White House Leak: Cheney's Plan for Iran Attack Starts With Israeli Missile Strike

An alarming article I found. It seems the United States is the most aggressive state in the international system at this time. One can only hope that the warhawks lose their grip on power and soon.

By Gregor Peter Schmitz and Cordula Meyer, Der Spiegel

Posted on October 26, 2007, Printed on October 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66157/

US Vice President Dick Cheney -- the power behind the throne, the eminence grise, the man with the (very) occasional grandfatherly smile -- is notorious for his propensity for secretiveness and behind-the-scenes manipulation. He's capable of anything, say friends as well as enemies. Given this reputation, it's no big surprise that Cheney has already asked for a backroom analysis of how a war with Iran might begin.

In the scenario concocted by Cheney's strategists, Washington's first step would be to convince Israel to fire missiles at Iran's uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Tehran would retaliate with its own strike, providing the US with an excuse to attack military targets and nuclear facilities in Iran.

This information was leaked by an official close to the vice president. Cheney himself hasn't denied engaging in such war games. For years, in fact, he's been open about his opinion that an attack on Iran, a member of US President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil," is inevitable.

Given these not-too-secret designs, Democrats and Republicans alike have wondered what to make of the still mysterious Israeli bombing run in Syria on Sept. 6. Was it part of an existing war plan? A test run, perhaps? For days after the attack, one question dominated conversation at Washington receptions: How great is the risk of war, really?

Grandiose Plans, East and West

In the September strike, Israeli bombers were likely targeting a nuclear reactor under construction, parts of which are alleged to have come from North Korea. It is possible that key secretaries in the Bush cabinet even tried to stop Israel. To this day, the administration has neither confirmed nor commented on the attack.

Nevertheless, in Washington, Israel's strike against Syria has revived the specter of war with Iran. For the neoconservatives it could represent a glimmer of hope that the grandiose dream of a democratic Middle East has not yet been buried in the ashes of Iraq. But for realists in the corridors of the State Department and the Pentagon, military action against Iran is a nightmare they have sought to avert by asking a simple question: "What then?"

The Israeli strike, or something like it, could easily mark the beginning of the "World War III," which President Bush warned against last week. With his usual apocalyptic rhetoric, he said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could lead the region to a new world war if his nation builds a nuclear bomb.

Conditions do look ripe for disaster. Iran continues to acquire and develop the fundamental prerequisites for a nuclear weapon. The mullah regime receives support -- at least moral support, if not technology -- from a newly strengthened Russia, which these days reaches for every chance to provoke the United States. President Vladimir Putin's own (self-described) "grandiose plan" to restore Russia's armed forces includes a nuclear buildup. The war in Iraq continues to drag on without an end in sight or even an opportunity for US troops to withdraw in a way that doesn't smack of retreat. In Afghanistan, NATO troops are struggling to prevent a return of the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists. The Palestinian conflict could still reignite on any front.

In Washington, Bush has 15 months left in office. He may have few successes to show for himself, but he's already thinking of his legacy. Bush says he wants diplomacy to settle the nuclear dispute with Tehran, and hopes international pressure will finally convince Ahmadinejad to come to his senses. Nevertheless, the way pressure has been building in Washington, preparations for war could be underway.

In late September, the US Senate voted to declare the 125,000-man Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. High-ranking US generals have accused Iran of waging a "proxy war" against the United States through its support of Shiite militias in Iraq. And strategists at the Pentagon, apparently at Cheney's request, have developed detailed plans for an attack against Tehran.

Instead of the previous scenario of a large-scale bombardment of the country's many nuclear facilities, the current emphasis is, once again, on so-called surgical strikes, primarily against the quarters of the Revolutionary Guards. This sort of attack would be less massive than a major strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

Conservative think tanks and pundits who sense this could be their last chance to implement their agenda in the Middle East have supported and disseminated such plans in the press. Despite America's many failures in Iraq, these hawks have urged the weakened president to act now, accusing him of having lost sight of his principal agenda and no longer daring to apply his own doctrine of pre-emptive strikes.

Sheer Lunacy?

The notion of war with Iran has spilled over into other circles, too. Last Monday Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, made it clear that the president would first need Congressional approval to launch an attack. Meanwhile, Republican candidates for the White House have debated whether they would even allow such details to get in their way. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said he would consult his attorneys to determine whether the US Constitution does, in fact, require a president to ask for Congressional approval before going to war. Vietnam veteran John McCain said war with Iran was "maybe closer to reality than we are discussing tonight."

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has also adopted a hawkish stance, voting in favor of the Senate measure to classify the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Her rivals criticized Clinton for giving the administration a blank check to go to war.

The US military is building a base in Iraq less than 10 kilometers (about six miles) from Iran's border. The facility, known as Combat Outpost Shocker, is meant for American soldiers preventing Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. But it's also rumored that Bush authorized US intelligence agencies in April to run sabotage missions against the mullah regime on Iranian soil.

Gary Sick is an expert on Iran who served as a military adviser under three presidents. He believes that such preparations mark a significant shift in the government's strategy. "Since August," says Sick, "the emphasis is no longer on the Iranian nuclear threat," but on Iran's support for terrorism in Iraq. "This is a complete change and is potentially dangerous."

It would be relatively easy for Bush to prove that Tehran, by supporting insurgents in Iraq, is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. It might be harder to prove that Iran's nuclear plans pose an immediate threat to the world. Besides, the nuclear argument is reminiscent of an embarrassing precedent, when the Bush administration used the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- which he didn't -- as a reason to invade Iraq. Even if the evidence against Tehran proves to be more damning, the American public will find it difficult to swallow this argument again.

The forces urging a diplomatic resolution also look stronger than they were before Iraq. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wants the next step to be a third round of even tighter sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. Rice has powerful allies at the Pentagon: Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral William Fallon, head of US Central Command, which is responsible for American forces throughout the region.

Rice and her cohorts all favor diplomacy, partly because they know the military is under strain. After four years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US lacks manpower for another major war, especially one against a relatively well-prepared adversary. "For many senior people at the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department, a war would be sheer lunacy," says security expert Sick.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, agrees. A war against Tehran would be "a disaster for the entire world," says Riedel, who worries about a "battlefield extending from the Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent." Nevertheless, he believes there is a "realistic risk of a military conflict," because both sides look willing to carry things to the brink.

