01
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS WE ALWAYS SEE AREN'T THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS
First Amendment battles continue to rage across the US over the posting of the Ten
Command-ments in public places — courthouses, schools, parks, and pretty much anywhere else
you can imagine. Christians argue that they're a part of our Western heritage that should be
displayed as ubiquitously as traffic signs. Congressman Bob Barr hilariously suggested that the
Columbine massacre wouldn't have happened if the Ten Commandments (also called the
Decalogue) had been posted in the high school, and some government officials have directly,
purposely disobeyed court rulings against the display of these ten directives supposedly handed
down from on high.
Too bad they're all talking about the wrong rules.
Every Decalogue you see — from the 5,000-pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State
Judicial Building to the little wallet-cards sold at Christian bookstores — is bogus. Simply
reading the Bible will prove this. Getting out your King James version, turn to Exodus 20:2-17.
You'll see the familiar list of rules about having no other gods, honoring your parents, not killing
or coveting, and so on. At this point, though, Moses is just repeating to the people what God told
him on Mount Si'nai. These are not written down in any form.
Later, Moses goes back to the Mount, where God gives him two "tables of stone" with rules
written on them (Exodus 31:18). But when Moses comes down the mountain lugging his load, he
sees the people worshipping a statue of a calf, causing him to throw a tantrum and smash the
tablets on the ground (Exodus 32:19).
In neither of these cases does the Bible refer to "commandments." In the first instance, they are
"words" which "God spake," while the tablets contain "testimony." It is only when Moses goes
back for new tablets that we see the phrase "ten commandments" (Exodus 34:28). In an
interesting turn of events, the commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the
ten rules Moses recited for the people, meaning that either Moses' memory is faulty or God
changed his mind.
Thus, without further ado, we present to you the real "Ten Commandments" as handed down by
the LORD unto Moses (and plainly listed in Exodus 34:13-28). We eagerly await all the new
Decalogues, which will undoubtedly contain this correct version:
I. Thou shalt worship no other god.
II. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
III.. The feast of unleavened bread thou shalt keep
IV. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.
V. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of
ingathering at the year's end.
VI. Thrice In the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord God.
VII. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven.
VIII. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
IX. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God.
X. Thou shalt not seethe a kid [ie, a young goat] in his mother's milk.
02
ONE OF THE POPES WROTE AN EROTIC BOOK
Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and
rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn't
get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly
publication on literature claims that Historia "was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of
the whole Renaissance." The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: "The
Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German]
Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy]."
It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the
turn of the century, 37 editions had been published. Somewhere around 1553, the short book
appeared in English under the wonderfully old-school title The Goodli History of the Moste
Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye
Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. Despite the obvious historical interest of this archaic
Vatican porn, it has never been translated into contemporary language. (The passages quoted
below mark the first time that any of the book has appeared in
modern English.)
The 1400s being what they were, the action is pretty tame by today's
standards. At one point, Euralius scales a wall to be with Lucres:
"When she saw her lover, she clasped him in her arms. There was
embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and
wearied Venus, now with Ceres, and now with Bacchus was
refreshed." Loosely translated, that last part means that they shagged,
then ate, then drank wine.
