news you can use

MINNEAPOLIS - To commemorate World Day for Farm Animals, the Animal Rights Coalition will be serving free samples of vegetarian burgers, vegetarian hot dogs, and non-dairy beverages on Monday, October 2, from 11:00 - 2:00 in Peavey Plaza (13th and Nicollet, Minneapolis). In addition, the ARC Veggiemobile, featuring colorful and educational displays about the vegetarian lifestyle, will be parked on the Plaza for people to tour during this event.

World Day for Farm Animals is a nation-wide, annual event sponsored by the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM). The Minneapolis observance is intended to show the public that a vegetarian diet not only benefits their health, the environment, and the animals, but also tastes good too! A vegetarian diet can also offer quick foods for busy people. Modern coops and supermarkets feature many vegetarian items that require minimal preparation, cooking, and cleaning up.

For people concerned about animals, on World Day for Farm Animals we urge them to consider the billions of animals slaughtered for food each year in the United States and the conditions in which animals killed for food are raised. For people concerned about the environment, consider meat production’s negative impact on tropical rain forests, soil stability, and air and water quality. For those concerned about their health, consider that vegetarians are generally at lower risk than non-vegetarians for heart disease, high blood pressure, some forms of cancer, and obesity.

Today, being a vegetarian is more popular than ever. A recent poll conducted by Vegetarian Times magazine found that 12.4 million Americans consider themselves vegetarian.

Companies donating food to be served at the Veggie-Q include:
Amy’s Kitchen, Inc. “Amy’s Veggie Burger”
Imagine Foods, Inc. “Rice Dream”
Mud Pie Frozen Foods, Inc. “Mud Pie Veggie Burgers”
Northern Soy, Inc. “Soy Boy Not Dogs”
Pacific Foods of Oregon “Ultra Non-Dairy Beverage”

Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.

ATLANTA (Reuter) - Salmonella from undercooked, infected eggs accounted for most cases of bacterial foodborne illnesses during a recent five-year period, federal health experts said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli accounted for 79 percent of foodborne disease outbreaks and 90 percent of individual cases between 1988 and 1992.
Salmonella, a bacteria commonly found in animals, caused 69 percent of bacterial foodborne disease outbreaks during the period. Undercooked eggs were the most common cause of salmonella outbreaks. Outbreaks linked to contaminated produce and the E. coli bacteria appeared to be increasing, the CDC said.
The agency said most cases of foodborne illnesses go unreported. A surveillance system detected an average of 15,475 cases and 14 deaths every year, however, the CDC estimates there are six million cases of foodborne illnesses annually.
The estimates did not include sickness linked to food consumed on cruise ships or outside the country, even if the illness developed in the U.S.
The salmonella bacteria causes an illness called salmonellosis, with symptoms of fever, abdonimal cramps and diarrhea that start 12 to 48 hours after a person consumes contaminated food or liquid. The illness usually lasts four to seven days and often requires hospitalization.

By Brad Liston

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuter) - For 20 years the face on Mars has been one of the world’s most famous faces - serene, mysterious and remote. Very remote.
It was first photographed by a Viking spacecraft in 1976, a mile (1.6 km) in length from crown to chin, staring blankly into the heavens. But a year from now, we are likely to see it quite differently.
The Mars Global Surveyor, due to launch on Wednesday, is expected to send back a new batch of pictures, this time from high-resolution digital cameras. If the pictures are good, they will answer many questions, and may spell the end of a cottage industry that has grown up around the Viking images.
Dozens of books and thousands of articles and newsletters have spun various theories about the face, some scholarly, some fit only for the supermarket check-out line.
One “Face on Mars” site on the World Wide Web recorded more than 20,000 visitors in October. Another had recorded half a million since its creation. Face on Mars may not beat the Kennedy assassination as an underground phenomenon, but it rivals alien abductions. And it is much bigger than pyramids.
“There’s been a lot of growth in Face on Mars since the late ‘80s,” said Alan Merten, a paranormal writer who chronicles such things for tabloid weeklies. “All it needs is a guest shot on ‘The X-Files’ (a popular television show dealing with the paranormal) to really take off.”
“The UFO folks were quick to incorporate it, and of course, there’s a theory that JFK was killed because he was ready to tell the public everything about UFOs,” he said.
But the riddle of the face may actually be solved soon. If not by the Global Surveyor, then by another of the nine planned Mars missions in the near future.
If the face is nothing but a tricky play of light across a natural mesa, as NASA originally said, then new photographs will show that. And that could be bad news for hypnotist-therapist Donald Zanghi, who counsels victims of alleged alien abduction and believes the face is evidence of a vast and ancient civilisation living beneath the Martian soil.
“Why do you think the last spacecraft they sent to Mars simply disappeared?” Zanghi asks. “The Martians weren’t ready to reveal themselves. Maybe this time they will let us see them.”
Then there is face theorist John C. Cunningham, who says the face was built by the same people who built the Tower of Babel, which was really a spaceship, and the whole story is right there in Genesis.
“Most Creationist theories state that man did not rise - he fell,” said Cunningham. “It should not surprise Creationists that there might be evidence of past human achievements that go beyond anything we now have.”
Then there is the chance that the face is an artifact. In that case, the scientific community will adopt it as its own, and legions of face fans will have to take a back seat.
“I think it’s very likely that it will turn the world of planetary science on its ear,” said David Webb, one of a small but growing number of Ph.D’s who have devoted themselves to studying the face and lobbying NASA to do the same.
Webb, a Reagan appointee to the National Commission on Space, is among those who think it is irresponsible to talk about life on Mars in the present tense. But he believes the face probably means that intelligent life once was there.
In the same region, observers have spotted other objects that appear to have smooth, angular sides like a pyramid, and what might be the ruins of walls.
“None of the independent researchers has maintained that these details prove the face is artificial,” says Stanley V. McDaniel, whose 1994 book, “The McDaniel Report,” is credited with giving the face community some legitimacy. “But certain details make it more difficult to view the anomalies as accidents of nature.”
Carl Sagan, the best known planetary scientist, for years dismissed the Mars anomaly crowd as kooks and charlatans. But last year he modified that position and called NASA’s early dismissal of the face as a trick of light unfortunate.
Sagan remains thoroughly sceptical about the face but now says it is worthy of further study by NASA.

By Martin Wolk

SEATTLE (Reuter) - Federal officials confirmed 29 cases of bacterial poisoning linked to fresh apple juice as investigators tested for contamination in samples pulled from Western U.S. and Canadian store shelves.
Bob Howard of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said the agency had confirmed that 29 children and young adults had been infected with a potentially fatal strain of the E. coli bacterium after drinking Odwalla Inc. fruit juice in California, Washington, Colorado and the Vancouver area of British Columbia.
At least 36 additional cases are suspected or under investigation, state, county and provincial officials said.
State and federal officials continued to test Odwalla juice samples over the weekend but said they had not found any evidence of contamination.
“We’re going to have to wait a few days to know for sure whether the samples are negative or positive,” Arthur Whitmore of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said. “It is quite possible we won’t actually find anything, but we have a good selection of samples, including those from the company’s library of samples.”
Odwalla, a rapidly growing juice company based in Half Moon Bay, California, was able to provide samples from production runs of two weeks ago, when the first cases surfaced in the Seattle area.
Whitmore said he did not know of any cases in which illness set in after Oct. 23, although the disease can incubate for up to two weeks.
At least four children remained hospitalized because of complications caused by the E. coli O57:H7 bacterium, including a 2-year-old girl in critical condition in California. Tara Azizi was in critical condition ``but improving slightly,’’ Stephen Texeira of Children’s Hospital in Oakland said.
Young children are most susceptible to the bacterium, which causes stomach cramps followed by bloody diarrhea. In severe cases the illness can lead to kidney failure, which is treated through dialysis but may cause brain damage and death.
The bacterium, which normally lives in the digestive system of cattle, can enter the food chain through fecal contamination, because of either improper slaughtering or contact with manure.
Health officials speculated that Odwalla may have used apples that had fallen onto the ground, although company officials say they do not use “ground apples” and all produce is thoroughly washed before processing at the company’s Dinuba, California, plant.
Odwalla juices are not pasteurized. Heat processing kills bacteria but can also alter flavor.
The outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 is the biggest in the United States since 1993 when more than 500 people fell ill in the Pacific Northwest and three children died after eating tainted meat, mostly at Jack-In-The-Box hamburger restaurants.
The same strain of E. coli sickened 9,500 people and killed 11 in Japan last summer. No source was identified in that outbreak, though raw radish shoots were suspected.
The CDC’s Howard said the agency recommended that people boil unpasteurized cider or juice.

By Suzanne Rostler

NEW YORK (Reuter) - Its fans call it “brain food,” claiming it has powers to boost energy, stimulate the immune system, heighten mental clarity and increase sexual stamina.
Its detractors say it is nothing more than pricey pond scum and the latest bit of nutrition quackery. Eating it can cause nausea and vomiting. Some strains have been found to cause paralysis in laboratory animals.
Known to more neutral observers as blue green algae, this food supplement has come under fire by scientists, nutritionists and consumer advocates, while sales have surged.
“The problem is that most of the information on blue green algae is anecdotal and you can’t separate that from the placebo effect,” said Varro Tyler, professor of pharmocognsy, or plant, animal and mineral pharmacy, at Purdue University.
People who take blue green algae products are convinced it improves their mental and physical health. Samantha Cintron, a 30-year-old actress in New York City, said the supplements corrected an underactive thyroid and boosted iron levels in her blood. “I also felt more focused mentally,” Cintron said. “I was motivated and had more energy.”
Such claims lie at the heart of the products’ success. Sales of Super Blue Green Algae (SBGA), the most popular brand nationwide, rose to $133.6 million in 1995 from $17.9 million in 1993. Oregon-based Cell Tech, which harvests and markets SBGA products through distributors in the United States and Canada, said its marketing network has grown to 350,000 from 7,000 in 1985. Sales of spirolina and chlorella, two other strains of algae, have also increased during that time, said several health food stores that sell the products nationwide.
“It absolutely sells itself,” Marta Kollman, president of Cell Tech, said. “Let’s face it: we don’t eat correctly so we are missing some basic nutrients. The human body is an amazing thing if you feed it the right stuff.”
Super Blue Green Algae products contain protein, vitamin B-12, beta carotene and essential minerals no longer present in the soil, according to Cell Tech. The company said a volcano that erupted thousands of years ago continues to provide the Upper Klamath Lake region, where Cell Tech is based, with a deep bed of these very minerals.
Critics argue such claims lack scientific proof.
“There is very little evidence of a nutrition deficiency in the soil of this country,” Marion Nestle, chairwoman of the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, said. “People can take anything and feel better.
At an average cost of $60 to $100 a month for Cell Tech’s products and about $40 a month for recommended dosages of spirulina, consumers would pay less for actual food containing the same nutrients. The supplements cost about six times more than a roast beef dinner containing equal amounts of protein and many times more than carrots and sweet potatoes, foods rich in beta carotene, Purdue’s Tyler said.
But Kollman says years of pesticide and chemical use have sapped vegetables of virtually all nutrients. “Chemical companies have figured out how to make (vegetables) taste great but if you were to test it what’s really inside? A plant is only as good as the soil it’s grown in, and our soil has been farmed so hard and so fast there is nothing left.
But concerns go beyond costs.
Spirolina that came from lakes in Mexico was found to be contaminated by fecal matter in the 1980s, Arthur Whitmore, a spokesman with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said. And according to an FDA investigation, a strain of algae found in Cell Tech products caused laboratory animals to stop breathing and become paralysed.
“Aphanizomenon flos aqua (the strain of algae in Cell Tech’s SBGA) has been found to produce a toxin that is a powerful neuromuscular blocking agent. In laboratory studies it has caused animals to stop breathing,” the FDA said in its investigataive report.
Cell Tech concedes the strain of algae found in its products can be deadly but said no toxins have ever been discovered in the algae in Upper Klamath Lake. What’s more, each batch of algae undergoes a series of rigorous tests by independent laboratories.
“With all of this testing, no neurotoxins have ever been found in Super Blue Green Algae,” a company brochure reads. It says the articles questioning the purity of the products “have legitimate, but in the light of close examination, unnecessarily excessive concerns about the algae’s safety.”
The federal government seems to agree. Under the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the FDA cannot pull a dietary supplement off the shelves unless it can prove the product is dangerous.
Our hands are tied,” Whitmore said. While the toxic effects of algae in general are well-documented in humans, only a handful of adverse effects have been reported from the food supplements, he said. “We cannot say there is no potential for toxic algae to be in these products but we cannot do anything about a potential.”
Meanwhile, as long as the company does not claim that a product cures a disease or has medicinal powers, it is not violating the law. Manufacturers do not always follow even this rule since there is very little policing of products and no mechanism in place to guarantee safety, critics said.
“We have the worst regulations in the world with respect to these products,’’ Tyler said. ``The customer cannot be assured of anything.”
Such warnings worried Cintron and prompted her temporarily to give up her daily doses of algae. But when a trip to California left her tired and depressed, Cintron she went back to her plastic bottle. “Now I have more energy and things are clearer to me,” she said.

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuter) - If the current size of the ozone hole over the Antarctic is maintained until the middle of next week, it will be another record setting season, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) predicted.
The United Nations agency also said the hole had extended over the most southern part of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans northward to a latitude of nearly 50 degrees south for a few days during the past week.
The hole’s extension so far northward during the South Hemisphere spring season was “an extremely rare event” and meant these ocean areas had been exposed to UV-B radiation as intensive as that over the tropical belt, according to WMO.
Experts say that any sustained surge in radiation reaching the Earth could lead to a rise in cancer in humans and animals, and lower crop yields. It could also affect the marine food chain - starting with microscopic plankton in the oceans.
The ozone, a fragile shield of gas which absorbs and blocks most ultra-violet rays of the sun, is being depleted by man-made chemicals. These include chlorofluorocarbons (used in aerosols and refrigeration), the pesticide methyl bromide and solvents.
The surface covered by the ozone hole over the Antarctic, currently 6.95 million sq. miles, has persisted for 50 days, according to the WMO’s network of satellite and observing stations in the region.
Similar long duration of this size was observed only in 1993 and 1995 during Antarctic spring seasons.
“If current size is maintained until the middle of next week this will be another record setting season,” WMO’s ozone expert Dr. Rumen Bojkov said in the statement.
“The extension of the ozone hole values so far northward over the ocean areas, although for only a few days, exposes sub-Antarctic and upper middle latitude regions to UV-B radiation as intensive as it is over the tropical belt which is an extremely rare event,” the Bulgarian scientist added.
The ocean areas covered stretch from 30 degrees west to 60 degrees east longitudes, according to the Geneva-based agency.
Current coverage was slightly below the maximum of more than 7.7 million sq. miles - twice the surface of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural mountains - reached at the end of September-early October.
Temperatures in the lower stratosphere, where the ozone is depleted nearly 90 percent for the seventh week, continue to be between six and eight degrees centigrade lower than the pre-ozone hole average, according to the statement.
Cold is a major factor facilitating ozone destruction by man-made compounds containing chlorine and bromine.
WMO has said it does not expect the Antarctic-spring ozone hole phenomenon to end until the second half of the 21st century when environmental control measures take full effect.
Under the 1987 Montreal Protocol of the Vienna Convention, governments agreed to phase out chemicals destroying the ozone.
Industrialized countries have banned chlorofluorocarbons, halons and carbon tetrachloride, while developing countries have until the year 2010 to conform.
Industrialized countries will phase out hydrochlorofluorocarbons by the year 2030 and were to freeze methyl bromide levels by last year. Developing countries have not yet agreed to control measures for these two substances.

