Damned Heretics

Times exposes industry’s ploys to keep America salt-smitten

The cure: home cooking, sea salt, 2/3 tsp daily

But are the salt police scientifically correct?

A knockout piece about salt today (Sun May 30 2010) on the ever more investigative New York Times’ front page – The Hard Sell on Salt by Michael Moss – showing how intensely the salt industry is fighting to keep plenty of salt in the American diet, despite its proven depredations in the form of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke.

Their solution: people can eat less, period.

That might be what they indeed have to do, since most (80%) of the salt Americans swallow is added to processed foods:

“Salt is a pretty amazing compound,” Alton Brown, a Food Network star, gushes in a Cargill video called Salt 101. “So make sure you have plenty of salt in your kitchen at all times.”

The campaign by Cargill, which both produces and uses salt, promotes salt as “life enhancing” and suggests sprinkling it on foods as varied as chocolate cookies, fresh fruit, ice cream and even coffee. “You might be surprised,” Mr. Brown says, “by what foods are enhanced by its briny kiss.”

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the industry is working overtly and behind the scenes to fend off these attacks, using a shifting set of tactics that have defeated similar efforts for 30 years, records and interviews show. Industry insiders call the strategy “delay and divert” and say companies have a powerful incentive to fight back: they crave salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.

Scientific prescription: 2/3rds teaspoon daily if at risk

The science of salt is simple enough. The body needs a balance between potassium and sodium, with more potassium than sodium. The current balance for too many people is more sodium than potassium, mostly in the form of sodium chloride, common salt.

Normal intake should be around one teaspoon (2 grams) of salt, give or take half a teaspoon. But for thirty years the typical American has been using more, sometimes up to ten times that amount, mostly unwittingly. Currently the average adult figure is 3.5 grams daily, just about the world wide average according to the industry Salt Institute’s quite informative page Food, Salt and Health.

The Institute of Medicine recommends a teaspoon and a half as optimal. The CDC says 145 million US adults (69 per cent) are now oversensitive to salt – those with high blood pressure, African-Americans and everyone older than 40 – who typically use 3.4 grams daily. Only 1 in 10 restrict themselves to 2/3rds of a teaspoon of salt a day, 1.5 grams, which is what they should do to avoid heart attacks and strokes.

Unfortunately, with the taste and texture of so much manufactured food heavily dependent on its added salt all this will be hard to reverse as long as American tastes lean toward the appalling rubbish – sorry, nutritionally low caliber snacks – many are used to enjoying.

The power that salt holds over processed foods can be seen in an American snack icon, the Cheez-It.

At the company’s laboratories in Battle Creek, Mich., a Kellogg vice president and food scientist, John Kepplinger, ticked off the ways salt makes its little square cracker work.

Salt sprinkled on top gives the tongue a quick buzz. More salt in the cheese adds crunch. Still more in the dough blocks the tang that develops during fermentation. In all, a generous cup of Cheez-Its delivers one-third of the daily amount of sodium recommended for most Americans.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

“Salt really changes the way that your tongue will taste the product,” Mr. Kepplinger said. “You make one little change and something that was a complementary flavor now starts to stand out and become objectionable.”

Moving the goalposts

High blood pressure is an increasing concern worldwide and more recently the level of blood pressure considered healthy was lowered. As Jane Brody wrote last September, in Too Much Salt Takes a Blood-Pressure Toll ,

Once, the prevailing medical opinion was that lowering an elevated blood pressure was hazardous because it would deprive a person’s vital organs of an adequate blood supply. But a few pioneering medical researchers thought otherwise and eventually showed that lowering high blood pressure could prevent heart attacks, heart failure, strokes and kidney disease — and save lives.

Even then, it was long thought that the only important indicator was diastolic pressure — the bottom number, representing the pressure in arteries between heartbeats. Further studies showed that the larger top number, systolic pressure, representing arterial pressure when the heart beats, was also medically important.

And as the various studies reached fruition, it became apparent that the long-accepted numbers for desirable blood pressure were too high to protect long-term health.

Now the upper limit of normal blood pressure is listed as 120 over 80; anyone with a pressure of 140 over 90 or higher is considered hypertensive. Those with pressures in between are considered prehypertensive and should take steps to bring blood pressure down or, at least, prevent it from rising more.

The change mirrors what happened with serum cholesterol, for which “normal” was once listed as 240 milligrams per deciliter of blood and is now less than 200 to prevent heart disease caused by clogged arteries.

It was also long thought that blood pressure naturally rises with age. Indeed, the Framingham Heart Study showed that when 65-year-old people whose blood pressure was below 140 over 90 were followed for 20 years, about 90 percent of them became hypertensive because their arteries narrowed and stiffened with age, causing blood to push harder against artery walls.

But in many societies where obesity is rare, activity levels are high and salt intake is low, blood pressure remains low throughout life. This is the best clue we have for the lifestyle changes needed to prevent illness and premature death caused by hypertension.

Back to home cooking

The simple solution to all this is to prepare properly nourishing and tasty real food at home, such as potassium rich fruit and vegetables, added to buffalo or other lean meat, fish and chicken prepared from scratch, organic if possible. Walking a few miles a day helps too.

Dr. Claude Lenfant, who served as director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, is now 81 and has a blood pressure of 115 over 60, a level rarely found among older Americans not taking medication for hypertension. His secret: a normal body weight, four or more miles of walking daily, and no salt used to prepare his meals, most of which are made from scratch at home.

In an interview, Dr. Lenfant, who now lives in Vancouver, Wash., said the problem of hypertension was rising all around the world and added that by 2020 the number of people with uncontrolled hypertension was projected to rise 65 percent. One reason is that doctors today are more likely to diagnose the problem, so it is reported more often in population surveys. “But I’m much more concerned about the fact that so much high blood pressure is not controlled,” he said, and called “therapeutic inertia” an important reason.

It is not enough for doctors to write a prescription and tell patients to return for a check-up in six months, he said. Rather, a working partnership between health care professionals and patients is needed to encourage people to monitor their pressure, adopt protective habits and continue to take medication that effectively lowers pressure.

Of course, many people nowadays do not know how to cook even a boiled egg, so this may not be feasible without forced retraining.

But if you do this, you won’t have any problem with salt. We have this on the best authority (the live in critic at SG HQ). But there are many more details in the Times article which should be pored over, if the whole situation is to be fully understood.

The picture it draws of the endless wriggling of the industry to get out of its plain duty to reduce salt in its food processing is marvelous to watch.

Back in the 1980s, some companies began offering low-sodium products, but few sold well. Surveys by the Center for Science in the Public Interest have found little change in salt levels in processed foods.

Sugar and fat had overtaken salt as the major concern in processed foods by the 1990s, fueling the “healthy” foods market. When the F.D.A. pressured companies to reduce salt in those products, the industry said that doing so would ruin the taste of the foods already low in sugar and fat. The government backed off.

“We were trying to balance the public health need with what we understood to be the public acceptability,” said William K. Hubbard, a top agency official at the time who now advises an industry-supported advocacy group. “Common sense tells you if you take it down too low and people don’t buy, you have not done something good.”

Science provides a loophole

But are they wrong? When the scientific studies are sifted, it does seem that reducing salt intake does not reliably improve health even as it reduces blood pressure – the latter effect established since 2001 (Study: Reducing salt really does lower blood pressure).

As one of the few science reporters who takes official pronouncements with a pinch of salt, John Tierney, pointed out in the Times in February, there is plenty of room for skepticism here, however doubtful the motivations of industry might be in promoting it. In When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet. he was able to note the following:

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?

A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).

B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).

C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).

D) Not much one way or the other.

E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.

Don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer, at least not yet. That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to…….

In other words, if you do get people to try to reduce salt intake, they may not succeed. But worse, while it may reduce blood pressure, this may involve other consequences which are not necessarily so beneficial.

The salt solution

But even if people could be induced to eat less salt, would they end up better off? The estimates about all the lives to be saved are just extrapolations based on the presumed benefits of lower blood pressure.

(Tierney again:) If you track how many strokes and heart attacks are suffered by people on low-salt diets, the results aren’t nearly as neat or encouraging, as noted recently in JAMA (Reducing Dietary Sodium : The Case for Caution by Michael H. Alderman, MD – JAMA. 2010;303(5):448-449) by Michael H. Alderman, a hypertension expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. A low-salt diet was associated with better clinical outcomes in only 5 of the 11 studies he considered; in the rest, the people on the low-salt diet fared either the same or worse.

As the JAMA abstract puts it:

Authoritative recommendations, sometimes sanctioned by government, routinely call for reduced dietary sodium. However, when the strength of evidence is made explicit, it is generally acknowledged to be opinion or common “practice.”1 Advocates contend that the recommendation is justified because sodium restriction has been convincingly proven to lower blood pressure and that this will surely prevent stroke and myocardial infarction. Skeptics argue that modification of this single surrogate end point does not guarantee a health benefit as measured by morbidity or mortality. Instead, they note that salt restriction capable of reducing blood pressure also unfavorably affects other cardiovascular disease surrogates.

Diet is a complicated factor involving a multitude of interrelating nutrients. Genetic, behavioral, and environmental factors determine wide interindividual variation in sodium intake compatible with good health (end abstract).

Tierney continues:

“When you reduce salt,” Dr. Alderman said, “you reduce blood pressure, but there can also be other adverse and unintended consequences. As more data have accumulated, it’s less and less supportive of the case for salt reduction, but the advocates seem more determined than ever to change policy.

Before changing public policy, Dr. Alderman and Dr. McCarron suggest trying something new: a rigorous test of the low-salt diet in a randomized clinical trial. That proposal is rejected by the salt reformers as too time-consuming and expensive. But when you contemplate the potential costs of another public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign, a clinical trial can start to look cheap.”

So all in all, it seems that all the wise really need do is simply avoid processed foods for this and other nutritional reasons, stay with home cooking and add sea salt to taste.

This may involve unintended consequences of a benign nature, of course, such as stowing the Blackberry and switching off the screen and actually talking to the spouse and kids.

ADDENDUM: :

To heck with the salt police! Here’s a mildly amusing Time piece on America’s most outrageously non PC burger:

Hold the Bun by Joel Stein on the KC Bunless Burger

My first bite of KFC’s Double Down made me question why I ever used bread for sandwiches. By replacing the bun with two fried chicken breasts and putting bacon, cheese and glorified Thousand Island dressing in between, this culinary invention made me feel, for perhaps the first time in my sandwich-eating life, completely free — my fingers greasy, my mouth a mess, my testosterone pumping like Henry VIII eating a turkey leg and demanding a new wife to behead. It inspired me to plan a whole diet of breadless sandwiches: a hamburger that consists of two meat patties and an inner layer of condiments; a BLT that packs lettuce and tomato between crisscrossed pieces of bacon; a pastrami sandwich that entails my just shoving pastrami in my mouth…..

Tests at Mt Sinai counter current theory

Civility breaks out among surprised Beethoven experts

Would that HIV?AIDS, cancer and other fields of scientific inquiry could learn that lesson

James Barron in the New York Times today (May 29 Saturday) in Beethoven May Not Have Died of Lead Poisoning, After All reveals that Andrew C. Todd, a lead poisoning expert at Mt Sinai hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has tested two skull fragments from Beethoven’s grave and found that the larger piece had only 13 micrograms of lead per gram, about average for a man of 56.

So although the smaller piece had more lead (48 micrograms) Todd appears to have toppled the long standing paradigm that his death in 1827 was due to lead poisoning, or at least called it into question.

Beethoven’s miserable ill health at the close of his life and the considerable pain he recorded in his letters (added to by the doctors who poured hot oil into his ears and drained fluid from his abdomen) were put down to lead poisoning after the lead content of his hair (click this link for technical discussion) and skull was found to be well above normal in tests thirteen and five years ago, at up to one hundred times the levels of modern urban man.

Scientists began speculating about what really killed Ludwig van Beethoven almost as soon as he was buried in 1827. He had complained of a “wretched existence,” with a long list of symptoms: abdominal pain, digestive trouble, colic, chronic bronchitis, foul body odors and extremely bad breath. And of course there was the hearing problem.

Thirteen years ago scientists, including one who had investigated whether Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning and whether the paint on the Shroud of Turin dated to the time of Jesus, tested strands of Beethoven’s hair and ruled out syphilis as the cause of death. Unexpectedly, they found signs of acute exposure to lead.,

Five years ago tests on different strands of Beethoven’s hair and a tiny piece of his skull again pointed to lead. That, Beethoven scholars said, could have explained his infamous temper and his occasional memory slips. Some figured he had drunk too much cheap wine that was sweetened — in the custom of the 19th century — with lead to hide the bitterness.

But last week a lead-poisoning expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York tested the same piece of Beethoven’s skull that had been examined in 2005, along with another, larger, fragment. The researcher, Dr. Andrew C. Todd, said that over all he had found no more lead than in the average person’s skull.

The hair was obtained from Ira F. Brilliant, a real estate magnate who bought it for $7300 in 1994 at Sotheby’s in London, and the two skull fragments from Dr Meredith were among those originally taken home by a friend of Beethoven’s when his body was exhumed from a Vienna cemetery in 1863, and kept in his bedroom.

As Russell Martin’s book Beethoven’s Hair : An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved suggested in 2000, lead seemed a likely culprit for the ill health that wracked the supremely gifted composer in his tortured last years, which were so very different from his youth as a charming and sociable man.

Meek concession by ruling dogmatists

After all, there were plenty of other reasons to suppose that the composer suffered from lead poisoning, since the plum wine he drank to excess (a treat suggested by his doctors) was sweetened in the 18th Century with lead, and the pencils Beethoven uindoubtedly chewed on contained lead, which also filled the china and the plumbing of the time. His symptoms of irritability, lassitude, headaches and muscular weakness fitted the hypothesis.

So it is quite surprising and even heart warming to find (judging from the article) that the scientists and scholars who had adopted this attractive theory are being surprisingly gracious in conceding its debunking from this one test of one fragment. Todd’s methods, like those conducted earlier by Dr William J. Walsh of Illinois, whose tests at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, involved “multiple measurements with X-ray fluorescence”.

Walsh now notes that Todd has only tested skull fragments and not the hair samples, but “agrees with the notion that Beethoven’s exposure to lead was a short term problem that came toward the end of his life.”

Whatever happened to the famous tendency of scientists like all academics to cling like barnacles to current theory and fight any revision to the death? William R. Meredith, the Beethoven scholar who carried the skull fragments from California to Mt Sinai, is surprised by the findings but amiably concedes it is “back to the drawing board” for all those concerned with why Beethoven died.

Perhaps it is the influence of James Barron, the Times reporter, which accounts for the geniality of the discussion. Or perhaps he discreetly omitted the more combative comments made to him in researching the event. Certainly one can ask why the one large skull fragment reading is so decisive when the smaller one contained four times as much lead, and when the skull bone grows much more slowly than hair and naturally will not register high doses of lead that quickly.

