Posse Incitatus

Some transgender thought experiments

One of the Hated Instapundit's co-bloggers had a link to a formerly transgender military veteran who has decided to embrace his body as it is and this got me thinking:

What if Big Pharma developed a revolutionary new drug to treat individuals suffering from mental illness?

It's being touted as a miraculous breakthrough that will cure some of the most difficult cases. 

However, it does have some considerable side effects.

For one thing, a single dose renders the patient sterile.  The sterility is irreversible, so once you start the treatment, you can never have children. 

Another issue is the high doses that need to be administered during the first two years of treatment.  The drug is so potent at these levels that patients need to be hospitalized before taking it.  Heavy bleeding, tissue infections and debilitating pain are common during this period.  Even after these symptoms go away (and they have presented in 100 percent of the cases to date), the patient will be dependent on low doses of the drug for life.

Most alarmingly, people who complete the first intense cycle of treatment have a greatly elevated likelihood of death.  After that, the long-term health effects aren't known.  Surviving patients claim to be happier, but others are deeply unhappy and regret ever beginning the treatment.  How many feel that way isn't known, likely because Big Pharma is threatening them with lawsuits.

Here's another thought experiment:

Let us say that in the run-up to 2020, Donald Trump goes all-in on cracking down on crime by illegal immigrants.  He get so carried away that he issues an executive order requiring that any non-citizen sex offenders that come into ICE's custody will have their genitalia physically cut off before they are released.

To even write that is to laugh at it.  It's utterly absurd and not only would ICE agents refuse to obey it, the courts would immediately strike it down as being cruel and unusual punishment.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

A century ago, people who believed themselves to be the brightest and most compassionate minds in the country decided that forced sterilization of "undesirables" was a moral imperative, and they set about their work with gusto.  We now look back on horror at eugenics, but it was once a highly-respected field.

There is no doubt in my mind that people will look back on the mutilation of these helpless mentally ill people the same way.  They needed healing and in the name of compassion they were cut apart.

 

Some optimism on a Sunny Sunday Morning

For a long time, it seems as though we've gone from one awful event to another.  The culture has been remorselessly coarsened and our politics is utterly dysfunctional.

But outside the narrow confines of the increasingly out-of-touch media bubble, there are a number of encouraging signs for our society.

The fact is that left's endless war on everything is finally wearing people out.  It's like the old joke:

Q:  How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A:  That's not funny!

That joke is older than I am and it's still funny because it's still true.  Happily, a lot of people are checking out of the culture wars and getting on with their lives. 

The other day I heard a song on the radio - some alternative station, I forget which - but it was a happy little tune sung by a honey-voiced woman with sparse accompaniment.  It's central theme was the once universal dream of young women to settle down with a good man and live happily ever after.

The imagery stuck with me because unlike contemporary popular music, it was so normal.

There was no call for hedonistic sex, the female vocalist didn't proclaim herself an emotional wreck or party animal out on the prowl.  Thinking it over, the basic sentiment was really just a throwback to the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice?"

Actually, the sentiment goes back much farther because it is a universal one - an idea rooting in culture, tradition and evolution.

As I listened to the song, I was reminded of the fact that my college-town parish has put out yet another urgent call for volunteers to help manage the growing flood of converts.  This has been going on for a while, but apparently the tide is still rising.

Now if one surrendered to the defeatist views of Quisling Never Trumpers like Rod Dreher, these happy events would be dismissed as impossible or at best a local phenomenon, but in fact there is a ground swell taking place.

Far from the sexual harassment hot spots located in legacy media newsrooms, young people are deciding that maybe grandma and grandpa were on to something.  Finding a mate, raising children and having a meaningful life are hard enough without the added difficulty of trying to create an entirely new culture on the fly with nothing else to guide you than resentment at the world.

The angry left is angry because it is so miserable, and its only satisfaction is spreading that misery to others.  As the MeToo movement is showing, they are now to the point where they don't care who they destroy, so long as they destroy someone.