VATICAN CITY (Reuter) - Pope John Paul II has lent his support to the theory of evolution, proclaiming it compatible with Christian faith in a step welcomed by scientists but likely to raise howls from the religious right.
The Pope’s recognition that evolution is “more than just a theory” came in a written message he sent
Wednesday to a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a body of experts that advises the Roman Catholic Church on scientific issues.
It broke new ground by acknowledging that the theory of the physical evolution of man and other species through natural selection and hereditary adaptation appeared to be valid.
Though the Pope made clear he regarded the human soul as of immediate divine creation, and so not subject to the process, his remarks brought banner headlines in the Italian press.
“Pope says we may descend from monkeys,” the conservative newspaper Il Giornale said on its front page. La Repubblica said the Pope had “made peace with Darwin.”
The theory of evolution, most notably expounded by 19th century English naturalist Charles Darwin, had until now been viewed by the Catholic Church as serious and worthy of discussion but still an open question.
“It is indeed remarkable that this theory has progressively taken root in the minds of researchers following a series of discoveries made in different spheres of knowledge,” the Pope said.
“The convergence, neither sought nor provoked, of results of studies undertaken independently from each other constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.”
The theories of Darwin and other evolutionists about man’s origins were for long anathema to
theologians, who saw a conflict with the biblical account of creation in the Book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Most theologians no longer believe that the doctrine that God created the world and made man in his own image and the theory of evolution stand in each other’s way.
But fundamentalist Christians who take a literal approach to Genesis, known as “creationists,” have recently reopened the controversy, especially in the southern United States.
In Tennessee, where teacher John Scopes was famously fined $100 by a court in 1925 for teaching evolution in his class in what became known as the Monkey Trial, a bill that would have banned teaching evolution as fact was only narrowly voted down in the state legislature earlier this year.
The Vatican’s first substantive response to the theories of evolution was contained in an encyclical, Humani Generis, written in 1950 by the Pope Pius XII.
It cited no objection to discussing evolution while cautioning that the theory played into the hands of communists eager to cut God out of the equation.
Pope John Paul II has previously endorsed the 1950 document. He said Wednesday its essential point was that “if the human body has its origin in living material which pre-exists it, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.”
But he also said: “Today, nearly half a century after appearance of the encyclical, fresh knowledge leads to recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.”
The Pope’s acknowledgement was welcomed as a significant advance by scientists, even though some said it had come late.
“It will allow many Catholic scientists, who have been engaged for some time in research on human evolution, to continue their work without any censure or difficulty,” said Francesco Barone, a leading Italian scientific philosopher.

ZURICH, April 12, 1996 -Swiss publishers will require proof from suppliers that their timber has not come from destructive forest practices such as clearfelling, under a statement of intent announced.
Greenpeace Switzerland forest campaigner Christoph Wiedmer said the code could alter the source of Switzerland imports which totalled 409,192 tons in 1994. The imports comprise: 78,387 t from Sweden, 58,026 t Canada, 53,997 Finland, and 28,600 t from the USA.
Switzerland also imports 872,582 tons of paper and board including; 235,965t from Germany, Finland 153,475t, Sweden 134,674t and Austria 131,726t.
The new statement of intent was announced today by Greenpeace Switzerland and the Swiss Journals Group within the Swiss Newspaper and Periodical Publishers Association.
The statement of intent says the paper and pulp industry must find ways of abandoning the clear cutting of forests, of preparing the way for an ecological sound management of forests and for optimising the use of waste paper.
The two organisations are calling on paper manufacturers to exploit forests in a ecologically sound manner. They said particular consideration should be paid to the structure and composition of forests, to threatened species, to genetic diversity and to their dynamic behaviour and protective and climatic functions.
Journal Group spokesperson Thomas Kaehr said the publishing houses are calling on their paper suppliers to furnish proof of the origin of the paper and pulp they have used. They have committed to buy such eco-paper as soon as it is offered by paper manufacturers at a reasonable price. They are also campaigning for a maximum content of recycled paper.

Bratislava, May 30, 1996 - The protest demonstration of the GREENPEACE and Slovak NGO FOR MOTHER EARTH took place in front of the governmental hotel Borik in Bratislava, Slovakia. The environmentalists protested against the signature of the financial agreements about the completion of the nuclear power plant Mochovce between the Slovak monopoly energy producer Slovenske elektrarne (joinstock company) and several bank representatives from Germany, France, Czechia and Slovakia. The activists blocked the main door of the hotel with the banners saying Hands out of Mochovce (Hande weg von Mochovce), Stop Atom mafia!, Unsafe in Germany, safe in Slovakia (Unsicher in Deutschland, sicher in Slowakei). This was in protest against the permanent ignoration of alternative proposals on how to produce energy in Slovakia without nuclear power, with the financial saving at least 1.7 million USD. The use of energy savings and existing hydro and thermic power plants, gas steam units and cogeneration in energy production as well as the development of renewable energy sources would also eliminate the high risk of nuclear accidents and damaging of the environment.
“The Slovak government has permanently ignored the alternative proposals of the experts and environmentalists. The economic minister Jan Ducky does not allow the discussion in spite of his knowledge of the expert study of the Slovak energy sector proving that the gas steam energy production is much more economically viable than the Mochovce completion,” said Lubica Trubiniova, nuclear campaigner of GREENPEACE in Slovakia. In March, the Committee of the Environment of the Parliament asked minister Ducky to submit the complex analysis of the Slovak energy sector showing the economic advantages of the support for nuclear power. Instead of the presentation of such a document, the minister has supported the contract for the completion of Mochovce in total sum 900 million USD. The main supplier of the nuclear safety technology is the German company Siemens with the guarantees of the state insurance company Hermes. A part of the investment is covered by the German state bank Creditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau.
“The German government clearly supports double standards in nuclear safety in the West and the East. The same type of VVER reactors as in Mochovce was shutdown in Greifswald because it never can reach the Western safety standards,” presented Lubica Trubiniova. “While the Mochovce project is still being discussed in the Slovak Parliament, the German government already supported the undemocratic steps to promote the Mochovce completion.”

WASHINGTON, DC, January 16, 1996 (GP) Medical experts have confirmed that changes in global climate due to the burning of oil, coal and gas and the release of ozone-depleting chemicals are likely to accelerate the already unprecedented emergence of infectious diseases.
At the US National Press Club, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health released “Global Climate Change and Emerging Infectious Diseases” which confirms earlier reports from the world’s most eminent scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The JAMA study outlines global climate change and its effect on the emergence of infectious diseases, and analyzes the direct and indirect effects of climate change on water-borne infectious and toxin-related illnesses, such as cholera and shellfish poisoning.
The JAMA study confirms the December conclusion of the 2,500 experts on the IPCC that: “Climate change is likely to have wide ranging and mostly adverse impacts on human health, with significant loss of life.” They also concluded, “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.”
The new emerging infectious disease study explores possible compounding effects of global climate change and immune suppression caused by increasing levels of ultraviolet-B radiation (UV-B) striking the earth due to depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer.
“Scientists have already warned us that climate change may supercharge the depletion of the ozone layer,” said John Passacantando, Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based environmental group Ozone Action. “However, we must now also consider that as depletion worsens over populated areas, more UV-B radiation-induced immune suppression in humans may worsen the impact of increased infectious disease transmission due to climate change.”
The JAMA study indicates that the geographic distribution of insect-borne and other infectious disease is disproportionately felt in the developing countries of the tropics an subtropics. Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, encephalitis and other viruses are extremely sensitive to climatic fluctuations. The recent climate-related emergence of a new hantavirus in the United States demonstrates that developed countries can fall prey to emerging microbes.
“The health impacts of climate change caused by burning coal, oil and gas are clearly dangerous and unacceptable,” said Erwin Jackson, Climate Impacts Specialist from Greenpeace International. “These startling and alarming findings must urgently be followed action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in order to avoid these impacts. Governments must stop procrastinating otherwise they risk delaying action until it is too late.”
Greenpeace said that throughout the developed world emissions continue to rise in spite of the existing commitments in the UN Climate Convention to stabilize emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. At the negotiations underway to develop further agreements on emissions most Governments are delaying and prevaricating under pressure from the oil and coal industry and from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Mr Jackson recently published an article in the Medical Journal of Australia that identifies climatic changes as a causative factor behind changes in the distribution of disease carriers and agents in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia.

Oslo, 4.5.96 (GP) Norway ignored scientific findings and flouted international norms to set a quota of 425 on the NE Atlantic population of minke whales.
In 1982 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) adopted an indefinite moratorium on commercial whaling. The N.E. Atlantic minkes were classified a Protection Stock by the IWC in 1986 due to depletion by over hunting. Norway filed formal objections to both the moratorium and the Protected Stock classification in order to continue whaling. The Commission’s Scientific Committee (SC) accepted a Norwegian estimate of stock size in 1992 but later recognised that the estimate was wrong and agreed that there is currently no acceptable estimate and thus no basis for setting any quota. [1]
A working group of the SC met in Oslo last week to try and agree an estimate but its conclusions are secret until they have been reviewed by the whole SC in late June and either accepted or rejected.
“The Norwegian government has hijacked the scientific process,” said Katrin Brubakk of Greenpeace Norway. “It is pointless to convene an international group of scientists when Norway simply sets the quota it wants based on what its own scientists say.”
Norwegian scientists provided the incorrect population estimate in 1992.
“This makes a farce of international cooperation on whales,” said Brubakk. “Norway is ignoring the clearly expressed wishes of the IWC.”
At its 1995 meeting, when the scientific error was discovered, the IWC passed a resolution calling on Norway to “halt immediately all whaling activities under its jurisdiction”.
Norway persisted with the 1995 hunt despite the IWC’s call.
Norwegian whalers, who have disproportionate clout in Norwegian politics since the thinly populated north of Norway needs fewer voters to elect an MP, have been vociferous in demanding increase quotas and weakening of IWC regulations.
When Norway resumed whaling in 1992, Norwegian press [2] attributed the decision to polls showing that the government was losing ground in the north.
“Increasing the quota will fuel smuggling,” said Brubakk.
“Norway can’t even consume the number of whales they caught last year, let alone 425.”
After the 1995 hunt of 218 minkes the whalers were unable to sell their whole catch and had to freeze 50 tons. An April 1996 seizure of 6 tons of smuggled Norwegian whale meat in Japan led to the uncovering of a conspiracy to smuggle 60 tons to Japan, equivalent to 30 whales, almost 15% of the 1995 catch.
“The Norwegian government is putting national politics ahead of protecting the environment,” concluded Brubakk. “Mrs Brundtland should be ashamed.”

(1) The process followed by the Committee when accepting the abundance estimate at its 1992 meeting was not satisfactory. An important factor arising our of the experience of the last two years is that the Committee is developing procedures to minimise the likelihood that similar mistakes happen in the future.
(2) The Committee does not consider the 1992 estimate valid.
(3) The Committee is working extremely hard to produce an estimate for this area (both for the 1989 survey and for the survey to be undertaken this summer) and has made considerable progress towards this end on both theoretical and practical levels. The Committee has recommended a procedure and workplan that should allow it to provide an estimate of this stock at the next meeting (Annex M). This implies considerable work Committee members.
(4) The Committee is determined o avoid its previous mistake of prematurely accepting an abundance estimate. It agrees that at this meeting it is not in a position to provide an estimate
of abundance for this stock. It emphasises that nothing in its Report should be interpreted as implying any particular estimate or range.
(5) The Committee had agreed in 1992 that should the Commission so wish, the RMP could be used to calculate catch limits for the North Atlantic minke whales. In view of the lack of an abundance estimate for the Northeastern Atlantic, it believes this is no longer the case until an acceptable estimate is obtained.

Will Councillors Show Public Health Leadership in Monday’s vote?

TORONTO, April 26, 1996 (GP) A Greenpeace report released in London, England confirms the urgent need for Toronto City Council to move forward with a proposal to restrict it’s use of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic.
Councillors will vote on a motion from the city’s board of health to phase-out the use of PVC piping for water and sewage distribution.
The Greenpeace report, highlights the need for the proposal to be accepted by showing that it is unborn children who are most at risk from hormone disrupting chemicals used to make PVC products (most commonly known as vinyl).
“If councillors have further doubts about how they are going to vote they should read this report,” said Greenpeace toxics campaigner Morag Simpson. “They have the opportunity to take a huge step forward in public health leadership. This report confirms the urgent need for action—for the sake of our children.”
If city councillors decide to impose restrictions against vinyl piping, Toronto will become the first municipality in North America to take action against the proliferation of vinyl
products.
The Greenpeace report ,”Taking Back Our Stolen Future”, draws on the publication of the new book ‘Our Stolen Future’, co-authored by US Scientist, Dr Theo Colborn. Colborn has, for the first time, compiled global evidence of hormone disruption and its effects on humans and wildlife.
Hormone disrupting chemicals including dioxins, by-products of the manufacture and disposal of PVC, and phthalates, added to make the substance flexible, interfere with the hormone system by blocking or copying the action of particular hormones. Such interference at crucial stages of foetal development can damage the unborn child irreparably. Hormone disrupting chemicals have been linked to falling sperm counts, genital abnormalities and rising testicular cancer rates. They have long been associated with the disruption of wildlife hormone systems, including the feminisation of fish and changes in the mating behaviour of gulls.
Humans are most affected through the food chain; and unborn children absorb the toxins through the placenta and babies through their mother’s milk.
Dioxin is one of the most toxic substances known and a recognised carcinogen. It is produced during the manufacture and disposal of PVC. Phthalates, which can make up 60 per cent of the final product, are added to soften flexible PVC. They have a weaker but still significant effect on the hormone system and are the most abundant hormone disruptor being released into the environment.
The extent of damage caused to developing embryos is related to the timing of exposure and can be caused by minuscule amounts of some chemicals such as dioxin. Because of this it is not possible to calculate a “safe” dose. Therefore, the normal regulatory approach of risk assessment does not work. Only the precautionary principle (to which Canada is officially committed through the Montreal protocol ), calls for action to prevent the release of substances wherever there is evidence of harm.
“The future of human reproduction and development is too important to us all to prevaricate while waiting for absolute proof”, said Simpson. “Greenpeace, along with a strong coalition of health and environmental groups across the city, are hoping our politicians will vote in favour of public health.”
Other countries have already taken steps against PVC:
* 200 German communities and states operate restrictions on the use of PVC.
* The Sydney 2,000 Olympics is committed to environmental criteria including, “a commitment to minimise the use of PVC”.
* 6 Austrian states and regional capitals, including Vienna have resolutions to avoid PVC.
* Similar measures exist in Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands and Denmark.
* The Danish Government is currently considering proposals to phase out PVC by the year 2000.
* The Swedish Government has committed to a phase out of PVC with harmful additives.
* PVC which is the second most common plastic. The largest quantity is used in building materials such as cables, flooring, window frames, water pipes and wall papers. It is also used in furniture and children’s toys, packaging including packaging for food.