Where we really need an antidote to poison in science

Is James Barron’s style is just so elegant that the scientists were influenced into civility, where they might otherwise have burst out with more indignant objections? If so, we would suggest to the Times editors that Barron might be assigned to look into the notoriously unsustainable paradigm in HIV/AIDS, the belief engendered by Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, Luc Montagnier and David Baltimore that HIV has anything to do with AIDS.

Perhaps his soothing manners might tone down the defensive alarm of defenders of this faith like the notoriously ungracious John Moore of Cornell, and the sinister Dr. Mark Wainberg, director of the McGill University Aids Centre in Montreal and a Toronto AIDS conference organizer, both enthusiasts for jailing if not hanging those who publicly question their fond funding paradigm.

Both these men have instigated poison pen letters to university administrations and other employers of those who ask awkward questions about HIV/AIDS lore, seeking to have them ejected from their positions for not believing HIV is the cause of AIDS, in one case at least resulting in the victim failing to gain tenure at her university, after writing one of the best argued and most realistic books on the topic.

The excessive zeal with which the defenders of HIV/AIDS and its indefensible paradigm rush to suppress its questioning could do with public exposure in the Times. That a scientific belief needs shoring up by personal attacks on its skeptics is a very telling indication of its weak intellectual foundation, and the current certainty that the vast funding now attached to it is being poured down a very large rat hole.

The antics of HIV believers in trying to pin responsibility for many African AIDS deaths on Peter Duesberg and to undermine his position at Berkeley have reached morally disgusting levels in recent months, and we will post on them shortly.

All those who believe in good science in the public interest can only dream that the civility and open minds of Beethoven scholars and the scientists who are helping them out could somehow be transferred to HIV/AIDS, cancer research and other areas where the internal politics of the science is so corrupted and rife with self serving, anti scientific nastiness.

US helicopter shooting of civilians shocks the world

Current wars in microcosm: a plague of fatal ignorance

How Greg Mortenson promotes peace better

The YouTube sensation of the past few days is the depressingly stark video record from 2007 of how easily US gunmen in helicopters can shoot unarmed Iraqis in flowing white robes, gathering in the street below in evidently friendly and relaxed fashion without a clue that they might be fired upon by the poorly trained soldiers sitting in the clattering machines overhead, who have imagined that a photojournalist’s camera lens is the barrel of an AK-47. The politically and morally labeled Collateral Murder – Wikileaks – Iraq has scored over 6 million hits now (April 17 update). It is not for the weak of stomach.

While the commenters (the Times stories have unusually articulate threads) quarrel over how culpable the US gunners are in their attitude that these were armed insurgents assembling to fight them, it seems very clear that they were under informed, to say the least, and taking lethal action partly because their imaginations filled in the gaps.

Here we have a tragic display of how dangerous it is to hand massive firepower to US soldiers of limited background and education (no fault of theirs, of course) without rigorous training in the modern problem of using an army in what is essentially a police action ie fighting rebels embedded in a civilian population in a foreign country, where there is no quick way to distinguish insurgents from innocent residents of the urban battlefield, in this case Baghdad, unless they actively use their weapons. Too often in the absence of good information the imagination rules:

“Let me engage,” the gunner demands, “can I shoot?”

A ground controller asks: “Picking up the wounded?” Seconds later the gunner asks again: “Come on, let us shoot.”

Permission is granted and a dust cloud envelopes a van and several Iraqis picking up bodies from a Baghdad square. Only afterwards do the crew of the American helicopter gunship realize that two children, now gravely wounded, are in the van. “Well,” one says, “it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle.”

The sequence comes half way through 17 minutes of harrowing gun camera footage, authenticated by unnamed US military officials, in which the co-pilot of the Apache has already mistaken a Reuters photographer for an insurgent brandishing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

In this case even given the noise that helicopters make overhead may be less than one imagines (though one informed blogger, Anthony Martinez, says “Up close helicopters are loud, the same isn’t necessarily true when they’re flying above you. You’d be surprised how quiet they can be in flight.”) there seems little doubt that the Iraqis must have known they were there and just assumed they would not be attacked, since they knew of no reason why they should be. As far as they were concerned they were acting peaceably out in the open and they were without weapons. Their behavior indicates no wariness at all.

As one commenter puts it:

DYORPEEPS Just to clear up for the idiots here.
There were NO weapons. At 3:40 you see a camera tripod. The other 2 have cameras, even Stevie Wonder can see those are not weapons.. They claimed they had AK47s. When did you see an AK47 that looked like a camera?
These guys wanted to kill and they were just making up anything they liked.
If you had an RPG, would you be standing? about casually in full view of a helicopter in a gang of 12 or so guys?

Gauging exactly what happened needs more than one viewing of this horror story (and as the Times story today reports WikiLeaks has a longer, 38 minute rather than 17 minute version at collateralmurder.com, which critics say makes clearer that clashes were ongoing in the neighborhood and that “one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade”), but it does seem that the sight of one man carrying a long lens camera or tripod in an apparently peaceful social assembly was far too easily transfigured into a gang of insurgents with multiple AK47s, and that the young US gunners were trigger happy, to say the least, apparently intent on acting out a video game in their heads rather than responsibly trying to hold back until they could be sure that what they guessed at was properly confirmed.

Particularly disgraceful is the followup after the shooting of the main group when a van enters the picture and the driver and his friend try to pick up a wounded man. No weapons are indicated and indeed it turned out later that the two children inside were being taken to school, but the gunners let fly a barrage of heavy ammunition which reduces it to an immobile smoking wreck. All the men were killed and the two children badly wounded (their scars, big as those after a heart transplant, were displayed in an interview on Democracy Now with the widow of the driver (video), conducted by Amy Goodman (also see Amy Goodman Conversation at Commonwealth Club (video):

(Comment): The wikileaks thing has two parts, the first part is debatable (they were not able to distinguish between civilians and combatants one way or another).

The second part is not, the man was identified as wounded, the vehicle as picking up dead and wounded. You can’t spin that to not be a war-crime. Denying medical attention to the children compounded it.

This was not a war-zone, this was a city, which under the rules of war America was obligated to secure from criminals. Using a helicopter unable to pick out children in a van constitutes a failure to make provision for identifying civilians and as such constituted a further possible war-crime.

Now this long clip is going to be viewed around the world and at the current rate may be seen by as many as 10 million people in the next month. The propaganda penalty could be greater than Abu Ghraib, since it offers such a long and convincing look at what collateral damage can really mean.

The 21 Century group think wars

And what is the key problem here? Surely it is the willingness to kill without sufficient information, in a striking parable of the fundamental problem in American actions in the Middle East for the last two decades. American policy and strategy in the Middle East in war and in diplomacy has suffered above all from lack of good information, from the inability to determine whether Saddam Hussein in fact had WMDs to our present inability to gauge Iran’s nuclear progress and intentions. Not to mention the inability to exploit good information when it does come in.

White House officials said later that no one had offered to resign at the meeting. However, it could prove harder to avoid either sackings or resignations when the outcome of a review into the intelligence handling is published later this week.

Former and serving officers are scathing about the way the operation in Afghanistan has been run and see it is part of an institutional weakness in the CIA and other intelligence-gathering agencies.

They said that the biggest US crisis in intelligence-gathering since 9/11 had been brought about mainly because no single agency is in charge, with a dozen agencies fighting for their own turf.

One of the most damning assessments came from a serving officer, Major General Michael Flynn, deputy head of military intelligence in Afghanistan. In a lengthy report published on Monday evening for a Washington thinktank, he and colleagues said the vast apparatus in Afghanistan was only marginally relevant. Analysts in Washington were so starved of information that “many say their jobs feel more like fortune-telling than detective work”, the report says.

Stepping back, one might see this tragic incident as one more example of how we have moved far into the new 21 Century Internet driven era of information/disinformation war, where physical battlefields are more and more irrelevant as they become more and more resistant to victory by force, given the inability to distinguish, defeat or root out the enemy. It is not just that the Army doesn’t serve well as a police force, though clearly it doesn’t adapt that well, with similar incidents (Civilians Killed as U.S. Troops Fire on Afghan Bus) causing havoc in Afghanistan now, leading even the Economist to wonder (When accidents stop seeming like accidents) if the nine year war there has amounted to any more than a “meaningless exercise of misguided violence”.

But how is it that good men go so far astray, so that hillybillies and homeboys from the backwoods and ghettos of America use civilians for target practice, having typed them as armed hostiles? Given the experience of this blog investigating the paradigm battlefields of science, where good and intelligent men and women seem to become hypnotized by their common ideology into losing all their professional skepticism and critical faculties, one obvious possibility is that they suffer from the social psychology of organized crowds and become unable to entertain any idea which conflicts with the shared assumptions.

Collateral alienation

Thus in the armed struggles now being played out where the US is actively seeking to change the political reality of faraway places by force, it seems that the individual soldier is behaving as if under this kind of hypnotic influence. Whether it is their fault is of course the great, Nuremberg question: Do the individual members of a modern social organization or ’system’ – a group united by common ideology, in whatever form, from army to bureaucracy to corporation to scientific field – bear total personal responsibility for their actions, or are they excused because they are under the influence of – permeated by – group think, induced by authority and social psychology, and may be completely unaware of how their minds have been compromised?

One thing is certain, the new era is one where one cloud of group think confronts another – battles are over tribal and mental boundaries now, not geographical ones. Instead of the great global melting pot we all hoped for with the fall of the Wall, we had the ingredients separating out all over instead. The trend continues without slowing. The Middle East confronts America and Israel, and fanatics imbued by radical distortions of Islam confront the US as the standard bearer of global capitalism, just as the Sunnis confront the Shiites, the Kurds confront the Iraqis, the Israelis confront the Palestinians and the Arabs at large, the Hutu killed their Tutsi brothers, etc etc.

Ideological mind games are now the important battlefield, a field of combat where too much ground has been lost over recent decades by a US political culture that still seems too often baffled by and at odds with the cultures it is trying to win over. Now the Internet is rocket boosting this trend by giving a global propaganda platform to every group on earth even as it transforms the world into one living room (For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point).

But there are brilliant exceptions to US failure in the case of individuals who adopt a non military approach, and try to bridge cultures rather than take them over.

Mortenson shows the way

One shining example of the latter is Greg Mortenson and his Stones into Schools program, which is winning over Afghans wholesale in a way which the billions spent on Army operations never will. As Mortenson (follow him on Twitter) told Bill Moyers recently, he was captured by the local Taliban who seemed likely to cut his head off, he thought, but after he asked for a Koran to learn about their ideology, and they found out about his work building hundreds of schools, they released him with a $100 contribution to his local project.

His work has not been without difficulty. In 1996, he survived an eight day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in Pakistan’ Northwest Frontier Province tribal areas, escaped a 2003 firefight with feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under putrid animal hides in a truck going to a leather-tanning factory. He has overcome fatwehs from enraged Islamic mullahs, endured CIA investigations, and also received threats from fellow Americans after 9/11, for helping Muslim children with education.

Mortenson is a living hero to rural communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he has gained the trust of Islamic leaders, military commanders, government officials and tribal chiefs from his tireless effort to champion education, especially for girls.

He is one of few foreigners who has worked extensively for sixteen years (over 72 months in the field) in rural villages where few foreigners go.

TV newscaster, Tom Brokaw, calls Mortenson, “one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, who is really changing the world”.

Congresswoman Mary Bono (Rep – Cali.) says, “I’ve learned more from Greg Mortenson about the causes of terrorism than I did during all our briefings on Capitol Hill. He is a true hero, whose courage, and compassion exemplify the true ideals of the American spirit.”

Losing the information race

If winning the hearts and minds of the Middle East is the great objective, one wonders again how much progress will be made given the enduring cultural chasm and the ease with which the US has been vilified by Arab leaders and clerics, and the seeming inability of the US to curb collateral damage, some of it caused by insurgents, of course:

(Washington Post) But Abdul Ghani, an Afghan man who told The Washington Post in a telephone interview that he was the driver of the bus, said the soldiers “didn’t give me any kind of signal. . . . They just opened fire. No signal at all.”

(Reuters) The United Nations says new guidelines issued by the commander of NATO and U.S. forces last year have helped reduce the number of civilian casualties, but such incidents still cause deep anger among Afghans the foreign troops are meant to protect. While the United Nations says foreign and Afghan troops killed 25 percent fewer civilians last year than in 2008, civilian deaths rose overall, because the number killed by insurgents rose 40 percent.

More than 2,400 civilians were killed in 2009, making it the deadliest year of a war now more than eight years old. There are some 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, set to rise to 150,000 by the year’s end.

Likewise, where Al Qaeda is at work only good intelligence will prevent another 9/11 or worse, yet the record so far with the latest shoe bombing scares is not reassuring.

With the military taking up almost half of the budget’s discretionary spending and the US spending as much on force of arms as the rest of the world combined, the US achievement in recent military and foreign policy looks more and more like the creation of a vast headless monster which roams the globe blindly demolishing the lives of millions while its brain remains on the shelf.

Finally, however, we have a thoughtful President – someone who can talk, think and listen at the same time, as Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has put it (transcript and video), – who should know how to put this right, and is trying to do so (Analysts Say U.S. Intelligence System Overloaded, Out Of Date):

In a recent piece for “The Washington Post,” Hoffman (Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a member of the government’s National Security Preparedness Group) argued that after 9/11, Al-Qaeda’s leadership adopted a new strategy against the United States, which he calls a “death by a thousand cuts” approach.

He says it involves overwhelming the country’s intelligence-gathering system with meaningless data to confuse it; striking U.S. allies (like Spain and Britain) for supporting the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; recruiting “lone operatives” from countries without U.S. visa restrictions; and expanding their operations into failed and lawless states, like Yemen, where the previously little-known group Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is based.

Hoffman argues that the systemic failure of intelligence analysis and airport security that occurred in the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas was, at its core, “a failure to recognize Al-Qaeda’s new strategy.”

He says the redundancy that was built into the system after 9/11 to act as a safety net that would catch mistakes “isn’t enough, and it really boils down to a changing mind-set, as well, that sees Al-Qaeda as it is: this very dynamic, very evolutionary adversary, and that mandates that we prepare not just for yesterday’s threat but we need a system that’s more anticipatory and that’s better at preempting, as well.”

Following last week’s security review, President Obama ordered several immediate changes implemented throughout the intelligence community.

Deja vu

The parallel with the science infowars in HIV/AIDS, global warming, particle physics and other battlefields in science where theory is disputed, information is spun for the public, and entrenched power represses free speech, will not be lost on readers of this blog. The unhappy converts to the current spurious paradigm which persuades the ignorant to accept HIV as the cause of AIDS are not very different from the foolish and imagination driven soldiers in their helicopters overhead, when they victimize innocents with their medical bullets against the wrong threat.