It is hard to imaging going through life perpetually enraged about something, waking up each day wondering whose life needs to be ruined for an innocuous remark, a clumsy attempt at a come-on, or something they did that was socially acceptable 20 years ago but now must be called out as an unforgivable sin.

A much more attractive option is to hang out with people who are comfortable with who they are and live by time-tested truths.  No wonder people are lining up to get in.

The real housewives of the deadliest catch

I spent the better part of last week roaming about, exploring this vast nation.  Between sorties, we rested and refueled in our hotel room and made a point of not watching news.  Instead, we amused ourselves by watching reality television.

There was a moment on The Real Housewives of Someplace Rich where one super-rich chick got upset about something another super-rich chick said about her and whether the subsequent apology was sufficiently sincere.  All the other super-rich chicks then picked sides and argued amongst themselves.

This, my wife informed me, was a great episode for that show.

In the course of this obviously staged catfight, one of the women announced that whatever people saw before was irrelevant because "her truth" was that she has been insulted.  She kept coming back to "her truth" and demanding that other people honor it because their failure to do so really hurt her feelings. 

And everyone else on the show took this at least somewhat seriously, even the ones who knew she was full of shit.  In fact, the producers helpfully rolled the tape of the earlier episode with the previous catfight, so we could see for ourselves just how contrived and stupid this whole affair truly was.  But no matter.  Super-rich chicks have their own individual truths and we should honor them or they will be sad and retreat inside their mansions.

There was another show on at some point that I was more familiar with:  Deadliest Catch.  It's a reality show about Alaskan fishermen.  Not "fisherpersons," fishermen.

I don't watch the show, but I remember seeing it when it was new and it was kind of fun to watch monster waves toss the boats around while the crewmen get their limbs broken and the skippers suffer heart attacks.

That is to say:  These guys get a few extra bucks to let bored viewers watch them get crippling injuries while trying to make a living.

If everything goes well and they don't get maimed or killed, they'll still be worth a fraction of what the super-rich chicks are, but at least they have Male Privilege.

That to me is where we are in terms of feminism and the culture.  Men live shorter, harder lives but some of them do very well in certain fields that convey a lot of prestige. 

Women clearly prefer social drama to actual life-taking risk, and yet they demand that they be treated the same.  I'm sure you saw that the World Champion Women's Soccer Team got destroyed by a bunch of under-15 teenage boys the other day, and yet the girls demand the same pay as the men because fairness.

My position is this:  If women should be given preference and extra bonuses to go into STEM fields, I think it only fair that some of them be consigned to work the Alaskan fishing fleet as well. 

I mean, women are terribly underrepresented there.  Fairness demands that half the crews of the crab boats swinging massive steel cages around a rolling deck be female.

Anything else is sexist.

 

The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers

One of the paradoxes of the culture war is that the overwhelming strength of the left also carries within it the seeds of its own downfall.

The fact that the left is now ascendant may dismay classical liberals and friends of freedom everywhere, but in the long view, it cannot last.

The left needs enemies.  As traditional society recedes into the shadows, the left must begin attacking itself.  It is the nature of the creature.  Like Morgoth and Sauron, the left needs the enemies to survive - without them it begins to self-destruct.

The last century has conclusively shown that one cannot create paradise on earth.  There can be no New Man, only an increasingly warped and twisted version of one God made.

Looking around us, can we not see such creatures already?

Many conservative commentators (myself included) have lamented that having subverted the Supreme Court, neutered Congress and captured the Executive, the left is now poised to begin hunting down the rest of civil society.  Persecution of those who do not full-throatedly endorse the left's talking points of the moment is already underway.

And yet, the left will ultimately fail.  They can create prisons, kill in the millions and shatter nations, but they cannot conquer the human spirit.  Grim thinking perhaps, but true nevertheless.