New York, N.Y. - “Monkeys” in spacesuits led members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a colorful protest of NASA’s repetitive and painful weightlessness experiments on primates outside the International Space Development Conference.
In its Bion 11 and 12 projects, NASA sinks electrodes into the arm and leg muscles of monkeys; wires from the electrodes are threaded beneath the monkeys’ skin and exit their bodies through a hole in their backs. The monkeys are then shot into space, where they are fully restrained as they orbit the Earth for 14 days straight.
NASA employees contacted PETA about the Bion 11 project after primates being used at NASA’s Ames Research Center died from inadequate anesthesia, hypothermia, and dehydration.
Says PETA’s Mary Beth Sweetland, “These hideous monkey experiments purport to study the effects of weightlessness on astronauts, when NASA already has data on human beings who have spent more than 400 days in space-far superior data to any from monkeys. The Bion project wastes millions of dollars, while thousands of NASA employees are being laid off. Bion needs to be blasted out of the skies.”
Bion 11 is a joint U.S./French/Russian project, funded entirely by the United States. On May 10, PETA testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Appropriations, asking for the elimination of Bion’s funding. PETA’s efforts to cancel the $33.2 million experiment continue on Capitol Hill.
From People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Chicago, IL - One day after Oprah Winfrey’s beef-free pledge caused live cattle futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to fall sharply, a “cow” bearing flowers and a thank-you card and a “chicken” carrying a “Save Me, Too” sign lined up outside Harpo Studios. Recently, Oprah also swore off pork after seeing Babe, but she still eats chickens and turkeys.
PETA’s “chicken” will urge Oprah to stop eating poultry for both ethical and health concerns. Not only do chickens in intensive factory farms suffer from overcrowding, heart attacks, and being killed cruelly, but they may also have transmitted Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)-believed to be linked to mad cow disease-to humans, according to an expert with the National Institutes of Health. There are 250 cases of CJD a year in the United States.
In addition, chicken has just as much fat and cholesterol as beef. As much as 90 percent of all chicken flesh is contaminated with salmonella, campylobacter, and other potentially deadly bacteria, resulting in some 4 million illnesses and up to 3,000 deaths per year. Meat-eating promotes the three biggest killers in this country: heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
Says PETA’s Tracy Reiman, “If beef doesn’t kill you, chicken will. The only way to ensure that meat is safe is to throw it out.”
From People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Manure Unloaded at “Meat Stinks” Protest
Des Moines, Iowa - A giant “pig,” carrying a banner reading, “Meat Stinks, led members of
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a massive manure dump outside the World Pork Expo on Thursday, June 6, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds (Gate 15).
While protesters unload their present for conference attendees, the giant “pig” will give away leaflets detailing the benefits of vegetarianism and the animal suffering inherent in flesh foods. Pigs on typical factory farms are confined 50 together in such small spaces that they often mutilate themselves from stress. In order to keep disease down and profits up, pigs are fed massive doses of hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides, which remain in their flesh and are passed on to consumers. Pigs are jabbed with hooks and electric shock prods in their eyes, mouths, and rectums to goad them onto trucks headed for the slaughterhouse. Each year in the United States, 92 million pigs are slaughtered for human consumption.
“Meat stinks for the environment, human health, and animals,” says PETA’s Violet Kelly. “From the farm to the freezer, life is hell for pigs.” Consumers can obtain easy, tasty, and free vegetarian recipes by calling 1-888-VEG-FOOD.
From People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Vegetarians Attack Wienermobile in Tempe
Arrests Expected at Pre-Super Bowl Event
Tempe, AZ - A “pig,” a “butcher,” and members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) greeted the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile during its appearance at the pre-Super Bowl event The NFL Experience.
Angry about Oscar Mayer’s attempts to use children to promote cruel intensive pig farming and slaughter, PETA activists pursued the Wienermobile across the country during Oscar Mayer’s 1995 “talent search.” PETA’s protesting “pig” was arrested at several Wienermobile stops, and the Wienermobile bowed out of appearances at other planned protest sites across the country. Demonstrations were held at Wienermobile stops in 20 cities throughout the United States.
“Eating the ‘leftover’ parts of diseased and disabled pigs isn’t something to get kids to sing about,” says PETA’s Tracy Reiman. “Consumers would lose their lunch if they knew what pig parts go into a wiener.” Pigs are forced to spend their entire lives in cramped, narrow stalls. When they reach the slaughterhouse, they are commonly unloaded with gaff-type metal hooks, which are jabbed into their eyes, mouths, and rectums. After intense confinement, many pigs are so weak they can barely walk. Each year, the pork industry mutilates and slaughters 92 million pigs on U.S. factory farms.
Consumers may obtain free vegetarian recipes by calling the PETA hotline, 1-800-355-VEGE.
From People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Portland, OR - Carrying a banner reading, “Meat Stinks,” a giant “cow” and members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Students for Animal Liberation faced off with beef trade bigwigs outside the Northwest Meat Processors Annual Convention.
PETA’s co-founder, Alex Pacheco, will accompany the “cow” and a “bloody butcher” who vow to disrupt the meeting.
Overcrowding of animals, common on factory farms, creates a prime environment for disease. To control contagion, animals are fed and sprayed with antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones, which remain in their bodies and are passed on to those who eat them.
“Painful dehorning, branding, and castration-performed without anesthesia-are standard practices within the industry,” says PETA’s Tracy Reiman. “From the farm to the freezer, life is hell for these animals.”
Each year, 8 million animals are mutilated and slaughtered for consumption in the United States.
From People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Yams Could Spell An End
To Taxpayer-Funded Cruelty To Horses
Women’s Health Initiative Estrogen Study
Targeted by Animal Lovers

June 12, 1996

Contact:

Megan Patterson 301-770-7444, ext. 464

Libby Frattaroli 617-567-0280

A ventriloquist cowboy walked into a little Oklahoma town and saw a rancher sitting on his porch with his dog:
Cowboy: Hey, cool dog. Mind if I speak to him?
Rancher: Dawgs cain’t talk.
Cowboy: Hey dog, how’s it going?
Dog: Doin’ alright.
Rancher: (Extreme look of shock)
Cowboy: Is this your owner? (pointing at rancher)
Dog: Yep.
Cowboy: How’s he treat you?
Dog: Real good. He walks me twice a day, feeds me great food, and takes me to the lake once a week to play.
Rancher: (Look of disbelief)
Cowboy: Mind if I talk to your horse?
Rancher: Horses cain’t talk!
Cowboy: Hey horse, how’s it goin?
Horse: Cool.
Rancher: (an even wilder look of shock)
Cowboy: Is this your owner? (pointing at rancher)
Horse: Yep.
Cowboy: How’s he treat you?
Horse: Pretty good, thanks for asking. He rides me regularly, brushes me down often, and keeps me in the barn to protect me from the elements.
Rancher: (total look of amazement)
Cowboy: Mind if I talk to your sheep?
Rancher: (gesticulating wildly, and hardly able to talk) Them sheep ain’t nothin’ but liars!

Excerpted from the ‘Notebook’ pages of The New Republic 1995:

Study Finds Sex, Pregnancy Link
Cornell Daily Sun, December 7, 1995
Whatever Their Motives, Moms Who Kill Kids Still Shock Us
Holland Sentinel, date unknown.
Survey Finds Dirtier Subways After Cleaning Jobs Were Cut
The New York Times, November 22
Larger Kangaroos Leap Farther, Researchers Find
The Los Angeles Times, November 2
‘Light’ Meals are Lower in Fat, Calories
Huntington Herald-Dispatch, November 30
Alcohol Ads Promote Drinking
The Hartford Courant, November 18
Malls Try to Attract Shoppers
The Baltimore Sun, October 22
Official: Only Rain Will Cure Drought
The Herald-News, Westpost, Massachusetts
Teenage Girls Often Have Babies Fathered by Men
The Sunday Oregonian, September 24
Low Wages Said Key to Poverty
Newsday, July 11
Man Shoots Neighbor With Machete
The Miami Herald, July 3
Tomatoes Come in Big, Little, Medium Sizes
The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Virginia, March 30
Dirty-Air Cities Far Deadlier Than Clean Ones, Study Shows
The New York Times, March 10
Man Run Over by Freight Train Dies
The Los Angeles Times, March 2
Scientists See Quakes in L.A. Future
The Oregonian, January 28
Wachtler Tells Graduates That Life in Jail is Demeaning
The Buffalo News, February 26
Free Advice: Bundle Up When Out in the Cold
Lexington Herald-Leader, January 26
Prosecution Paints O.J. as a Wife-Killer
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, January 25
Economist Uses Theory to Explain Economy
Collinsville Herald-Journal, February 8
Bible Church’s Focus is the Bible
Saint Augustine Record, Florida, December 3, 1994
Clinton Pledges Restraint in Use of Nuclear Weapons
Cedar Rapids Gazette, April 6
Discoveries: Older Blacks Have Edge in Longevity
The Chicago Tribune, March 5
Court Rules Boxer Shorts Are Indeed Underwear
Journal of Commerce, April 20
Biting Nails Can Be Sign of Tenseness in a Person
The Daily Gazette of Schenectady, New York, May 2
Lack of Brains Hinders Research
The Columbus Dispatch, April 16
Chick Accuses Some of Her Male Colleagues of Sexism
“Accusing some of her male colleagues of sexism, Los Angeles Councilwoman Laura Chick lashed out at City Hall on Thursday as [sic] the ‘most sexist good-old-boys work environment that I’ve ever been in.’ ...”
The Los Angeles Times, June 23
How We Feel About Ourselves is the Core of Self-Esteem, Says Author Louise Hart
Boulder, Colorado, Sunday Camera, February 5
Fish Lurk in Streams
Rochester, New York, Democrat & Chronicle, January 29
And more headlines from elsewhere (sorry no sources):
Clinton Renames Greenspan
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
Police Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers
Safety experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted
Survivor Of Siamese Twins Joins Parents
Stud Tires Out
Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over
Soviet Virgin Lands Short Of Goal Again
Lung Cancer In Women Mushrooms
Eye Drops Off Shelf
Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
Plane Too Close To Ground, Crash Probe Told
Miners Refuse To Work After Death
Juvenile Court To Try Shooting Defendant
Stolen Painting Found By Tree
Two Soviet Ships Collide, One Dies

1. Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 5:00 and then bring it to me. The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.
2. If it’s really a “rush” job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it’s going. That helps.
3. Always leave without telling anyone where you’re going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.
4. If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books or supplies, don’t open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors is good training.
5. If you give me more than one job to do, don’t tell me which is the priority. Let me guess.
6. Do your best to keep me late. I like the office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do.
7. If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. Leaks like that could cost me a promotion.
8. If you don’t like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversation.
9. If you have special instructions for a job, don’t write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done.
10. Never introduce me to the people you’re with. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.
11. Be nice to me only when the job I’m doing for you could really change your life.
12. Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it’s nice to know someone less fortunate.

My young brother asked me what happens after we die. I told him we get buried under a bunch of dirt and worms eat our bodies. I guess I should have told him the truth-that most of us go to Hell and burn eternally-but I didn’t want to upset him. Age 10
When I go to heaven, I want to see my grandpa again. But he better have lost the nose hair and the old-man smell. Age 5
I once heard the voice of God. It said “Vrrrrmmmmm.” Unless it was just a lawn mower. Age 11
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy watching paint dry. I imagine that the wet paint is a big freshwater lake that is the only source of water for some tiny cities by the lake. As the lake gets drier, the population gets more desperate, and sometimes there are water riots. Once there was a big fire and everyone died. Age 13
I like to go down to the dog pound and pretend that I’ve found my dog. Then I tell them to kill it anyway because I already gave away all of his stuff. Dog people sure don’t have a sense of humor. Age 14
I believe you should live each day as if it is your last, which is why I don’t have any clean laundry because, come on, who wants to wash clothes on the last day of their life? Age 15
It sure would be nice if we got a day off for the president’s birthday, like they do for the queen. Of course, then we would have a lot of people voting for a candidate born on July 3 or December 26, just for the long weekends. Age 8
As you make your way through this hectic world of ours, set aside a few minutes each day. At the end of the year, you’ll have a couple of days saved up. Age 7
Democracy is a beautiful thing, except for that part about letting just any old yokel vote. Age 10
Home is where the house is. Age 6
Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher. That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number. Age 15
It would be terrible if the Red Cross Bloodmobile got into an accident. No, wait. That would be good because if anyone needed it, the blood would be right there. Age 5
Give me the strength to change the things I can, the grace to accept the things I cannot, and a great big bag of money. Age 13
I bet living in a nudist colony takes all the fun out of Halloween. Age 13
For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That’s what happens to cheese when you leave it out. Age 6
Think of the biggest number you can. Now add five. Then, imagine if you had that many Twinkies. Wow, that’s five more than the biggest number you could come up with! Age 6
The only stupid question is the one that is never asked, except maybe “Don’t you think it is about time you audited my return?” or “Isn’t it morally wrong to give me a warning when, in fact, I was speeding?” Age 15
Once, I wept for I had no shoes. Then I came upon a man who had no feet. So I took his shoes. I mean, it’s not like he really needed them, right? Age 15
I often wonder how come John Tesh isn’t as popular a singer as some people think he should be. Then, I remember it’s because he sucks. Age 15
If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the looting started. Age 15

Getting married is very much like going to a continental restaurant with friends. You order what you want, then when you see what
the other fellow has, you wish you had ordered that.
At the cocktail party, one woman said to another, “Aren’t you wearing your wedding ring on the wrong finger?” The other replied, “Yes I am, I married the wrong man.”
Man is incomplete until he is married. Then he is really finished.
Marriage is an institution in which a man loses his bachelor’s degree and the woman gets her master’s.
A little boy asked his father, “Daddy, how much does it cost to get married?” And the father replied, “I don’t know, son, I’m still paying for it.”
Young Son: Is it true, Dad, I heard that in some parts of Africa a man doesn’t know his wife until he marries her? Dad: That happens in most countries, son.
Then there was a man who said, “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; and then it was too late.
A happy marriage is a matter of give and take; the husband gives and the wife takes.
Three rings: Engagement ring, Wedding ring, Suffering.
When a newly married man looks happy we know why. But when a ten-year married man looks happy - we wonder why.
Married life is very frustrating. In the first year of marriage, the man speaks and the woman listens. In the second year, the woman speaks and the man listens. In the third year, they both speak and the neighbours listen.
After a quarrel, a wife said to her husband, “You know, I was a fool when I married you.” And the husband replied, “Yes, dear, but I was in love and didn’t notice it.”
It doesn’t matter how often a married man changes his job, he still ends up with the same boss.
A man inserted an ‘ad’ in the classifieds: “Wife wanted”. Next day he received a hundred letters. They all said the same thing: “You can have mine.”
When a man opens the door of his car for his wife, you can be sure of one thing: either the car is new or the wife.