Might does not make right

The anachronistic US determination to exert influence through military might in unwinnable situations has been hard to understand since Vietnam. Military might cannot win a propaganda war. Military might cannot win a guerrilla war. Military might cannot win against terrorism and suicide bombers.

Military might is certainly not the right weapon to police an international criminal conspiracy, which is all that Al Queda is, as the thoughtful Andrew Bacevich, the great skeptic on Iraq and Afghanistan, whose latest book is The Permanent War, tells Bill Moyers in his latest interview:

We don’t learn from history….There is this inexplicable belief that the use of military force in some Godforsaken country on the other side of the planet will not only yield some purposeful result but will produce significant benefits for the United States. We’re now in the ninth year of this war, the longest in American history, with no end in sight… a war utterly devoid of strategic purpose….if we could wave a magic wand tomorrow and achieve all of the purposes General McChrystal would like us to achieve, would the jihadist threat be sustantially reduced as a consequence? Is jihadism centered or headquartered in Afghanistan? …you only have to think about it for three seconds…it is an international movement.. it could come from Brooklyn. ..the notion that because the 9/11 was concocted in this country, as it was, somehow it will guarantee there won’t be another 9.11 is absurd.. the notion that we can prevent another 9/11 by invading and occupying and transforming other countries is absurd… Al Queda is not Nazi Germany…Al Queda is the equivalent of an international criminal conspiracy, a Mafia that draws its energy or legitimacy from a distorted understanding of a particular religious tradition..and the proper response is a police effort…ruthless and sustained to identify the thugs, root out the networks and destroy it …an effort which will never fully succeed in eliminating the threat, just as the NYPD isn’t able to fully eliminate criminality in New York City. (Full transcript is at this page at Moyers Journal

).

The uselessness and tragedy of thinking otherwise has never been better encapsulated than in this outrage video.

So who really deserves the Nobel Peace prize?

Perhaps US policymakers should ask Greg Mortenson’s advice. On the basis of his record to date it is not too much to say that it should have been Mortenson who got the Nobel Peace Prize, not Obama.

“By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to promote peace with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote communities in central Asia.

Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time.

In 1993 Mortenson was descending from his failed attempt to reach the peak of K2. Exhausted and disoriented, he wandered away from his group into the most desolate reaches of northern Pakistan. Alone, without food, water or shelter, he stumbled into an impoverished Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health.

While recovering he observed the village’s 84 children sitting outdoors, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village was so poor that it could not afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher. When he left the village, he promised that he would return to build them a school. From that rash, heartfelt promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time.

In an early effort to raise money he wrote letters to 580 celebrities, businessmen, and other prominent Americans. His only reply was a $100 check from NBC’s Tom Brokaw. Selling everything he owned, he still only raised $2,400. But his efforts changed when a group of elementary school children in River Falls, Wisconsin, donated $623.40 in pennies, and who inspired adults to begin to take action. The 283 foot Braldu Bridge was completed in 1995 and the Korphe School was completed in 1996. Since then, he’s established 78 schools. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived an armed kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. Yet his success speaks for itself.”

Mortenson is the author of Three Cups of Tea, his autobiography, of which the above is part of a review, and last year of his Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here’s part of the review in the Washington Post bv Jay Matthews:

…. few new books are as well-timed as “Stones Into Schools.” Mortenson is the author of the most popular recent account of a part of the world at the center of American foreign policy. His views will influence how voters react to President Obama’s efforts in Afghanistan. However distasteful he finds the word “terrorism,” Mortenson makes no secret of his disgust with the Taliban. The heroes of this book are 14 riders, loaded with AK-47s, their horses “short legged and shaggy and iridescent with sweat,” who came across the Irshad Pass to Pakistan in 1999 and begged Mortensen to build a school in their remote part of Afghanistan. The school was built, and at the end of that struggle the author saw their triumph as a path to peace for all. “They had raised a beacon of hope that called out not only to the Kirghiz themselves, but also to every village and town in Afghanistan where children yearn for education, and where fathers and mothers dream of building a school whose doors will open not only to their sons but also to their daughters,” Mortenson writes, “including — and perhaps especially — those places that are surrounded by a ring of men with Kalashnikovs who help to sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran.” After some initial reluctance, he embraces the U.S. military as part of the effort to bring education to children so unimaginably far from civilization. Soldiers provide personal donations and transportation of materials for some of his projects. But Mortenson puts most of his faith in the Afghans themselves, particularly those who persuaded him to build more schools. He says they can crush the Taliban and overcome the country’s old cultural biases against educating girls. Mortenson may be unrealistic, but the past decade of his life has been one improbability after another. It is unfair to expect him to lose hope now. He wants the United States to stay and help his friends save their country. He’s on a roll, and he doesn’t see why he can’t carry everyone with him.

We’re with you, Greg.

UPDATE: Were the American gunners to blame? Further discussion

The AtWar blog at the Times has excerpts from military blogs which evaluate the video and whether the gunners were justified in panting to open fire.

Here’s an excerpt from Anthony Martinez’s post at A Look Inside. Martinez is an experienced viewer of aerial footage and says he would not have recommended firing, even though he observes two weapons as well as the camera lens:

I have spent quite a lot of time (a conservative estimate would be around 4500 hours) viewing aerial footage of Iraq (note: this time was not in viewing TADS video, but footage from Raven, Shadow, and Predator feeds)…

Between 3:13 and 3:30 it is quite clear to me, as both a former infantry sergeant and a photographer, that the two men central to the gun-camera’s frame are carrying photographic equipment. This much is noted by WikiLeaks, and misidentified by the crew of Crazyhorse 18. At 3:39, the men central to the frame are armed, the one on the far left with some AK variant, and the one in the center with an RPG. The RPG is crystal clear even in the downsized, very low-resolution, video between 3:40 and 3:45 when the man carrying it turns counter-clockwise and then back to the direction of the Apache. This all goes by without any mention whatsoever from WikiLeaks, and that is unacceptable.

At 4:08 to 4:18 another misidentification is made by Crazyhorse 18, where what appears to clearly be a man with a telephoto lens (edit to add: one of the Canon EF 70-200mm offerings) on an SLR is identified as wielding an RPG. The actual case is not threatening at all, though the misidentified case presents a major perceived threat to the aircraft and any coalition forces in the direction of its orientation. This moment is when the decision to engage is made, in error.

(note: It has to be taken into consideration that there is no way that the Crazyhorse crew had the knowledge, as everyone who has viewed this had, that the man on the corner of that wall was a photographer. The actions of shouldering an RPG (bringing a long cylindrical object in line with one’s face) and framing a photo with a long telephoto lens quite probably look identical to an aircrew in those conditions.)

I have made the call to engage targets from the sky several times, and know (especially during the surge) that such calls are not taken lightly. Had I been personally involved with this mission, and had access to real-time footage, I would have recommended against granting permission. Any of the officers with whom I served are well aware that I would continue voicing that recommendation until ordered to do otherwise. A few of them threatened me with action under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for doing so. Better officers than they, fortunately, were always ready to go to bat for me and keep that from happening. That said, if either of the clearly visible weapons been oriented towards aircraft, vehicles, troops, or civilians I would have cleared Crazyhorse 18 hot in a heartbeat and defended my actions to the battle staff if needed….

The point at which I cannot support the actions of Crazyhorse 18, at all, comes when the van arrives somewhere around 9:45 and is engaged. Unless someone had jumped out with an RPG ready to fire on the aircraft, there was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm from above. Might it have been prudent to follow the vehicle (perhaps with a UAV), or at least put out a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for the vehicle? Absolutely without question. Was this portion of the engagement even remotely understandable, to me? No, it was not.

All in all, the engagement clearly went bad. I would have objected when I was a private first-class pulling triple duty as an RTO, driver, and vehicle gunner. I would have objected when I was a sergeant working well above my pay-grade as the Brigade Battle NCO. My assessment is based on my experiences in that very theater of operations. I did not see a threat that warranted an engagement at any point. I did, however, see the elements indicating such a threat could develop at any moment.

Read the whole post and the informed comments there and the extraordinarily well expressed and fluent comments at the Times AtWar blog for a rounded out picture, but our own assessment of trigger happy, poorly trained US gunners acting on insufficient information remains. Be that as it may, the whole episode now stands as yet another example of how using an army to fight insurgents can create gigantic propaganda failures now that digital recording and the Web ensures that sooner or later we will have bad behavior leaks of enormous impact.

Esperanza says:
April 7, 2010 at 7:21 am
What a surprise. The US military kills reporters and covers it up!

I mean, what is there to say in defense of the obvious content of this footage? The people on the radio got hyped up after they saw the rifles and RPG and even more so when they saw the photographer crouching behind the wall and stupidly thought it was a man with an RPG. That was clearly a camera lens sticking out at 4:10 onward.

What needs to happen when events like this transpire is not a cover up, but a holding to account. Anyone involved with the mis-identification and subsequent murder of these people should have been relieved of their duties and discharged. It’s that simple. We cannot afford to have incompetent persons at the controls of such lethal measures with absolutely no accountability.

It’s clear that an Arab’s life and an Arab’s rights are not worth as much to the Pentagon as those of the homicidal incompetents heard on this video (they are the real “fuckin’ pricks”).

Of course we know this already – recall Abu Ghraib and the cover-up and the shelling of all those reporters in the Palestine Hotel and the cover-up, etc, etc, etc. So great, this blogger explains that WikiLeaks didn’t point out the weapons in the hands of some with whom the reporters were seen. So what? Does that alter the fact that these reporters were murdered? No.

“Keep shootin’” and wonder why we continue to be the #1 target for Muslim terrorists.

UPDATE 2: Psychologists explain Iraq airstrike Video: Stress of combat

New York Times finds psychologists to explain/excuse hillybilly target practice on defenseless civilians:

Experts Cite Conditioning and Heat of Combat to Explain Iraq Airstrike Video

Combat training “is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being” to take another life, the colonel writes. “Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened.”

The men in the Apache helicopter in the video flew into an area that was being contested, during a broader conflict in which a number of helicopters had been shot down.

Several other factors are on display during the 38-minute video, said psychologists in and out of the military. (A shortened 17-minute version of the video has been viewed about three million times on YouTube.)

Soldiers and Marines are taught to observe rules of engagement, and throughout the video those in the helicopter call base for permission to shoot. But at a more primal level, fighters in a war zone must think of themselves as predators first — not bait. That frame of mind affects not only how a person thinks, but what he sees and hears, especially in the presence of imminent danger, or the perception of a threat.

Among the 448 Comments so far:

C. Peter Herman
Toronto
April 7th, 2010
9:10 pm
The fact that these pilots are primed to see anyone as a potential threat is all the more reason why they should be trained to compensate for this bias. Police are trained to disambiguate threats, whereas soldiers,it seems, are trained to shoot first and count on getting exonerated by their superiors later.
Recommended by 158 Readers

Michael L.
New York
April 7th, 2010
9:10 pm
As a photographer and as someone who has combat photographers as friends, the mistaking of a camera for a weapon is disturbing enough, but this rationalization is appalling. No where in the video do the helicopter crew express concern that they are under attack. In fact they are so far away that the people on the ground seem completely unaware of them and even once the gunfire starts, they seem to have no idea where it is coming from. Tragic mistakes are made by cops and combat soldiers, but if technology is going to allow US soldiers to kill from such a distance, tighter rules of engagement are needed. And shooting up a minivan full of kids because it stopped to help injured people is not tight.
Recommended by 307 Readers

D Carter
Western NC
April 7th, 2010
9:39 pm
Anyone who watches the video while listening to the chatter of the pilots and gunners and then comes up with this kind of pseudo-scientific “psychological”/situational apologia is seriously lacking in any sense of ethical grounding. As other respondents have pointed out, the Apache crew members were clearly in no danger–the only adrenalin flowing was not fear, but the excitement of the kill.

Does “distancing” justify hoping that a dying man will pick up a gun so that he can be blown to bits with a 30 mm cannon? And forget about the children. Does the fear inherit in combat justify these crews pleading with their controller (and lying in the process) in order to be able to slaughter a wounded combatant and the two men who are trying to take him away to be treated?

And for those respondents who refer to “split second decisions,” look closely at the timeline. These men had ample time to assess the situation from a safe distance and then make their decisions.

Equally depressing is the fact that this video was reviewed at the time by military authorities who insisted that these action were justified by the rules of engagement. One can only assume that they regarded this kind of trigger-happy and reckless behavior standard operating procedure.

War is brutal, but–however tenuous–there are still rules that we can try and follow if for no other reason than that this kind of callous brutality–sanctioned by superior officers who should know better–will inevitably blow back on us abroad and at home.
Recommended by 245 Readers

R. Vega
Dallas, Texas
April 7th, 2010
9:42 pm
I agree we cannot simply condemn the soldiers for their callous remarks under the stress of combat. We can, however, condemn the system that led to that and many other instances of senseless deaths of civilians. We must also keep in mind that this was not your typical battlefield. Real people actually live in those neighborhoods. That helicopter was not under threat, in fact, the people on the ground seemed oblivious to its existence, and they did not even have an idea where the attack was coming from. They were gunned down even after being incapacitated and posing no real threat. Despite all the psychological mambo-jumbo, that is inexcusable. It may have looked like a video game, but that was no video game. A real leader, had there been one in that helicopter, would have known the difference. Commanders and their subordinates must have known that they could not go around indiscriminately shooting at anyone they thought could be threat. Instead of finding excuses, our leaders should be asking the hard questions, particularly as they pertain to the rules of engagement. Otherwise we are just providing more recruitment tools for the terrorism of years to come.
Recommended by 133 Readers

Michael A. Hoffman
Idaho
April 7th, 2010
9:26 pm
The New York Times furnishes a sophisticated psychological rationale for gunning down human beings from the air. Every possible excuse and alibi is offered to justify the carnage and dehumanization. The Times and the psychologists and academics its quotes omit one factor, however: the victims were not afraid of the helicopter gunship, they sauntered casually down the street. They obviously believed they were doing nothing wrong and had a considerable amount of faith in the decency of the US military. Moreover, your high falutin’ explainers failed to explain one aspect of the pilot’s depraved indifference to human life: when the pilot begged the wounded, crawling man to find a weapon and pick it up so the pilot could shoot him again. Ah yes, but that’s okay, he just a “soldier who is doing his job” –which is — to “destroy the enemy.” And what made these people enemies? Being Arab? I thought we settled all this at Nuremberg? Or perhaps Nuremberg does not apply to the USA? I’m going to file this article of yours under the heading, “Prima Facie Evidence of the War Fever that has Gripped the New York Times.” God help us all.
Recommended by 188 Readers

On the other side:

Robert Levine
Malvern, PA
April 7th, 2010
10:05 pm
This was no massacre. This was a combat situation. Armed insurgents in that area were killing Iraqi and American personnel. The reason the ground forces were in the area and prepared to show up in combat vehicles was because they had already been operating there against hostile forces. The smug presumptions of people responding here who have an obvious bias against anything the U.S. military is involved in is beyond stupid and dishonorable. As for the pilots, they did see side arms and these bad actors were armed because they are part of a continuing insurgency. We should never have initiated this second Iraq war, and the Bush administration prosecuted it with an incompetence that puts Katrina in a good light by comparison. The use of torture by amateur security consultants brought in from the outside was also stupid, ineffective, and ultimately damaging to the interests of the U.S, but make no mistake, the people we’re shooting at in Iraq want to see us dead, and they felt that way all over the Middle East before 9/11. When and wherever we send them in harm’s way, these brave American kids are defending the very jerks writing uninformed opinions on this page.
Recommended by 13 Readers

B. Bailey
Colorado Springs, CO
April 8th, 2010
12:34 pm
My initial reaction to this article was one of relief and gratitude. Gratitude that the NYT had the courage to speak on behalf of the war fighters who have been placed at ground zero in the war. After reading the comments here, the article seems only to have stirred the hornets’ nest. This has been a blood thirsty comment thread.