His Holiness describes the next time they hook up:
Thus talking to each other, they went into the bedroom, where they had such a night as we
judge the two lovers Paris and Helen had after he had taken her away, and it was so
pleasant that they thought Mars and Venus had never known such pleasure....
Her mouth, and now her eyes, and now her cheeks he kissed. Pulling down her clothes, he
saw such beauty as he had never seen before. "I have found more, I believe," said Euralius,
"than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain. What is more pleasant or
more fair than these limbs?... O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it
you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my
arms?... O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I
am, or more blessed."...
He strained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren't weary. Like Athens,
who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were more desirous of war.
But Euralius isn't just a horndog. He waxes philosophical about love to Lucres' cousin-in-law:
You know that man is prone to love. Whether it is virtue or vice, it reigns everywhere. No
heart of flesh hasn't sometime felt the pricks of love. You know that neither the wise
Solomon nor the strong Sampson has escaped from this passion. Furthermore, the nature
of a kindled heart and a foolish love is this: The more it is allowed, the more it burns, with
nothing sooner healing this than the obtaining of the loved. There have been many, both in
our time and that of our elders, whose foolish love has been the cause of cruel death. And
many who, after sex and love vouchsafed, have stopped burning. Nothing is better when
love has crept into your bones than to give in to the burning, for those who strive against
the tempest often wreck, while those who drive with the storm escape.
Besides sex and wisdom, the story also contains a lot of humor, as when Lucres' husband
borrows a horse from Euralius: "He says to himself, 'If you leap upon my horse, I shall do the
same thing to your wife.'"
Popes just don't write books like that anymore!
03
THE CIA COMMITS OVER 100,000 SERIOUS CRIMES EACH YEAR
It's no big secret that the Central Intelligence Agency breaks the law. But just how often its does
in is a shocker. A Congressional report reveals that the CIA's spooks "engage in highly illegal
activities" at least 100,000 times each year (which breaks down to hundreds of crimes every
day). Mind you, we aren't talking about run-of-the-mill illegal activities — these are "highly
illegal activities" that "break extremely serious laws."
In 1996, the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a
huge report entitled "IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century." Buried amid
hun-dreds of pages is a single, devastating paragraph:
The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence community], indeed of
the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break
extremely serious laws in countries around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated
efforts by foreign governments to catch them. A safe estimate is that several hundred times
every day (easily 100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in
highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment
to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals
and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself.
Amazingly, there is no explanation, no follow-up. The report simply drops this bombshell and
moves on as blithely as if it had just printed a grocery list.
One of the world's foremost experts on the CIA — John Kelly, who uncovered this revelation —
notes that this is "the first official admission and definition of CIA covert operations as crimes."
He goes on to say:
The report suggested that the CIA's crimes include murder and that "the targets of the CS
[Clandestine Service] are increasingly international and transnational and a global
presence is increasingly crucial to attack those targets." In other words, we are not talking
about simply stealing secrets. We are talking about the CIA committing crimes against
humanity with de facto impunity and con-gressional sanctioning.
Other government documents, including CIA reports, show that the CIA's crimes include
terrorism, assassination, torture, and systematic violations of human rights. The documents
also show that these crimes are part and parcel of deliberate CIA policy (the
[congressional] report notes that CIA personnel are "directed" to commit crimes).


