property, to use contraception, to divorce abusive husbands — were
adamantly opposed to abortion.
The most famous nineteenth-century feminist — Susan B. Anthony, she of the ill-fated dollar
coin — referred to abortion as "the horrible crime of child-murder." And that's just for starters.
She also called it "infanticide," "this most monstrous crime," "evil," and a "dreadful deed."
Surprisingly, given that unsparing language, she didn't believe that it should be made illegal.
Responding to an article in which a man called for the outlawing of abortion, Anthony writes:
"Much as I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder, earnestly as I desire its suppression, I
cannot believe with the writer of the above-mentioned article, that such a law would have the
desired effect. It seems to be only mowing off the top of the noxious weed, while the root
remains."
The root, she believed, was the horrible way in which women (and
children) were treated. As summed up in the book Prolife
Feminism, these pioneering women felt that "abortion was the
product of a social system that compelled women to remain
ignorant about their bodies, that enabled men to dominate them
sexually without taking responsibility for the consequences, that
denied women support during and after the resulting pregnancies,
and that placed far more value on a child's 'legitimacy' than on his
or her life and well-being."
Indeed, while Anthony gave women a lot of grief for ending a pregnancy, she reserved the most
vitriol for the men who knocked them up:
Guilty? Yes, no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the
unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her
conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! thrice guilty is he who, for selfish
gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation
which impelled her to her crime.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony's best friend for life, resented society's dictate that all women
must become mothers. Yet she also thought that "maternity is grand," but it must be on the
woman's own terms. Despite this, she railed against abortion. Like her pal, she referred to
abortions as "murder," "a crying evil," "abominations," and "revolting outrages against the laws
of nature and our common humanity." Also like Anthony, Stanton laid the blame for abortion at
the feet of men.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, lionized as the first US woman to become a medical doctor (in 1849),
wrote in her diary:
The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with
indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term "female
physician" should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking
trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become
a noble position for women.
Another prolife feminist was Victoria Woodhull, best known for being the first female candidate
.for US President (way back in 1870). Radical even by early feminist standards, she and her
sister, Tennnessee Claflin, declared that children had rights which began at conception. Their
essay "The slaughter of the Innocents" first discusses the abominable death rate of children under
five, then turns its sights on abortion:
We are aware that many women attempt to excuse themselves for procuring abortions,
upon the ground that it is not murder. But the fact of resort to so weak an argument only
shows the more palpably that they fully realize the enormity of the crime. Is it not equally
destroying the would-be future oak, to crush the sprout before it pushes its head above the
sod, as it is to cut down the sapling, or cut down the tree? Is it not equally to destroy life, to
crush it in its very germ, and to take it when the germ has evolved to any given point in its
line of development? Let those who can see any difference regarding the time when life,
once begun, is taken, console themselves that they are not murderers having b««n
abortionists.