I don't think it will come to camps and pograms (other than virtual ones), largely because the American left is too lazy to get up from its keyboard.  Actual pograms require goons, and that 's a job that hipsters aren't really up to doing.  The only people in this country willing to actually mix it up tend to be on the right.  If the left were to try to use physical violence,  it will end poorly for them.

Indeed, the collapse of the left is already underway.  Their greatest stronghold, the citadel of their power, is academia.  They have destroyed the liberal arts and are already corrupting the "hard sciences" through their cult of Global Warming Climate Change.

The cost of college is already far more than it is worth, and the rape hysteria is only going to speed up the bursting of the Higher Education Bubble.

Consider this item from Michigan's crazy capital, Ann Arbor.  The Skunk Bears conducted a campus safety study that was designed to create false positives and conflate boorish behavior with attempted rape and forcible sexual assault.

Sexual assault is a serious crime - a felony that should be investigated by police, yet academics want this handled by bureaucrats whose only weapon is expulsion.  How this is supposed to deter non-students who have long treated the campus as a gun-free victim zone is nowhere addressed.

Even with creative accounting, U-M sex commissars failed to duplicate the bogus "One in five women will be sexually assaulted" and will no doubt use this to enforce their neo-Victorian sexual mores, but the ultimate result will be to destroy the "brand" of college altogether.

Still, all is not lost.  They did get the data that wanted:

Dramatically fewer students reported the misconduct to a university official — only 3.6 percent. And of those who disclosed to a UM official, just 60 percent said they received a response that made them feel supported — an issue that UM officials said they need to address. [Emphasis added.]

The poor things.  One wonders what the target percentage should be - and how many people's lives have to be ruined to ensure that everyone who files a complaint feels happy with the outcome?  I guess transitioning to full-on "all accusations must be true" is the only way to truly make things "safe."

U-M is courting with its own destruction here.  After all, who wants to send their daughters to a place of (self-proclaimed) rampant sexual violence?  Who wants to send their sons to a school where a single allegation can destroy their future?  Who would risk either while paying $40,000+ in tuition?

Male enrollment is already falling and as universities morph into Feminist Finishing Schools, demand for their overpriced credentials will disappear.

At the same time, state governments facing increasing health-care costs and pension pressure will see little reason to bankroll this nonsense and cut funding, in turn leading to further tuition spikes.

That is why I titled this piece with what might call the Princess Leia Paradox - the more the left gains total control, the more it will fragment and the greater the resistance to it will be come.

As they extend their totalitarian grip across the public square, they will only undermine themselves further.

Valentine's Day contradictions

One of the more curious developments of my lifetime has been the increasingly blatant celebration of sex and sexual perversion coinciding with the rebirth of a belligerent puritanism.  The trend towards increasing sexualization of just about everything was well underway by the 70s and by the 80s the taboo against homosexuality had all but vanished and was in fact replaced with a bias in favor of it by the 90s.

The advent of the internet allowed every kind of deviant to find like-minded individuals and feed their twisted manias and this also helped push the culture towards acceptance of things that were simply taboo in earlier times.

It seems quaint now to think about the stir caused by Madonna masturbating with a crucifix or feeling "like a virgin."  My kids look at that and simply shrug:  Seems pretty tame to them.

So on the one hand, we've never been more exposed to every conceivable kind of sexual practice and thanks to online mate-seeking, it has never been easier to find anonymous, constraint-free (and sanitary) sex.

At the same time, militant feminism has brought forth a 21st Century version of Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League.  The anti-rape hysteria (and I use that word deliberately) where the accusation is tantamount to conviction can only have the outcome of driving men into dating non-college women.  The very standard of "affirmative consent" - passed into statute without any real idea of how to achieve it - is an effort to outlaw any and all sex, marital or non-marital.

This is because the legislation empowers the woman (and only the woman) to retroactively withhold consent and thereby create a crime with no physical evidence and no witnesses other than the participants.

What is more, as the case with Mattress Girl at Columbia, even if the male somehow gets exonerated, he will continued to be harassed and such stalking is considered not only legal but laudable by feminists.

