Oklahoma Public Schools Affidavit In Support Of: Fill & Download for Free

The simple answer is science by government decree motivate by political gain that is unfounded. The lie for example that carbon dioxide is carbon pollution and the fudged temperature data erasing the Medieval Warming period and the Little Ice Age are false science by government decree taking us back to 1984. These blatant lies spouted by political leaders around the world including Barack Obama and JUSTIN TRUDEAU mislead millions into thinking that climate change was about pollution control and that there was an urgent climate crisis of catastrophic warming.CO2 is non-toxic, invisible gas that everyone breathes out at 35,000 ppm every second.Thursday, November 20, 2008Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is Not PollutionCarbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant and the global warming debate has nothing to do with pollution. The average person has been misled and is confused about what the current global warming debate is about - greenhouse gases. None of which has anything to do with air pollution.People are confusing smog, carbon monoxide (CO) and the pollutants in car exhaust with the life supporting, essential trace gas in our atmosphere - carbon dioxide (CO2). Real air pollution is already regulated under the 1970's Clean Air Act and regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) will do absolutely nothing to make the air you breath "cleaner".They are also misled to believe that CO2 is polluting the oceans through acidification but there is nothing unnatural or unprecedented about current measurements of ocean water pH and a future rise in pCO2 will likely yield growth benefits to corals and other sea life.Thus, regulating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions through either 'carbon taxes', 'cap and trade' or the EPA will cause all energy prices (e.g. electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil) to skyrocket."CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? - it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving – I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality."- Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science, MIT"CO2 is not a pollutant. In simple terms, CO2 is plant food. The green world we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2. These plants largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today. Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2. In and of itself, therefore, the increasing concentration of CO2 does not pose a toxic risk to the planet."- John R. Christy, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alabama"Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a naturally occurring, beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. For the past few million years, the Earth has existed in a state of relative carbon dioxide starvation compared with earlier periods. There is no empirical evidence that levels double or even triple those of today will be harmful, climatically or otherwise. As a vital element in plant photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is the basis of the planetary food chain - literally the staff of life. Its increase in the atmosphere leads mainly to the greening of the planet. To label carbon dioxide a "pollutant" is an abuse of language, logic and science."- Robert M. Carter, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Earth Sciences, James Cook University"Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. On the contrary, it makes crops and forests grow faster. Economic analysis has demonstrated that more CO2 and a warmer climate will raise GNP and therefore average income. It's axiomatic that bureaucracies always want to expand their scope of operations. This is especially true of EPA, which is primarily a regulatory agency. As air and water pollution disappear as prime issues, as acid rain and stratospheric-ozone depletion fade from public view, climate change seems like the best growth area for regulators. It has the additional glamour of being international and therefore appeals to those who favor world governance over national sovereignty. Therefore, labeling carbon dioxide, the product of fossil-fuel burning, as a pollutant has a high priority for EPA as a first step in that direction."- S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia"To state in public that carbon dioxide is a pollutant is a public advertisement of a lack of basic school child science. Pollution kills, carbon dioxide leads to the thriving of life on Earth and increased biodiversity. Carbon dioxide is actually plant food."- Ian R. Plimer, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne"Carbon and CO2 (carbon dioxide) are fundamental for all life on Earth. CO2 is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas. CO2 is product of our breathing, and is used in numerous common applications like fire extinguishers, baking soda, carbonated drinks, life jackets, cooling agent, etc. Plants' photosynthesis consume CO2 from the air when the plants make their carbohydrates, which bring the CO2 back to the air again when the plants rot or are being burned."- Tom V. Segalstad, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Geology, University of Oslo"To suddenly label CO2 as a "pollutant" is a disservice to a gas that has played an enormous role in the development and sustainability of all life on this wonderful Earth. Mother Earth has clearly ruled that CO2 is not a pollutant."- Robert C. Balling Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Climatology, Arizona State University"C02 is not a pollutant as Gore infers. It is, in fact essential to life on the planet. Without it there are no plants, therefore no oxygen and no life. At 385 ppm current levels the plants are undernourished. The geologic evidence shows an average level of 1000 ppm over 600 million years. Research shows plants function most efficiently at 1000-2000 ppm. Commercial greenhouses use the information and are pumping C02 to these levels and achieve four times the yield with educed water use. At 200 ppm, the plants suffer seriously and at 150 ppm, they begin to die. So if Gore achieves his goal of reducing C02 he will destroy the planet."