20 - BLACK PEOPLE SERVED IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY

Like "prolife feminist," the phrase "black Confederate" seems like an oxymoron. But the record
shows that many slaves and free blacks were a part of the South's military during the US Civil
War.
None other than abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a former slave and one of the most prominent
African Americans in history, declared:
There are at present moment [autumn 1861], many colored men in the Confederate Army
doing duty not only as cooks, servants, and laborers, but as real soldiers, having musket on
their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops and do all
that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government and build up that of the traitors
and rebels.
In Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Professor Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.,
writes:
Numerous black Virginians served with Confederate forces as soldiers, sailors, teamsters,
spies, and hospital personnel.... I know of black Confederate sharp-shooters who saw
combat during the 1862 Seven Days Campaign and [of] the existence of black companies
[which] organized and drilled in Richmond in March-April 1865. Integrated companies of
black and white hospital workers fought against the Union army in the Petersburg trenches
during March 1865. There were several recruitment campaigns and charity balls held in
Virginia on behalf of black soldiers and special camps of instruction were established to
train them.
The book Black Confederates contains loads of
primary documents testifying to the role of African
Americans: letters, military documents, tributes,
obituaries, contemporaneous newspaper articles, and
more. In an 1862 letter to his uncle, a soldier at Camp
Brown in Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote that his
company had recently gunned down six Union
soldiers and that "Jack Thomas a colored person that
belongs to our company killed one of them."
An 1861 article in the Montgomery Advertiser says:
"We are informed that Mr. G.C. Hale, of Autauga County, yesterday tendered to Governor
Moore the services of a company of negroes, to assist in driving back the horde of abolition
sycophants who are now talking so flippantly of reducing to a conquered province the
Confederate States of the South."
The obituary of black South Carolinian Henry Brown states that he had never been a slave and
had served in three wars: the Mexican, the Spanish-American, and the Civil (on the side of the
South). He was given a 21-gun salute at his funeral.
In 1890, black Union veteran Joseph T. Wilson wrote in his book, The Black Phalanx: A History
of the Negro Soldiers of the United States, that New Orleans was home to two Native Guard
regiments, which comprised 3,000 "colored men." Referring to these regiments in an 1898 book,
Union Captain Dan Matson said: "Here is a strange fact. We find that the Confederates
themselves first armed and mustered the Negro as a solider in the late war."
Most blacks in the Confederate Army, though, were in supporting roles such as cook, musician,
nurse, and the catch-all "servant." However, a lot of them ended up fighting on the battlefield,
even though the South didn't officially induct black soldiers until late in the conflict. And all of
them — whether inducted or not, whether solider or some other position — were eligible for
military pensions from several Southern states (including Tennessee and Mississippi), an records
show that many of them signed up for these benefits.
A follow-up volume, Black Southerners in Confederate Armies, presents even more source
documents. A book from 1866 contains the recollection of a Union man whose compatriot killed
a black Confederate sniper "who, through his skill as a marksman, had done more injury to our
men that any dozen of his white compeers..." Union documents show Henry Marshall, a black
soldier with the 14th Kentucky Cavalry, being held in Northern prisoner of war camps. A
pension document from South Carolina reveals that "a free Negro who volunteered" for the army
served from August 1861 to the end of the war — over three and a half years. An obituary for
George Mathewson says that the former slave received "a Cross of Honor for bravery in action,"
based on his role as standard-bearer.
The New York Tribune noted "that the Rebels organized and employed 'Negro troops' a full year
before our government could be persuaded to do any thing of the sort." After the Battle of
Gettys-burg, the New York Herald reported: "Among the rebel prisoners who were marched
through Gettysburg there were observed seven negroes in uniform and fully accoutered as
soldiers."
An article from Smithsonian magazine relates: "A New York Times correspondent with Grant in
1863 wrote: 'The guns of the rebel battery were manned almost wholly by Negroes, a single
white man, or perhaps two, directing operations.'"
While it certainly couldn't be said that African Americans played a major military role in the
Southern army, they were definitely there. And some of them had even volunteered.