The left has never been capable of thinking through the consequences of its actions and contradiction has never bothered them, but it is fascinating to look at exactly the kind of doublethink the modern feminist must now embrace as her of her credo:

1.  Women and men are completely equal in every way, yet when both get drunk, only the male is answerable for his actions.

2.  Women are mentally and emotionally strong enough to be CEOs, world leaders and combat soldiers, yet they cannot be expected to report crimes against them to law enforcement or defend themselves due to their emotional frailty.

3.  Sex is wonderful and needs to be celebrated with week-long campus events highlighting exotic practices, yet the actual performance of the act needs to have more legal documentation than a corporate merger.

Radical feminists have long tried to hijack Valentine's Day into a period of mourning, dubbing it "V-Day" to remember the victims of sexual assault or the past offenses of the Patriarchy.

Some years ago (pre-internet) I wrote a mock article about how, after the ritual naming of names and airing of grievances, the feminists concluded their ceremony with the ceremonial castration and killing of a white goat to symbolize both the guilt of all white males and the fate that they would face.

In fact, there is a certain amount of paganism going on in all of this, from invocations of one's "inner goddess" to full-throated denunciations of the Christian moral tradition and traditional ideal of strong, masculine husband and supportive, feminine wife.

Strangely, biology is now taking a side in this discussion, revealing that it is intrinsic to human nature for men and women to be different.  The roles of the two sexes must and therefore are different.  Women uniquely can bear young and their thought processes are honed to this end, making them capable of enduring great pain (essential for childbirth) and socially more adroit.

Men, by contrast, are the predatory side of the species, optimized to hunt, defend hearth and home and they obtain their mates through displays of this prowess.  It is interesting to note that despite decades of Hollywood attempting reprogram people to find Alan Alda's "Hawkeye Pierce" as the epitome of the desireable man (a weak, handsome, educated, funny, supportive coward), women continue to gravitate towards strong, masculine figures. 

Of course that isn't fair to Hawkeye, who (as I noted before) actually did display courage under fire, often sheltering the nurse he was with with his own body when under fire.  Still, there has been a concerted effort to show that women can be as strong or stronger then men.  The scene where the tiny female martial artist utterly crushes the beefy male opponent are now a staple of every movie.

(It is amusing to note that even though Hollywood keeps advocating women in close combat situations, they know better than anyone else that this does not really work for.  Remember the super-muscular female Colonial Marine Vasquez in "Aliens?"  She was the avatar of the hard-ass woman, yet the actress needed frequent breaks because the prop-equipment - which fired blanks, not real round - was simply too much for her to carry for extended periods.)

The current new thing is for people to get surgery in order to try to erase these differences, but once again all that is being created is a stitched-together construct, a Frankenstein's monster of mixed sex.  (And isn't it interesting that feminists now wonder if men who become women are not also exercising their "privilege" to become women - everything is a crime with these people.)

The awful, inescapable truth that has feminists so enraged is that the vast majority of people are happy in an arrangement where man and woman are joined as partners and lovers, husband and wife, different but together they become one flesh and from their union new life is born.

Valentine's Day is thus becoming the exclusive province of traditional married couples - or those who aspire to it.  Every effort to subvert or destroy it is doomed to failure because down through the millennia of human existence the image of a husband bringing a gift to his wife and professing his continued love has continued to stir women into renewed passion.

Despite efforts to secularize and paganize this day, this purpose endures and it is one reason why, protestations to the contrary, women who have no "valentine" are so freaking angry about everything else.

Reality strikes in Ann Arbor - Plus NCAA gets a clue

It is a rare thing for the Skunk Bear fan base to come to terms with reality before it actually smacks them in the face – even then, it doesn’t always happen. However this article takes a remarkably clear-sighted look at their upcoming season.