As an “old” Marine and the father of an active duty Marine infantryman who was deployed to Iraq and will soon return to Afghanistan, I’m angered and frustrated at the ignorant, myopic and narrow-minded pre-formed opinions regarding the men and women prosecuting our country’s war.

Here in Colorado Springs, we live with the war is a daily fact of life. Our familys and neighbors deploy. Our nightly news regularly parts the curtain of relative peace to reveal the memorials for the latest casualties (Ft. Carson’s 4th ID, 10th Special Forces Group and others have lost almost 300) from Iraq and Afghanistan. They also regularly give account of the psychological devastation wrought on young men and women pressed to kill (suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, spousal abuse, etc.). PTSD walks our streets. We know these people in their “real” lives back here in the U.S. and they are little different than any of you. They have families, they have hobbies, they have political opinions, and they also have morals and ethics. How dare you take a “snapshot,” a brief video clip viewed in isolation and lacking any real context other than what has been conjured by those rushing to judgement and condemn these men and women.

What no one here seems interested in is the fact that, when we enter the story and the WikiLeak posted video begins, this is an engagement already well underway with an unexplained backstory, these pilots had responded to a call for assistance from a ground patrol (the units variously identified by call signs “Hotel26″, “Hotel22″ and “Bushmaster26″ in the video) that had already been engaged by insurgents. The pilots seek clearance from “Hotel26″ to fire on the group they were surveilling so as not to inadvertently kill friendly troops. Hotel26 gives the Apaches the go ahead telling them that “We have no personnel east of our position.” The ground forces indicate where they last saw the insurgent, “Uh negative, uh, he was, uh, right in front of the Brad (Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle and presumably call sign “Bushmaster26″).” Once the Apaches fire, you can hear “Bushmaster26″ saying, “We need to move, time now!” follow shortly by, “26, this is 26, we are mobile (on the move).” We later hear the ground element ask the pilots, “Can you walk us onto that location (the scene where the Apaches engaged the men on the street), over (give us directions)?” There is obvious tension on the ground.

Granted, the chatter between the pilots sounds sanguinary today, but in 2007, the height of the war in Iraq (More U.S. casualties, 961, than any other year according to iCasualties.org), this 37 minute clip was a heartbeat in an ongoing bloody battle where a lot of U.S. ground troops were dying in ambushes just like this one. Context, people…

Neither helicoptor pilots nor soldiers on the ground are patrolling Iraq and/or Afghanistan looking for opportunities to kill and most would rather take a bullet, and many have, rather than risk hitting innocent civilians. You have no idea the day-to-day restraint these men and women demonstrate nor at what cost. When you and/or your comrades are in very real danger and you are constrained or unable to react, it tears at your psychological fabric. Killing an innocent, regardless of circumstances, shreds it. Just ask a vet. And, comparing soldiers under fire (whether the pilots felt directly threatened or were responding to calls for assistance from those on the ground who were) to police in the city is a convenient but utimately false simile. Viewed in context, the behavior of the men under surveillance by the Apache crews, peering around corners, presumably in the direction of the ground patrol, while wielding an RPG and AKs immediately following an ambush, is suspicious at best. The pilots’ responsed by characterizing them as hostiles on an existing and active urban battlefield. In that context, their actions and language, while discomforting to the average person sitting in the comfort of their home or their local coffee shop, are ultimately better understood…unless you’re predisposed to see war criminals anywhere there’s an American uniform and then there’s no understanding…

Ironically, one of the places you’ll hear chatter very similar to that of the pilots in the video is in a hospital…ask an ER Tech or ICU nurse or doctor. Gallows humor in these environments is a defense mechanism just as the “video game” analogy used in the article is for the pilots. Unfortunately, the infantryman can’t disassociate quite as easily as he can often see the white in the other man’s eyes.

“War is Hell!” W.T. Sherman
Recommended by 22 Readers

For 2 Grieving Families, Video Reveals Grim Truth (see pic in the HIDE/SHOW discussion section above left).

For Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s family, the video seemed to bring closure for an event that had left many questions unanswered.

“God has answered my prayer in revealing this tape to the world,” said the photographer’s father, who taught his son how to take pictures. “I would have sold my house and all that I own in order to show this tape to the world.”

Families of Victims of 2007 US Helicopter Killing React to Leaked Video – Democracy Now segment featuring the team from Iceland interviewing the family:

Journalists from the investigative team in Iceland that released the now-infamous US military video on WikiLeaks traveled to Baghdad recently to meet with the family members of some of the twelve people killed in the 2007 attack. Ahlam Abdelhussain, the widow of Saleh Mutashar who was killed when the gunship opened fire on a van, asks, “Why was he shot with his children in the car? They did nothing wrong. He was helping a journalist. What was his crime? What was the crime of our children who are left with no father and no support?”

UPDATES

Oops! Obama dropped the ball on intelligence says Daily Beast column

Obama’s Dangerous Spy Game by John Lehman (May 25)

With the coming of the Obama Administration and its view that everything Bush did should be reversed, there was hope the president would make a new start with the DNI, and perhaps even read our 9/11 report. Those hopes were dashed when he put his pal Leon Panetta at CIA and then reversed attempts by Negroponte’s successor, John McConnell—and Blair—to exercise some of the powers over the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense that we had intended for the office.

While three successive DNIs have striven hard and accomplished some useful things, the intelligence community is now even more bloated and just as dysfunctional as it was before 9/11. The solution does not lie in yet another reorganization by a fourth powerless DNI. There will be no improvement until we have a president who gets it. Until then, the burden of keeping Americans safe from terrorism must rest outside the federal government, with individual centers of intelligence excellence like Ray Kelly’s NYPD Counterterrorism Office.

John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission.

Personal testimony (Videos):

From Media Sanctuary

Innocence Lost: Ethan McCord recounts aftermath of Iraqi civilian massacre | UNPC 7/24/2010 (video)

The Rules of Engagement in Iraq Are a Joke: Elaine Brower & Ethan McCord | UNPC 7/24/2010 (video)

Vast machine plunges into unknown as CERN evades international control, ramps up Large Hadron Collider to 7 TeV collisions

Officials and scientists knowingly mislead public as unanswered critiques accumulate

Appeals to UN and US, German governments rebuffed, CERN beehive mentality rules out response to outside concern

Possible happy outcome: everybody wrong

Look carefully at these faces. Would you entrust your life, and the lives of your children, and the lives of all present and future inhabitants of this planet. to these men and women, without at least a very careful review of what they are up to?

Disregarding the objections of a handful of critics, some very expert, who say it may be the greatest folly of mankind ever constructed, the council of CERN has given the go ahead to the thousands of scientists in charge of the fabulous $9 billion Large Hadron Collider to proceed with collisions at rates of 600 million or more a second at energies matching conditions one billionth of a second after the Big Bang, starting tomorrow, Mar 30, 2010, Tuesday, in the early morning.

If all goes as planned, the scientists running the Geneva based experiment will take all 6.8 billion of their fellow humans on an unprecedented joyride for the rest of this year and next further than ever before into hitherto unknown regions and dimensions of subatomic reality, possibly generating dark matter and hitherto unseen particles including a ‘God particle’ or Higgs boson to win Peter Higgs his Nobel, and/or mini Black Holes and extra dimensions to win Brian Greene his, not to mention supersymmetry and sparticles.

Also in view are local thermonuclear explosions at the rate of one H-Bomb a second, and/or a swarm of micro Black Holes (mBHs) and/or strangelets at the possible expense of the planet, the sun and even, if vacuum bubbles result, the entire universe, according to texts by critics ranging from students of Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar to top ranking theorists from Oxford, Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute of Physics.

What will happen now is unknown

For all these theories the proof is in the pudding, but so far, the record of CERN in putting together the wonderful machine doesn’t argue very convincingly that its work is reliably error free either on the engineering or the theoretical side.

Following the embarrassment of its first attempt at start up in September 2008, when the vast, supposedly excruciatingly carefully designed and finely honed contraption exploded within nine days, the repaired collider with its 27 kilometer circumference tunnel and four underground detectors too large to fit into St Peters Basilica was finally revved up this autumn from November 20 to December 16th to record collision levels of 2.36 TeV (teraelectronvolts), before being shut down for the winter. Unexpected results already appeared in the run in the form of an excess of mesons, particularly kaons, the building blocks of strangelets.

The achievement came after power mysteriously cut off on November 5 during a test and when scientists headed above ground they discovered a bird eating a baguette , a piece of which it had dropped and short circuited a compensating capacitor. Apparently CERN engineers are prone to forget electrical wiring safety measures such as insulation since the delay of over a year from September 2008 was laid to faulty wiring between two of the magnets causing the explosion.

Lest we forget (most reporters on CERN have, it seems), there was also the theoretical miscalculation which caused similar embarrassment and heartbreak for all concerned on March 27 2007, when incorrect mathematics by Fermilab designers led to an explosion in the CERN tunnel, filling it with helium, just as would happen a year or more later after things had supposedly been put right. Apparently the design mistakes had survived multiple reviews:

(TimesOnLine) It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

Last week an apparently furious and embarrassed Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, wrote to his staff saying they had caused “a pratfall on the world stage”. He said: “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”

Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.

“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by Cern researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments.

Charging ahead

This year after the autumn trial of collisions at a record 1.18 TeV proved out the step by step approach has been abandoned and the proton beams have been running for a week at the new and historically astonishing pace of 3.5 TeV, three times the record level of last autumn, for a collision energy of 7 TeV, and head on collisions of protons start in a few hours. They will run at that level for the remainder of this year and thru 2011, before another year of shut down in 2012, while further upgrading is accomplished to allow beam power to be doubled to 7 TeV.

While the beam energy remains at the high new level of 3.5 teV the collision energy will be much greater towards the end of this year as the potentially much more dangerous ALICE experiment comes on line, for then instead of protons lead nuclei will be whizzing around the course and colliding head on, multiplying the collision energy around 90 times to over 500 TeV! The process demands astonishing accuracy which Steve Myers director for accelerators and technology at CERN compares to aiming needles across the Atlantic to hit each other head on.

That’s what is planned, at least, in line with the fervent hopes and dreams of the 1,700 scientists, engineers, technicians and students from more than 90 US universities and labs funded by the DOE and NSF, not to mention the rest of the 10,000 people from 60 countries who have designed and built the accelerator and its experiments.

Fending off the spoilsports

Critics and alarmists, that is to say, responsible people who worry that the safety reassurances of CERN officials are based on insufficient impartial review and who have discerned that human error may still complicate matters based on the past record are hoping that something else goes wrong, so that outside intervention will finally put a stop to the heedless rush to higher and higher levels of impact.

One reason is that the safety concerns of theorists such as Rainer Plaga (ex group leader at Max Planck Institute of Physics), Adrian Kent of Cambridge, Toby Ord of Oxford, and even Martin Rees (who now publicly cheers on CERN but whose book devotes a whole chapter of doubt to the LHC) have not been answered in any way since CERN safety theorists Giddings and Mangano chose the wrong equation in Plaga’s work to refute in 2008, an embarrassment they have apparently tried to live down with silence.

Meanwhile CERN personnel continue to dismiss serious concerns and reassure the public that the “probability (of global catastrophe) is zero” , which Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker of May 14, 2007 (Annals of Science: Crash Course) revealed to be a knowingly false pr statement ( “Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”). Meanwhile physicists everywhere repeat the invalid argument (now generally known as “cosmic ray 1″, and discredited in the CERN 2008 safety report) that the Earth has been subjected to cosmic rays for aeons without discernible problems.

“Give me a crystal ball”

But in fact the scientists and administrators involved also all admit that they have no idea what will, in fact, happen, and have offered no reason why the public should join them in crediting their own theorists’ papers any more than the paper of the ex-Max Planck group leader Rainer Plaga who urges a halt for review.

The truth is that the outcome of this imminent threefold jump in power is wide open, according to CERN director Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer himself at a CERN press conference on November 23, where the kindly looking Heuer informed the world, according to Concerned International, that it all “depends how kind nature is to us. If we would know, then it would be nice but I need a crystal ball in order to predict it…..Give me a glass ball, a crystal ball, then I would know but I don’t know what nature has for us.“

His colleague Verdee (CMS) assured the assembled press stenographers that this was quite right. “We have this standard model. […] So, we have these prejudices which we have just gone through. But nature could have a complete surprise for us and that would be also very interesting. So one should not rule out the fact, we’ve just listed these theory things but nature could have done something different.”

Giotto (ATLAS) added: “Research is called research because we are going to find, to look for something that a priori is not well known. […] This is part of the charm. And I personally will be very happy in fact, I will be very happy to find something that has not been foreseen and that nature in the end is always more simple and more elegant than the speculations of mankind and our theories.”

Indeed, the truth appears to be that no one has any idea what will transpire, which in one way is reassuring, since it suggests that the papers of the best informed critics such as Rainer Plaga are equally likely to be replaced by novelties. The biggest machine ever constructed will take a near light speed shot in the dark, and the result may indeed be a “complete surprise.” It may even be nothing at all, say some.

Nature explains why CERN scientists are so irresponsible

Whether this is a good basis for complacency is a matter for those put at risk to decide, some might argue, but the CERN leadership, such as it is, has decided for us. More specifically, the group think in place at CERN has more or less mesmerized all participants down to the worker bee level in this vast hive to ignore the simple logic of the situation, which is that if no one knows which theory is correct yet, bad things may happen to good people. Caution seems more in order than going at it gangbusters in what appears to be a determined attempt to see if we can achieve the end of the world if we really try our hardest.