21 - ELECTRIC CARS HAVE BEEN AROUND SINCE THE 1880s

The car of the future runs completely on electricity. No more dependence on gas. No more
choking the atmosphere with fumes. Whenever the possibility of electric cars is raised, the media
and other commentators ooh and ahh over the potential. But this technology isn't futuristic — it's
positively retro. Cars powered by electricity have been on the scene since the 1800s and actually
predate gas-powered cars.
A blacksmith in Vermont — Thomas Davenport — built the first rotary electric motor in 1833
and it to power a model train the next year. In the late 1830s, Scottish inventor Robert Davidson
rigged a carriage with an electric motor powered by batteries. In his Pulitzer-nominated book
Taking Charge, archaeology professor and technology historian Michael Brian Schiffer writes
that this "was perhaps the first electric car."
After this remarkable achievement, the idea of an
electric car languished for decades. In 1881, a
French experi-menter debuted a personal vehicle
that ran on electricity, a tricycle (ie, three wheels
and a seat) for adults. In 1888, many inventors in
the US, Britain, and Europe started creating three-
and four-wheel vehicles — which could carry two
to six people — that ran on electricity. These
vehicles remained principally curios-ities until May 1897, when the Pope Manufacturing
Company — the country's most successful bicycle manufacturer — started selling the first
commercial electric car: the Columbia Electric Phaeton, Mark III. It topped out at fifteen miles
per hour, and had to be recharged every 30 miles. Within two years, people could choose from an
array of electrical carriages, buggies, wagons, trucks, bicycles, tricycles, even buses and
ambulances made by numerous manufacturers.
New York City was home to a fleet of electric taxi cabs starting in 1897. The Electric Vehicle
Company eventually had over 100 of them ferrying people around the Big Apple. Soon it was
unleashing electric taxis in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington DC. By 1900,
though, the company was in trouble, and seven years later it sputtered out.
As for cars powered by dead dinosaurs, Austrian engineer Siegfried Marcus attached a onecylinder
motor to a cart in 1864, driving it 500 feet and thus creating the first vehicle powered by
gas (this was around 25 years after Davidson had created the first electro-car). It wasn't until
1895 that gas autos — converted carriages with a two-cylinder engine — were commercially
sold (and then only in microscopic numbers).
Around the turn of the century, the average car buyer had a big choice to make: gas, electric, or
steam? When the auto industry took form around 1895, nobody knew which type of vehicle was
going to become the standard. During the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first
few of the twentieth, over 100 companies placed their bets on electricity. According to Schiffer,
"Twenty-eight percent of the 4,192 American automobiles produced in 1900 were electric. In the
New York automobile show of that year more electrics were on display than gasoline or steam
vehicles."
In the middle of the first decade of the 1900s, electric cars were on the decline, and their gaseating
cousins were surging ahead. With improvements in the cars and their batteries, though,
electrics started a comeback in 1907, which continued through 1913. The downhill slide started
the next year, and by the 1920s the market for electrics was "minuscule," to use Schiffer's word.
Things never got better.
Many companies tried to combine the best of both approaches, with cars that ran on a mix of
electricity and gas. The Pope Manufacturing Company, once again in the vanguard, built a
working prototype in 1898. A Belgian company and a French company each brought out
commercial models the next year, beating the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight to the market
by over a century. Even Ferdinand Porsche and the Mercedes Company got in on the act.
Unfortunately, these hybrids never really caught on.
Didik Design — which manufactures several vehicles which run on various combinations off
electricity, solar power, and human power — maintains an extensive archive on the history of
electric and electro-fuel cars. According to their research, around 200 companies and individuals
have manufactured electric cars. Only a few familiar names are on the list (although some of
them aren't familiar as car manufacturers): Studebaker (1952-1966), General Electric (1901-
1904), Braun (1977), Sears, Roebuck, and Company (1978), and Oldsmobile (1896 to the
present). The vast majority have long been forgotten: Elecctra, Pfluger, Buffalo Automobile
Company, Hercules, Red Bug, and Nu-Klea Starlite, to name a few. Henry Ford and Thomas
Edison teamed up on an electric car, but, although some prototypes were built, it never was
commercially produced. Though they have faded from mass cultural memory, electric cars have
never been completely out of production.
The reasons why electrics faded into obscurity while gas cars and trucks became 99.999 percent
dominant are complex and are still being debated. If only they hadn't been sidelined and had
continued to develop apace, the world would be a very different place.

22 - JURIES ARE ALLOWED TO JUDGE THE LAW, NOT JUST THE FACTS

In order to guard citizens against the whims of the King, the right to a trial by jury was established by the Magna Carta in 1215, and it has become one of the most sacrosanct legal aspects of British and American societies. We tend to believe that the duty of a jury is
solely to determine whether someone broke the law. In fact, it's not unusual for judges to instruct juries that they are to judge only the facts in a case, while the judge will sit in judgment of the law itself. Nonsense.