In the process – by dwelling on the fact that there are six road games rather than four, and they are against ranked opponents rather than sacrificial lambs – the author reinforces my argument that U-M’s prestige was inflated by an amazingly soft schedule.

It is worth noting that MSU’s schedule was much more difficult – road games at Notre Dame, Ohio State, Nebraska and Iowa last year, and at Ann Arbor, Northwestern, Iowa and Penn State the year before. In addition, MSU has had to face the Wisconsin juggernaut – a fate the Skunk Bears have managed to sidestep.

A key variable for both teams will be the quality of the Fighting Kellys. With the Irish return to form or is Brian Kelly really just an ill-tempered poseur with a resume built on harvesting the fruits of others’ labors? Kelly’s tenure has been controversial, from the death of videographer Declan Sullivan  to sideline theatrics and most recently returning quarterback Tommy Reese’s arrest .

Seems that Kelly has his back to the wall and is now in Ron Zook territory.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SPARTANS? Congratulations to the NCAA for making an obviously correct decision and allowing DeAnthony Arnett to take the field with MSU this fall. Normally, I would regard this as somewhat of a non-issue – he would lose no eligibility and an extra year in the system would be to his benefit and help MSU as well. However, his father is in poor health and the possibility that he might pass away without seeing his son play college football was a compelling reason to let him play right away. 

Memo to the NCAA: Remember when you worried more about students and less about rules and revenue?

...or we shall surely hang seperately

Via the Hated Instapundit, we learn that the warmist front is beginning to crack.

The danger all along would be that, even in the face of the incriminating emails and code, the CRU conspirators would hold together and come up with a common story.  By being consistently brazen, they might have been able to stall an unwilling officialdom and at least muddy the issue enough to get away with some token reproaches for sloppy work.

But the implied destruction of Freedom of Information Act materials changes the game.  This is a criminal matter, and tenure won’t protect faculty who countenance such behavior.  Professor Michael Mann works for Penn State, a land-grant university that receives considerable government funding.  That makes him particularly vulnerable.  In times of tight budgets, it only takes a couple of enterprising legislators to force embarrassing testimony from university officials on why their employees are flouting transparency laws.

Again, the crime isn’t the issue – it’s the coverup.  The public remains divided about global warming, but there is complete unanimity in favor of obeying FOIA requirements.

Right now, in college campuses across the country (and perhaps the world), university presidents are looking with apprehension at their climate studies departments and wondering if they will be called to testify at the next state budget hearing about FOIA compliance.

As sure as the sun rises, you can bet that more than a few Republican state legislators are salivating at the opportunity to make liberal professors sweat at the next Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee hearing.

Excrement, as the saying goes, rolls down hill.  Thus the presidents are contacting department chairs, demanding to know the full story.  The chairs in turn are pushing their underlings to come clean.  As anyone with even a passing knowledge of faculty politics knows, there are plenty of factions who would be eager to snap up funding/facilities/prime office space, and they need little encouragement to turn up the heat on their rivals.

These rivalries extend through all of academia, and one can rest assured that the case is being built that University A, which is implicated, should be punished by having its money taken away and given to smaller University B, which is untainted and would do oh so much better.

Adding to the mix is the fact that NASA is now facing a FOIA lawsuit – and unpleasant questions may surface there as well.  The fact is, there is nothing in FOIA that would exempt climate research materials – you can’t even claim that it would endanger patents.

The pressure to turn “state’s evidence” is therefore enormous.  Watch for more academics to claim that they were intemperate, perhaps a little mean-spirited, but it was the other guy who totally broke the law.

The necessity of deceit

The release of the Climategate emails has been called a “smoking gun” for the global warming/climate change movement. It is perhaps the perfect metaphor, because the science behind gun control relies on similar deceptions.

Long-time readers may be shocked to know that once upon a time, I was what could be called a centrist on gun control: I supported the free use of hunting and sporting weapons, but thought that handguns and automatic weapons should be heavily regulated.