On the one hand, says Riedel, Iran is playing with fire, challenging the West by sending weapons to Shiite insurgents in Iraq. On the other hand, hotheads in Washington are by no means powerless. Although many neoconservative hawks have left the Bush administration, Cheney remains their reliable partner. "The vice president is the closest adviser to the president, and a dominant figure," says Riedel. "One shouldn't underestimate how much power he still wields."

'Is it 1938 Again?'

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last week also played into the hands of hardliners in Washington, who read it as proof that Putin isn't serious about joining the West's effort to convince Tehran to abandon its drive for a nuclear weapon. Moreover, the countries bordering the Caspian Sea, including Central Asian nations Washington has courted energetically in recent years, have said they would not allow a war against Tehran to be launched from their territory.

Cheney derives much of his support from hawks outside the administration who fear their days are as numbered as the President's. "The neocons see Iran as their last chance to prove something," says analyst Riedel. This aim is reflected in their tone. Conservative columnist Norman Podhoretz, for example -- a father figure to all neocons -- wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he "hopes and prays" that Bush will finally bomb Iran. Podhoretz sees the United States engaged in a global war against "Islamofascism," a conflict he defines as World War IV, and he likens Iran to Nazi Germany. "Is it 1938 again?" he asks in a speech he repeats regularly at conferences.

Podhoretz is by no means an eccentric outsider. He now serves as a senior foreign-policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani. President Bush has also met with Podhoretz at the White House to hear his opinions.

Nevertheless, most experts in Washington warn against attacking Tehran. They assume the Iranians would retaliate. "It would be foolish to believe surgical strikes will be enough," says Riedel, who believes that precision attacks would quickly escalate to war.

Former presidential adviser Sick thinks Iran would strike back with terrorist attacks. "The generals of the Revolutionary Guard have had several years to think about asymmetrical warfare," says Sick. "They probably have a few rather interesting ideas."

According to Sick, detonating well-placed bombs at oil terminals in the Persian Gulf would be enough to wreak havoc. "Insurance costs would skyrocket, causing oil prices to triple and triggering a global recession," Sick warns. "The economic consequences would be enormous, far greater than anything we have experienced with Iraq so far."

Because the catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran are obvious, many in Washington have a fairly benign take on the current round of saber rattling. They believe the sheer dread of war is being used to bolster diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis and encourage hesitant members of the United Nations Security Council to take more decisive action. The Security Council, this argument goes, will be more likely to approve tighter sanctions if it believes that war is the only alternative.

deezelboy - More Bad News on the Global Warming Front

The time has come for drastic action
Kenneth Davidson
October 11, 2007

Living as we did in the 1950s may save the Earth and us.

SCIENTIFIC projections about climate change continue to worsen. Leading Australian scientist Tim Flannery said this week that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "synthesis" report for 2007 — to be released next month — would conclude that greenhouse gases had already reached levels "with the potential to cause dangerous climate change".

There is now a growing concern among scientists that the two-degree warming cap accepted by the United Nations and European Union was based on a political compromise rather than a genuine scientific target. According to a paper prepared by Carbonequity, The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007, which is available online, with the speed of change now in the climate system and the positive feedbacks that two degrees will trigger, it looms as a death sentence for a billion people and a million species.

According to this report, which is a review of the latest scientific publications on the issue, the Arctic's floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration by 2013, a century ahead of the IPCC projections. The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet and, through the albedo effect (white reflective ice replaced by dark, heat-absorbing sea), raise sea levels by as much as five metres by the turn of the century.

The report concludes that to allow the re-establishment and long-term security of the Arctic summer sea ice, it is likely to

be necessary to bring global warming back to a level at or below 0.5 degrees (a long-term precautionary warming cap) by reducing production of greenhouse gases to or below a long-term precautionary cap of 320 parts per million of carbon dioxide.

The evidence for the early melt of the Arctic is conclusive. According to the US National Ice and Snow Data Centre, the 2007 sea ice minimum was 4.13 million square kilometres, compared with the previous low of 5.32 million square kilometres in 2005. This represents a precipitous decline of 22 per cent in two years, roughly equal to the size of California and Texas combined or nearly five Britains.

US naval scientists have calculated that the thickness of the Arctic ice has reduced from 3.5 metres in the 1960s to one metre now. They conclude the summer ice has lost more than 80 per cent of its volume in 40 years. Carbonequity says the central point is that the Arctic is irreversibly headed to total summer sea ice loss very quickly — way beyond the expectations of the IPCC and most scientists' views only two years ago.

Now glaciologists think that the loss of Arctic sea ice means that the Greenland ice sheet may be doomed, which would push sea levels up five metres. But even the loss of 20 per cent of Greenland's ice volume and a one-metre rise would be catastrophic.

According to the influential 2006 Nicholas Stern report to the British Government on the economics of climate change, "currently, more than 200 million people live in the floodplains around the world, with 2 million square kilometres of land and $1 trillion worth of assets less than one metre elevation above sea level".

According to hydrologists cited by Carbonequity, rising sea water will contaminate with salt the aquifer water supplies of dozens of major cities around the world.

The science suggests we have choices. The first is the two-degree warming cap that looked almost impossibly expensive and politically suicidal for any politician who attempted to present a policy that seriously addressed it.

The second alternative, based on more up-to-date science, is to set a lower target if we are to protect the Earth's biodiversity and make it fit for habitation by most of the present population.

To be blunt, it will be necessary to apply a 0.5-degrees (or lower) temperature cap, which will require a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions 30 per cent lower than present levels — equal to 320 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent, a point we passed more than half a century ago.

Living in a 1950s world of energy consumption? Terrifying? Politically impossible? Even for the few million people who might win the lottery to survive at the poles at the end of the century in the disastrous wake of the softer option, it will sure beat the alternative.

The Age

deezelboyThe CarbonEquity's report The big melt: lessons from
the Arctic summer of 2007 can be downloaded here. It's quite worrying reading. It also gives a link to a Google-Mapped 'flood planner', where you can see the changes to the world from a sea level rise of between 0 and 14 metres. Excellent fun!

The prospect of an ice free Arctic is extremely worrying as it may not be reversible. There's a lot of geological evidence to support an ice-free arctic stable system, one which would be stable for millions of years.