Juries are the last line of defense against the power abuses of the authorities. They have the right
to judge the law. Even if a defendant committed a crime, a jury can refuse to render a guilty
verdict. Among the main reasons why this might happen, according to attorney Clay S. Conrad:
When the defendant has already suffered enough, when it would be unfair or against the
public interest for the defendant to be convicted, when the jury disagrees with the law
itself, when the prosecution or the arresting authorities have gone "too far" in the singleminded
quest to arrest and convict a particular defendant, when the punishments to be
imposed are excessive or when the jury suspects that the charges have been brought for
political reasons or to make an unfair example of the hapless defendant...
Some of the earliest examples of jury nullification from Britain and the American Colonies were
refusals to convict people who had spoken ill of the government (they were prosecuted under
"seditious libel" laws) or who were practicing forbidden religions, such as Quakerism. Up to the
time of the Civil War, American juries often refused to convict the brave souls who helped
runaway slaves. In the 1800s, jury nullifications saved the hides of union organizers who were
being prosecuted with conspiracy to restrain trade. Juries used their power to free people charged
under the anti-alcohol laws of Prohibition, as well as antiwar protesters during the Vietnam era.
Today, juries sometimes refuse to convict drug users (especially medical marijuana users), tax
protesters, abortion protesters, gun owners, battered spouses, and people who commit "mercy
killings."
Judges and prosecutors will often outright lie about the existence of this power, but centuries of
court decisions and other evidence prove that jurors can vote their consciences.
When the US Constitution was created, with its Sixth Amendment guarantee of a jury trial, the
most popular law dictionary of the time said that juries "may not only find things of their own
knowledge, but they go according to their consciences." The first edition of Noah Webster's
celebrated dictionary (1828) said that juries "decide both the law and the fact in criminal
prosecutions."
Jury nullification is specifically enshrined in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and
Maryland. The state codes of Connecticut and Illinois contain similar provisions.
The second US President, John Adams, wrote: "It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty...to
find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in
direct opposition to the direction of the court." Similarly, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton
declared: "It is essential to the security of personal rights and public liberty, that the jury should
have and exercise the power to judge both of the law and of the criminal intent."
Legendary Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay once instructed a jury:
It may not be amiss, here, Gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions
of fact, it is the providence of the jury, on questions of law, it is the providence of the court
to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this reasonable
distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless the right to take upon yourselves to
judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy.
The following year, 1795, Justice James Irdell declared: "[T]hough the jury will generally
respect the sentiment of the court on points of law, they are not bound to deliver a verdict
conformably to them." In 1817, Chief Justice John Marshall said that "the jury in a capital case
were judges, as well of the law as the fact, and were bound to acquit where either was doubtful."
In more recent times, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously held in 1969:
If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent
circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their
logic and passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide that decision.
Three years later, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals noted: "The pages of history shine on
instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard uncontradicted evidence and
instructions of the judge."
In a 1993 law journal article, federal Judge Jack B. Weinstein wrote: "When juries refuse to
convict on the basis of what they think are unjust laws, they are performing their duties as
jurors."
Those who try to wish away the power of jury nullification often point to cases in which racist
juries have refused to convict white people charged with racial violence. As attorney Conrad
shows in his book, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, this has occurred only in very
rare instances. Besides, it's ridiculous to try to stamp out or deny a certain power just because it
can be used for bad ends as well as good. What form of power hasn't been misused at least once
in a while?
The Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) is the best-known organization seeking to tell all
citizens about their powers as jurors. People have been arrested for simply handing out FIJA
literature in front of courthouses. During jury selections, FIJA members have been excluded
solely on the grounds that they belong to the group.
FIJA also seeks laws that would require judges to tell jurors that they can and should judge the
law, but this has been an uphill battle, to say the least. In a still-standing decision (Sparf and
Hansen v. US, 1895), the Supreme Court ruled that judges don't have to let jurors know their full
powers. In cases where the defense has brought up jury nullification during the proceedings,
judges have sometimes held the defense attorney in contempt. Still, 21 state legislatures have
introduced informed-jury legislation, with three of them passing it through one chamber (ie,
House or Senate).
Quite obviously, the justice system is terrified of this power, which is all the more reason for us
to mow about it.