I greatly enjoyed your poems, particularly “the carpet factory, the shoes.”
If you’re single and good-looking, what don’t you come to my place this summer!? My girlfriend dumped me one month ago. I greatly loved her, I sent her a letter to tell her I loved her - I even invited her to my place for Christmas - but she never responded. She is from my hometown and her cousin had been my first girlfriend when I was 16.
We could maybe fall in love together. I am a good-looking fellow, you know, the son of a physician, never married, no kids, shoveling snow in the winter and cutting grass during the summer. I work in a youth camp as a maintenance worker.
Here, you know, the lakes are beautiful and numerous. Do you like swimming? Do you like canoeing under the sun when it’s 35 degrees Celsius outside in July? It’s very peaceful down here, no violence, no crimes, the days are cold in winter and warm in summer.
Do you like biking? Behind my house there is a biking track as long as 200 kilometers It is reserved for biking and running in summer and cross-country skiing in winter.
People here are simple and open-hearted. I left my hometown at 18, spent 7 years in Ottawa, 10 years in Montreal, then in 1989 I came back into my hometown area. Anyways, Janet, once again, I really enjoy your poetry and... Drop me a line if you have the time.
Daniel Reid
editor’s note: I swear, this man has never met me before in my life. God, I think this is further evidence of what growing up in Canada can do for a person. “My girlfriend is about to put a restraining order on me, so I though I’d write you...” Don’t bother, pal. Here’s a hint: don’t proposition me, ever, especially if you’re nearly twice my age or dated cousins of exes when you ran out of options. When you said simple and open-hearted I think you meant boring and desperate. A biking track behind your house, huh? I can see it now, wooded secluded areas where you hide the bodies of the little boys you abduct from the youth center you work at. Geesh, this is the winner for most pathetic letter.
p.s.: Kids, don’t try this at home, or you’ll get even more humiliation than this freak did.

I received Children, Churches and Daddies just the other day, and you were right about the ‘96 issues being HUGE. Actually, I wasn’t expecting something quite that large, but then, I don’t really know what I was expecting either. Anyway, though, I really enjoyed it - not just the poetry, but everything about it, really, especially the articles and letters about various things - it was interesting, too, reading about the origin of the title of your Scars Publications.
With the poetry you included, I really enjoyed the pieces by Alexandria Rand, C Ra McGuirt, Lyn Lifshin, Mark Sonnenfeld (his writing style is so engaging) and Greg Kosmicki. I also liked your poems “i want love” and “dandelions for a passing stranger.”

i want love

i’m laying here in bed
and i’m looking over at him

he’s sound asleep
perfectly happy

you know, i can’t remember
the last time he’s held me

he has no idea what i’m thinking
he’s perfectly content this way

i decided to spend the rest
of my life with him

he’s my best friend
but i don’t know if he loves me

damnit
i want love

by Janet Kuypers

I loved my silly red tricycle, the type that every suburban three year old probably had. I would play on my driveway, riding past the evergreens, past the white mailbox... But I’d usually turn around before I rode past the gravel and onto the neighbor’s driveway and ride back toward the security of my own garage. I would sometomes play on the neighbor’s driveway, since it was on a hill. I would scale to the top by their maroon colored garage, navigate my trusted tricycle around by its rusted handlebars, hop on the seat and zoom downhill. But those times were only for when I thought no one was home at their house, and for when I was feeling particularly adventurous.
Once I was riding up and down my own driveway and I saw another little girl walking on the neighbor’s yard. I watched her approach my driveway, walking on the edge of our lawn. I was fascinated by this girl. There was a new face to look at - a girl with long blonde hair, so different from my own. She came from the lawn behind my house and was walking along the side of my driveway, away from my home. I just watched her walk. When she passed me, I looked over to the neighbor’s yard. Our lawn was full of green grass. Theirs was full of dandelions. I rode over to the side of my driveway, got off my tricycle, hopped over the ledge and ran onto the neighbor’s lawn. I picked a dandelion.
I quickly ran back to my tricycle. It patiently waited there, just where I left it... I pedaled fiercely to the end of my driveway, and caught up with that little girl. Still sitting on my tricycle, I looked up at her until she stopped walking right in front of me. I held up the dandelion to her.
I thought “crazy” and “philosophy monthly” were very good, too, and I loved that title “breast cancer in her coffee.” Well, maybe “loved” is too strong a word to use, but it was really a great title.
Thanks again for the great issue of cc+d!
Joseph Verrilli
editor’s note: thanks for the great comments. Preaise is always appreciated here. If you’d like to give us or any of the writers appearing in our issues some comments please email them to ccandd@shout.net or snail mail them to the address on our masthead.
So here is the original written piece that prompted the name “Scars publications and Design”:

by Janet Kuypers

Like when the Grossman’s German shepherd bit the inside of my knee. I was babysitting two girls and a dog named “Rosco.” I remember being pushed to the floor by the dog, I was on my back, kicking, as this dog was gnawing on my leg, and I remember thinking, “I can’t believe a dog named Rosco is attacking me.” And I was thinking that I had to be strong for those two little girls, who were watching it all. I couldn’t cry.
Or when I stepped off Scott’s motorcycle at 2:00 a.m. and burned my calf on the exhaust pipe. I was drunk when he was driving and I was careless when I swung my leg over the back. It didn’t even hurt when I did it, but the next day it blistered and peeled; it looked inhuman. I had to bandage it for weeks. It hurt like hell.
When I was little, roller skating in my driveway, and I fell. My parents yelled at me, “Did you crack the sidewalk?”
When I was kissing someone, and I scraped my right knee against the wall. Or maybe it was the carpet. When someone asks me what that scar is from, I tell them I fell.
Or when I was riding my bicycle and I fell when my front wheel skidded in the gravel. I had to walk home. Blood was dripping from my elbow to my wrist; I remember thinking that the blood looked thick, but that nothing hurt. I sat on the toilet seat cover while my sister cleaned me up. It was a small bathroom. I felt like the walls could have fallen in on me at any time. Years later, and I can still see the dirt under my skin on my elbows.
Or when I was five years old and my dad called me an ass-hole because I made a mess in the living room. I didn’t.
Like when I scratched my chin when I had the chicken pox.

by Janet Kuypers

my phone rang earlier today
and I picked it up and said “hello”
and a man on the other end said,
Is this Janet Kuypers?
and I said, “Yes, it is, may I ask
who is calling?”
and he said, Yeah, hi, this is
George Washington, and I’m sitting here
with Jefferson and we wanted to
tell you a few things. And I said
“Why me?” And he said Excuse me,
I believe I said I was the one
that wanted to do the talking.
God, that’s the problem with
Americans nowadays. They’re so
damn rude. And I said, “You know,
you really didn’t have to use
language like that,” and he said,
Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just I’ve been
dead so long, I lose all control
of my manners. Well, anyway, we just
wanted to tell you some stuff. Now,
you know that we really didn’t have
much of an idea of what we were
doing when we were starting up
this country here, we didn’t have
much experience in creating
bodies of power, so I could understand
how our Constitution could be
misconstrued

and then he put in a dramatic pause
and said,
but when we said people had
a right to bear arms
we meant to protect themselves
from a government gone wrong
and not so you could kill
and innocent person
for twenty dollars cash
and when we said freedom of
religion we included the separation
of church and state because freedom
of religion could also mean freedom
from religion
and when we said freedom of speech
we had no idea you’d be
burning a flag
or painting pictures of Christ
doused in urine
or photographing people with
whips up their respective anatomies
but hell, I guess we’ve got to
grin and bear it
because if we ban that
the next thing they’ll ban is books
and we can’t have that
and I said, “But there are schools
that have books banned, George.”
And he said Oh.

Janet,

George called you too, huh? Damn if he wasn’t cussing up a storm about the recent government shutdowns. He kept saying that only the People were supposed to be doing stuff like that, not the government itself. It did no good to remind him that people generally know very little and could not care less about the inner workings of government machinery. All he did was go on some tangent about how the priniciple of government is based (or supposed to be based) on the idea that “it” represents the People through representation, and that through the democratic process justice and goodness is guaranteed to prevail, and the People will prosper as a result. He reminded me of what Confucius said:
Equity is the treasure of the states.
And I told him that I never heard of such a thing. This made him really upset. “Probably got banned in one of those books Janet was talking about,” he muttered glumly. What a strange duck he was! The idea that a People’s Representative would seek, during the term of his or her office, to do more harm than good was completely and utterly unfathomable to him. Anyway, Janet, if ol’ Georgie should ever call you again, see if you can get his number. I have a feeling that we’re not the only ones who would like to have a little chat with the guy whose face is on a billion dollar bills.

by Janet Kuypers

I had a dream the other night
I was walking down the street in the city
and a man came up to me
a skinny man, he lost his hair
and he walked right up to me
and told me no one cares anymore
and he took my hand
and asked me to care about him
“I’m not supposed to be like this” he said
“I’m not homeless, you know
I have AIDS”
and I wanted to tell him that
someone did care,
that he didn’t have to die alone,
but you know how sometimes
you can’t do things in your dream
no matter how hard you try,
well, my mouth was open, wide open,
but no words were coming out

you know, I’m afraid to go to sleep tonight
I’m afraid that a pregnant woman
will come up to me
and ask me for a hanger
and I’ll tell her there has to be another way
and she’ll say this is the way she chooses

I’m afraid a woman will come up to me
and tell me she doesn’t want to live
because she’s just been raped
and her world doesn’t make sense anymore
and I’ll tell her that she can make it
that one in three women are raped in their lifetime
and they all make it
and besides, the world doesn’t make sense
to anyone
and she’ll say that doesn’t make me
feel any better

and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to
walk down that city street again
without it looking like a Quentin Tarentino movie
where everyone is pointing guns at each other
ys, Mr. NRA
you are right
I feel so much safer
knowing everyone out there has a gun
that there are more gun shops than gas stations
and that everyone is so willing
to do the killing

You know, it has often occurred to me that if there were less gunshots fired on the Big Screen and more acts of altruism shown, we might not have less crime (see bad economic policy/economic disparity versus action films as true cause of violent crime) but we would at least have examples of human beings whose actions truly merit admiration. In my opinion, “Pulp Fiction” wasn’t a bad movie at all. Tarentino knows how to keep things interesting. But perhaps IF there were more films such as Akira Kurosawa’s “Red Beard” there wouldn’t be nearly as much interest in depravity (however entertaining it is to watch) as there would be in overcoming one’s faults in order to become a better person...which benefits society as a whole where individuals are concerned.

Re “Child labor”:

the poem: “the carpet factory, the shoes”

by Janet Kuypers

i heard a story today
about a little boy
one of many who was enslaved
by his country
in child labor

in this case
he was working
for a carpet factory

he managed to escape
he told his story
to the world
he was a hero at ten

put the people from the factory
held a grudge
and today i heard
that the little boy
was shot and killed
on the street
he was twelve

and eugene complains to me
when i buy shoes
that are made in china

now i have to think
did somebody
have to die for these

will somebody have to die
for these

Wee said. I know a few kids right here in Minneapolis who work twelve hour shift seven days a week. For less than seven dollars an hour. At a factory which makes junk mail and newspaper advertisements and inserts. Some of these kids are fresh out of school (I worked there for three months as a janitor and got to know them a bit) whose eighteen-year-old minds are fresh and easily aquire new ideas. It is my belief that any of them, in another time and place, could just as easily have been Henry David Thoreaus or Einsteins or Ghengis Khans for that matter, but instead they stand in front of machines for half their lives helping their employers and various other Big Players make their wallets fatter, while these kids struggle to pay the bills.
While talking to an older fellow named Ron about it, he simply said life is not fair...and that people are wrong to call such operations “profiteering.” He said that’s “commie talk,” that here in America it’s called Entrepreneurship, or Capitalism.
Neil Cunningham

ed: Thanks for the great comments, and for actually thinking, which I still personally believe is something that most people would prefer to relinquish from their list of responsibilities. Other than the fact that it was slave labor/child labor, the company you mention has every right to do what they wish with their company and their employees, if the employees allow it. It’s illegal to physically abuse employees via slave labor, and by law one must be sixteen to be employed. Otherwise you’re an adult that can stand up for your rights, and if you don’t like a job, you can find another, or simply leave.
And yes, Pulp Fiction was a good movie, and maybe violence doesn’t cause crime in our society. I must admit, though, that Pulp Fiction had characters which while evil were also intelligent and witty; they discussed etiquette, philosophy and religion over the course of this one day. I thought that movie was more mentally stimulating than any Stallone flick, or Van Damme, or Schwartzenager, or however you spell it. Movies they do reduce violence to one witty (to the least common denominator, of course) punch line and one easy-to-shoot bullet with no consequences.
And sorry, but George hasn’t called back - I think after seeing the rest of America give up, maybe he’s started to give up, too.