CERN as giant beehive

The leaderless beehive thinking at CERN that has given rise to this phenomenon is well sketched in Nature’s current piece on The Large Human Collider, which describes how “Social scientists have embedded themselves at CERN to study the world’s biggest research collaboration. Zeeya Merali reports on a 10,000-person physics project.” Here are some key paragraphs:

Sergio Bertolucci, CERN’s research director, is acutely aware of the importance of cohesive collaboration. “This is an incredible social experiment,” he says, noting that roughly 10,000 physicists around the world are taking part in the LHC experiments and 2,250 of them are employed at CERN. Just reflecting on the size of the collaboration he co-manages makes Bertolucci’s head ache. “Imagine the organization needed when 3,000 people all want to know in advance if they can go home for Christmas,” he says.

Managers at CERN have endured a series of headaches since the LHC powered up in September 2008. A little more than a week after the collider came online, a faulty electrical coupling caused an explosion that brought the project to a halt for 14 months. That setback demoralized the scientists at CERN, particularly the graduate students, who worried about the fate of their degrees, says Roy. A graduate student herself, from the University of California, Berkeley, Roy has been camped out at CERN on and off for three years to observe the “language, taboos and rituals of this exotic community”…..

The arrogance of physicists at CERN, apparent from their behavior, is noted by the visiting sociologists who bear their scorn:

When Knorr Cetina first arrrived, physicists there were working on a smaller collider and their detector teams were less than one-tenth the size of today’s. “In those days 100 people in a team was considered huge,” she says. Knorr Cetina says she was met with friendly bemusement by particle physicists, who were helpful, but thought of a sociologist “as a poor cousin of real scientists”.

That attitude continues today, says Roy. “What can you say? Physicists are professionally contemptuous,” she says.

But judging from what Zeeya Merali writes, it seems that the arrogant physicists might do well to pay attention to the social scientists, as well as vice versa. Her story confirms that the image that many worried people have developed of all these superannuated whiz kids having been given a $9 billion box of matches to play with and liable to light the nearest living room curtain with the sole gleeful purpose of seeing what will happen

What’s especially interesting is the social scientists conclusion that that CERN physicists have been acting as a kind of enormous committee, with subcommittees, but without a real intellectual leader.

Social scientists say they earn the trust of the physicists at CERN by immersing themselves in the culture, just as they would with any other population. Knorr Cetina used this approach to unravel the politics of peacekeeping among the thousands of scientists at the lab.

When she first started, she says, “I expected the same lines of command we know from other complex organizations — industry or government”. But she didn’t find that hierarchy at CERN. Although there are spokespeople who hold positions of authority in the collaboration, there is no top-down decision-making because there are so many highly specialized teams working on different parts of the detector. Knorr Cetina says that at CERN, “the industrial model cannot work. One human simply cannot make technical decisions on such a large scale.

CERN’s unconventional structure stems in part from its history and philosophy. The lab was established on the Swiss–Franco border in 1954 to unite a Europe that had been fractured by war. “It’s a place for global collaboration, where science exists beyond the politics of nationality,” says Bertolucci. But within the lab, the idealism runs into the tensions of conducting actual research. “The paradox is that science is not democratic; we don’t determine who is right by a vote or the majority decision.”

“It’s a cognitive bubble that you can’t escape — that you don’t want to escape.”

If not an industry or a democracy, what is the structure? Knorr Cetina says that CERN functions as a commune, where particle physicists gladly leave their homes and give up their individuality to work for the greater whole. The communal lifestyle is encouraged by the fact that the laboratory stands on its own international territory. “Even the Swiss police cannot come in and grab us,” says Bertolucci. It has its own restaurants, post office, bank and other facilities. “You can live forever within CERN, without ever needing to visit nearby Geneva,” says Knorr Cetina. “It’s a cognitive bubble that you can’t escape — that you don’t want to escape.”

Bertolucci says that this immersion is essential to CERN’s success as a global enterprise. “People coming here from around the world don’t feel like they are visiting someone else’s country, they feel they are coming home.”

“The laboratory does feel like a commune with so many people coming from around the world to work towards a collective goal,” says Kevin Black, a postdoc with the ATLAS collaboration.

Not surprisingly then, this ‘commune in a cognitive bubble’ has difficulty seeing outside its blinkered vision to the real possibility that its theoretical models and its safety reports are untrustworthy, cognitively speaking, at least until reviewed by outsiders.

The schizophrenic group consciousness that on one side acknowledges privately that its theories are just theories and subject to radical revision depending on the outcome of the unprecedented Colossus’s experiments, and on the other side generates the ‘gungho let’s go full steam ahead’ policy is well expressed on a current LHC blog page, where a CERN physicist explains that no one should take physics theories too seriously.:

One our goals here on the US/LHC blog is to clarify a few public misconceptions about physics. One thing that the popular press seems to get consistently wrong is that people are married to their models—by which I mean “plausible, but speculative, frameworks for explaining natural phenomena.” Journalists will often write about a physicist’s pet model by starting with “Professor So-and-So believes that…,” as if Professor So-and-So goes to bed at night thinking of ways to explain to the world why his/her model is right and everyone else is wrong.
That’s not how science is done, not even speculative science. Just because someone spends some time developing a new idea, that doesn’t mean that they are doing so because they think it must be true. This may sound silly: if they don’t think its true, then why devote so much time to it?

All those pursuing the vexed question of the sanity of CERN’s overconfidence can thank the writer for that little gem of enlightenment.

As we noted in our previous post, there are three dangers inherent in the CERN insistence on going full speed ahead despite all the warning signals: strangelets turning the planet into a smoking asteroid the size of a baseball park, a micro black hole swallowing the earth from the core outwards, if not the sun, and/or the generation of a huge amount of energy equivalent to a thermonuclear bomb per second. Now we have learned of another possibility mentioned by Toby Ord of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, “a bubble of ‘true vacuum expanding outward at the speed of light, converting the universe into (a) different state apparently inhospitable for any kind of life (Turner and Wilczek 1982).” There goes the universe.

All these are theoretical dangers, but it seems inarguable they exist at some level of probability above zero, intentionally false assertions from the pr arm of the $900 million annual budget, 2500 employee CERN notwithstanding.

Critics rebuffed, but ConCERNed UN paper remains persuasive

Meanwhile, the series of mishaps so far arising from mistakes in design and construction do nothing to bolster the confidence of skeptics in the 100% competence or thoroughness of CERN scientists and engineers, and like an unleashed Gargantua CERN is taking advantage of the lack of governmental oversight to move ahead, despite actions in US and German courts and an appeal to the UN to halt the process until outside review on behalf of the public at large can be completed.

All of these appeals have been rebuffed, and the critics were forced last week to go to the council of CERN itself, as they met for the last time to authorize CERN to proceed. Since all they were permitted to do was distribute their revised UN complaint text by ConCERNed International to the national representatives at the meeting, they had no apparent response there either.

All literate observers will find it worth reading their document of complaint, Critical Revision of LHC Risks and Communication, which has been shortened from its earlier version but is still 66 pages. It is hard to get through without agreeing with their point, which is sooner or later the rapid climb up ever higher levels of collision energy in colliders must come under review, and there is a very strong case for doing it right now.

But that won’t happen, and so we are all in for an interesting time over the next two years, especially since some of the effects forewarned by the theorists may not be immediately apparent (black hole consumption of the planet may take five or even fifty years, with little apparent effect on the surface). On the other hand if Plaga’s thermonuclear explosions come about at the predicted rate of one a second, it is possible that the entire CERN project and its staff, and large chunks of France and Switzerland near Geneva, will be obliterated in short order, together with modern civilization.

The start up of collisions in a few hours can be followed blow by blow on Twitter at CERN twitter.

UPDATE: Kick off runs into problem. Two posts just now – beam lost! (4am NYC) :

On webcast soon: A. Siemko to explain the cause of the beam loss. http://bit.ly/aQftoi
9 minutes ago via web

It’s all live! New photos: http://bit.ly/dfTGiF http://bit.ly/b5qbSu http://bit.ly/dvYahz – Watch the webcast http://bit.ly/aQftoi
30 minutes ago via web

Experts are still investigating the situation. It looks like the problem is with the machine protection system. We’ll keep you posted
12 minutes ago via web

Beams lost again…operators will need to study the situation now.
37 minutes ago via web

Looks like the critics may be right! They already lost the beams!! But they expect to have them up again and collisions within a couple of hours.

Previously:

The energy ramp has to happen slowly. It will easily take 30-40 minutes to get to the highest peak.
about 1 hours ago via web
The energy ramp has started – up to 3.5 TeV now!
about 1 hours ago via web
The live webcast has started! Follow it at http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/
about 1 hours ago via web
Beams are in-operators have set the path to collisions. However, stable beams are needed before attempting the energy ramp again.
about 1 hours ago via web
A new injection of particles into the LHC has just started
about 2 hours ago via web
Operators are discussing the procedure for the new injection and ramp. See http://bit.ly/diGcFS
about 2 hours ago via web
Operators are ramping the energy in the machine without beams. See photo http://bit.ly/9TnMr4
about 3 hours ago via web
We will follow live the first high-energy collisions at the LHC: stay tuned!
about 3 hours ago via web
Hello, this is now Antonella speaking live from the CERN Control Centre
about 3 hours ago via web
Beams in! Optimising the beams before ramping < - Ramping means increasing the energy - This takes time...
about 4 hours ago via web
All lights are green. Injection of beams into the #LHC is being prepared.
about 4 hours ago via web
Live from the CERN Control Center - Arnaud is speaking. First attempt for collisions may take time. We will keep you up to date...
about 5 hours ago via web
Good morning. #LHC spent a good night with two stable beams at 3,5 TeV each. Next fill for collisions!
about 5 hours ago via web
#LHC is ready for first attempt at 7 TeV collisions tomorrow morning
about 14 hours ago via web

LIVE WEBCASTS are at LHC First Physics

Watch the cranking up of the 21st Century’s greatest marvel in a party atmosphere where scientists explain what is going on to Italian accented female TV reporter, and see how confident they are that their lost beam will be up and running again in a short while, and how atrocious the French accent of the English scientist who explains that is.

Young lawyer’s remarkable treatise is thorough update on LHC danger, treated as legal issue

90 page analysis renders safety doubts respectable, highlights holes in CERN’s Swiss cheese safety claims

Author says he does not expect gamble with globe to be halted, but some hope he will have influence

One of the more remarkable documents challenging the wisdom of scientific leaders has appeared on the Web. The paper has just been published in the Tennessee Law Review by an assistant law professor at the University of North Dakota, one Eric E. Johnson. A pdf version has been posted (Wed, Dec 30, 2009) on arXiv (”archive”) the physics papers site, at The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World by Eric E. Johnson.

The footnoted, precisely worded and well researched paper brings to bear the kind of legal reasoning that can be expected from a good, Harvard educated lawyer, member of a species that seems to be better trained in logic than the average scientist, one has to say.

All who wish to be fully briefed in the matter, and why they should take it seriously, should download and print out this exemplary analysis, which in its clarity and exposure of the folly of the scientists concerned is highly entertaining, as long as one overlooks the vast consequences in play which otherwise lend the utmost seriousness to the issue, once one is persuaded to take it seriously, which Johnson’s full analysis may lead you to do.

Dissecting the LHC defenses

Purporting to be a brief for any judge who might have to make a decision on the matter, his analysis in fact judiciously but thoroughly takes apart the defense of CERN scientists against LHC critics. It brilliantly illuminates the case for halting the LHC in Geneva (see previous post) while outside review of its risk of global catastrophe is carried out. Laying out the evidence from the papers that have been published Johnson notes, as we have, that contrary to some of the statements of CERN scientists and their public relations staff, the risk is clearly higher than zero, and there are many sociological reasons for for putting it on a leash. This, without even including all that can be said against CERN’s hypocritical public reassurance that safety is 100% assured, which we will add in later posts on this blog.

What should a court do with a preliminary-injunction request to halt a multi-billion-dollar particle-physics experiment that plaintiffs claim could create a black hole that will devour the planet? The real-life case of CERN’s LHC seems like a legal classic in the making. Unfortunately, however, no court has braved the extreme factual terrain to reach the merits. This article steps into the void. First, the relevant facts of the scientific debate and its human context are memorialized and made ripe for legal analysis. Next, the article explores the daunting challenges the case presents to equity, evidence, and law-and-economics analysis. Finally, a set of analytical tools are offered that provide a way out of the thicket – a method for providing meaningful judicial review even in cases, such as this one, where the scientific issues are almost unfathomably complex.
Comments: 90 pages, 1 table, published in the Tennessee Law Review, vol 76, pp. 819-908 (2009). Version2: fixes font rendering problems experienced with some pdf viewers
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); History of Physics (physics.hist-ph)
Journal reference: 76 Tenn. L. Rev. 819 (2009)

The piece is available as a pdf download, also linked at the top right of the arXiv page. The presentation is factual and powerfully so, though politically discreet, as befits a professor who has a full teaching schedule at a respected school of law. It politely ends with saying that Johnson is not himself fearful opf the outcome of the LHC experiments, but merely providing a helpful brief for any judge that might have to deal with the matter. He is also respectful of the scientists involved, as can be seen by his phrase above, counting the scientific issues as “almost unfathomably complex”.

Who is Eric Johnson?

Who is this remarkable author, who has carried out such an exemplary piece of research and writing? Here is his biography, and introduction to his masterwork:

Eric E. Johnson Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Dakota has written a 90 page summary of the problem the issue poses to the courts in the Tennessee Law Review . His paper is available as a pdf at The Black-Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World, 76 Tennessee Law Review 819 (2009) (Eric E. Johnson is an interesting fellow, being a 2000 Harvard Law School graduate after the University of Texas at Austin (1994) who has a blog, Pixelization, on intellectual property and entertainment law, another, The Backbencher, a “humorous take on the law, laywering and his life as a law professor”, and has been “a top-40 radio disc jockey, a stand-up comic, and a consultant at an early-stage internet start-up. In 2005, he was awarded a patent on a headrest he invented for patients suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.”) His earlier writings on the topic are collected on his site page Black Holes and the Law:

The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World

Eric E. Johnson
(Submitted on 30 Dec 2009 (v1), last revised 31 Dec 2009 (this version, v2))
What should a court do with a preliminary-injunction request to halt a multi-billion-dollar particle-physics experiment that plaintiffs claim could create a black hole that will devour the planet? The real-life case of CERN’s LHC seems like a legal classic in the making. Unfortunately, however, no court has braved the extreme factual terrain to reach the merits. This article steps into the void. First, the relevant facts of the scientific debate and its human context are memorialized and made ripe for legal analysis. Next, the article explores the daunting challenges the case presents to equity, evidence, and law-and-economics analysis. Finally, a set of analytical tools are offered that provide a way out of the thicket – a method for providing meaningful judicial review even in cases, such as this one, where the scientific issues are almost unfathomably complex.
Comments: 90 pages, 1 table, published in the Tennessee Law Review, vol 76, pp. 819-908 (2009). Version2: fixes font rendering problems experienced with some pdf viewers
Subjects: Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); History of Physics (physics.hist-ph)
Journal reference: 76 Tenn. L. Rev. 819 (2009)
Cite as: arXiv:0912.5480v2 [physics.soc-ph]

In this article, I explore the LHC case having two goals in mind.
My first aim is to fill a gap in the reporter volumes. The black hole case has all the makings of a law-school classic. The clash of extremes provides an exceptional vehicle for probing our notions of fairness and how we regard the role of the courts. But jurisdictional hurdles have prevented any lawsuit from progressing to the issuance of an opinion on the merits, and no litigation on the
horizon appears likely to get there.