23 - THE POLICE AREN'T LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO PROTECT YOU

Without even thinking about it, we take it as a given that the police must protect each of us.
That's their whole reason for existence, right?
While this might be true in a few jurisdictions in the US and Canada, it is actually the exception,
not the rule. In general, court decisions and state laws have held that cops don't have to do a
thing to help you when you're in danger.
In the only book devoted exclusively to the subject, Dial 911 and Die, attorney Richard W.
Stevens writes:
It was the most shocking thing I learned in law school. I was studying Torts in my first year
at the University of San Diego School of Law, when I came upon the case of Hartzler v. City
of San Jose. In that case I discovered the secret truth: the government owes no duty to
protect individual citizens from criminal attack. Not only did the California courts hold to
that rule, the California legislature had enacted a statute to make sure the courts couldn't
change the rule.
But this doesn't apply to just the wild, upside down world of Kalifornia. Stevens cites laws an
cases for every state — plus Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Canada -
which reveal the same thing. If the police fail to protect you, even through sheer incompetence
and negligence, don't expect that you or your next of kin will be able to sue.
Even in the nation's heartland, in bucolic Iowa, you can't depend on 911. In 1987, two men broke
into a family's home, tied up the parents, slit the mother's throat, raped the 16-year-old daughter,
and drove off with the 12-year old daughter (whom they later murdered). The emergency
dispatcher couldn't be bothered with immediately sending police to chase the
kidnappers/murders/rapists while the abducted little girl was still alive. First he had to take calls
about a parking violation downtown and a complaint about harassing phone calls. When he got
around to the kidnapping, he didn't issue an all-points bulletin but instead told just one officer to
come back to the police station, not even mentioning that it was an emergency. Even more
blazing negligence ensued, but suffice it to say that when the remnants of the family sued the city
and the police, their case was summarily dismissed before going to trial. The state appeals court
upheld the decision, claiming that the authorities have no duty to protect individuals.
Similarly, people in various states have been unable to successfully sue over the following
situations:
when 911 systems have been shut down for maintenance
when a known stalker kills someone
when the police pull over but don't arrest a drunk driver who runs over someone later that
night
when a cop known to be violently unstable shoots a driver he pulled over for an inadequate
muffler
when authorities know in advance of a plan to commit murder but do nothing to stop it
when parole boards free violent psychotics, including child rapist-murderers
when felons escape from prison and kill someone
when houses burn down because the fire department didn't respond promptly
when children are beaten to death in foster homes
A minority of states do offer a tiny bit of hope. In eighteen states, citizens have successfully
sued over failure to protect, but even here the grounds have been very narrow. Usually, the
police and the victim must have had a prior "special relationship" (for example, the authorities
must have promised protection to this specific individual in the past). And, not surprisingly,
many of these states have issued contradictory court rulings, or a conflict exists between state
law and the rulings of the courts.
Don't look to Constitution for help. "In its landmark decision of DeShaney v. Winnebago County
Department of Social Services," Stevens writes, "the US Supreme Court declared that the
Constitution does not impose a duty on the state and local governments to protect the citizens
from criminal harm."
All in all, as Stevens says, you'd be much better off owning a gun and learning how to use it.
Even in those cases where you could successfully sue, this victory comes only after years
(sometimes more than a decade) of wrestling with the justice system and only after you've been
gravely injured or your loved one has been snuffed.