by Ann Alexander

Allison Ward administered the lethal combination of the narcotic and barbiturate cocktail which Eric Johnston consumed willingly. He then lay back in his bed, his young body emaciated with disease and he waited to feel the effects of the drugs. Eric was tired, too weak to continue the struggle against a relentless disease and he welcomed death. It was his choice and that of his mother, Elizabeth, the only family he had for support. He had come home to be in familiar surroundings and now he took comfort in being so near to those things which had once been such a big part of his life.
His high school graduation portrait, so full of youthful vigor and eagerness to begin life, still hung on the wall. Below that was the Bidwell High School Class of ‘79 gathered together for a final picture on the bleachers edging the football field. He wanted to reach out and touch them as his mind filled with the memories of football games, parties, and Friday night cruising. It all seemed so real yet so distant.
He continued to view the evidence of his life as through a video camera, an interested observer but no longer a participant: He’d always been a 49er fan and the team’s red, white and gold banner stretched over his old dresser. Eric even had a red and white jersey with the number 16 printed on the front and back, Joe Montana’s number. He would never see them play again. A large, stuffed Snoopy dog stood in the corner beside the sliding closet door. The white was now a brownish color, one ear was ripped and both eyeballs were missing but Snoopy had been given to him for his fifth birthday by his grandfather and had been his companion through his childhood years. Eric’s eyes roved about the room, taking in the faded curtains with their torn lace, the tinted blue light fixture centered on the ceiling, the printed wallpaper of little boats and trains. He was at home.
Eric’s thinking started to fog and he began to have trouble focusing his eyes which now rested on his mother. She was trying to smile through her tears as she held tightly to his hand.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” it was hard for Eric to speak, “This way is best. We’ll meet again on the other side.” Those were his last words before his mind entered unconsciousness.
Elizabeth Johnston’s tears flowed freely as her son’s respirations became less frequent and more shallow but she continued to hold his hand. Allison Ward held onto Elizabeth’s other hand, attempting to offer tangible strength and comfort. But these were not the only attendants at Eric’s bedside. Allison and Elizabeth were accompanied by Barbara “Babs” Carson and Misty Yerrington and these four women all joined hands while gently beginning to sing, “Jesus keep me near the cross....”
The evening light had faded into night leaving the bedroom aglow in soft candlelight from votive candles lit in memory of others who had died a similar death. Giant shadows moved in reflection on the walls as the women swayed in time with their singing, finishing the old hymn “....till my raptured soul shall find rest beyond the river.” And Eric Johnston breathed his last.
The room was silent for a long while, each woman alone with her individual thoughts and prayers. But the deed was done and it was time to disperse. Allison left first, followed by Babs then Misty at fifteen minute intervals. Elizabeth was left alone with her son. Though her heart was anguished, she knew she’d done the right thing. Eric’s suffering was over, not drawn out for agonizing months just waiting for the inevitable. He was at peace now and though Elizabeth took comfort in this, she could not hold back the tears which she shed over her son’s deathbed.
When Elizabeth regained enough composure and self control, she made the appropriate phone calls to the doctor and the local mortuary. Eric had been under a doctor’s care and there would be no cause for an autopsy. The direct cause of death was a pneumo carinii infection.
After they had taken away her son’s body, Elizabeth was left alone in her house. This is what she wanted, to be alone in her grief. Allison, Babs, and Misty had all offered to come stay with her but Elizabeth had refused. Alone now, she wandered through the house, turning on the lights, letting past memories fill her as the light did their home - Eric’s little-boy laughter and cries, the pitter-patter of his bare feet, the loud music of his teen years and worry-filled late nights. He’d been a happy boy yet she’d known he was different and Bidwell, his home town, was too small for him. So as a young man, he moved away to “The City” where his heart and talent could flourish, where he could keep his pride and self-respect intact. But when he finally returned home it was in defeat, stricken down in the end stages of Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome. And Bidwell was still too small for him. There were no support groups for him or his mother, his old friends had made themselves scarce, and their neighbors were afraid of him. So Eric and his mother, Elizabeth, were isolated in their time of physical, emotional, and spiritual need.
But they had a choice and could score one more victory before going down. The disease was destroying Eric’s body but he would not let it destroy his mind and spirit. He chose his time of death when there was no more purpose or pleasure in life. Elizabeth supported his decision in philosophy as well as in deed. For them, this way was best.

crazy

Janet Kuypers

This dialogue is transcribed from repeated visits with a patient in Aaronsville Correctional Center in West Virginia. Madeline*, a thirty-six year old woman, was sentenced to life imprisonment after the brutal slaying of her boyfriend during sexual intercourse. According to police reports, Madeline sat with the remains of the man for three days after the murder until police arrived on the scene. They found her in the same room as the body, still coated with blood and malnourished. Three doctors studied her behavior for a total period of eight months, and the unanimous conclusion they reached was that Madeline was not of sound mind when she committed the act, which involved an ice pick, an oak board from the back of a chair, and eventually a chef’s knife. Furthermore, she continued to show signs of both paranoia and delusions of grandeur long after the murder, swaying back and forth between the two, much like manic depression.
For three and a half years Madeline has stayed at the Aaronsville Correctional Center, and she has shown no signs of behavioral improvement. She stays in a room by herself, usually playing solitaire on her bed. She talks to herself regularly and out loud, usually in a slight Southern accent, although not in a very loud tone, according to surveillance videotape. Her family abandoned her after the murder. Occasionally she requests newspapers to read, but she is usually denied them. She never received visitors, until these sessions with myself.
The following excerpts are from dialogues I have had with her, although I am tempted to say that they are monologues. She wasn’t very interested in speaking with me, rather, she was more interested in opening herself up to someone for the first time in years, someone who was willing to listen. At times I began to feel like a surrogate parent. I try not to think of what will happen when our sessions end.
* Madeline is not her real name.

Hitler’s Religious Beliefs and Fanaticism

(Selected quotes from Mein Kampf and Hitler’s henchmen)

People often make the claim that Adolph Hitler adhered to Atheism, Humanism or that his religion involved ancient Nordic pagan mythology. None of these fanciful and wrong ideas hold. Although one of Hitler’s henchmen, Alfred Rosenberg, did undertake a campaign of Nordic mythological propaganda, Hitler and most of his henchmen did not believe in it (see the last part of this text).
Many American books, television documentaries, and Sunday sermons that preach of Hitler’s “evil” have eliminated Hitler’s god for their Christian audiences, but one only has to read from his own writings to appreciate that his God equals the same God of the Bible. Hitler held many hysterical beliefs which not only include, God and Providence but also Fate, Social Darwinism, and politics. He spoke, unashamedly, about God, fanaticism, idealism, dogma, and the power of propaganda. Hitler held strong faith in all his convictions. He justified his fight for the German people and against Jews by using Godly and Biblical reasoning. Indeed, one of his most revealing statements makes this quite clear:
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: *by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.*”
Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible’s God. He got raised as a Catholic and went to a Catholic school. Much of his philosophy came right out of the Bible, and more influentially, from the Christian Social movement. The German Christian Social movement remarkably resembles the Christian Right movement in America today.
Hitler’s anti-Semitism grew from his Christian education. Christian Germany in his time took for granted the belief that Jews held an inferior status to German Christians. Jewish hatred did not spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests, and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, “On the Jews and their Lies,” Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until World War II. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther.
Hitler did not have to prove his belief in God, as so many American Christians do now. He did not have to justify his Godly belief against an Atheist movement. He took his beliefs for granted just as most Germans did. He did not have to preach God to his audience. His thrust aimed at politics, not religion. Although, through his politics he had wanted to create a German Reich Church to instill dogmatic beliefs in the German populace.
Future generation should always remember that Adolph Hitler could not have come into power without the support of Christian believing people.
The following quotes provides some of Hitler’s expressions of his belief in religion, faith, fanaticism, Providence, and even a few of his paraphrasing of the Bible. It by no means represents the totality of Hitler’s concerns. To realize the full context of these quotes, I implore the reader to read Mein Kampf.
The end of this text provides a few quotes from Hitler’s henchmen. This text represents but only a sampling of the full extent of the influence of Christianity upon the Third Reich. These quotes provide a quick source of Hitler’s and the Nazi leaders belief in God.
Lastly, an addendum includes quotes from Protestant leader, Martin Luther. Although Hitler carried out atrocities against the Jews, Martin Luther and generations of following believers set the stage for World War II and the Holocaust.
The purpose of this paper intends to reveal the dangers of belief-systems, and in no way attempts to give endorsement against the Jewish people.

Volume 1, Chapter 1, In the House of My Parents

—-
Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Note: “Their sword will become our plow” appears to paraphrase
Micah 4:3 about beating swords into ploughshares, but his tears of
war more resembles Joel 3:9-10 “Beat your plowshares into
swords.”
I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were the battlefields on which the ‘conflicts’ which exist everywhere in life were decided.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one’s nationality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 2, Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna
—-
...God have mercy!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Fate must bring retribution, unless men conciliate Fate while there is still time.
How thankful I am today to the Providence which sent me to that school!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Thus my faith grew that my beautiful dream for the future would become reality after all, even though this might require long years.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word ‘Jew,’ with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions.... For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought.
At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna’s destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Note: Karl Lueger (1844-1910) belonged as a member of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party, he became mayor of Vienna and kept his post until his death.)
The man and the movement seemed ‘reactionary’ in my eyes. My common sense of justice, however, forced me to change this judgment in proportion as I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work; and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times.
-Adolf Hitler speaking about Dr. Karl Lueger (Mein Kampf)
How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement!
My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: *by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.*
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 3 General Political Considerations Based on My Vienna Period
—-
A man does not die for something which he himself does not believe in.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Just as a man’s denominational orientation is the result of upbringing, and only the religious need as such slumbers in his soul, the political opinion of the masses represents nothing but the final result of an incredibly tenacious and thorough manipulation of their mind and soul.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
God forbid!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Sooner will a camel pass through a needle’s eye than a great man be ‘discovered’ by an election.
-Adolf Hitler with his twist on Mark 10:25 (Mein Kampf)
Thank the Lord, Germanic democracy means just this: that any old climber or moral slacker cannot rise by devious paths to govern his national comrades, but that, by the very greatness of the responsibility to be assumed, incompetents and weaklings are frightened of.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For by employing religious force in the service of its political considerations, the crown aroused a spirit which at that outset it had not considered possible.
-Adolf Hitler on the state of Rome (Mein Kampf)
For when a people is not willing or able to fight for its existence- Providence in its eternal justice has decreed that people’s end.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party... was to assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Even less could I understand how the Christian Social Party at this same period could achieve such immense power. At that time it had just reached the apogee of its glory.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
But the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone.
Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The hard struggle which the Pan-Germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The root of the whole evil lay, particularly in Schonerer’s opinion, in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, and that for this very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Protestantism as such is a better defender of the interests of Germanism, in so far as this is grounded in its genesis and later tradition; it fails, however, in the moment when this defense of national interests must take place in a province which is either absent from the general line of its ideological world and traditional development, or is for some reason rejected.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Thus, Protestantism will always stand up for the advancement of all Germans as such, as long as matters of inner purity or national deepening as well as German freedom are involved, since all these things have a firm foundation in its own being; but it combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people fulfilled their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, both together and particularly at the first flare, there really existed in both camps but a single holy German Reich, for whose existence and future each man turned to his own heaven.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Verily a man cannot serve two masters. And I consider the foundation or destruction of a religion far greater than the foundation or destruction of a state, let alone a party.
-Adolf Hitler speaking like Jesus in Matthew 6:24 (Mein Kampf)
Heaven will smile on us again.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political parties.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
*For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!*
-Adolf Hitler [the original comes in italics] (Mein Kampf)
In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people.
-Adolf Hitler speaking about the leader of the Christian Social movement (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 4, Munich
—-
But the people on top made a cult of the ‘ally,’ as if it were the Golden Calf.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The Golden calf occurs in Exodus 32:1-4)
Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
We must, therefore, coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
...a man does not die for business, but for ideals.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 5, The World War
—-
Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I had so often sung ‘Deutschland u:ber Alles’ and shouted ‘Heil’ at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Indeed, nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure, and not seldom end with the exact opposite of the desired result...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 6, War Propaganda
—-
I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger’s time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Certainly we don’t have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord’s image.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-Volume 1, Chapter 7, The Revolution
—-
More than once I was tormented by the thought that if Providence had put me in the place of the incapable of criminal incompetents or scoundrels in our propaganda service, our battle with Destiny would have taken a different turn.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord’s grace smiled on His ungrateful children.
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
...we must pray to the Almighty not to refuse His blessing to this change and not to abandon our people in the times to come.
-Hitler recalling a priest’s speech after the defeat of WWI (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 8, The Beginning of My Political Activity
—-
As soon as the theoretician attempts to take account of so-called ‘utility’ and ‘reality’ instead of absolute truth, his work will cease to be a polar star of seeking humanity and instead will become a prescription for everyday life.
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea...
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to depend on human beings...
If this were not so, the founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth... In its workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 10, Causes of the Collapse
—-
Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of the heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hastily and indifferently, people tried to pass by the unpleasant truths, as though by such an attitude events could be undone. No, the fact that our big city population is growing more and more prostituted in its love life cannot just be denied out of existence; it simply is so.
...it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation. But this applies only to profanation of the blood and the race.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Avenged to the tenth generation appears in Deuteronomy 23:2-3)
Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles.
The first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the ‘image’ of God.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...
Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
-Adolf Hitler sounding like the Moral Majority (Mein Kampf)
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The works of Mortiz von Schwind, or of a Bo:cklin, were also an inner experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
How widespread the general disunity was growing is shown by an examination of religious conditions before the War. Here, too, a unified and effective philosophical conviction had long since been lost in large sections of the nation. In this the members officially breaking away from the churches play a less important role than those who are completely indifferent.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine- an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular- right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply so their own ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Also noteworthy is the increasingly violent struggle against the dogmatic foundations of the various churches without which in this human world the practical existence of a religious faith is not conceivable.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all efficacy.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The attack against dogmas as such, therefore, strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state, and , as the latter would end in a total anarchy of the state, the former would end in a worthless religious nihilism.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 11, Nation and Race
—-
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;
(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator. And as a sin this act is rewarded.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! ‘Man’s role is to overcome Nature!’
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Man’s dominion over earth appears in Genesis 1:26)
...the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(See Genesis Chapter 3)
...that is why the prophet seldom has any honor in his own country.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(“For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country.” John 4:44)
The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties- and this against their own nation.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
At times of the bitterest distress, fury against him finally breaks out, and the plundered and ruined masses begin to defend themselves against the scourge of God.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(See Isaiah 63)
This game is repeated again and again, and in it the role of the so-called ‘German princes’ is just as miserable as that of the Jews themselves. These lords were really God’s punishment for their beloved peoples and find their parallels only in the various ministers of the present time.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
They [German princes] made a pact with the devil and landed in hell.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If we consider how greatly he has sinned against the masses in the course of the centuries, how he has squeezed and sucked the blood again and again; if furthermore, we consider how the people gradually learned to hate him for this, and ended up by regarding his existence as nothing but punishment of Heaven for the other peoples, we can understand how hard this shift must be for the Jew.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
First, therefore, he goes about making up to the people for his previous sins against them. He begins his career as the ‘benefactor’ of mankind. Since his new benevolence has a practical foundation, that the left hand should not know what the right hand giveth; no, whether he likes it or not, he must reconcile himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he feels the sufferings of the masses and all the sacrifices that he himself is making to combat them.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The left/right hand paraphrase appears to come from Matthew 6:3)
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a Jewess.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Peoples which bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Providence did not bestow her reward on the victorious sword, but followed the law of eternal retribution.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 1, Chapter 12 The First Period of Development of the Nationalist Social German Worker’s Party
—-
Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole correct movement, and push it past other formations of a similar sort.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
...absolute intolerance also provides long growth.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God’s grace.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull’s horns over their heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The above statement refutes the common impression that Hitler admired ancient Nordic customs.)
A man who knows a thing, who is aware of a given danger, and sees the possibility of a remedy with his own eyes, has the duty and obligation, by God, not to work ‘silently,’ but to stand up before the whole public against the evil and for its cure.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 1, Philosophy and Party
—-
Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the ‘remaking’ of the Reich as they call it.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
By helping to raise man above the level of bestial vegetation, faith contributes in reality to the securing and safeguarding of his existence. Take away from present-day mankind its education-based, religious-dogmatic principles- or, practically speaking, ethical-moral principles- by abolishing this religious education, but without replacing it by an equivalent, and the result will be a grave shock to the foundations of their existence.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Of course, even the general designation ‘religious’ includes various basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This, above all, is the fighting factor which makes a breach and opens the way for the recognition of basic religious views.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 2, The State
—-
We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not only assures the preservation of its nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
World history is made by minorities when this minority of number embodies the majority of will and determination.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church.
Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the admonition finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created?
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
*For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.*
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It doesn’t dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 5, Philosophy and Organization
—-
Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure?
...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 7, The Struggle with the Red Front
—-
I must frankly admit that... I should probably lose all interest in life and would rather not be a German at all. But since, thank the Lord, this cannot be done, we have no need to be surprised that the health, unspoiled people avoid ‘bourgeois mass meetings’ as the devil holy water.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
This, it may be that centuries, dissatisfied with the form of their religious life, yearn for a renewal, and that from this psychic urge dozens and more men arise who on the basis of their insight and their knowledge believe themselves as prophets of a new doctrine, or at least as warriors against an existing one.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The main fighter for the DSP [*Deutsch-Sozialistische Partei* or German Socialist Party], as I have said, was Julius Streicher, then a teacher in Nuremberg. At first he, too, had a holy conviction of the mission and the future of his movement.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
*Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 10, Federalism as a Mask
—-
The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making *people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated.*
For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
In the ranks of the movement [National Socialist movement], *the most devout Protestant* could sit beside *the most devout Catholic,* without coming into the slightest conflict with his religious convictions. The mighty common struggle which both carried on against the destroyer of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutually to respect and esteem one another.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 13, German Alliance Policy After the War
—-
... the world has no reason for fighting in our defense, and as a matter of principle God does not make cowardly nations free...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If the German nation wants to end a state of affairs that threatens its extermination in Europe, it must not fall into the error of the pre-War period and make enemies of God and the world; it must recognize the most dangerous enemy and strike at him with all its concentrated power. And if this victory is obtained through sacrifices elsewhere, the coming generations of our people will not condemn us.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For this, to be sure, from the child’s primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until the timorous prayer of our present parlor patriots: ‘Lord, make us free!’ is transformed in the brain of the smallest boy into the burning plea: ‘*Almighty God, bless our arms when the time comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our battle!’
-Adolf Hitler’s prayer (Mein Kampf)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 14, Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy
—-
...we National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy, namely *to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitles on this earth.* And this action is the only one which, before God and or German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified: before God, since we have been put on this earth with the mission of eternal struggle for our daily bread...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
And so he [the Jew] advances on his fatal road until another force comes forth to oppose him, and in a mighty struggle hurls the heaven-stormer back to Lucifer.
Germany is today the next great war aim of Bolshevism. It requires all the force of a young missionary idea to raise our people up again, to free them from the snares of this international serpent...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
*The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub.*
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(devils through Beelzebub comes from Luke 11:15-19)
Never forget that the most sacred right on this earth is a man’s right to have earth to till with his own hands, and the most sacred sacrifice the blood that a man sheds for this earth.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(till the ground: see Genesis 3:23)
—-
Volume 2, Chapter 15, The Right of Emergency Defense
—-
Viewing all this from a higher vantage-point, we can speak of one single piece of good fortune in all this misery, which is that, though men can be befuddled, the heavens cannot be bribed.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
But in the great hour Heaven sent the German people a great man, Herr von Cuno.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