The prospect of reducing emission levels to 1950s standards is probably highly optimistic - especially given that the '5% from 1990 levels' enforced by Kyoto was felt by many to be impractical for their economies.

It's probably time to stop thinking of warming/climate change as happening a generation down the line. It's also probably time to stop thinking of any political changes as having any measurable impact to the quality of our lives during ourt lifetimes regarding climate change. This was a problem taht first surfaced in teh late-1970s, much like ozone depletion. Unlike ozone depletion, it's one we're still arguing about, despite having a far greater risk attached than the 'mere' disappearance of the ozone layer.

deezelboy - Greenhouse gas emissions hit danger mark

By Michael Perry
Reuters, Tue Oct 9, 2007 8:22am BST

SYDNEY (Reuters) - The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia's leading scientists.

Tim Flannery, a world recognised climate change scientist and Australian of the Year in 2007, said a U.N. international climate change report due in November will show that greenhouse gases have already reached a dangerous level.

Flannery said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in mid-2005 had reached about 455 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent -- a level not expected for another 10 years.

"We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade," Flannery told Australian television late on Monday.

"We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold," he said.

"What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change."

Flannery, from Macquarie University and author of the climate change book "The Weather Makers", said he had seen the raw data which will be in the IPCC Synthesis Report.

He said the measurement of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere included not just carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). All these gases were measured and then equated into potentially one gas to reach a general level.

"They're all having an impact. Probably 75 percent is carbon dioxide but the rest is that mixed bag of other gases," he said.

COLLISION COURSE

Flannery said global economic expansion, particularly in China and India, was a major factor behind the unexpected acceleration in greenhouse gas levels.

"We're still basing that economic activity on fossil fuels. You know, the metabolism of that economy is now on a collision course, clearly, with the metabolism of our planet," he said.

The report adds an urgency to international climate change talks on the Indonesian island of Bali in December, as reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough to prevent dangerous climate change, he said.

U.N. environment ministers meet in December in Bali to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change that expires in 2012.

"We can reduce emissions as strongly as we like -- unless we can draw some of the standing stock of pollutant out of the air and into the tropical forests, we'll still face unacceptable levels of risk in 40 years time," he said.

Flannery suggested the developed world could buy "climate security" by paying villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests.

"That 200 gigatonnes of carbon pollutant, the standing stock that's in the atmosphere, is there courtesy of the industrial revolution, and we're the beneficiaries of that and most of the world missed out," he said.

"So I see that as a historic debt that we owe the world. And I can't imagine a better way of paying it back than trying to help the poorest people on the planet."


deezelboy - If it does turn out that in 2005 there was 455ppm of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are sublimely fucked. Previous estimates gauged it as between 315ppm to 380ppm.

To put this into context, in 1800 there was estimated to be 280ppm of CO2 (586 gigatonnes) in the atmosphere, and much the same level for the last 55 million years (during the Ice Ages, CO2 equivalents fell to 180ppm, and average global temperature fell by 5 degrees celsius).

At 450pmm CO2 equivalent, the projections are that the average global temperature will rise by 2 degrees celsius. This is expected to be a tipping point. Certainly this summer there was worrying news - the northwest passage opened up, and the Greenland Ice Sheet melt accelerated by 150% this year. It is suspected that we have already passed one of these tipping points.

A rise of 3 degrees would cause half the Earth's biodiversity to be imperilled or vanish; crop failure rates will increase; sea levels will rise; coastal areas, such as London or New York, will be flooded.

As Flannery has pointed out, we are now well beyond the worst case scenarios envisaged in 2001. The world is going to warm by 2 degrees celsius even if the human race vanished overnight if the CO2 equivalent ratio is as Flannery suggest it is.

I guess we find out in November. But what we certainly won't find out by then is any political response taht will have global consequences. We are all sublimely fucked.

Atheist Richard Dawkins on 'The God Delusion'

With Trent gone, here is something in his spirit. We've argued this stuff many times, but I found this interview of Atheist author Richard Dawkins interesting. It is quite long and I apologize.

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on January 18, 2007, Printed on September 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46566/

In the last few years, Americans have seen the dark side of religion. The events of 9/11 brought home the extremes to which some radical Muslims would go to defeat infidels and attain virgins. At home, we've seen assaults on the separation of Church and State and attacks on the teaching of evolution and the distribution of life-saving condoms. And now, it appears the godless are fighting back.

During the recent holiday season, there were prominent articles about atheism in The New York Times and the UK's Financial Times and Telegraph, and a segment on NPR's All Things Considered. Richard Dawkins debated the existence of God on the London chat show, The Sunday Edition. Dawkins' book, The God Delusion was a top 10 bestseller on the lists of both the New York Times and LA Times, number one at Amazon UK and Amazon Canada, and number two at Amazon.com. Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris was recently an equally successful bestseller.

A group calling itself "The Rational Response Squad," has launched The Blasphemy Challenge, a campaign to entice young people to publicly renounce belief in the God of Christianity. Participants who videotape their blasphemy and upload it to YouTube will receive a free DVD of The God Who Wasn't There, a number one bestselling independent documentary at Amazon.com.

Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term "meme." In January 2006, Dawkins hosted on the UK's Channel 4 a two-part documentary on the dangers of religion, entitled (against his wishes, I might add) The Root of All Evil. His newest book, The God Delusion, is an international bestseller.

Below is a shortened version of Terrence McNally's recent interview with Richard Dawkins. You can also listen to the audio of the full interview.

Terrence McNally: When and how did you become an atheist?

Richard Dawkins: I suppose it was discovering Darwinism. I was confirmed into the Church of England at the age of thirteen. I then got pretty skeptical about it, but retained some respect for the argument from Design -- the argument that says living things look as though they've been designed, so they probably have been. I then learned the real scientific explanation for why they look as though they've been designed, and that was enough for me. I lost my religious faith pretty much then.

TM: What do you think explains the current interest in atheism?

RD: I would love to think that there really is something moving -- a shifting in the tectonic plates, and, at last, in America, atheism is becoming respectable; that one can now come out of the closet and proclaim one's self.