24 - THE GOVERNMENT CAN TAKE YOUR HOUSE AND LAND, THEN SELL THEM TO PRIVATE CORPORATIONS

It’s not an issue that gets much attention, but the government has the right to seize your house,
business, and/or land, forcing you into the street. This mighty power, called "eminent domain," is
enshrined in the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment: "...nor shall private property be taken for
public use without just compensation." Every single state constitution also stipulates that a
person whose property is taken must be justly compensated and that the property must be put to
public use. This should mean that if your house is smack-dab in the middle of a proposed
highway, the government can take it, pay you market value, and build the highway.
Whether or not this is a power the government should have is very
much open to question, but what makes it worse is the abuse of this
supposedly limited power. Across the country, local governments
are stealing their citizens' property, then turning around and selling
it to corporations for the construction of malls, condominiums,
parking lots, racetracks, office complexes, factories, etc.
The Institute for Justice — the country's only nonprofit, public-interest law firm with a
libertarian philosophy — spends a good deal of time protecting individuals and small businesses
from greedy corporations and their partners in crime: bureaucrats armed with eminent domain. In
2003, it released a report on the use of "governmental condemnation" (another name for eminent
domain) for private gain. No central data collection for this trend exists, and only one state
(Connecticut) keeps statistics on it. Using court records, media accounts, and information from
involved parties, the Institute I found over 10,000 such abuses in 41 states from 1998 through
2002. Of these, the legal I process had been initiated against 3,722 properties, and condemnation
had been threatened against 6,560 properties. (Remember, this is condemnation solely for the
benefit of private parties, not for so-called legitimate reasons of "public use.")
In one instance, the city of Hurst, Texas, condemned 127 homes so that a mall could expand.
Most of the families moved under the pressure, but ten chose to stay and fight. The Institute
writes:
A Texas trial judge refused to stay the condemnations while the suit was on-going, so the
residents lost their homes. Leonard Prohs had to move while his wife was in the hospital
with brain cancer. She died only five days after their house was demolished. Phyllis Duval's
husband also was in the hospital with cancer at the time they were required to move. He
died one month after the demolition. Of the ten couples, three spouses died and four others
suffered heart attacks during the dispute and litigation. In court, the owners presented
evidence that the land surveyor who designed the roads for the mall had been told to
change the path of one road to run through eight of the houses of the owners challenging
the condemnations.
In another case, wanting to "redevelop" Main Street, the city of East Hartford, Connecticut, used
eminent domain to threaten a bakery/deli that had been in that spot for 93 years, owned and
operated by the same family during that whole time. Thus coerced, the family sold the business
for $1.75 million, and the local landmark was destroyed. But the redevelopment fell through, so
the lot now stands empty and the city is in debt.
The city of Cypress, California, wanted Costco to build a retail store on an 18-acre plot of land.
Trouble was, the Cottonwood Christian Center already owned the land fair and square, and was
planning to build a church on it. The city council used eminent domain to seize the land, saying
that the new church would be a "public nuisance" and would "blight" the area (which is right
beside a horse-racing track). The Christian Center got a federal injunction to stop the
condem-nation, and the city appealed this decision. To avoid further protracted legal nightmares,
the church group consented to trade its land for another tract in the vicinity.
But all of this is small potatoes compared to what's going on in Riviera Beach, Florida:
City Council members voted unanimously to approve a $1.25 billion redevelopment plan
with the authority to use eminent domain to condemn at least 1,700 houses and apartments
and dislocate 5,100 people. The city will then take the property and sell the land to
commercial yachting, shipping, and tourism companies.
If approved by the state, it will be one of the biggest eminent domain seizures in US history.
In 1795, the Supreme Court referred to eminent domain as "the despotic power." Over two
centuries later, they continue to be proven right.

25 - THE SUPREME COURT HAS RULED THAT YOU'RE ALLOWED TO INGEST ANY DRUG, ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE AN ADDICT