That was a mainstream position during the 1980s when I was growing up and the “science” of the time labored heavily to back it up. Shotguns were (and still are) fine for taking game or defending the home – and they weren’t particularly threatening. “Assault weapons”, on the other hand, were the province of survivalists and militia crazies. Just ban ‘em.

So went my thinking.

That began to change during the debate over the Assault Weapons Ban in the 1990s. For the first time, I began to actually study the matter and learned that the science wasn’t as solid as it seemed. When John Lott’s massive study on the effect of shall-issue laws burst onto the scene, I was skeptical but willing to be convinced if the facts were there.

Lott’s academic reputation has taken a (not entirely undeserved) beating since then, but what really pushed me into the gun rights camp was the compulsive dishonesty of the gun control advocates. These guys couldn’t ever make an honest argument; everything they said was twisted, spun or blatantly false. This got me to thinking: if your position is so strong, why weaken it with lies?

This is pretty much my rule now, and it has served me very well. Whether dealing with gun control or climate change, you can tell the strength of the argument by how much its supporters have to distort the truth to make it.

The question of climate change is, from a purely scientific perspective, a very difficult one to answer. The only way that we can even approach the truth is to take an open, collaborative attitude to research – basically we have to use the classical scientific method.

This method, where data is openly shared, where theories are constantly questioned – is what has allowed the Western world to make the quantum advances it has in less than a century. What the Climategate emails show is that the supporters of the globalwarmism are not interested in real science. Their agenda is too important.

They are driven by a moral certitude that is so overwhelming that it renders facts unimportant – it’s bigger than such trifling considerations. There is also a “bunker mentality” at work. These people simply cannot handle the thought of being proved wrong. They must be right, they have to be right, they know they are right – so they believe they are permitted to use any means necessary to win the public debate.

A few years ago, gun control was starting to falter. John Lott’s research had broken the debate wide open. Other criminologists, like Gary Kleck, were asking very uncomfortable questions about whether guns caused or prevented crime.

As the debate raged, the gun control advocates received news that powerful help was on the way: Michael Bellesiles was doing ground-breaking research to prove that guns in colonial America were rare and barely utilized, in effect undermining the core arguments in favor of the Second Amendment.

Bellesiles was an immediate hero and a great many academics fell over themselves praising him. His book, Arming America, won top prizes and became an instant best-seller.

And then it all fell apart, and it was the scientific method that brought him down. As more academics sought to replicate his research (in this case his sources rather than equations or methods), problems began to appear. His defenses became more convoluted and resulted in a series of embarrassing excuses and walkbacks until even his own institution was forced to fire him for academic misconduct. His prize was rescinded; his publishing contract terminated and he went from rising star to the Stephen Glass of the history profession.

Bellisiles misconduct also brought a great deal of discredit to the gun control supporters who had endorsed him and caused a new level of scrutiny on the science behind previous studies. It is no coincidence that public support for gun rights is now at an all-time high, and that even for Democrats, gun control is now a dead issue.

Climategate may have a similar effect. The warmenists in academia have been increasingly shrill and demanding over the years. Like gun control advocates, they had a set of policies they wished to see enacted and, like gun control researchers, they profited handsomely from the resulting attention.

Of course, their policies would have utterly reordered society to an extent far exceeding anything contemplated by gun control advocates. A natural response – a rational response – was to question if all this was really necessary. Was the science sound?

The answer is: we don’t know. But “not sure” isn’t enough to justify a transformative global government that will tax and regulate every single human activity. So these folks set out to prove the science was settled even though it wasn’t.

I suspect that like gun control, the climate change movement is now headed for hard times politically. A good many scientists may be sympathetic to the case (and grants and power) accorded by the global warming theory, but the sheer crassness of the behavior illustrated by these emails will cause them to hold back. Their entire profession has been brought into disrepute.

In a time of tight government budgets, the public is ill-disposed to funding junk science. They will have to police their own – whether through tenure hearings or Freedom of Information Act investigations – or the whole university edifice will take irreparable damage.