I got certain indications of that on my recent tour of the United States. I got packed houses everywhere I went. Of course, I was preaching to the choir, but I was impressed by how large the choir is and how enthusiastic. Over and over again people came up to me afterwards and said how grateful they were that I and Sam Harris and others were finally speaking out and saying the things that they wanted to say, but perhaps didn't feel able to.

TM: You compare the experience of atheists to that of gays in the fairly recent past. Do you think that's an apt comparison?

RD: I think the parallel is a valid one. Until recently nobody dared admit that they were gay. Now, they're rather proud to do so. Nowadays it's impossible to get elected to public office if you're an atheist, and I think that's got to change. The Gay Rights Movement raised consciousness. It initiated the idea of Gay Pride. I think we've got to have Atheist Pride, Atheist Consciousness. I think it's pretty clear that a fair number of members of Congress must be lying because not a single one of them admits to being an atheist. The probability that in a sample of over 500 well-educated members of American society, not a single one of them is an atheist, statistically, that is highly unlikely. So, some of them, at least, have got to be lying, and I think it's a tragedy that they have to.

TM: Could you address a couple of reactions that I see in the media, either to atheism, in general, or to you and your book? One, people ask why are atheists so angry?

RD: That's a very curious misperception. We get accused of being angry or of being intolerant, but, if you were to look at critiques of one political party by the other... when Democrats criticize Republicans, or Republicans criticize Democrats, nobody ever says, "You're being intolerant of Republicans, or angry." It's just normal, robust argument.

People have gotten so used to the idea that religion must be immune to criticism that even a very mild and gentle criticism of religion comes across as angry and intolerant. That's yet another piece of consciousness raising that we've got to undertake.

TM: You and others are accused of being arrogant, condescending. What would you say to that?

RD: Exactly the same thing. Nobody says that a Democrat who dismisses Republican ideas is arrogant. They just assume that's what politicians do. They attack each other's ideas with good, robust give and take. That's exactly what people like me and Sam Harris are doing with respect to religion. Once again, the accusation of arrogance comes about because religion has acquired this weird protection that you're not allowed to criticize.

TM: You give the Americans too much credit. In the last couple of years, perhaps since 9/11, when people criticize the Bush Administration, they are accused of Bush-hating. I think they're attempting to clothe this President and this Administration in the same kind of protective halo that religion has had.

RD: Now that you mention it, I have noticed that very thing. There has been a tendency to say, if you criticize the President, Bush, you are criticizing America, which is ludicrous because he was elected by a --

TM: --a minority.

RD: -- if indeed he was elected at all. I take your point completely. Thank you.

TM: People finally say, "What's it to you? Why not be an atheist if that's what works for you, and leave the rest of us to be as religious as we wish?" This, I believe, is offered as a challenge to your open-mindedness or your respect for others. You're being called "an atheist fundamentalist."

RD: "Fundamentalist" usually means, "goes by the book." And so, a religious fundamentalist goes back to the fundamentals of The Bible or The Koran and says, "nothing can change." Of course, that's not the case with any scientist, and certainly not with me. So, I'm not a fundamentalist in that sense.

Why not live and let live? Why not just say, "Oh, well, if people want to believe that, that's fine." Of course, nobody's stopping people believing whatever they like. The problem is that there's not that much tolerance coming the other way. Things like the opposition to stem-cell research, to abortion, to contraception -- these are all religiously inspired prohibitions on what would otherwise be freedom of action, whether of scientists or individual human beings.

There are religious people who are not content to say, "Oh, well, my religion doesn't allow me to use contraceptives, but I'm quite happy for anybody else to." Instead, we have religiously-inspired prohibitions on aid programs abroad, including in areas where HIV AIDS is rife, prohibiting aid going in any form that might be used to help contraception. That is religion over-stepping the bounds and interfering in other people's freedom. So, religion does not observe this "live and let live" philosophy.

TM: In other words, if it were just a philosophical belief that had no impact on the world, fine.

RD: Exactly. I don't think you'll find many people criticizing any gentle religion, like Jainism.

The other thing is that, as a scientist and an educator, it is impossible to overlook the fact that, especially in America, there is a vigorous and virulent campaign to suppress the teaching of scientific biology. In state after state, there are court battles being fought. Scientists have to go out of the laboratory and waste their time responding to these know-nothings who are trying to stop the teaching of evolution or give equal time to creationism or intelligent design, or whatever they like to call it. They actually are trying to interfere with the freedom of children to learn science and the freedom of science teachers to teach their science properly.

TM: Why did you write The God Delusion?

RD: I care passionately about the truth. I believe that the truth about whether there is a God in the Universe is possibly the most important truth there is. I happen to think it's false, but I think it's a really important question.

Also, because I felt that the world actually is drifting, parts of it anyway, towards theocracy in very dangerous ways. Education in my own field of Evolutionary Biology was under threat. There are all sorts of reasons why one might worry about the looming rise of religious influence, especially in the United States of America and in the Islamic world.

TM: Can you explain the distinction you offer between Einstein's God, as you put it, and Supernatural God? You clarify this at the top of the book to make clear which definition of God you believe is a delusion.

RD: Sometimes when people hear that one is an atheist, they say something like, "Oh, well, surely you believe in something." Or "You believe that the Universe is a wonderful place." And I say, "Yes, of course, the Universe is a wonderful place." And they say, "Oh, well, then you believe in God." And they are using "God" in the Einsteinian sense of a kind of metaphor for that which is mysterious and wonderful in the universe. And the more the physicists look into the origins of the universe, the more wonderful it does seem to become. Without a doubt there is cause for something approaching worship or reverence that moves scientists such as Einstein, and Carl Sagan, and, in my humble way, myself. Einstein was very fond of using the word "God" to refer to that feeling of non-personal reverence.

TM: Beyond that feeling, didn't he also use it to refer to the awesome existence that we confront?

RD: Yes, he did. When Einstein wanted to say something like, "Could the universe have happened in any other way? Is there only one kind of universe?" The way he expressed it was, "Did God have a choice in creating the universe?" Now, to any ordinary churchgoer in the pew, that sounds as though Einstein believed that a personal God designed the universe. In fact, all Einstein was doing was wondering whether there could be more than one kind of universe, which is a perfectly respectable scientific question.