In the early 1920s, Dr. Linder was convicted of selling one morphine tablet and three cocaine
tablets to a patient who was addicted to narcotics. The Supreme Court overturned the
con-viction, declaring that providing an addicted patient with a fairly small amount of drugs is an
acceptable medical practice "when designed temporarily to alleviate an addict's pains." (Linder v.
United States.)
In 1962, the Court heard the case of a man who had been sent to the clink under a California
state law that made being an addict a criminal offense. Once again, the verdict was tossed out,
with the Supremes saying that punishing an addict for being an addict is cruel and unusual and,
thus, unconstitutional. (Robinson v. California.)
Six years later, the Supreme Court reaffirmed these principles in Powell v. Texas. A man who
was arrested for being drunk in public said that, because he was an alcoholic, he couldn't help it.
He invoked the Robinson decision as precedent. The Court upheld his conviction because It had
been based on an action (being wasted in public), not on the general condition of his addiction to
booze. Justice White supported this decision, yet for different reasons than the others. In his
concurring opinion, he expanded Robinson:
If it cannot be a crime to have an irresistible compulsion to use narcotics,... I do not see how
it can constitutionally be a crime to yield to such a compulsion. Punishing an addict for
using drugs convicts for addiction under a different name. Distinguishing between the two
crimes is like forbidding criminal conviction for being sick with flu or epilepsy, but
permitting punishment for running a fever or having a convulsion. Unless Robinson is to be
abandoned, the use of narcotics by an addict must be beyond the reach of the criminal law.
Similarly, the chronic alcoholic with an irresistible urge to consume alcohol should not be
punishable for drinking or for being drunk.
Commenting on these cases, Superior Court Judge James R Gray, an outspoken critic of drug
prohibition, has recently written:
What difference is there between alcohol and any other dangerous and sometimes addictive
drug? The primary difference is that one is legal while the others are not. And the US
Supreme Court has said as much on at least two occasions, finding both in 1925 and 1962
that to punish a person for the disease of drug addiction violated the Constitution's
prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. If that is true, why do we continue to
prosecute addicted people for taking these drugs, when it would be unconstitutional to
prosecute them for their addiction?
Judge Gray gets right to the heart of the matter: "In effect, this 'forgotten precedent' says that >ni!
can only be constitutionally punishable for one's conduct, such as assaults, burglary, and driving
under the influence, and not simply for what one puts into one's own body."
If only the Supreme Court and the rest of the justice/law-enforcement complex would apply
these decisions, we'd be living in a saner society.

26 - THE AGE OF CONSENT IN MOST OF THE US IS NOT EIGHTEEN

The accepted wisdom tells us that the age at which a person can legally consent to sex in the US
is eighteen. Before this line of demarcation, a person is "jailbait" or "chicken." On their
eighteenth birthday, they become "legal." But in the majority of states, this isn't the case.
It's up to each state to determine its own age of consent. Only fifteen states have put theirs at
eighteen, with the rest going lower. Eight have set the magic point at the seventeenth birthday.
The most popular age is sixteen, with 27 states and Washington DC setting the ability to sexually
consent there. (Hawaii's age of consent had been fourteen until mid-2001, when it was bumped
to sixteen.)
Of course, as with anything regarding the law, there are considerable shades of gray. For one
thing, these laws don't apply if the lovers are married. The age of consent for marriage,
especially with parental permission, is usually lower than the age of sexual consent.
The Constitution of the State of South Carolina says that females aged fourteen and up can
consent to sex, but state law appears to set the age at sixteen.
In a lot of states, the age of the older partner is a consideration. For example, Tennessee doesn't
consider sex with someone aged thirteen to seventeen to be statutory rape if the elder partner in
less than four years older. So a nineteen-year-old could get it on with a sixteen-year-old without
breaking the law. The most extreme example of this rule is in Delaware. If you're 30 or older,
boffing a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old is a felony. But if you're 29 or younger, it's perfectly
legal.
And let's not even get into Georgia's Public Law 16-6-18, which outlaws sex between anyone
who isn't married, no matter what their ages or genders.
Then, of course, we have the laws regarding same-sex relations, which are completely illegal in
fifteen or so states. In almost all of the others states, the age of consent for gay sex is the same as
that for het-sex. Two exceptions are Nevada and New Hampshire, which both allow sixteenyear-
olds to consent to a member of the opposite sex, but set the limit at eighteen for those who
go the other way. Somewhat startlingly, even though New Mexico's age of consent for straights
is seventeen, it's thirteen for gays and lesbians.
The situation around the world varies even more than within the US. The age of consent in the
UK is sixteen, except in Northern Ireland, where it's a year older. Various territories in Australia
set the age at sixteen or seventeen, and in Canada it's universally fourteen. The lowest age — in a
few countries, such as Chile and Mexico — is twelve. Only one country is known to have set the
age above eighteen — Tunisia, which feels that twenty is the acceptable age.