- Tim F. Ball, Ph.D. Climatology"Many chemicals are absolutely necessary for humans to live, for instance oxygen. Just as necessary, human metabolism produces by-products that are exhaled, like carbon dioxide and water vapor. So, the production of carbon dioxide is necessary, on the most basic level, for humans to survive. The carbon dioxide that is emitted as part of a wide variety of natural processes is, in turn, necessary for vegetation to live. It turns out that most vegetation is somewhat 'starved' for carbon dioxide, as experiments have shown that a wide variety of plants grow faster, and are more drought tolerant, in the presence of doubled carbon dioxide concentrations. Fertilization of the global atmosphere with the extra CO2 that mankind's activities have emitted in the last century is believed to have helped increase agricultural productivity. In short, carbon dioxide is a natural part of our environment, necessary for life, both as 'food' and as a by-product."- Roy Spencer, Ph.D. Meteorology, Former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies, NASA"I am at a loss to understand why anyone would regard carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Carbon dioxide, a natural gas produced by human respiration, is a plant nutrient that is beneficial both for people and for the natural environment. It promotes plant growth and reforestation. Faster-growing trees mean lower housing costs for consumers and more habitat for wild species. Higher agricultural yields from carbon dioxide fertilization will result in lower food prices and will facilitate conservation by limiting the need to convert wild areas to arable land."- David Deming, Ph.D. Professor of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma"Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a colorless, odorless trace gas that actually sustains life on this planet. Consider the simple dynamics of human energy acquisition, which occurs daily across the globe. We eat plants directly, or we consume animals that have fed upon plants, to obtain the energy we need. But where do plants get their energy? Plants produce their own energy during a process called photosynthesis, which uses sunlight to combine water and carbon dioxide into sugars for supporting overall growth and development. Hence, CO2 is the primary raw material that plants depend upon for their existence. Because plants reside beneath animals (including humans) on the food chain, their healthy existence ultimately determines our own. Carbon dioxide can hardly be labeled a pollutant, for it is the basic substrate that allows life to persist on Earth."- Keith E. Idso, Ph.D. Botany"To classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant is thus nothing short of scientific chicanery, for reasons that have nothing to do with science, but based purely on the pseudo-science so eagerly practiced by academia across the world in order to keep their funding sources open to the governmental decrees, which are in turn based on totally false IPCC dogma (yes, dogma - not science)."- Hans Schreuder, Analytical Chemist"Atmospheric CO2 is required for life by both plants and animals. It is the sole source of carbon in all of the protein, carbohydrate, fat, and other organic molecules of which living things are constructed. Plants extract carbon from atmospheric CO2 and are thereby fertilized. Animals obtain their carbon from plants. Without atmospheric CO2, none of the life we see on Earth would exist. Water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide are the three most important substances that make life possible. They are surely not environmental pollutants."- Arthur B. Robinson, Ph.D. Professor of Chemistryhttp://www.populartechnology.net/2008/11/carbon-dioxide-co2-is-not-pollution.htmlTHERE IS NO CARBON FOOTPRINT TO REDUCEComedy: Science By Decree, Washington Tries To Declare A Science Settled And A Debate OverBy P Gosselin on 27. June 2013The President of the United States stepped up to the podium and announced to the land that he was hereby officially declaring climate science settled and the debate has ended. Unfortunately, science is never settled, and the remarks will go down in history as being among the most naïve ever expressed by the office of the President.Naïve and just plain stupid. Washington thinks it can declare a science as settled. Photo: US government, public domain=================================The Latest List of LiesBy Ed CarylOn Tuesday, June 25, in advance of President Obama’s Climate speech, David Simas, a White House presidential advisor, sent an email to the press corp outlining the government’s position on climate change. This missive was so unabashedly full of lies dressed as irrefutable statements that it would have made the most notorious dictator propagandist proud. The refutation is absurdly easy. Let’s break down each paragraph:The carbon pollution that causes climate change isn’t a distant threat, the risk to public health isn’t a hypothetical, and it’s clear we have a moral obligation to act.”