I think it's extremely unfortunate that Einstein chose to use the word "God" for that. Einstein himself was most indignant when he was taken literally and people thought that he meant a personal God, such as the Christian God or the Jewish God. But I think he was asking for trouble by using the word "God." He did it again over Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, which he hated. He expressed his hatred for it by saying, "God does not play dice."

TM: So you're making the distinction between that use of the word "God" and the God that you believe is a delusion?

RD: A personal God. A God who is a deliberate, conscious intelligence, the sort of God who listens to your prayers, forgives your sins. A God who sits down like a master engineer or physicist and designs the Universe, works out what ought to happen, worries about sins, all that kind of thing.

TM: Could you briefly respond, as you do in the book, to some of the arguments for this supernatural, directive, personal God. The argument from beauty...?

RD: People say things like, "If you don't believe in God, how do you account for Beethoven? How do you account for a lovely sunset? How do you account for Michelangelo?" It's such a dopey thing to say. Beethoven wrote beautiful music. Michelangelo painted wonderful paintings and did wonderful sculptures. Whether or not there is a God doesn't add to the argument one bit. So that's not an argument, although an amazingly large number of people seem to think it is.

TM: The argument from scripture...?

RD: There are lots of scriptures all around the world and they contradict each other. There's really no reason to suppose that just because something's written down, it's true. You have to ask who wrote it and when and why.

If you ask somebody, "Why do you believe that your Scripture is the Word of God?" the answer that comes back is, "Oh, because it says so." And you say, "Well, where does it say so?" And they say, "In my Scripture." So, the Holy Scripture, whichever it is, The Koran, or The Bible, or The Book of Mormon, says within itself that it is the Word of God. This is a circular argument and not to be taken seriously.

TM: The argument from personal experience...? In late-night conversations during my high school days, my questions regarding God's existence would be answered by the challenge-defying, "You have to experience it."

RD: I think that is a difficult one, but, on the other hand, anybody who knows anything about psychology, knows what an immensely powerful simulation engine the brain is. I'm impressed by the fact that every single night of my life, my brain conjures up images and sounds of things that have never existed and never will exist. They are completely non-sensical. It's as though I go temporarily insane every night of my life and you do, too. Everybody does. We get a very life-like, full color simulation of a fantasy world inside our heads. Now, when we get that in our sleep, we call it a dream. When we get it in our waking lives -- in much less vivid form -- we might call it a vision of God or a vision of an angel, or we might say "God just talks to me."

Even when you actually see an angel or you actually hear a voice inside your head, that is an easy feat of simulation for the brain to achieve. When it's just a sort of vague feeling that God is whispering to you, it's really rather pathetic to be fooled by that, I think.

TM: My president claims God talks to him.

RD: Yes. Your president is told by God to invade Iraq. It's a pity, by the way, that God didn't tell him there were no weapons of mass destruction.

TM: I, too, wish God had been more specific. What do you make of the recent scientific conversations about certain phenomena such as a "God nodule" in the brain?

RD: There is a certain amount of evidence that specific parts of the brain do have something to do with so-called religious experience. I've had experience of the work of the Canadian neurophysiologist, Michael Persinger. He tries to mimic the effects of temporal lobe epilepsy by passing magnetic fields through the brain. In about eighty percent of subjects, when he passes magnetic fields through certain parts of the brain, he can induce religious or mystical experiences. The details of the religious experience depend upon how the person was brought up. So, if the person was Catholic, they tend to see Virgin Marys or whatever it might be. I turned out to be one of the twenty percent for whom it didn't work. If it had worked for me, I probably wouldn't have seen any gods, but I probably would have experienced some sort of mystical experience of Oneness with the Universe.

TM: How universal is the belief in a supernatural God?

RD: It's universal in the sense that all human cultures that anthropologists have looked at seem to have something corresponding to a belief in some sort of God.

Sometimes it's many gods. Sometimes it's one. Sometimes it's an animistic set of gods -- the God of the Waterfall, the God of the River, the God of the Mountain, the Sun God. The details vary, but it does seem to be a human universal, in the same sort of way as heterosexual lust is a human universal, even though not all individual humans have it. Like sexual lust, I suspect there's a kind of lust for God.

TM: How do you explain its prevalence?

RD: When you ask a Darwinian like me, how we explain something, we usually take that to mean, "What is the Darwinian survival value of it?"

Quite often, when you ask what is the survival value of "X", it turns out that you shouldn't be asking the question about "X" at all, but that "X" is a by-product of something else that does have survival value. In this case, the suggestion I put forward as only one of many possible suggestions, is that religious faith is a by-product of the childhood tendency to believe what your parents tell you.

It's a very good idea for children to believe what parents tell them. A child who dis-believes what his parents tell him would probably die, by not heeding the parent's advice not to get into the fire, for example. So child brains, on this theory, are born with a rule of thumb, "believe what your parents tell you." Now, the problem with that -- where the by-product idea comes in -- is that it's not possible to design a brain that believes what its parents tell it, without believing bad things along with good things. Ideally we might like the child brain to filter good advice like, "Don't jump in the fire," from bad advice like, "Worship the tribal gods." But the child-brain has no way of discriminating those two kinds of advice. So, inevitably, a child-brain that is pre-programmed to believe and obey what his parents tell it, is automatically vulnerable to bad advice like, "Worship the tribal juju."

I think that's one part of the answer, but then, you need another part of the answer: Why do some kinds of bad advice, like, "Worship the tribal juju," survive and others not?

Beliefs like "life-after-death" spread because they are appealing. A lot of people don't like the idea of dying and rather do like the idea that they'll survive their own death. So the meme, if you like, spreads like a virus because people want to believe it.

TM: Though children may tend to believe what their parents tell them, you state strongly that a child should not be called a Catholic child, a Muslim child, or a Jewish child.

RD: Yes. I'm very, very keen on the idea that children should be not labeled like that. We're back to consciousness raising. The feminists raised our consciousness about use of language in all sorts of ways -- things like saying, "his or hers," instead of just "his". In the same way, I think we need to raise consciousness about such labeling of children.

I'm not saying that parents shouldn't influence their children. That would be hopelessly unrealistic. Parents influence their children in all sorts of ways, but I think religion is more or less unique in being licensed to confer a label on a child. You never talk about a "Republican child" or a "Democratic child." You never make the assumption that because a professor of post-modernist literature has a child, that therefore it will be a post-modernist child. It would be ridiculous to do that, and yet if a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim has a child, then the whole of society goes along with the idea that you can label this child "a Jewish child," "a Christian child," "A Muslim child." I think that is a form of child abuse. I think it's a civil rights issue.