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DNA ni nezmotljiv:

40
DNA MATCHING IS NOT INFALLIBLE
Speaking of tests that aren't all they're cracked up to be, let's look at DNA testing. This is supposed to be the absolute silver bullet of criminal justice, an incontrovertible way to pin guilt on someone. After all, the chances of a mismatch are one in a billion, a quadrillion, a jillion! Some experts have testified under oath that a false match is literally impossible.

Not quite. As he did with HIV testing, risk scholar Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute punches a hole in the matching of genetic material:
In the first blind test reported in the literature, three major commercial laboratories were each sent 50 DNA samples. Two of the three declared one false match; in a second test one year later, one of the same three laboratories declared a false match. From external tests conducted by the California Association of I Crime Laboratory Directors, the Collaborative Testing Services, and other agencies, the psychologist Jonathan Koehler and his colleagues estimated the false positive rate of DNA fingerprinting to be on the order of 1 in 100. Cellmark Diagnostics, one of the laboratories that found matches between O.J. Simpson's DNA and DNA extracted from a recovered blood stain at the murder scene, reported its own false positive rate to the Simpson defense as roughly 1 in 200.
It gets even worse. In 1999, the College of American Pathologists performed its own secret tests of 135 labs. Each lab was sent a DNA sample from the "victim," some semen from the "suspect," and a fake vaginal swab containing DNA from both parties. They were also sent a strand of the "victim's" hair. The object was to see how many of the labs would make the matches (ie, match the two sperm samples of the man, and match the hair and DNA sample of the woman). But something unexpected happened: Three of the labs reported that the DNA from the suspect matched the victim's DNA! Obviously, they had mixed up the samples. Only fourteen labs tested the hair, but out of those, one screwed it up by declaring a match to the "suspect."
These kind of switches don't happen only during artificial situations designed to gauge a lab's accuracy (which are usually performed under ideal conditions). During a 1995 rape trial, a lab reversed the labels on the DNA samples from the victim and the defendant. Their testing then revealed a match between the defendant's alleged DNA (which was actually the victim's) and the DNA on the vaginal swab, which didn't contain any semen from the rapist. Luckily, this boneheaded move was caught during the trial, but not everyone is so lucky.
The Journal of Forensic Science has reported an error that was discovered only after an innocent man had been convicted of raping an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to prison, where lie was undoubtedly brutalized in ways that would give you nightmares for the rest of your life, were you to hear them described in detail. After four years, he was released because the lab hadn't completely separated the real rapist's DNA (extracted from his semen) from the victim's DNA. When the two were swirled together, they somehow matched that of the poor bastard whose eleven alibi witnesses failed to sway the jury. But when the semen DNA was checked properly, it was beyond doubt that a match didn't exist.
While most false matches are the result of human error, other factors do come into play. Some testing techniques are more definitive than others. In the case of one innocent man — Josiah Sutton, found guilty of rape based primarily on DNA evidence — criminology professor William C. Thompson said: "If police picked any two black men off the street, the chances that one of them would have a DNA profile that 'matched' the semen sample as well as Sutton's profile is better than one in eight." Also, we mustn't forget about corruption. In some known cases, DNA analysts have misrepresented (ie, lied about) their findings in order to obtain convictions.



41
AN FBI EXPERT TESTIFIED THAT LIE DETECTORS ARE WORTHLESS FOR
SECURITY SCREENING
Now let's turn our attention to the last member of our trifecta of defective tests — the polygraph, more commonly referred to as the lie detector. Invented by the same person who created Wonder Woman and her golden lasso that makes you tell the truth (I'm not kidding), the polygraph is said to detect deception based on subtle bodily signals, such as pulse rate and sweatiness. Its proponents like to claim that it has a success rate of 90 percent or more. This is pure hogwash. While the evidence against lie detectors is way too voluminous to get into here, it will be very instructive to look at a statement from Dr. Drew Richardson. Richardson is a scientist who was an FBI agent for 25 years; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he dealt with polygraphs.
In fall 1997, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held hearings regarding the FBI Crime Lab. Richardson gave scorching testimony about polygraphs. Referring specifically to the practice of using lie detectors to question people in sensitive positions, he said under oath:
It is completely without any theoretical foundation and has absolutely no validity. Although there is disagreement amongst scientists about the use of polygraph testing in criminal matters, there is almost universal agreement that polygraph screening is completely invalid and should be stopped. As one of my colleagues frequently says, the diagnostic value of this type of testing is no more than that of astrology or tea-leaf reading.
If this test had any validity (which it does not), both my own experience, and published scientific research has proven, that anyone can be taught to beat this type of polygraph exam in a few minutes.
Because of the nature of this type of examination, it would normally be expected to produce large numbers of false positive results (falsely accusing an examinee of lying about some issue). As a result of the great consequences of doing this with large numbers of law enforcement and intelligence community officers, the test has now been manipulated to reduce false positive results, but consequently has no power to detect deception in espionage and other national security matters. Thus, I believe that there is virtually no probability of catching a spy with the use of polygraph screening techniques. I think a careful exam-ination of the Aldrich Ames case will reveal that any shortcomings in the use of the polygraph were not simply errors on the part of the polygraph examiners involved, and would not have been eliminated if FBI instead of CIA polygraphers had conducted these examinations. Instead I believe this is largely a reflection of the complete lack of validity of this methodology. To the extent that we place any confidence in the results of polygraph screening, and as a consequence shortchange traditional security vetting techniques, I think our national security is severely jeopardized.
After he ripped polygraphs a new one, the FBI silenced Richardson, refusing to let him speak publicly about the subject again.


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