Raymond L. Heinrich

at this moment
when you read this line
and this line
and this

i want to help you celebrate
your parts of glass

how much we try
for flexibility
when all
we really want to do
is break

By Jordana Abraham

My words could never serve you justice, my love for you could never be strong enough
Although as long as we are together forever, just us
I would be eternally devoted, never let you down
Stand by you when no one else would
For I do love you
Despite your flaws, I love you still
I would never turn my back on you
I could not possibly care for anyone more than I care for you
Could never be any more honest then I am with you
I could never leave you, for I love you

Jack Bowman

My dreams and waking thoughts
are filled with you
those weekend afternoons at Whittier Narrows
Rev Hsu smiling as we kissed and swore our vows
the night you surprised me with the scant blue teddy
laying on the living room rug by candlelight
on El Molino
talking always talking even when we agreed not to.
rubbing you as you drifted off to sleep
your smile as you put on your big glasses
before we met my life was filled only with questions
for the last six years
I’ve been blessed with answers
you.
Love,
Jack

Joyce Carbone

You swim by
stun minutes
flatten time
& the shore smells
of more than dead things;
of joy & hope &love,
the clean sea air blasting
my tiny cloth of sand space.

I blink. You rise.
I know I’m dreaming
but love the dream
as you walk by, near
enough to see the whole of you
lifted like a goat-call,
a burly sorcery
fixated on the profane.
I dial old wounds,
call them to mind,
remind myself of bleeding sorrow,
bottomless pits,
agonies unleashed,
then grin a smile,
pull you close,
closer, take your breath,
trade you mine.

J.E. Dorsey

I am intrigued by planets
however,
it is people that amaze
and astonish me

I cherish the time traversing
through dense autumn leaves
exploring the mysterious fog
of earthy desires
Then, sailing into the misty breath
of pleasure’s wet mornings...

And beyond the day to day
of living
payments and purchases
I yearn
to pursue the blue
of my love’s persistent eyes
and the soft touch of her ardent kisses

There is an electricity high in
the mountains today
running through great wires
coiled and ready to surge
stirring the hearts of warm
and loving people

As I look our over the sea
I can feel the resonance
of this earth - laugh with heaven
knowing - that we stand naked
without understanding the vast truth of it
And awed at the scant voyage
we take on life’s little ocean

How we reach out to embrace
one another
finding only air
and the smell
of eucalyptus.

michael estabrook

the more it seems I’m
becoming my father, shaving
with a Remington Electric Razor,
using Old Spice, feeling
patriotic, drinking ice cold glasses
of milk, listening
to old Western tunes from the 40s
by the Sons of the Pioneers.
At least I’m not
as bad yet as my wife
who’s becoming her mother,
talking to herself all
the damn time and dribbling food
down the front of her blouse.

(c)1995 By Paul L. Glaze

Today Is The Day We Have Our Say,
A Special Day So Very Sincere.
We Take A Moment To Stop And Pray,
For The Blessed Mothers We Revere

Be It The Mother Of Our Life
Who Graciously Gave Us Birth.
Or The Mother We Call Wife,
With Whom We Walk This Earth.

We Thank Thee Dear Mothers
For The Love And Comfort You Abide.
And A Special Thanks To Those
M O T H E R S
Who Will Forever Be Our Bride..

By Richard M. Grove

How have you been my grandmother dear?
It was a nice short visit
even though
it penetrated the tranquillity
of solace.

One is not required to visit the past you know
but now that I am here,
how are you my grandmother dear?

I hope that Lawrence Welk and you are fine.
Every Sunday at noon
your stroke of passion
your only delight.

I trust that you are fine my grandmother dear,
in your dark, drape drawn world
with hopes and dreams forgotten.

I can only assume you are fine my grandmother dear
with three bland meals on a tray
served with a smile
day after day.

I trust you are fine my grandmother dear
with your neighbours all gone,
and your relatives in hiding.

Now that you are invisible,
I am sure you are fine my grandmother dear.

Ray Heinrich

well
i should be
but i’m reading an old newspaper instead

it’s a special edition of the new york times
with photographs
of hitler’s assassination
of shera
standing on the granite steps
her arm

held straight before her as she shoots

Allison Eir Jenks

Fenced in at Fox River.
Committing nonsense;
splitting worms, tossing berries.

Twisted within candy trees.
Wedged under your callused chest,
chanting with the bark of the starved coyotes.

You lie to me. I bite your shoulders.
We cut down a tree and licked the roots.

A bullet of snow snaked its way down my chest.
You left it there, smirking with pleasure,
diving at the chilled spot.

You paved my fingers.
Placed granite rocks under my head.

My eyes were stained glass windows.

Over there, on the side of the foot bridge,
beer signs sit on the river like fishing lure.

A curly, red-haired boy
blows a wreath of bubbles off the bridge.
They rise by the protruding brick cross.

I think of when I met you
by Mr. Craytons grocery store

With lollipop stains,
your blue tongue flagged me down.

newman

- 1 -

it
always goes
so:
day by day
until there are no
more days left
in which to be saved
by fear or love or even
by the grace of god

- 2 -

sleep is no peaceful calling
the program isn’t that easy
regardless of what you’ve heard
and what you think
nobody dreams here
grace carries a premium
even though it’s free
rapture is reserved for the precious few
like love everlasting
nobody ducks deceit who practices it
and we have practiced to perfection dear heart
seduction is more our line
temptation our metier
rhapsodies in flesh tones
and scriptures in skin
nobody escapes
gentle angel [not even you]
even though you do your best
longing for a release you cannot find within
and no matter what you do
nobody includes you
delicate sister
guidebooks deceive some but
you have an instinct
depend on no one but yourself
know your way around
even though you’re new here
my situation is less secure
[everyone knows this is so]
writing it down for posterity
gathering sensation
taking in what sensibility is available
erasing what history I can
remembering what I must
saving the best
nobody refuses the offer
suspect though it may be
unless they’ve been here
thickhead grin in place
nobody accepts defeat
or claims victory
unless they want to leave
regardless of the cost
the price of admission was sin
[foreign currency accepted]
denial notwithstanding
evasion nonetheless
or any juicy little tidbit
you have saved for this rainy day
non-negotiable reality
esoteric images aside
neverending shadows in your eyes
the price of departure is virtue
religiously applied
eternally sworn
torn from your heart
your soul in some state of karmic zen
entering soft as death
turbulent as birth

- 3 -

and the sky is filled with stars
like the sea is filled with salt
like the desert is filled with sand
I close my eyes to avoid confusion
[nothing helps]
passing my ghandi visions
lying in wait
agonizing over nothing in particular
carelessly turning down one opportunity after another
even the money-in-your-pocket sure things
negligent to the nth degree of perfection
or meticulous past the point of distraction
there must be more than this I whisper to myself
how do you figure? you ask
[I have no answer]
never question faith I say
guarding my back while you circle
in smiling silence
nothing happens
[or if it does I am unaware]
reclaiming my past makes it all the more difficult
denial makes it simply impossible
eager to please you I defer
regardless: you go your way
some say I should do the same
take my cues from that starry sky
despite my past failures
[not that they let me forget them]
some say I should be different
take my cues from you
roll with the punches
some say I should do nothing
[not that that hasn’t occurred to me]
for this or that reason
knowing nothing
related to my love for you
you say nothing
even though you know I’d listen
some say something different
every time the subject is brought up
to no end I can discover
even though they want me to stay
relative quiet prevails
yearning remains

- 4 -

I fall back on the old ways
supposing they will save me
I dream of living in peace
think about my childhood
trust in memories that might be lies
how do you avoid this?
always so calm
tranquil in the midst of my fury
inspite of my frenzy
too much history
in too little time
sabotage in familiar camouflage
tearing at my bones
hollowing my nights
arguing my days
touching me where no one ever has
I cannot take much more
touching me where I cannot
inspite of my defenses
so you ask where to now?
old ways only seem safe
religion superstition science
insanity waiting to make an entrance
soft lies buttressing hard truths
in its own sweet time
too much history
never lived outside my head
on the low road to salvation
too little time
to confront the cracked mirror
however you measure it
and in the end?
the end
it’s that simple
torturous rewards
in foreign currencies
served up on silver platters of deceit
nervously tendered by angels of despair
ordinary people with glass wings
turning their eyes away from me
turning deaf ears my way
heaven bent on my salvation
against my will
turning their backs to me
in silent desperation
trusting
intuition
suspecting
nothing
or simply
taking me home the long way around

- 5 -

turning it over in my mind
or turning my back on it
or not
my history surrounds me
[understanding makes no difference]
caressing my thin flesh
hovering just too far away to touch
too close to ignore
or avoid
or deny in last gasp desperation
sublimating the deception
only as far as I can see
or you can tell
[nobody cares now do they?]
turning it over in my mind
or turning its insides out
or front to back
little is accomplished
I hesitate once too often
turn the other cheek
turn the other cheek
like I am somehow holy
even in this place
too much happens that I cannot explain
or excuse
or extinguish
lovingly obsessed as I am
[am I or am I kidding myself?]
turning this into that
excuses nothing

- 6 -

it always goes so:
we can touch one another
gently and with love
or we can
touch one another
fearfully
the
choice is
ours

pete lee

he told himself
he was already dead

until it became his mantra
strangely this kept him alive

strangely this motivated his limbs
and cleared his mind

just as his already
dead friends had said it would

luckily there were no mirrors
before the battle

to prove him wrong
how can the dead be afraid

twenty-five years later
he still has no use for mirrors

he knows what already
dead looks like

******************************

among his effects
an unfinished manuscript:
the story of his life

mark sonnenfeld

the meanwhiles mend
the morningtime
in their dimple
birthweight
beside a lilac ointment the
crowning
headboards
kindly twirl circle dance uphigh
marble stills
plump
smack looks of thorn
snubbing wildflower
in sweet frogwater

Janet Kuypers

I

I remember when you and Brad and Joe and I
decided to kill a bottle of champagne, Andre pink, two-for-five,
on a building top in the December cold.
I remember standing at the top of this building
with this bottle of cheap champagne in my hand
and not caring that it was cold, that I was breaking the law.
I was young, and free. And I had friends.
We stood in the shape of a triangle and made the person in the center
drink. I said they had to spin while they drank,
then belch when they were done.
Brad and Joe were more than willing; the belching was
a contest for them. And I became one of the boys for a night,
to become closer to you.
You didn’t want to belch, or spin, or really even drink.
I didn’t make you. But you did. And I’d like to think that in your heart
you did it because you wanted to follow me.
I’ve always wanted to tell you
that I wanted to follow you, too.