TM: Many suggest that you and other atheists, perhaps especially scientists who are atheists, neglect phenomena that you cannot explain. For example, the subjective experience of meaning or comfort of inspiration many claim to receive from their belief or their relationship with God... If millions experience such things, is this not evidence for the source to which they attribute them? If not, can you clarify why it isn't?

RD: There's no question that people do get comfort and consolation from religion. If a loved one has died, of course, it's comforting to feel that they're still somewhere out there caring for you, and you're going to see them again one day. But, what is comforting isn't necessarily true, and it is sort of intellectual cowardice to say, "We should let people wallow in their illusions, because it comforts them." I think it's rather patronizing.

TM: Do you think this is similar to when families or even doctors debate whether to tell someone their cancer is terminal? Because, after all, life is terminal...

RD: That's a really good parallel. There are people who would rather not be told the truth by a doctor and I respect that, but that doesn't make it true. That you want your doctor to tell you that you haven't got terminal cancer, and your doctor obliges by lying to you, that's fine; but the fact is he has lied to you. Similarly, you may be comforted by the thought that there's a God looking after you, but if there isn't a God looking after you, then I'm afraid there isn't one, and that's all there is to it.

I don't want to impose my beliefs on anybody else, but I do care about what's true. If you want to know what I think is true, read my book. If you'd rather not know what I think is true, don't read my book.

TM: Many criticize you on the grounds that science can't answer some of the biggest questions or that science is unwilling or unable to offer those meaningful things that we just talked about. Is it fair to respond to your book or your arguments by pointing out insufficiencies of science?

RD: There are some questions that science not only can't answer, but doesn't want to answer, things like, "What is right? And What is wrong?" or "How shall we be comforted?" Science has nothing to say about "right" or "wrong." Moral philosophy does. There's another whole category of questions that science may not be able to answer -- the really deep questions of existence, like, "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" or "Where did the laws of physics come from in the first place?" It's an open question at the moment whether science will ever be able to answer questions like that.

Physicists, in particular, are working on questions like, "Where do the laws of physics come from?" But it's a fallacy to say that because science can't answer such a question, therefore religion can. Much more realistic to say, "Well, if science can't answer that deep question, nothing can."

TM: In America, we hear that we're more provincial and religious than so many other people; that much of Europe, even the Roman Catholic countries of Spain and Italy, for instance, are far more secular...

RD: I suspect that the grip that religion is alleged to have over America has been exaggerated. If people who are not religious would only recognize that they're not a beleaguered minority, but actually are exceedingly numerous and potentially very powerful... If they would stand up and recognize each other and organize, I suspect that they would soon give the lie to this idea that America is a supremely religious country.

I think there's been a kind of hijacking of American political life by religious interests, and I think it's rather sad the way so many have gone along with that. You'll see even intelligent Democrats desperately currying favor with the religious vote because they think it's so powerful. No member of Congress will admit to being an atheist, although obviously some of them are.

TM: In polls, people are least likely to vote for an atheist for significant political office. They claim to be much more willing to vote, for instance, for a homosexual or a Muslim...

RD: It's no wonder that politicians are scared.

TM: I don't think we can expect too many politicians to move first.

RD: People have to come out of the closet and write to their Congressmen and Congresswomen and say, "Look, stop sucking up to the religious vote. Suck up to us, for a change. Better still, don't suck up to anybody, but speak your own convictions."

TM: I once asked a member of the Achuar -- an Amazon rainforest tribe who had its first contact with the modern world in the 1970s -- "How do you feel about the missionaries?" I assumed he would say, "Oh, bad folks," but he said, "They were the ones who stopped us from killing each other all the time."

Although several of our Founding Fathers were more likely Deists than conventional Christians, they believed that once you took away the monarchy or the Papacy, that the people did need religion in order to behave as a moral society. Do you agree that religion is a civilizing or moralizing force?

RD: There's something awfully patronizing and condescending about saying, "Well, of course, we don't need religion, but the common people do." I hope it's not as bad as that.

With regard to the missionaries being a civilizing influence on tribes whose habit was to kill each other -- presumably, if their first contact with Westerners had been with policemen, they would have said, "Until the policemen came, we killed each other."

Through centuries of change, we have now reduced our natural tendency to kill each other, but there have long been tribes where killing is the norm and the way to achieve worldly success. In our society we talk about making a killing on Wall Street. The equivalent in some tribes in the Amazon jungle might be to literally go and kill sexual rivals, for example.

That changes when such tribes are brought into contact with Western civilization. The fact that the people who go out of their way to bring Western civilization to such tribes usually are missionaries doesn't mean that religion fosters the "Thou salt not kill," point of view. "Thou shalt not kill" is a general moral principle, which we all have now, whether or not we're religious.

TM: Some people will claim that without religion we would not act morally; we would lack ethics...

RD: That's an appalling thing to say, isn't it? It suggests that the only reason we have morality -- the only reason we don't kill and rape and steal -- is that we're afraid of being found out by God. We're afraid that God is watching us, afraid of the great surveillance camera in the sky. Now, that's not a very noble reason for being good.

As a matter of fact, there's not the slightest evidence that religious people in a given society are any more moral than non-religious people. We are, all of us in the modern world, far more reluctant to kill, reluctant to discriminate against other people on grounds of sex. We no longer regard slavery as a good thing. All these things are universally approved of among educated people of goodwill in modern society, whether or not they are religious. You can point to abolitionists who happened to be religious, and you can point to other religious individuals who were in favor of slavery.

Modern morality is very different from the truly horrifying version of morality in the Old Testament. If we went by the Bible, we'd still be taking slaves. If we went by the Bible, we'd still be stoning people to death for the crime of picking up sticks on the Sabbath. There are all sorts of ways in which we've moved on, and nobody who claims to get their morality from religion, could seriously maintain that they get it from Scripture.

TM: You have a problem with moderate Christians, Jews, and Muslims, don't you?