The public is rightfully skeptical of people who have to cheat to win. Fabricating and distorting data is no way to win an argument over the long term. The intellectual argument for gun control collapsed because of it. Climate change may go the same way.

The end of the eco-apocalypse

Here is a thought experiment.

Imagine that a few months from now, someone somewhere makes a breakthrough discovery in energy technology that solves all of our power needs without using fossil fuels or generating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

I’m not going to explore possible technologies that make this happen, that would be beside the point. Just assume (like any good Star Trek fan) that the technology exists and it works.

Now ask yourself: how would the environmental movement react?

I think that there would be monumental denial (in the psychological sense). I don’t mean at the instant of the announcement, I mean once the full implications dawned on us.

I mean, if fuel is essentially free of cost, why not build the biggest car you can? If energy is no longer polluting, what purpose does Earth Hour serve?

These people have a lot emotionally invested in the eco-apocalypse they have convinced themselves is just around the corner. Do they become like Shakers and gradually disappear? Do they find some new cause to champion? Do they smash the new engines that took away their favorite nightmare?

At some point, I think that the technology will be found.  And when it does, a lot of the rationale for the green movement - and the control it has tried to exercise over our lives - will vanish.

Greenpeace had better start diversifying its portfolio.

Looking for Atlantis

Returning to our holiday theme of avoiding current events, the Posse would like to take you an excursion to find the lost continent of Atlantis.

Atlantis has long been a hobby of ours, dating back to our college days.

While the Posse can no longer call upon world-class collegiate libraries, the Internet is our willing servant. 

First, we must examine the evidence our earlier research produced.

One of the more intriguing books we have found is Secret of Atlantis.  It is out of print, but we were lucky enough to come across a copy by sheer accident.

The author, WW II German rocket scientist Otto Muck, makes a pretty compelling case that Atlantis can be found under the Azores Islands, and that the Dolphin Plateau was formed after an asteroid strike some 11,000 years ago.

While visiting the geology library, we stumbled across two working papers by R. Cedric Leonard.

His web site offers similar evidence and to our knowledge, none of it has been refuted.

Unfortunately, like many who study Atlantis, Leonard damages his reputation by offering speculation about ancient Indian flying machines.

We're not sure what it is about the study of Atlantis that causes people to go from solid scientific examination of the evidence into strange UFO-related theories.

It is clear that more research is needed - and it needs to be clear-eyed and open, not blinded by current academic dogma.

Otherwise, this fascinating field will remain the domain of occultists and other assorted weirdos.

If one is going to take Plato's accounts as anyway informative, one must first take them as accurate.  Arguing that the fellow didn't know geography and mistook 900 years for 9,000 years or was making the whole thing up isn't helpful.

A rational mind would first see if Plato could be proven false, not come up with reasons to believe him wrong to advance a pet theory.

This passage is fascinating:

This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

One of the striking things about this is how it accurately describes the Atlantic Ocean.

If there were a major island beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, the geography fits perfectly.

This is one of the big sticking points with "Oh the fellow got his directions wrong" schools of thought.  The Greeks knew where Crete was, and they damn well knew where Asia was - Persia had only invaded them from it twice.

The thing is, Plato wasn't alone.  Other authors also noted legends surrounding the eastern Atlantic, and Wikipedia offers a nice overview.

Yet even then, Wikipedia can't resist throwing in the usual fantasy/science fiction garbage and this topic always attracts.

Thus far, no conclusive archeological evidence has surfaced linking the Azores to an ancient culture in Atlantis.  This is often held as proof that Atlantis has to be somewhere else - somewhere ruins can be found.

There is a problem with this logic, of course.  No major research has yet been undertaken there.  We speak not of core samples or shallow dives, but a systematic, large-scale search similar to that which located the Bismarck and Titanic.

Until then, the scholarly obsession with "finding" Atlantis in the middle of prime Greek tourist destinations will only obscure the search for the truth.