II

I got your watch engraved the day of my Christmas party.
I didn’t want to bother with wrapping the thing,
besides, I didn’t even have a box for it,
so I just wore it. You never knew it was there.
When you couldn’t take the suspense any longer,
I told you that I had it on me.
It must have been quite a sight to see you walking in circles
around me, trying to figure out what I was hiding from you.
But I wasn’t even hiding it. I was wearing it on my wrist,
with my other watch, as plain as day.

III

So I made a full picnic and brought it to an empty theater.
And I put on my best black dress, you know, the one
that is off the shoulders, the one I wear to make heads turn.
I set out the food, played slow music and put the champagne glasses
you bought me on the center of the stage floor. When I sat down
I was afraid splinters from the hard-wood floor
would run my stockings. But I wanted you to see what you
could make me do. I didn’t want you to think I was some
nobody. And I wanted to see the look on your face
when you opened the theater doors.
That night you said that everything
was perfect. But it was perfect
only when you sat down to join me.

pete lee

the wading blue heron
bows its head repeatedly
to the fish-god

whereas the osprey
from its far greater height
proves even more reverent

in both cases
the fishes themselves
hardly have time to pray

***********************

anthropomorphic

in the merry-
go-round chase
of dog-eat-dog,
the dog’s tail
wins by a nose:
it’s a very
human race.

Kay Lynn

I came here tonight
looking for you.
As a calmness settled
within my heart
I realized
you’re not here.

Smiling down upon me
your reassuring presence
holds me tight
without a touch,
you wipe away
these tears.

I look forward
to that special day
when you meet me at the gate,
but as for now
I have work to do -
so in my heart
I’ll carry you,
that’s where
you’ll always stay.

And when I need you
I know you’re there
with open arms,
a listening ear;
on your shoulder
my head shall lay.

c ra mcguirt

when i was 18, i decided
to go live in fayetteville, arkansas
with the rest of the great writers.

i had about fifteen hundred
graduation dollars,
no idea how to balance a checkbook,
a penchant for impulse buying,
& a reluctance to acquire
an ordinary job.

after all, i was a writer.
& i wasn’t in town
to wash dishes.

i ended up washing dishes

for several weeks
before deciding
to go to lakeland, florida
on an idiot whim.

when i called the boss & told him
i wasn’t coming in,
he said: ‘i should have known
that you were just a drifter.’

after a few more misadventures,
i went back to nashville

where i’ve continued
to drift

for 19 years.

Jim Maddocks

Slowly and deliberately
she picked her way
through the husks of words
searching for a kernal of hidden meaning,
what she called “truth.”

“Was that all that was worth saying ?”
I asked, when she seemed to have found it,
and she said, “No,
but that was all I wanted to hear.”

c ra mcguirt

a cold
& holy wind

is blowing
through me
tonight,

even though
i’m only

drunk
& high.

D. Michael McNamara

How far can I separate without consequence?
I could sever my vitals and do a jig fueled by adrenaline and fever. You are absolutely right.
But you fail by way of unfair application of justice. There is a similar problem with being uncompromising in your values and true to your philosophies as a self as there is with nominalism between language and stereotype.
When will I learn to be more concerned with the places I’m leaving than to regret the inability to be in all the places I have yet to be? Certain things in this world are too tiring and predictable to be enjoyed.
Humanity as a social structure is no less subject to this as is gravity. Orbits may play outside the games of change, but they cannot escape death.
Regardless of variables and degrees of wavering, everything’s existence extends to its end.

Ben Ohmart

My feet are there, breaking off
by the piece and when Im at my kneew,
I look behind me and you’re still there,
getting me together, making me late
for the lecture, but getting me there at all.
Grades slip when fall brings its winds,
you look for me all over and I am there.
Lay down, roll within me, a weekend.
Come up, we’re fine, the bath with a plug.
Mud, but you reshape me,
but into my own image. Photos. From all sides.
In the sun, my tan aludes me, comes back.
Joints loosen, no on can hear me soon,
I catch up and realize, you’re too good.

By Peter Scott

Hello kind Morpheus, I
Bid you jolly tidings
Happenings of the world
For which to give birth and rely
How regal you stand!
Bleeding dried blood from your pores
Stationed firmly to lax
I rest for the adventure
Whether hiding from the dogs
Kept out by the disjointed door
Staring at my love
Or searching for a certain dream
One which tells the future
By fables of the past
Always am I merry for
Never have you disappointed
Quenching answers I give day to night
All in a matter of moments
I salute you, dear Morpheus!
For actions silence your critics
Some damn you as a process
While I relinquish all control
Slip from reality
Past sister Insomnia
Into a land
Troublesome only when awakened.

By Peter Scott

Forgive me, love
I cherish another
Forgive me, love
My soul sleeps elsewhere
Forgive me, love
I dream of her
Forgive me, love
She is my other
Forgive me, love
This is not a choice
Forgive me, love
You are still in my heart while
Forgive me, love
I am promised elsewhere
Life points the direction
Whispers the answer
My love
She is gentle
So forgive, my love
She is sweet
So forgive, my love
The girl is promised to me
As I am to her
So forgive, my love
I am incomplete without her
So forgive, my love
The whole me loves you
And that is why
She must be my wife
So forgive, my love
Until then
I can not give all you deserve.

helena wolfe

dry
compressed powder

a factory
how temporary it is

It’s destroyed
reused

a wheat field after a rainstorm
wet paper

cheryl townsend

When he grabbed her ass
it was like Pavlov’s dog
and her lips began to drool
in her cotton panties

cheryl townsend

They sometimes expect
now to be then and here
to be there but it’s not
any more and you tell them
it’s like when you’re hungry
then you eat and you’re full
you just don’t have room for
dessert or when you buy a
cactus and over water it
and it dies then a blatant
I don’t want any dead cactus
for dessert not here not now
but they still don’t get it
their brain a frying egg white
and your cholesterol is too high
if only you had a can of Raid or
some Preparation H snicker as
a fuck you suck and my parakeet
is better hung your tongue couldn’t
lick an ice cream cone and you kiss
like a St. Bernard but they still
want to try again and promise
they’ll be better so you put away
your nail polish and open up one
last time again and the guy does
it right then you cry

by courtney steele

As Gregor Samsa woke up one innocent morning to prepare for work as he usually did, his nightmares became a reality. Never before did he wake up with such difficulty; never before did he wake up unable to move in the ways he was so accustomed to. His legs seemed unable to move as freely, and his arms felt like untrained appendages. His back felt harder than a shell. Unexplainable as it was to him, he arose this one particular morning not as a human. He was a cockroach
Adrenalin rushed through his body as he tried to figure out how to get out of bed without killing himself. Gregor could not do the things he used to do, and although he felt disabled, he did not want to alarm his family. But what little he said to his family through the door of his locked bedroom sounded like a squeaking gibberish to them, while to Gregor his voice sounded perfectly natural. Since he never arose from his bed and went to work, the manager from his office eventually stopped by to see what the problem was. As Gregor tried to explain that he was trying to unlock his door to his family and his manager, he struggled with his stick-like arms. “It was an animal’s voice,” thought the manager as he tried to understand what had happened. Samsa only wished for support from his family in achieving this astronomic task of unlocking his bedroom door, but eventually received only shock, horror and coldness
As he finally opened the door, a wave of disbelief pierced through his mother like a knife. His father only possessed a menacing air upon the sight of his son, an air that made you think that he wanted to beat Gregor until he got back into his room. Gregor tried to tell his manager that nothing was really wrong and that he would be at work shortly, for he felt as if nothing was terribly wrong with himself. But his manager only ran out of the house, terrified at the sight he saw
As time passed on, the days became the same. He was always locked in his room, for not only were his parents too frightened to even look at him, but they were also too afraid and too ashamed to let anyone else see him. They couldn’t understand how they were supposed to accept Gregor. They couldn’t understand how they were supposed to integrate this creature into their lives. They seemed to feel as if they couldn’t accept this task. As he would try to listen to the conversation in the living room that could usually be heard in his household through the bedroom door, he found that his family suddenly became particularly silent
Gregor didn’t like the same foods anymore. Milk disgusted him. His eating habits eventually became a routine where daily his sister Grete would come into his room and lay out rotten food for him to eat. However, he would hide under the couch whenever she came in, for he knew that she would be too frightened by his sight. She never looked at him. His family feared being alone in the same house as him, and yet they feared leaving him in the house alone - so they decided that there would always have to be two people in the house at the same time
Eventually Grete and their mother decided that emptying the furniture out of his room would give him more space to move, for with Gregor’s new body shape he needed more floor space to turn around and walk about. The empty room left Gregor with no mementos to help him remember his life the way it used to be. He eventually began to feel as if he was not longer human, and never was human in the first place
Because Gregor was no longer making money for the family, the other members of the family started to work. As they continued to function efficiently on their own because of necessity and slowly started to take care of him less and less, Gregor became more and more depressed. He couldn’t sleep, and he hardly ate. Because of a fit that his father had once where he threw an apple that jabbed Gregor in his side and stayed stuck there, Samsa began to lose his agility. Grete didn’t take care of him as much. She seldom cleaned his room anymore, and there was dirt and dust everywhere. Feeding became more and more sporadic. He felt as if he had become a misfortune to his family
His family, in order to make more money, rented out rooms in their house to tenants. Once when Grete was playing the violin for their tenants, Gregor snuck out of his room to listen. He wondered then if he was human - for only a human could have this appreciation for music. But his handicaps told him otherwise
As they all listened to the music, the tenants eventually saw Gregor and demanded that they would not have to pay for their rent up to date because of their lack of knowledge about what they were living with. They moved out immediately. His father threw him back into his bedroom where Gregor’s legs gave way under the extreme physical - and emotional - pressure
That evening, Grete decided that she couldn’t take anymore of the life that she - and her family - had been living. She told her father that they would have to “get rid of it.” Her father only agreed. The family could not believe that this animal was still their son. They often only seemed to be scared of him, and at the same time they seemed to pity him. But they never had any love for him
That night, after being unable to sleep until nearly daybreak, Gregor, in the depths of depression, passed away
In the morning, when the family eventually found out about his death, they suddenly felt a great burden lifted off of their backs. Because they no longer felt that this animal was their son, they were actually relieved that it had finally passed away. They were then able to move into a smaller, more affordable place, in a neighborhood where they were not known as well. Grete was able to grow up into a young lady after the experience, especially since they had no one else to worry about
They felt as if there was nothing more that they could have done for their handicapped son.

Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis struck the hearts of many when it was written in the nineteenth century, during the period when social thinkers like Herbert Spencer and later Emile Durkheim were making their own waves. The role of the handicapped person in society has always been questioned because of the differences between them and “average” people in society. To many they are merely considered “socially deviant” and therefore do not have a place in society. But questions that pertain to the role of the individual in society, the role of the state in accordance with handicapped people, the degree of social conflict and the possible solutions to these social problems have to be answered in order to eliminate any problems and any misfortunes like the terrible case of Gregor Samsa
How does this all relate to the conflict of the handicapped person and their role in today’s society? What are the implications for the future? A better ability to judge and come to possible conclusions may be easily arrived at upon examination of the analysis of past social thinkers
Many people cannot understand or explain why members of society seem to foster negative views toward the handicapped person in society. Although people don’t want to admit or don’t want to believe that these negative attitudes exist, they do - and understanding many of the theories of social thinkers throughout the years may help people to understand why. Let this be the next step in the understanding process
Going back to the Pagan times of Aristotle, one may come to the conclusion that “humans are only rational animals”, and that the parallel of the human to the cockroach in this story is merely a parallel that had always existed. However, most Pagan thinkers may reply that the change that Kafka was postulating was merely a change that disallowed other humans to communicate with him. Because in this example the family could no longer communicate with him, they thought that it was because Gregor no longer had the ability to communicate or think rationally at all. They seemed to believe that he was no longer thinking and living through reason, but only through instinct, and that because of this factor he could no longer be considered Gregor Samsa. This is where the conflict arose. A possible solution to these problems may be found in bridging the communication problems between people with handicaps and people without or attempting to eliminate misconceptions about handicapped people
If we look toward social thought that was closer in time to the time in which this book was written, more specific concrete ideas may be found. After all, it is possibly because of the conflicts that were in discussion at the time the book was written that the book was even written in the first place. We will start with thinkers that preceded the Darwinian Revolution like Hume and Rousseau
David Hume may have concluded that because human beings have an innate sympathetic sense, we may feel compelled to help them, or at least pity them the way that Gregor Samsa’s family does in Metamorphosis. However, the characteristics that humans like in other humans, characteristics such as wisdom, kindness, integrity, benevolence, generosity, courage or a sense of responsibility, aren’t easily found in the handicapped, many may argue. Because of this, people may have a difficult time in trying to have respect or admire handicapped people. This may result in the negative feelings that Gregor’s family felt toward him. This can be seen in the fact that they were scared of him. If the theories postulated by Hume are correct, there may be nothing that society can do about the treatment of handicapped people. because it is the human’s innate sense that compels them to have these views. According to Hume, there may be nothing wrong with the beliefs that people have about the handicapped
Rousseau may state that the handicapped person has no proper place in society. In a social contract, everyone works for the good of everyone else. Because a handicapped person may not be able to do this, they cannot fill their social contract and therefore are not a useful addition to society. This may be why there are negative feelings for handicapped people: because, unlike other people, they cannot take care of themselves. Rousseau’s solution may be to either find menial things for the handicapped to do so that they can fill a better role in society (which may ultimately be inefficient to the society as a whole) or to somehow eliminate them from a society that generally requires a lot from their members. (which doesn’t seem to be a very feasible solution to the problem)
The Darwinian Revolution expanded on the five understandable aspects of nature (with a population in an environment, reproduction will inevitably produce a surplus of a species and therefore a shortage of foods and the consequential competition for those goods) by stating that all offspring are going to have different traits, and some traits will be better than others. Charles Darwin called these differences in traits fortuitous variations. He furthermore stated that a natural selection would occur, which generally meant that species members with better traits would survive because they were better suited for their environment. These notions startled the people of the nineteenth century, but these people may have come to the conclusion that handicapped people were not suited for their environment, and therefore would not easily survive. Because according to this theory handicapped members of the species may eventually die out, there may seem to be no point in helping them out. This may console the family that feels that there is nothing that they can do for the handicapped family member who doesn’t even seem to possess any human traits any longer and eventually gets tired of working to help this member out with no evident success
Herbert Spencer expanded on this idea and framed it in a social context. His theory of the survival of the fittest depended on adaptation in order to survive. A handicapped person cannot adapt well. Furthermore, Spencer took from the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired traits and stated that it may be necessary to work to adapt. It was basically the handicapped person’s own fault if they could not or did not work to adapt. This again rested the burden on the handicapped person and not on the rest of the society
A great deal of information can be inferred through the work of Emile Durkheim. For example, it can be viewed that Kafka’s animals are totems (a concept in which Durkheim elaborates on in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), and that there is this totemic identification between beast and man. In Kafka’s works, this identification is symbolic and literal. Symbolically, the beast may be a symptom of unconscious conflicts (similar to the conflicts that Sigmund Freud would find in psychoanalysis), or a representation of the disabilities of the handicapped person trying to function in society. Literally, the beast is in his own person a true friend, and in some respects, another self (remember that once Gregor’s furniture was removed from his room he had trouble keeping as his “human” self and started to become more and more like his “animal” self). It is possible that Kafka is trying to show that man is trying to act out some kind of animal-identity within himself. It should also be kept in mind that totemism depends heavily on the contagiousness of sacred and profane characteristics, and that the “symbolicness” of something isn’t possessed by the object but by the people that view it. This would have to be considered when viewing the role of the symbol of the cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Further information can be inferred by studying other points of Durkheim’s works like Suicide. For example, the homo duplex states that there are two parts to people: the animal characteristic and the human characteristic. Kafka clearly defines differences between the handicapped person and the rest of the society by referring to the handicapped person in his story as a cockroach. Furthermore, the animal characteristic according to Durkheim is based on desires and is a lower level of functioning, while the human characteristic is based on reason and is a product of society. Therefore the handicapped person is not a product of society but merely an animal that rests it’s existence on desires and other basic needs. This concept, like others postulated by older social thinkers discussed so far, again sheds a poor light on the role of the handicapped person in society
When looking at Hegel, one may assume that the conclusion of his theory of history going to a certain point where perfection will eventually be reached would be that the handicapped person does not fit into the idea of perfection in society and that they may somehow be eliminated (possibly in a Darwinian sense) before perfection is reached. This further enhances the idea that the handicapped person should not necessarily be a part of society, and that something must be done or that perfection that history draws nearer and nearer to will never actually be reached
Emmanuel Kant’s idea of the Categorical Imperative, however, seems to contradict the general notions so far that have been produced by social thinkers. His universalized Golden Rule can be elaborated upon to state that the treatment of handicapped people should be no different or no worse than a person’s treatment of other human beings. Furthermore, it can possibly be inferred that the handicapped person should be accommodated for in any way possible, for it may be considered morally wrong to treat another person poorly. However, others may argue that altering the treatment of handi- capped people may help the handicapped people, but it may ultimately help the handicapped people alone and inversely hurt the society as a whole because some positive production for society would be eliminated by focusing on this particular minority. This may be reason enough to have a negative view toward handicapped people
Karl Marx believed that it was not the particular histories that would ultimately reach perfection and that had to be studied, but it was the ideas behind each culture that had to be examined. Furthermore, he stated that he believed that communism would be the ultimate ideological structure, and eventually it would be world-wide communism that would be achieved. However, in a communistic society people work to their full extent and receive what they need - and this system would ultimately be unfair and biased toward the handicapped, for they would be unable to work and would inversely require a large sum of money in order to sustain life in the same way that the rest of society does. This too may foster the negative attitudes that many people hold toward handicapped people
Fredrich Nietzsche recognized that the word “good” among the ancient Greeks meant not selfless, altruistic acts but aristocratic values (like nobility, power or dignity). “Bad” seemed to mean anything vulgar or lower class. This was closely associated with the social classes. When he comes to the conclusion that humans most importantly want power (over things and yourself - a freedom that is most importantly a control over yourself), the question then arises: where does the handicapped person fit in? The “will to power” entails the ability to confront obstacles and produce constructive outputs. Self-control and self-discipline are necessary. This naturalistic foundation stems from Darwin and again poses problems for the handicapped person. It only seems that in all of the views generated so far, only negative attitudes have been uncovered in reference to the handicapped. These might explain our feelings today
American social thought even reflected these ideas. The economist Edward Bellamy, for example, wanted a vast disciplined industrial class and no leisure class. However, even in this case the handicapped person does not seem to fit in to this plan
Thorstein Veblen, who was influenced by Bellamy, Marx, Spencer and Darwin, felt that it was money that ultimately brought a person ahead. But the handicapped person who cannot make any money can therefore never get ahead in the world. Because they are therefore of a lower class, they are then looked down upon. Self-esteem is a reflection of social opinion, Veblen felt, and the accumulation of wealth enhances that self-esteem. This never happens for the handicapped person, and they therefore also are never able to gain any self-respect
G. H. Mead, in his differentiation of the “I” and the “Me”, may end up postulating that people would think that the handicapped person has only an “I”, a more basic instinctual level of functioning, when it is actually the case where people just can’t communicate with the “Me” part, or the higher level of functioning part, of the handicapped person
These social thinkers may have been able to reflect upon the reasons for the conflict concerning handicapped people, but questions still have to be answered: what kinds of solutions are there to these social problems? How drastic are the solutions? What is the role of the state and the individual in solving these matters?

Some of the possible solutions that have been presented seem to have their faults, and many seem too drastic (relatable to a revolution versus a reform). Finding a role for the handicapped person in society seems to be a difficult position to fill, because there are not only varying degrees of severity in being handicapped, but there is also the moral consideration of typecasting the handicapped person and not allowing those people the opportunity to work to become better people. The concept of their eventual elimination somehow does not seem to give today’s society a good enough justification for condemning them. So the question of the problems and the social conflicts that arise in today’s society because of the handicapped still does not seem to be fully answerable
But people have to keep looking toward a solution for the future. The belief in certain theorists may cause one to believe that the condition of being handicapped will eventually disappear and everything will ultimately work itself out. The belief in other theorists may cause one to believe that it is only right to treat handicapped people in the best way possible. There may be a day where a conclusion - and a solution - can be reached.

Nick DiSpoldo, Small Press Review (on "Children, Churches and Daddies," April 1997) Kuypers is the widely-published poet of particular perspectives and not a little existential rage, but she does not impose her personal or artistic agenda on her magazine. CC+D is a provocative potpourri of news stories, poetry, humor, art and the “dirty underwear” of politics. One piece in this issue is “Crazy,” an interview Kuypers conducted with “Madeline,” a murderess who was found insane, and is confined to West Virginia’s Arronsville Correctional Center. Madeline, whose elevator definitely doesn’t go to the top, killed her boyfriend during sex with an ice pick and a chef’s knife, far surpassing the butchery of Elena Bobbitt. Madeline, herself covered with blood, sat beside her lover’s remains for three days, talking to herself, and that is how the police found her. For effect, Kuypers publishes Madeline’s monologue in different-sized type, and the result is something between a sense of Dali’s surrealism and Kafka-like craziness.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada
I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer’s styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.

Ed Hamilton, writer #85 (of children, churches and daddies) turned out well. I really enjoyed the humor section, especially the test score answers. And, the cup-holder story is hilarious. I’m not a big fan of poetry - since much of it is so hard to decipher - but I was impressed by the work here, which tends toward the straightforward and unpretentious. As for the fiction, the piece by Anderson is quite perceptive: I liked the way the self-deluding situation of the character is gradually, subtly revealed. (Kuypers’) story is good too: the way it switches narrative perspective via the letter device is a nice touch.

Children, Churches and Daddies.
It speaks for itself.
Write to Scars Publications to submit poetry, prose and artwork to Children, Churches and Daddies literary magazine, or to inquire about having your own chapbook, and maybe a few reviews like these.

Jim Maddocks, GLASGOW, via the Internet I’ll be totally honest, of the material in Issue (either 83 or 86 of Children, Churches and Daddies) the only ones I really took to were Kuypers’. TRYING was so simple but most truths are, aren’t they?

---

what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don’t consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.

why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.

so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.

A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.

vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444

---

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review (on Children, Churches and Daddies) cc&d is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist. "I really like ("Writing Your Name"). It’s one of those kind of things where your eye isn’t exactly pulled along, but falls effortlessly down the poem. I liked "knowledge" for its mix of disgust and acceptance. Janet Kuypers does good little movies, by which I mean her stuff provokes moving imagery for me. Color, no dialogue; the voice of the poem is the narrator over the film.

Children, Churches and Daddies no longer distributes free contributor’s copies of issues. In order to receive issues of Children, Churches and Daddies, contact Janet Kuypers at the cc&d e-mail addres. Free electronic subscriptions are available via email. All you need to do is email ccandd@aol.com... and ask to be added to the free cc+d electronic subscription mailing list. And you can still see issues every month at the Children, Churches and Daddies website, located at http://scars.tv

Also, visit our new web sites: the Art Gallery and the Poetry Page.

Mark Blickley, writer The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

---

MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)

functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen

We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.

---

Gary, Editor, The Road Out of Town (on the Children, Churches and Daddies Web Site) I just checked out the site. It looks great.

Dusty Dog Reviews: These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding.

John Sweet, writer (on chapbook designs) Visuals were awesome. They’ve got a nice enigmatic quality to them. Front cover reminds me of the Roman sculptures of angels from way back when. Loved the staggered tire lettering, too. Way cool. (on "Hope Chest in the Attic") Some excellent writing in "Hope Chest in the Attic." I thought "Children, Churches and Daddies" and "The Room of the Rape" were particularly powerful pieces.

C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review: cc&d is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist.

Cheryl Townsend, Editor, Impetus (on Children, Churches and Daddies) The new cc&d looks absolutely amazing. It’s a wonderful lay-out, looks really professional - all you need is the glossy pages. Truly impressive AND the calendar, too. Can’t wait to actually start reading all the stuff inside.. Wanted to just say, it looks good so far!!!

Dusty Dog Reviews: She opens with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers’ very personal layering of her poem across the page.

---

Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA
Indeed, there’s a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there’s a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Mark Blickley, writer
The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.

Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book or chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers. We’re only an e-mail away. Write to us.

---

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies’) obvious dedication along this line admirable.

The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST’s three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST’s SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does "on the road" presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061

Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies’) obvious dedication along this line admirable.

---

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA
"Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family.
"Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

want a review like this? contact scars about getting your own book published.

---

Paul Weinman, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies) Wonderful new direction (Children, Churches and Daddies has) taken - great articles, etc. (especially those on AIDS). Great stories - all sorts of hot info!

The magazine Children Churches and Daddies is Copyright © through Scars Publications and Design. The rights of the individual pieces remain with the authors. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Okay, nilla wafer. Listen up and listen good. How to save your life. Submit, or I’ll have to kill you.
Okay, it’s this simple: send me published or unpublished poetry, prose or art work (do not send originals), along with a bio, to us - then sit around and wait... Pretty soon you’ll hear from the happy people at cc&d that says (a) Your work sucks, or (b) This is fancy crap, and we’re gonna print it. It’s that simple!

Okay, butt-munch. Tough guy. This is how to win the editors over.
Hope Chest in the Attic is a 200 page, perfect-bound book of 13 years of poetry, prose and art by Janet Kuypers. It’s a really classy thing, if you know what I mean. We also have a few extra sopies of the book "Rinse and Repeat", which has all the 1999 issues of cc&d crammed into one book. And you can have either one of these things at just five bucks a pop if you just contact us. It’s an offer you can’t refuse...

Carlton Press, New York, NY: HOPE CHEST IN THE ATTIC is a collection of well-fashioned, often elegant poems and short prose that deals in many instances, with the most mysterious and awesome of human experiences: love... Janet Kuypers draws from a vast range of experiences and transforms thoughts into lyrical and succinct verse... Recommended as poetic fare that will titillate the palate in its imagery and imaginative creations.
Mark Blickley, writer: The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing the book.

You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.
Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book and chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers - you can write for yourself or you can write for an audience. It’s your call...

Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA: "Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family. "Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.

Dusty Dog Reviews, CA (on knife): These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding. Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Dusty Dog Reviews (on Without You): She open with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers’ very personal layering of her poem across the page.
Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.

Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada (on Children, Churches and Daddies): I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer’s styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.
Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA: Indeed, there’s a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there’s a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.

Published since 1993 No racist, sexist or homophobic material is appreciated; we do accept work of almost any genre of poetry, prose or artwork, though we shy away from concrete poetry and rhyme for rhyme’s sake. Do not send originals. Any work sent to Scars Publications on Macintosh disks, text format, will be given special attention over smail-mail submissions. There is no limit to how much you may submit at a time; previously published work accepted.

Publishers/Designers Of

Children, Churches and Daddies, The Burning mini poem books, God Eyes mini poem books, The Poetry Wall Calendar, The Poetry Box, The Poetry Sampler, Mom’s Favorite Vase Newsletters, Reverberate Music Magazine, Down In The Dirt, plus assorted chapbooks and books

---

Sponsors Of

Scars Publications Poetry Chapbook Contest, Scars Publications Poetry Book Contest, Scars Publications Prose Chapbook Contest, Scars Publications Prose Book Contest, Scars Publications Poetry Calendar Contest, Collection Volumes

---

Children, Churches and Daddies (founded 1993) is written and researched by political groups and writers from the United States, Canada, England and Italy. Monthly features provide coverage of environmental, political and social issues as well as fiction and poetry, and act as an information and education source. Children, Churches and Daddies is the leading magazine for this combination of information, education and entertainment. Children, Churches and Daddies (ISSN 1068-5154) is published monthly by Scars Publications and Design; Janet Kuypers, president.

To contributors: No racist, sexist or blatantly homophobic material. No originals; include SASE & bio. Work sent on disks or through email given special attention. Previously published work accepted. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission of the publisher is forbidden. Copyright © 1993 Scars Publications and Design, Children, Churches & Daddies, Janet Kuypers. All rights of pieces remain with their authors.

---