RD: I take this largely from Sam Harris. In his two excellent books, Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, he points out -- and I agree with him -- that the majority of religious people are perfectly nice people who don't do horrible things. Yet moderate religion makes the world safe for extremist religion by teaching that religious faith is a virtue, and by the immunity to criticism that religion enjoys. That immunity extends to extremists like Osama Bin Laden and that dreadful man who goes around saying, "God hates fags." I've forgotten his name...

TM: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, the list goes on.

RD: The world is made safe for people like them and Osama Bin Laden because we've all been brainwashed to respect religious faith and not to criticize it with the same vigor we criticize political and other sorts of opinions that we disagree with.

If you can say, "such and such a view is part of my religion," everybody tiptoes away with great respect. "Oh, it's part of your religion," then of course, you must go ahead. In a way, we've been asking for trouble by moderate people persuading us to give to all religion a respect, which it has never done anything to deserve.

TM: You quote physicist Steven Weinberg: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. For good people to do evil things, it takes religion."

You open the book marveling at the wonders of existence. You end it writing about your personal experience of awe and transcendence. You also write eloquently about this in a previous book, Unweaving the Rainbow.

RD: Unweaving the Rainbow, which I wrote in the late '90s, was my answer to those people who say that science and, in particular, my world view in The Selfish Gene was cold and bleak and loveless. Maybe I could read a few words from the opening of Unweaving the Rainbow, which I've set aside and asked to be read at my funeral.

"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I."

We are lucky to be alive and therefore we should value life. Life is precious. We're never going to get another one. This is it. Don't waste it. Open your eyes. Open your ears. Treasure the experiences that you have and don't waste your time fussing about a non-existent future life after you're dead. Try to do as much good as you can now to others. Try to live life as richly as possible during the time that you have left available to you.

Why do we even HAVE political parties anymore?

It looks as if another one of the basic foundations of the division between parties is now being eroded, which begs the question, what does a party affiliation even mean anymore?

Republicans Grow Skeptical On Free Trade

By JOHN HARWOOD
October 4, 2007; Page A1

WASHINGTON -- By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president.
MORE

The sign of broadening resistance to globalization came in a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll that showed a fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy. While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.

Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations to limit foreign imports. That represents a challenge for Republican candidates who generally echo Mr. Bush's calls for continued trade expansion, and reflects a substantial shift in sentiment from eight years ago.

"It's a lot harder to sell the free-trade message to Republicans," said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with Democratic counterpart Peter Hart. The poll comes ahead of the Oct. 9 Republican presidential debate in Michigan sponsored by the Journal and the CNBC and MSNBC television networks.

The leading Republican candidates are still trying to promote free trade. "Our philosophy has to be not how many protectionist measures can we put in place, but how do we invent new things to sell" abroad, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a recent interview. "That's the view of the future. What [protectionists] are trying to do is lock in the inadequacies of the past."

Such a stance is sure to face a challenge in the 2008 general election. Though President Bill Clinton famously steered the Democratic Party toward a less-protectionist bent and promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement, his wife and the current Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has adopted more skeptical rhetoric. Mrs. Clinton has come out against a U.S. trade deal with South Korea.

Other leading Democrats have been harshly critical of trade expansion, pleasing their party's labor-union backers. In a March 2007 WSJ/NBC poll, before recent scandals involving tainted imports, 54% of Democratic voters said free-trade agreements have hurt the U.S., compared with 21% who said they have helped.

Take a closer look at how voters' age, gender, income and other factors are affecting their choices for the Republican nominee, according to the recent WSJ/NBC News poll.

While rank-and-file Democrats have long blasted the impact of trade on American jobs, slipping support among Republicans represents a fresh warning sign for free-market conservatives and American companies such as manufacturers and financial firms that benefit from markets opening abroad.

With voters provoked for years by such figures as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, "there's been a steady erosion in Republican support for free trade," says former Rep. Vin Weber, now an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

One fresh indication of the party's ideological crosswinds: Presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas, who opposes the Iraq war and calls free-trade deals "a threat to our independence as a nation," announced yesterday that he raised $5 million in third-quarter donations. That nearly matches what one-time front-runner John McCain is expected to report.

In a December 1999 Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, 37% of Republicans said trade deals had helped the U.S. and 31% said they had hurt, while 26% said they made no difference.

The new poll asked a broader but similar question. It posed two statements to voters. The first was, "Foreign trade has been good for the U.S. economy, because demand for U.S. products abroad has resulted in economic growth and jobs for Americans here at home and provided more choices for consumers."

The second was, "Foreign trade has been bad for the U.S. economy, because imports from abroad have reduced demand for American-made goods, cost jobs here at home, and produced potentially unsafe products."

Asked which statement came closer to their own view, 59% of Republicans named the second statement, while 32% pointed to the first.

Rocky Outlook

Such sentiment suggests a rocky outlook for trade expansion. Early in his term, Mr. Bush successfully promoted a number of new free-trade pacts, but the efforts have stalled, particularly after Democrats took control of Congress last November.

Even relatively small deals are facing resistance. While trade pacts with Peru and Panama have a strong chance of passing in the current congressional term, deals with South Korea and Colombia are in serious jeopardy. Some legislators believe South Korea isn't opening its market wide enough to American beef and autos.

'Fast Track'

Presidential "fast track" trade negotiating authority has lapsed. Without such authority, which requires Congress to take a single up-or-down vote on trade deals, the next president would have trouble pursuing large trade agreements, particularly the stalled global Doha Round.

AP
Presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) greeted cadets at Camden Military Academy in Camden, S.C., Wednesday.

Julie Kowal, 40 years old, who works in a medical lab and is raising five children in Omaha, Neb., said she worries that Midwestern producers face obstacles selling beef and autos abroad. "We give a lot more than we get," she said. "There's got to be a point where we say, 'Wait a minute.'"

Beyond trade, Republicans appear to be seeking a move away from the president. Asked in general terms, a 48% plurality of Republicans said the next president should "take a different approach" from Mr. Bush, while 38% wanted to continue on his path.

In the poll, Mr. Giuliani maintained his lead in the Republican field with support from 30% of respondents. Former Sen. Fred Thompson drew 23% in the survey, to 15% for Sen. John McCain, 10% for Mr. Romney and 4% for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. The telephone survey of 606 Republican voters, conducted Sept. 28-30, has a margin of error of four percentage points.