Therefore, I have endeavored to write up the case in a way that makes it ripe for review, discussion, and debate. In this way, I hope this article may serve some readers in the same way that Lon L.
Fuller’s “Case of the Speluncean Explorers” has served generations of law students by teeing up classic questions of legal philosophy.
My second purpose in writing is less playful. I intend to provide a set of analytical and theoretical tools that are usable in the courts for dealing with this case and cases like it. If litigation over the LHC does not put a judge in the position of saving the world, another case soon might. In a technological age of human-induced climate change, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificially intelligent machines, and other potential threats, the odds of the courts confronting a real doomsday scenario in the near future are decidedly non-trivial. If the courts are going to be able to play their role in upholding the rule of law in such super-extreme environments, then the courts need analytical methods that will allow for making fair and principled decisions despite the challenges such cases present.

In the pages ahead, I recount the LHC/black-hole controversy, looking into the purely scientific aspects of the debate as well as its social and political sides. Then, I review problems that face plaintiffs trying to enjoin the LHC’s operation. After that, I explore the judicial conundrums inherent in black-hole jurisprudence. Finally, I suggest new methods for judging the merits of cases of this kind.

The origin of his paper

Johnson’s mammoth paper indicates that his thoughts on the LHC were first worked out on a blog, PrawfsBlawg, where readers comments helped him refine his account. Those new to the topic may like to whet their appetite on these pages first, since they were written in October and November 2008, just before the LHC was switched on, only to fall apart for the second time, and the comments are fresh to the topic also.

Though the typically confident but thoughtless reassurances of under researched scientists immediately appear (”As a scientist by training and a 3L now, I think you’re putting shocking little faith in scientists. Do you think physicists would build a research machine capable of sucking the world in to it? (Weapon, maybe, but not something for research.) I understand that there’s a lot of FUD going around about this, but there isn’t a credible risk. – Posted by: Ben | Oct 22, 2008 8:23:55 AM) the approach taken by the author – to explore the legal recourse available to concerned outsiders – cleverly puts the inquiry on a firm footing.

Black Holes and the Law
Resources about the legal controversy over the safety of the Large Hadron Collider:
It’s one of the most interesting and daunting judicial controversies to come around in a long time: A few very worried individuals claim that a brand new, multi-billion-dollar largest-of-its-kind particle accelerator under Switzerland and France, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, could create a black hole capable of devouring the Earth.
The controversy raises an number of fascinating questions and conundrums of jurisprudence, equity, remedies, civil procedure, evidence, epistemology, and international law.
This web page is an ongoing effort to collect information, documents, and links to enable people to explore this intriguing case.

Among the first comments is one by Luis Sancho, the lead plaintiff in the case brought against the LHC in Hawaii:

As the lead plaintiff of the case Sancho vs. Doe (Department of Energy), I might be considered biased towards the defence of the Natural Law that applies to this cause: any remote chance of mass-murdering – let us use the proper terms – 6 billion people must be considered an act of terrorism, which falls under the jurisdiction of the patriot act. When one considers the authority of truth, the laws of the scientific method and experimental evidence, it turns out that regardless of CERN’s marketing campaign and 13 billion $ budget, with its industrial, scholar and political interests, the risk is huge and it grows as scientific evidence grows. If one considers the lies, these days called marketing of CERN, the situation of criminal negligence is obvious……

Sancho is somewhat language challenged, as you can see, but this young physicist, a specialist in “time theory”, feels very strongly about the dangers involved and behind his language difficulty is apparently professionally qualified to comment with expertise, contrary to his dismissal by CERN, as he asserts:

the disqualification of cern on our credentials as scientists is bogus. And though i dont like to talk in personal terms, it seems needed to rebate (rebut) them. I am the world chair of the science of (time) duality, increasingly regarded as the most advanced theory of time, which studies the universe not as they do, with the single arrow of entropy, energy and death, but also with the arrow of information and life, that nuclear physicists still deny, but all other scientists today accept.

Sancho also correctly states that the CERN cosmic ray argument generally served up to the public and press is untrue, which as we have pointed out is confirmed by CERN’s own report, and justifiably complains of the media ignorantly accepting the statements of CERN without further research.

He provides links for readers to evaluate his claims further. The most accessible is a 6 minute video on YouTube at Quantum Roulette (June 25 2009) , which so far has garnered only 1539 views, and 9 comments (”either way. you can’t do anything? about it now. they’re protected. they could foresee idiots being afraid of everything, including the next step in advancement of our planet and be afraid of what “could happen”.” – ModelDoll) compared with 3,693,105 for this simple image of the Earth being swallowed by a black hole in 38 seconds, which has 13,859 comments (”I regret watching that.”- burgharboy), and is most viewed in the Soviet Union.)

Frank Wilczek reveals why LHC critics don’t worry boosters

The former six minute video is well worth viewing. For the record, it features a Scientific American cover (”Catastrophysics! – What makes a Star Blow up? The Mystery of a Supernova – Quarks!)…. a wide eyed Yves Schutz, “experimental physicist” in hard hat, explaining ALICE will smash massive lead nuclei together to create a quark factory of 1 million quarks a second…. the Frank Wilczek Ford-MIT lecture “The Universe is a Strange Place”, where Nobel physicist (in 2004, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom and the theory of the strong interaction) Wilczek warned quarks could detonate Earth into a supernova, and when asked if high energy collisions that produced black holes could be dangerous, said it was true that “otherwise respectable” physicists had suggested just such a thing…. then a view of the snow covered ground above the LHC, which “(commentator) will deliver a billion times the amount of power by the accelerator used to research the atomic bomb, enough energy to create a black hole,” …..then Frank saying “it is always a logical possibility when you do something that has never been done before, that it will lead to a catastrophe”…. subtitle on video as he talks reads CERN’s chief said “Frank is 10x smarter than I am, but he is naive…”

Now Frank Wilczek continues with a surprisingly revealing statement: “I have never been so confident in making a prediction as when I was called to sit on a panel about an accelerator turning on and ending the world, predicting that it won’t is very safe because if your prediction is wrong—-” (throws hands up in air to audience laughter and nerdy, sounded with each breath sucked-in-Eric-Kandel-style giggle from the questioner)…. legend on video reads “so CERN instructed officials to say zero risk – New Yorker, then CERN paid Franz to sign a zero risk report, soon he won a Nobel prize, “OK so I think with that it is appropriate to end here and I will answer further questions in private thank you.”

The Wilczek syndrome

This of course is typical behavior these days on the part of physicists concerned with the CERN project and any other scientist these days (s in HIV/AIDS) where their public posture has to be more polite than honest about their own doubts.

The video then wrongly states that Wilczek afterwards wrote to Scientific American together with Walter Wagner, the physicist that originally raised safety concerns in regard top earlier US accelerators, implying that both were”warning against the risks of creating dark matter here on earth (commentator)”.

In fact Wagner wrote to Scientific American in 1999 rebutting the reassurances in a July letter from Wilczek, which was in response to Wagner’s earlier letter expressing concern. Wagner’s second letter is worth quoting here:

Man-made disasters have always been preceded by an excessive degree of arrogance on the part of the persons involved. The Titanic and Hindenberg disasters of earlier generations, and the Apollo launch-pad fire and Challenger disasters of our generation, all involved large numbers of scientists and engineers dedicated to the success of their project. In each such disaster, a key factor was overlooked or ignored, leading to deadly consequences…..
Also contrary to Frank Wilczek’s assertion, “strangelets” are a major theoretical problem at Brookhaven, and even if starting out very small (which theory shows they should), could prove quite aggressive by an overlooked mechanism……
Finally, Frank Wilczek seems to have overlooked a fundamental principle of physics. While admittedly cosmic rays have energies measured which exceed the 40,000 GeV of the RHIC, it is the center-of-momentum (COM) energy which is the fundamental criteria, not the earth-reference-frame energy. That is the very reason for building colliders, rather than fixed-target accelerators. An incoming cosmic ray, in order to mimic the RHIC, would be required to have about 4,000,000 GeV, which would produce a COM energy of about 40,000 GeV, the same as the RHIC COM energy. Reports of such cosmic rays are exceedingly rare, and have extremely wide error-bars….

Possibly the errors he pointed out were considered too impolitely phrased to print.

The video then features motion graphics and the voice of Wagner saying that “mini black holes could be created by smashing a proton into an anti proton with enough energy, and if one were created near a large concentration of mass, and started absorbing that mass before exploding, the black hole could reach a relatively stable half life and continue to grow. If this happened on the earth the mini black hole would be drawn by gravity towards the center of the planet absorbing matter along the way devouring the entire Earth in minutes.” Legend on the video reads “In 2009 LHC will make a black hole per second” as the Earth is shown disappearing down a broadening hole in its surface.

An independent legal mind

Who is Eric Johnson? His email is Eric E. Johnson . His faculty listing at the school of law in the University of North Dakota is at Eric E. Johnson, which offers his bio at Eric E. Johnson, his course materials, and his courses.

Professor Johnson received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2000, where he was a member of the Board of Student Advisers and an instructor in legal reasoning and argument. He received his B.A. from the Plan II program at the University of Texas at Austin in 1994.

After law school, Professor Johnson was an associate in the litigation and intellectual-property litigation practices at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles, where his clients included Paramount, MTV, CBS, Touchstone, Immersion Corporation, and the bankruptcy estate of eToys.com. At Irell, Johnson’s matters included claims of patent infringement in the video-game industry, copyright infringement of a television series, breach of a motion-picture director’s contract, and breach of a profit-participation clause in a television executive-producer’s contract. Professor Johnson later became in-house counsel to Fox Cable Networks in Los Angeles, drafting and negotiating deals for Fox Sports Net (“FSN”) and Fox College Sports.

Laughter as a sign of originality

His bio page also lists his two blogs, Pixelixation, on intellectual property and entertainment law, and Backbencher. One is tempted not to mention the latter since it may create an impression of the professor as not serious enough to tackle the enormous substance of the gigantic issue he is dealing with in his paper, which many potential readers may then dismiss out of hand.

In fact, we have to admit that some of his posts on the Backbencher: The Hard Hitting Global Solutions You Demand!”are downright, shall we say, lighthearted. But then, as we have noted ever since knowing Peter Medawar, Jim Watson and Professor Peter Duesberg at Berkeley, a sense of humor is a sign of superior wit in more than one sense, even if the humor is a little childish at times – another mark of genius, as it happens, since playfulness is close both to children and godliness when it comes to originality.

Back in 1999, at the end of “the Nineties,” I wondered what the new decade, the first decade of the Third Millennium, would be called.

Would people refer to it as “the Aughts,” “the Noughts,” or “the Zeros”? Or would it be something utterly unique? To mark the fact that all years of this decade had two 0’s in the middle, and paying homage to Y2K anxieties and millennial armaggedon fears, I thought it would have been fun to call this decade “the Oh Oh’s.”

But what did we end up calling this decade? What name eventually stuck?

None.

The only person I have heard refer aloud to this decade by any name was me. I tried “the Aughts.” In case you noticed, it didn’t catch on.

The entire English speaking world wussed out. And that includes you, dear reader. The media, however, has been the worst. Now, as television and radio embark on their ritualistic decennial orgy of best-of-worst-of lists and overhashed clips, the feckless cowards in the media persistently and pusillanimously refer to this decade by no name other than “this decade.”

Not sure why this excellent author overlooked the obvious solution of calling the decade the “two thousands”, so we have commented there as follows:

Why not the “two thousands”? Is this too difficult for those with a tendency to lisp? How you can have overlooked this option is hard to fathom, professor, unless there is some reason for it. After all, your exemplary treatise on the CERN “Black Hole” issue is 98 pages of excellent prose, with some brilliant aphorisms at several points. How come such a language expert and fine writer can have overlooked such an obvious solution as “the two thousands”?

Given your writing talent, hope you don’t mind us mentioning that “media” is plural.

All this is in a very light vein, of course. But then, this is because Johnson has a lighthearted side, and has even been a stand up comic.

Outside of his legal career, Professor Johnson was a top-40 radio disc jockey, a stand-up comic, and a consultant at an early-stage internet start-up. In 2005, he was awarded a patent on a headrest he invented for patients suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.

Clearly, this law professor is not only a good analytical mind but also an inventive and original one, a paid up member of the elite club of better minds who think free of the chains of conformity and acquiescence to authority, social or ideological, that shackle most of us. Others that come to mind in a scientific context might be Richard Feynman, Peter Duesberg, or indeed any of the names listed at the top of this blog.

Such men often make their mark most impressively when they rethink the difficulties caused by large groups of lesser minds, even in fields other than their own. Johnson seems to have achieved exactly that in tackling the vexed issue of how the public and its agents should approach the unique problem posed by CERN, where a large pack of scientists with narrow expertise are accelerating to full speed ahead a large machine that some respectable theorists fear may have the power to demolish all we know, rather than simply expand our knowledge.

Since this post is already too long we will return to the main topic and pick out a few plums from Johnson’s masterwork in the next post.

Global cult celebrates, unaware of AIDS leader busting main assumption

Nobelist to Brent Leung: HIV no threat to healthy people, no need for vaccine, microbicides

UK Independent demonstrates how media trash HIV/AIDS dissidents with gross bias

Today’s world wide celebration of non science in the form of HIV/AIDS propaganda and associated charity events will delight do gooders all over the earth, but it will profoundly irritate a lot of people familiar with the journal literature of the field.

Such scientifically literate observers are, after all, keenly aware that Peter Duesberg’s adamant refutation of HIV=AIDS, the basic rationale for delivering damaging drugs to AIDS sufferers here and abroad, stands unanswered in the same elite journals in which they were published.

In other words, the basic theory which drives the enormous amounts of money devoted to “stopping AIDS” is not only unproven, but without any good evidence, scientifically absurd and maintained sacrosanct only by the politics of a church, a church very comparable to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints run by Warren Jeffs before his arrest for turning his community into a gang run dictatorship of polygamous child abuse.

So in the view of some we have a global party to celebrate a broken paradigm, busted every year by more and more evidence of its error, which never should have been adopted in the first place, and one which causes immeasurable suffering, in other words, the festivities are a misguided toast to corrupt scientific leadership and scientific illiteracy even within science, let alone among the educated public, and a belief system that, like that Mormon cult, is the flip side of what it purports to be.

But today, however, these sensitive observers will find some solace for this global insult to intelligence and scientific literacy in a video released today on YouTube by Brent Leung, in what amounts to him firing an Exocet missile at the gunboat of HIV defenders that have been harassing him with false accusations of bias and worse, an explosive that stands a good chance of tearing a very large hole in the mothership of HIV/AIDS itself.

Brent Leung is the director of House of Numbers, the current movie that brilliantly exposes the embarrassing fact that the generals of HIV/AIDS science agree more with the critics of the paradigm than with each other, and come up empty when asked to explain how HIV/AIDS makes any sense at all.

The film has had the HIV paradigm defense squad run by John Moore of Cornell-Weill in a state of hysteria, and mounting a desperate counter move in the form of an attack website (HouseofNumbers.org) to trash the entertaining and enlightening movie, a well executed enquiry that merely faithfully records the words of the leadership they support (see previous posts).

HIV discoverer Luc Montagnier says HIV no threat to healthy people

Undoubtedly the most striking comment in House of Numbers was made by none other than Luc Montagnier, the Pasteur scientist who first discovered evidence of a retrovirus in AIDS patients, a dubious discovery for which he received the Nobel last year. Montagnier informed Leung and his audience that anyone with a healthy immune system could shrug off HIV in two or three weeks, and that even poor black Africans could do the same if they were given decent food and clean water.

This of course was precisely what Peter Duesberg and his thousands of fellow critics of the scientifically hollow paradigm of HIV-is-the-cause-of-AIDS have been saying all along ie for the last 23 years, earning the calumny of “denialist” and other labels for what is really nothing but common sense science which can be explained to a twelve year old.

More than any of the other conflicting and scientifically illiterate or questionable comments made by John Moore and others during the film, this remark of Montagnier’s threatened to bring down the whole house of cards that is the theory of AIDS that every scientist involved in this Enron of science is milking, especially since the film contrasted the belief they all proclaim with a portrait of reality in Africa that made it clear there was a much more sensible interpretation of HIV/AIDS, and it was in line with what Montagnier was saying.

Poverty and malnutrition, and the associated diseases especially TB, are almost certainly the real causes of supposed HIV/AIDS symptoms in Africa, and to give ARVs as a palliative, especially to pregnant women, is not a cure but a cause of worse health, since the TB goes untreated, and the all important good food and clean water is not emphasized as it should be.

This truth is so obvious that when they heard Montagnier expressed it in the film John Moore et al must have felt especially threatened, and they have evidently had a hard time handling it since, claiming that Montagnier was taken out of context or didn’t mean what he said, while canvassing accusations from participants that Brent Leung misled them in saying that his film was a study of how HIV/AIDS research had progressed.

In fact, the irony is that his stealth bomber of a film is exactly that – a study of how HIV/AIDS research has made no progress in making scientific sense in 25 years, and a clear suggestion why – all of this enlightenment out of the mouths of the top experts in the field.

Brent Leung’s HIV/AIDS depth charge – Montagnier on YouTube

As it turns out, the attacks of the paradigm death squad have now had the result they deserve. Today Brent Leung released the full segment of the interview where Montagnier makes his remarks on this theme, and it is up on YouTube today. Now that John Moore et al can no longer claim that the statement was taken out of context, it will be amusing to see how they try to wriggle out of this one.

Here’s what Montagnier said in full:

Brent Leung: You talked about oxidative stress earlier. Is treating oxidative stress one of the best ways to deal with the African AIDS epidemic?

Luc Montagnier: I think it is one way to approach. To decrease the rate of transmission because I believe HIV, we can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system; and this is the problem also of Africa, of African people. Their nutrition is not very equilibrated, they are in oxidative stress, even if they are not infected with HIV. So their immune system doesn’t work well, already. So it’s prone, you know, it can allow HIV to get in and persist.

So there are many ways which are not the vaccine, – the magic name, the vaccine! – there are many ways to decrease the transmission just by simple measures of nutrition, giving antioxidants, proper antioxidants, hygiene measures, fighting the other infections. So they are not spectacular, but they could, you know, decrease very well the epidemic to the level they are in occidental countries, Western countries.

Brent Leung: So if you have a good immune system, then your body can naturally get rid of HIV?!

Luc Montagnier: Yes.

Brent Leung: Oh, interesting. Do you think we should have more of a push for antioxidants and things of that nature in Africa than antiretrovirals?

Montagnier: We should push for more you know a combination of measures, you know, antioxidants, nutrition advice, nutrition, fighting other infections, malaria, tuberculosis, parasites, worms, education of course, genital hygiene for women and men also, very simple measures, which are not very expensive but which could do a lot.

And this is actually my worry about the many spectacular action for the global funds to buy drugs and so on. and Bill gates and so on, for the vaccine. But you know those kind of measures are not very well funded, they’re not funded at all, or they are, you know, it really depends on the local government to take choice of this. But the local government they take advice of the scientific advisors from the (international?) XXXX institutions and they don’t get this kind of advice very often.
((Any reader who can fathom the incomprehensible word use by Montagnier at 2.48 min please advise – Ed.))

Brent Leung: There’s no money in nutrition, right? There’s no profit.

Luc Montagnier: There’s no profit, yes! Water is important, water is key.

Brent Leung: Now I think you said you were talking about if you have a built immune systemthat it is possible to get rid of HIV naturally. If you take a poor African who has been infected and you build up their immune system is it possible for them to also naturally get rid of it?

Luc Montagnier: I would think so.

Brent Leugn: OK. That’s an important, that’s an important point.

Luc Montagnier: It’s important knowledge which is completely neglected. You know, people always think of drugs and vaccine.

(grinning broadly) So this is a message which may be different from the other what you heard before, no?

Brent Leung: The closing?

Luc Montagnier (smiling): No, no, yes, my message is different from what you heard from Fauci or er..!

Brent Leung: Yes. It’s a little different.

Luc Montagnier (beaming and grinning widely): Little different!

Like Samson, Montagnier brings down the main pillar of the temple of AIDS

All in all, a stunning shift in AIDS lore from the Nobel prize winning discover of HIV, the European leader now of world opinion in the science of AIDS, ever since Robert Gallo was sidelined by departure from the NIH after embarrassing investigations into the validity of his original lab work with the virus, and his humiliating omission from the Nobel prize award for the discovery of the virus which he, Gallo, had originally claimed for himself.

Why is this so stunning? Because Montagnier freely admits, indeed even emphasizes, that anyone with a healthy immune system has nothing to fear from the so called AIDS virus, which will be quickly defeated by the immune system.

No need for John Moore’s fruitless microbicides being further tested in drug company financed research on his hapless bonobos at Cornell-Weill Medical Center in Manhattan, nor for the billions being spent on the fruitless and irrational search for a vaccine for a virus which already easily vaccinates you against itself, nor for the cheap drugs for Africa which Bill Clinton hopes will redeem his moral reputation, an unlikely outcome in the long run if this kind of truth in AIDS finally finds its way into the reports of the uniformly bewildered media correspondents on AIDS at the New York Times and elsewhere, who have for so long acted as Xerox machines for the press releases of Dr Anthony Fauci at the NIAID, who it may impolitely but fairly be said is the chief drug pusher in the realm of HIV/AIDS.

The power of House of Numbers

Small wonder John Moore and the HIV defense league are excited about House of Numbers, and striving to ban its showing and the discussion panels which might follow (the Spectator of London tried to mount a showing and a panel a month ago, but retreated in the face of attacks from activists).

The fact remains, bottom line, the film makes a mockery of all that HIV scientists claim in their analysis of AIDS symptoms and their origin, simply by quoting their own words back to them. And no quotation is as powerful as Montagnier’s in damning the enormous effort they have provoked to bring dangerous drugs to Africans instead of good food and clean water.

No wonder Montagnier has a little mischievous smile which broadens into a massive grin at the end of the segment, when he volunteers to Leung that he is sure what he says is not the same as Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID told him.

Trashy Independent article trashes dissidents too obviously

This statement from Montagnier immediately outdates scurrilous press items trashing AIDS realists (”denialists”) such as today’s World AIDS Day propaganda from the Independent newspaper of London. We refer to the insult to truthseekers in science in the form of this not-so-independent article, Killer syndrome: The Aids denialists – Why does a small band of scientists and campaigners persist in denying the link between HIV and Aids, when the evidence that they are wrong is overwhelming? Rob Sharp reports”> wherein their correspondent Rob appears totally ignorant of the fact that it is late in the day to trash HIV/AIDS dissidents as “denialists”, not to mention that such prejudice is unprofessional, especially in science, where the reporter has no expertise to judge which side of a high level scientific dispute is likely to be right, nor any business coloring his report with his own opinion.

In the comment thread that follows, however, these and other points against what is written are made quite effectively by Michael Geiger and other AIDS realists – and significantly, John Moore himself was drawn into posting. Evidently the original and quite effective policy of avoiding all debate with his scientific critics trumpeted by Moore a few years ago is now null and void.

The scene in HIV/AIDS is heating up, with HIV defenders finally goaded into action by the serious challenge posed by House of Numbers which borrows its authority from the leaders of HIV ideology, and presents its results with a clarity that a child could understand. Its featured interviews and quotes from established HIV/AIDS authorities show that what we might suppose to be AIDS science is a self-contradictory mess, and what the real answer is once official outside review is not stifled as it has been for over two decades.

Meanwhile, in its coverage of how the WHO changes HIV treatment advice the Independent has see fit to inform us all how the Human Immunodeficiency Virus would look if microscopes were able to enlarge it to a decent size that we could all appreciate, courtesy of the hand of Sebastian Kaulitzki.

(Photo Left) The HIVirus finally revealed, courtesy of the brushwork of one Sebastian Kaulitzski for the Independent, art which will serve to enhance the mental framework in which all readers of that really not-so-independent minded rag will in future contemplate the scene in HIV=AIDS, more certain than ever before that their understanding is well served by the reports of Rob Sharp.

Dazzling engineering switched on, running fine and will risk all after Christmas

Critics appeal to UN to stop boffins playing with nuclear fire, but threat disturbs few

CERN escapes oversight, shielded by PR and scientists’ denial

Unrefuted paper by top physicist argues dire possibilities but goes unread

There was renewed excitement for thrill seekers around the world on Friday (Nov 20) as the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, otherwise known as CERN, fired up the Large Hadron Collider, its newly repaired $10 billion research gargantua/Christmas toy/doomsday machine which will explore the origins of the universe. Reports so far are that all is working smoothly in the LHC as proton beams whiz around its spectacular 17 mile racing circuit 330 feet under Switzerland and France in opposite directions, ready to crash into each other and reveal what happened the instant after the universe began.

A large part of the frisson of nervous pleasure generated by the biggest machine the world has ever seen derives, for some, from the thought that two thousand physicists are now playing with almost Godlike powers at recreating the way things were when galaxies didn’t yet exist. Respectable theorists have shown there is a not necessarily small chance that an inadvertent result may be the swift disappearance of the entire planet and possibly the sun as well into a small black hole, or if that is not our fate, the gigantic, gleaming, colorful contraption may spew forth sufficient “strangelets” to turn the world into an smoking asteroid of “strange matter” the size of a football field.

Supreme confidence in the unknown

Most people dismiss such notions as the scientific equivalent of “a dragon suddenly appearing in this room,” as a superconfident Brian Greene put it to us recently. The renowned string theorist and best selling author appeared at Philoctetes last weekend to discuss Mathematics and Beauty, and we took the opportunity to ask him where he stood on this neglected issue. His Op Ed contribution to the New York Times a year ago, The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course, was unreservedly gung ho on going ahead with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider, hadrons being certain subatomic composite particles including protons and neutrons which combine quarks and antiquarks) to maximum power, but has been outdated, after all, by CERN’s safety report admitting that the chief reassurance he used, the familiar “we live with cosmic rays hitting the earth every day and remain unscathed” argument, was null and void.

Green wrote in the Times (Op. Ed. on the interesting date of September 11 2008):

Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them, but short enough to avoid their wreacking any havoc.

Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong and such black holes don’t disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but they’ve been taking place throughout the universe — even here on earth — for billions of years.

Cosmic rays — particles wafting through space — constantly rain down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more powerful collisions haven’t resulted in astrophysical calamities, the collider’s comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won’t either.

But the LHC safety report to the public from CERN (see summary page) now admits that micro black holes (mBHs) produced by the massive collider could stay on Earth (7th para.). Since the proton beams will crash into each other in opposing directions, anything they yield could move slowly, like the fragments produced by two cars in a head on collision:

“Those (mBHs) produced by cosmic rays would pass harmlessly through the Earth into space, whereas those produced by the LHC could remain on Earth.”

Greene’s reply to us at Philoctetes, which we will detail in a future post, was the above dragon concept, the cosmic ray argument part II (equally flawed, some argue) and that anyway it “isn’t my field.” Given that no reputable physicists are writing papers saying a dragon may appear, the analogy seemed doubtful. Also, this statement seemed overlook the fact that the Columbia University department Greene belongs to has a project at the LHC, and funnels money and expertise to it, not to mention that his Op Ed piece remains the most prominent personal reassurance in the States that we don’t have anything to worry about. But Greene hurried away to an ice cream shop afterwards avoiding further questions.

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“The current issue has all the earmarks of something that needs outside review – possibly fatal global consequences, a safety report entirely produced by CERN scientists, the typical schoolboy attitude of physicists satisfying their curiosity, great public expense, the commitment of large organizations to evading public scrutiny, the tendency of huge projects to become unstoppable juggernauts, and so on.”
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We also attended the triumphant double presentation on “Hubble Trouble” at NYU recently, where Gregory Gabadadze and David Hogg, two top young physicist/astronomers there, described the latest results on black holes, white dwarves and other components of the universe beyond human sensory experience. Afterwards we asked both about CERN, receiving extensive replies (which we will convey in more detail later) full of boisterous confidence even after both graciously acknowledged that the cosmic ray argument constantly waved at doubters was invalid.

A black hole of possibility

But, as the Fermilab director Pier Oddone told Dennis Overbye of the New York Times a year or more ago (see earlier post), the truth is that “That there are many theories means we don’t have a clue. That’s what makes it so exciting. ” In other words, no one really knows what will happen as the drain on the Geneva power grid rises up to ten per cent of the total and the beam energy surpasses the current 0.9 teravolts (1 TeV = 10_12 electronvolts) operation record held by the Tevatron at Fermilab at Batavia near Chicago heading to levels never before explored (seven teravolts) to reproduce the conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

This is still the case. Nothing has changed since Fabiola Gianotti, a Cern physicist and the deputy spokeswoman for the team that built Atlas told Overbye in 2007, “Either we find the Higgs boson, or some stranger phenomenon must happen.”