A clear majority of Republicans want more tax cuts, but among Republicans who identify themselves as moderate or liberal -- about one-third of the party's primary voters -- a 48% plurality favored some tax increase to fund health care and other priorities.

In part, the concern about trade reflected in the survey reflects the changing composition of the Republican electorate as social conservatives have grown in influence. In questions about a series of candidate stances, the only one drawing strong agreement from a majority of Republicans was opposition to abortion rights.

Post-9/11 security concerns have also displaced some of the traditional economic concerns of the Republican Party that Ronald Reagan reshaped a generation ago. Asked which issues will be most important in determining their vote, a 32% plurality cited national defense, while 25% cited domestic issues such as education and health care, and 23% cited moral issues. Ranking last, identified by just 17%, were economic issues such as taxes and trade.

John Pirtle, a 40-year-old Defense Department employee in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he drifted toward the Republican Party in large part because of his opposition to abortion, but doesn't agree with the free-trade views of leading candidates.

"We're seeing a lot of jobs farmed out," said Mr. Pirtle, whose father works for General Motors Corp. Rankled by reports of safety problems with Chinese imports, he added, "The stuff we are getting, looking at all the recalls, to be quite honest, it's junk."

Bush's Veto

Mr. Bush lately has sought to elevate the importance of economic issues. Yesterday he vetoed a bill passed by Congress that would expand funding for a children's-health program by $35 billion over five years. He slammed what he described as the Democrats' tax-and-spend approach during a speech in Lancaster, Pa.

Economic advisers to Republican presidential hopefuls acknowledge the safety scandals have made defending free trade more difficult. "Americans are right to be angered at companies that take shortcuts" in importing goods, said Larry Lindsey, once the top economic aide in the Bush White House and now an adviser to Mr. Thompson's presidential bid. "The next president has to promote free trade by playing hardball, and to be seen doing so."

In the Republican campaign so far, elevating populist trade concerns has been left to the long shots. "The most important thing a president needs to do is to make it clear that we're not going to continue to see jobs shipped overseas....and then watch as a CEO takes a $100 million bonus," Mr. Huckabee said at a debate earlier this year. "If Republicans don't stop it, we don't deserve to win in 2008."

It seems to me as if both parties are suffering from increasingly divided factions. Free market republicans, the religious right, and the agricultural block all have very different policy preferences and yet are still walking under the same flag. Smaller government advocates, social program proponents, some minority groups and those against governmentally legislated morality all hear the call of the donkey. But it has become increasingly clear that these coalitions are weakening and make less sense today than ever.

Are we going to witness a shake-up in which groups associate with what parties? Are we going to see the emergence of a viable third or fourth party? Is there any point in even using the party labels when they clearly do not differentiate between the views within a party?

Three reasons to watch television again

I’ve been on a long sabbatical from any sort of enjoyment in television. The reality TV genre made shows that required complex sets or long story development times prohibitively expensive. Why spend a million per episode when you can get more viewers to watch a reality show that cost only a few thousand? Fortunately, the long winter may finally be coming to an end. I’ve seen three signs that TV may not be dead, but not for lack of trying.

• Entourage

Entourage is an Emmy winning show brought to us by HBO. There should be no surprise that a lot of the great TV from the last decade has come from those cable channels that are less worried about Neilson ratings and advertising. Entourage is in its fourth season and has only gotten better each year. It is loosely based on the life experiences of Mark Wahlberg but has obviously taken on a life of its own since its inception.

The show centers around five main characters. Vincent Chase is the fulcrum of the series. He is the actor that has brought his friends out from NY to Hollywood and who has retained a full entourage of support employees that include an agent, a manager, a gofer, a chef/trainer and a publicist. Although he is the fulcrum, he is often the least likeable of the group as he is self-centered and willfully shallow. Vince has the ability to be artistic and deep, but ops for womanizing and aloofness.

Vince’s best friend and manager, Eric “E” Murphy, is really the central character of the series and is the member of the group with the most common sense. He is the former manager of a “Sbarro’s Pizza Parlor” and is the voice of reason to Vince’s artistic and chauvinistic desires. E’s romantic life is also one of the key engines of plot development.

Although not a friend of Vince, Ari Gold has become a central character of the series. Ari is Vince’s agent and is the epitome of a self-interested, megalomaniac agent that will do anything to close a deal and to score his commission. Ari has had the largest character arc since the series began and has become the most entertaining and likeable member of the cast. Every time you hear “you’ve got gold” you know that is exactly what you’re gonna get.

Turtle and Johnny Drama round out the NY four and the entourage. Drama is Vince’s half brother and a one-time washed up actor who has come back into his own. He takes himself far too seriously but is down deep a good natured guy who would do anything for his friends. Turtle is the yin to Drama’s yang. He takes nothing seriously and is willing to exploit his friends to a degree but will go the distance for his friends when his back is to the wall.

It is the characters that drive this show, as the plot lines (although consistent and well written) are merely incidental. I’m going to make the not-so-bold claim that this is currently the best show on TV.

• House

Perhaps more miraculously is a great show on Network television. House is a medical drama that follows a sociopath anti-hero doctor that specializes in infectious diseases. House is played by British actor Hugh Laurie, without a hint of an accent, and is the medical Sherlock Holmes.

The show is loosely based on the criminal crime investigative format but with much more wit and better acting than most of those dramas. It would be difficult to discuss this show too much without giving too much away. Let me just say that if you aren’t sucked in by the very first show that you watch then you probably are not a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

House is on Tuesdays on Fox.

• Reaper

Reaper is my pick for best NEW show on television. It is directed by Kevin Smith (of Clerks fame) and fills a void that has existed since Joss Whedon’s last show left the air. It is clever, smart and hilariously funny.

Reaper’s plot development so far has been simple. The hero is a slacker 20-something named Sam that finds out that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born. The devil, a very likeable Ray Wise, recruits Sam to be his bounty hunter and return escaped damned souls to hell. Sam is accompanied by two sidekicks and a love interest. But the real interplay that makes this show something to watch is between Sam and the Devil.

Think of this show as Buffy meets the Ghostbusters with a little Clerks thrown in. Sadly, it is direct competition with House which makes me concerned with its potential longevity. It is on the newly formed CW network and hopefully can bring some ratings to a daring, but relatively small niche network.