Finding the “God particle” will complete the Standard Model of particle physics, and the planned production of mini black holes will imply extra dimensions do actually exist and thus will let string theorists off the hook of not yet having any actual physical results yet to show skeptics, but the truth is anything can happen. We have Brian Greene’s word for it in his Op Ed piece, Fermilab Director Pier Oddone has said the same thing, and Brian Cox, author of Why does E=Mc2, who might be said to be Britain’s version of Brian Greene, admits as much even while cheerfully if rather crudely dismissing fears of a black hole lunching on the planet as “a steaming pile of bollocks” on the Colbert Report a month ago.

Here is Brian Greene last year:

But the most exciting prospect of all is that the experiments will reveal something completely unanticipated, something that forces us to rethink our most cherished explanations.

Confirming an idea is always gratifying. But finding what you don’t expect opens new vistas on the nature of reality. And that’s what humans, including those of us who happen to be physicists, live for.

Rainer Plaga fires across CERN’s bows

Behind all the ridicule, however, there are some serious theoretical papers. One respectable theorist of disaster is physicist Rainer Plaga, previously a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich. He is now being being ignored by CERN and the media, but he has shown that CERN safety theorists managed to reject his argument last year only by picking on the wrong equation, and they have not come up with anything better since that embarrassment, despite promises.

Plaga has refined his initial paper, On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders, Version 1 through a second version, Version 2 (abstract), click this for full Version 2 pdf, in which he appended an explanation of how the attempted CERN rebuttal had confused his paper’s equations, into a third edition, of which this is the abstract at the physics site arXiv, On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders Version 3 (Abstract):

On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders

R. Plaga
(Submitted on 10 Aug 2008 (v1), last revised 9 Aug 2009 (this version, v3))
The question of whether collider produced of subnuclear black holes might constitute a catastrophic risk is explored in a model of Casadio & Harms (2002) that treats them as quantum-mechanical objects. A plausible scenario in which these black holes accrete ambient matter at the Eddington limit shortly after their production, thereby emitting Hawking radiation that would be harmful to Earth and/or CERN and its surroundings, is described. Such black holes are shown to remain undetectable in existing astrophysical observations and thus evade a recent exclusion of risks from subnuclear black holes by Giddings & Mangano (2008) and and a similar one by Koch et al. (2009). I further question that these risk analyses are complete for the reason that they exclude plausible black-hole parameter ranges from safety consideration without giving any reason. Some feasible operational measures at colliders are proposed that would allow the lowering of any remaining risk probability.
Giddings & Mangano drew different general conclusions only because they made different initial assumptions about the properties of microscopic black holes, not because any of their technical conclusions are incorrect. A critical comment by Giddings & Mangano (2008) on the present paper and a preprint by Casadio et al.(2009) – that presents a treatment of the present issue with methods and assumptions similar to mine – are addressed in appendices.

This is the paper (full version 3 in pdf form is at Full Rainer Plage Paper Version 3 pdf) that physicists involved in the enterprise at CERN and elsewhere are not bothering to read or are not even aware of, according to our interviewing. Their assumption appears to be that the initial CERN riposte rendered the paper invalid.

In fact, as Plaga makes clear, they foolishly chose the wrong equation to critique, and his polished third edition and its demolition of their assumptions and excessive confidence stands untouched, arguing that the world and all its inhabitants including you and me may well vanish down a black hole or in a third scenario that CERN has not even considered, that there is a distinct possibility that the greatest machine ever built could produce black holes generating an energy level equivalent to an H bomb every second, producing unprecedented global warming, multi continent earthquakes devastating civilization if not all of life, incinerating the 2200 physicists at CERN, Geneva and a large pie slice of France in the bargain.

Physicists joyride = planetary death ride?

Others like Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees (in ten pages on collider risks in Our Final Hour) earlier (they have since retreated), and now prominent physicist Adrian Kent of Cambridge and space engineer and computer scientist Richard Wagner say that it could spew strangelets that will turn the earth into a smoking asteroid the size of a football pitch. Then there is the admittedly somewhat eccentric (he likes to include dirty jokes in his papers) all round wiz theoretical chemist and physicist (and immunology Ph.D) Otto Rossler, and attorney physicist and nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner, who say the world could go slowly down a black hole, which Plaga notes in passing that CERN has not disproved.

In other words, outlandish or not, it can be soberly maintained that the fate of the world is in the hands of physicists and bureaucrats who are acting like a bunch of overgrown schoolboys who are going ahead regardless of high level papers suggesting that dire possibilities are theoretically valid, and not even as extremely unlikely as generally supposed, ranging from tiny through 1 in 6 to 50% or even 100% in some doomsday analyses.

There is no indication in the literature yet that the sophisticated critics are any less correct in their analysis than the CERN scientists, and currently Rainer Plaga has the best of his CERN critics.

Doubts about the gung ho approach have also been voiced by respected physicists such as Adrian Kent of Cambridge. Tony Rothman of Princeton quotes the papers of the highly respected Russian physicist Grigory Vilkovisky in support of caution, and a group of well informed professionals including the theorist Otto Rossler (founder of endophysics, the Rossler attractor in chaos theory and visiting professor in theoretical physics) and the knowledgeable former federal radiation safety official (he studied physics and did cosmic ray research at Berkeley) Walter Wagner (founder of LHCdefense.org who has now appealed to US federal court after his Hawaii suit was ruled out of jurisdiction) appealed to the United Nations last Friday (Nov 20) as the LHC was cranked up.

That 73 page appeal to the UN Human Rights Committee and the Commissioner of Human Rights at the UN by conCERNed international and LHC Kritik (Critique), calls attention to the lack of oversight of CERN actions and asks the UN to intervene and insist on outside review for CERN’s plan to take the planet on a roller coaster thrill ride with no guard rail to prevent a drop into the chasm.

Enclosed are critical studies of the method used in the CERN risk studies, one from members of the “Future of Humanity Institute” of the University of Oxford and a review on the LHC safety assessment process by risk assesment expert and ethicist Dr. Mark Leggett concluding that CERN at this date has fulfilled not more than a fifth of the necessary criteria expected for a modern safety study.

As long as there is no clear evidence that the possible production of “micro black holes” (expected to be created by many CERN scientists) pose neither long- nor short-term danger to life and to planet Earth, CERN and the member states should not aim for their production in high energy experiments at all.

Cynics however do not expect it to result in action fast enough to stop the fuse CERN has lit reaching high explosive. We use that metaphor advisedly since another possibility in the forefront of consideration is that heat radiation as powerful as a 12 megaton H Bomb every second may irradiate Geneva and a sizeable portion of France to a crisp in short order, according to Plaga’s calculations.

Panic over flu but end of world faced with calm fortitude

All in all, concerned citizens must wonder why scientists and their supporters in the media are ridiculing the critics when even the most infinitesmal chance of the biggest setback possible would seem to argue caution.

After all, the media have been happy to help stir up fear over the second coming of swine flu, which has now peaked at about two million cases so far in the US yielding 4000 deaths according to the CDC, compared with 20,000-50,000 for seasonal flu related deaths annually. There were plenty of sensational segments on national network television showing children in hospital dying from “swine flu” to the prayerful horror of their parents at bedside day and night, and 160 million vaccines were being rushed into production, with much popular clamor and even some cheating among people who want them as soon as possible.

Meanwhile excitement over the imagined consequences of the LHC has so far been confined to Hollywood (Angels and Demons), and amusing articles in the Times over whether the future is sending preventive measures:

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to rescue his grandfather from a traffic accident.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

Despite all the signs that the physicists in charge have an almost comic inability to handle basic engineering tasks such as insulating the vast creation from lightning strikes and even bird droppings, the PR campaign of behalf of the LHC has effectively shut down public debate this year, and now the LHC has started up again without fanfare.

Captive congregation of $10 billion church

The difference, we imagine, is that CERN scientists are the high priests of a very rich and esoteric church, particle physics, whose texts are completely illegible to most mortals, and whose credibility is absolute with the general public. On the face of it, the idea that they are behaving like NASA sending up the entire world’s population including 1.8 billion innocent children on a spectacular joyride which might explode like the Challenger or vanish as it heads for regions of tiny space and time beyond our ken seems no more credible that the prognostications of Michel de Nostradamus, 1503-66.

That notorious prognosticator did make a prediction that sounds rather ominous in this respect,as it happens. According to our reading of his text he advised everyone to leave Geneva around this time since there was a threat of “counter positive rays” dealing death and destruction to that city. The exact phrase was “Migrés, migrés de Genesve trestous, Saturne d’or en fer se changera, Le contre RAYPOZ (sic) exterminera tous” which, since the three metals named (Saturn means lead, to be collided in the ALICE experiment at CERN late next year, gold and iron) are or have been involved in collision experiments using beams moving counter to each other, offers juicy fodder for prophecy mavens.

The world keeps its nerve

So while the flu false alarm is trumpeted noisily in media world wide, whatever public concern was felt last year, when the LHC was first started up only to fall apart rather ignominiously, has largely dissipated, at least in the media. The whole issue has been successfully painted by the CERN publicity machine as one deserving of fictional treatment only, and Hollywood has been happy to oblige. Thus Angels and Demons offered a fine glimpse of the great 21 Century time and space galleon in its opening segments, and the just premiered 2012 overlooks CERN but has followed up with all kinds of imaginary threats derived from Mayan tablets and climate doomsayers to bring nervous Nellies into disrepute.

“Most of what’s claimed for 2012 relies on wishful thinking, wild pseudoscientific folly, ignorance of astronomy and a level of paranoia worthy of ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ ” Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory, in Los Angeles, and an expert on ancient astronomy, wrote in an article in the November issue of Sky & Telescope.

Even the New York Times’s previously helpful correspondent in this matter, the same Dennis Overbye, has done little this time on the topic other than write a jokey piece, Is Doomsday Coming? Perhaps, but Not in 2012, about speculation in some quarters that all the accidents that have interfered with the progress of the LHC so far – the latest being an a fowl or some other force of nature that shortcircuited its operation last week by dropping pieces of a baguette into its wires, if you can believe it – are visitations from a future than cannot survive if the LHC does rev up to its grand aim of over seven times the record set by the Tevitron (0.98 TeV).

Overbye took the opportunity to swipe at the CERN doubters rather offhandedly in passing: “All of this reminded me of the kinds of letters I received last year about the putative black hole at CERN. That too was more science fiction than science fact”.
The normally sensitive and alert New Yorker doesn’t seem interested, either, although Elizabeth Kolbert in 2007 caught the CERN officials telling the staff to say that the risk of things going wrong should always be said to be zero in answer to any public enquiry.

CERN’s chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen, is from the Netherlands. He serves under the director general, who is from France, and alongside the chief financial officer, who is from Germany. I went to speak to Engelen in his office; behind his desk a chart indicated when the various parts of the collider are supposed to be completed. It was a crazy quilt of multicolored blocks, with lines radiating in all directions. Engelen greeted me with a half-ironic cheerfulness that struck me as very Dutch. Among his responsibilities is dealing with the frequent calls and letters CERN receives about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world. When I asked about this, Engelen picked up a Bic pen and placed it in front of me.
“In quantum mechanics, there is a probability that this pen will fall through the table,” he said. “All of a sudden, it will be on the floor. Because it can behave as a wave, it can go through; we call that the ‘tunnel effect.’ If you calculate the probability that this happens, it is not identical to zero. It is a very small probability. But it never happens. I’ve never seen it happen. You have never seen it happen. But to the general public you make a casual remark, ‘It is not identical to zero, it is very small,’ and . . . ” He shrugged….

Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”

Russian roulette, or caution?

We would probably be in the same camp dismissing CERN anxiety as laughable if it weren’t for the fact that the realm of HIV/AIDS has shown so clearly that the advice of a distinguished scientist who is indubitably right can be swept under the carpet and then flattened by the steam roller of political propaganda and disinformation generated by those in charge of maintaining funding for huge scientific organizations, such as NIAID.

After all, it certainly seems like science fiction to suggest that the future is sending back signals that CERN’s gigantic adventurism is unacceptable, and sabotaging it accordingly. It is also hard to credit that so many responsible experts working in unison on a fabulous machine are prepared to risk their own lives, and the lives of their wives and children, let alone six billion other human beings, simply to find out whether the Higgs boson exists, and create the mini black holes which will support the string theorists in their dreams of glory and a Nobel prize, if there was the slightest chance that the entire globe would reduce to the size of a 2 cm marble and disappear into a black hole the size of a golf ball, as Rossler states.

But the history of internal disputes in science, particularly of the distinguished Duesberg’s fate in the hands of the distinctly lesser folk running AIDS science, tells us not to dismiss lightly members of the elite (such as Plaga or Adrian Kent) who challenge the mainstream.

The current issue has all the earmarks of something that needs outside review – possibly fatal global consequences, a safety report entirely produced by CERN scientists, the typical schoolboy attitude of physicists satisfying their curiosity, great public expense, the commitment of large organizations to evading public scrutiny, the tendency of huge projects to become unstoppable juggernauts, and so on.

That is why we will post further on this ridiculed topic by showing what the literature of the dispute actually conveys, and noting in full what three prominent physicists at NYU and Columbia admitted to us when we talked to them recently.

So far of course the world has emerged unscathed from similar anxious moments, such as start up of the Tevatron which was contested on similar grounds. The detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb was thought to risk the possibility that the atmosphere would catch fire and burn up. The research of Emil Konopinski suggested that it was safe (E. Konopinski, E. J, C. Marvin; Edward Teller (1946, declassified Feb. 1973). Ignition of the Atmosphere with Nuclear Bombs. Technical Report Los Alamos National Laboratory LA-602.)

But as noted previously, when we asked Hans Bethe once if there was 100% certainty, he denied it. “We were not completely sure.”

Given that speeding past the limit observed by the Tevatron is scheduled for the world’s biggest experiment before the New Year, the CERN public affairs group will no doubt begin crowing that the danger is over soon after, if nothing worrying seems to happen, but that may be premature.

The scenarios extant include waiting for several years as the black hole sinks to the center of the globe and digests the Earth from the inside out. Only after as long as four to fifty years will the complacent routines of everyday life eventually be disrupted as the surface finally crumbles and we and all our works all fly into a tiny golf ball of inner space.

Here is a preview of what we are in for if the nervous Nellies are right after all, viewed 3.5 million times so far.:

Black Hole Swallows Earth on YouTube

Or you may prefer a more poetic version:

Our Final Days

A list of papers and articles on the topic from experts is at LHC Defense – Experts and also LHC Defense – What Experts Say

Interesting facts from Hazel Morris about the LHC (It could hold 150,000 fridges full of sausages at a temperature colder than deep outer space etc)