…Here’s what President Obama is announcing today. Check it out, then help to spread the word.”Help spread the lies. But don’t think for yourself or investigate.First, he’s laying out a plan to cut carbon pollution in America — by working to cut pollution from power plants, protect the health of our kids, boost clean energy, and revamp our transportation sector for the 21st century. Second, he’s preparing the United States for the impacts of these changes — by building stronger, safer communities and developing resources to make our country more resilient. And finally, he’s leading international efforts to combat global climate change.”Raise the cost of energy. Raise government spending on more losing Alternative Energy Schemes. Make a case for more gun control. Give DHS more power. Raise the cost of health care. Make big government even bigger, and charge at international windmills.We’ve put together a graphic that breaks this all down — from the effects we’re already seeing to the specific actions we’re going to take to lead this fight.”The effects: food prices taking off, energy prices skyrocketing, and now more efforts to enhance both of those effects.No single step can reverse the effects of climate change, but that’s no excuse for inaction. We have a moral obligation to leave our kids a planet that’s not broken and polluted.None of those steps will have any effect on something that happens naturally. They will, however, increase costs, put more downward pressure on jobs, and further depress an already depressed economy. In the end, it will leave our kids a planet with poor job prospects, food prices they can’t afford, and energy prices that will reduce their standard of living, restrict mobility, and make it harder to heat their hovels. And that will really be a broken planet.https://notrickszone.com/2013/06/27/comedy-science-by-decree-washington-tries-to-declare-a-science-settled-and-a-debate-over/When Obama claims the science is settled, and the debate has ended he commits a grave error that ignores the open-minded attitude essential to the scientific method. Obama brings an arrogant attitude to a problem requiring loads of humility to succeed. Science issues are never settled, and the debate is never over.By erasing the warmer Medieval period and the colder Little Ice Mann made current warming appear unprecedented which it was not.He was called out by Dr. Tim Ball for fraud.Mann is a rogue scientist and his refusal to produce codes and data is unethical.THE AFFIDAVIT FILED BY DR. TIM BALL AS DEFENDANT IN THE LIBEL TRIAL IN THE SUPREME COURT OF BC.Ball exposes data fraud of Michael Mann in erasing climate history and refusing to produce “the codes, calculations and or data to allow proper verification of the results.”The Supreme Court of British Columbia has released the damning official final Judgment in the Mann-v-Ball ‘science trial of the century. SEE -Damning Ruling Posted in the Mann-v-Ball 'Trial of the Century' | PSI Intl“Michael Mann at Penn State should be in the state pen, not Penn State.”ALLEGED LIBEL OF DR. TIM BALL AFFIDAVIT FOLLOWSMANN lost the case by inaction that implied his libel case was a sham. This is the consent order agreed by both parties in 2017 where Mann agreed to deliver “any expert reports in response to the reports delivered by the defendants.” Mann failed to deliver anything.“ACTION NO. VLCS-S0111913VANCOUVER REGISTRY IN THE SUPREME COURT OF BRITISH COLUMBIABETWEENMICHAEL MANNPLAINTIFFANDTIMOTHY TIM") BALL, THE FRONTIER CENTRE FOR PUBLIC POLICY INC., and JOHN DOEDEFENDANTS.CONSENT ORDERBEFORE{A MASTER OF THE COURTFebruary 10, 2017ON THE APPLICATION of the defendants, without a hearing and by consent;THIS COURT ORDERS that:The date for delivery of particulars by the defendant Timothy Ball, to the plaintiff of the directly relevant background context referred to on page 35, paragraph 2 of Schedule A to the Order of Master Scarth entered January 3, 2017 in this action be extended from January 13, 2017 to February 1, 2017.2. The plaintiff, Dr. Michael Mann, shall deliver any expert reports in response to the reports delivered by the defendants Timothy Ball and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy Inc. on or before February 20, 2017.3. The plaintiff, Dr. Michael Mann shall provide particulars of the issues upon which his listed witnesses will testify on or before February 7, 2017.THE FOLLOWING PARTIES APPROVE THE FORM OF THIS ORDER AND CONSENT TO EACH OF THE ORDERS NOTED ABOVEBy the CourtSignature of ROGER MCCONCHIE Lawyer for the plaintiffDigitally signed by Sienature of MICHAELR. SCHERRMann has not appealed the judgment against him and time to do so has past.‘“Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be FraudAugust 26, 2019/ Francis MentonThe Michael Mann “Hockey Stick” is suddenly back in the news. It’s been so long since we have heard from it, do you even remember what it is?The “Hockey Stick” is the graph that took the world of climate science by storm back in 1998. That’s when Mann and co-authors Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published in Nature their seminal paper “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.” A subsequent 1999 update by the same authors, also in Nature (“Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations”) extended their reconstructions of “temperature patterns and climate forcing” back another 400 years to about the year 1000. The authors claimed (in the first paragraph of the 1998 article) to “take a new statistical approach to reconstructing global patterns of annual temperature . . . , based on the calibration of multiproxy data networks by the dominant patterns of temperature variability in the instrumental record.” The claimed “new statistical approach,” when applied to a group of temperature “proxies” that included tree ring samples and lake bed sediments, yielded a graph — quickly labeled the “Hockey Stick” — that was the perfect icon to sell global warming fear to the public. The graph showed world temperatures essentially flat or slightly declining for 900+ years (the shaft of the hockey stick), and then shooting up dramatically during the 20th century era of human carbon dioxide emissions (the blade of the stick).In 2001 the UN’s IPCC came out with its Third Assessment Report on the state of the climate. The Hockey Stick graph dominated, appearing multiple times, including being the lead graph in the “Summary for Policy Makers” that is the only part of an IPCC report that anyone reads. Here is the version of the Hockey Stick graph that appeared the the SPM of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report:Now that is seriously scary! The Medieval Warm period — an era between the years of about 1000 and 1300 once generally accepted to have had temperatures warmer than the present — had disappeared. The clear implication was that the earth had had a benign and unchanging climate for about a thousand years, and now humans had entered the picture with their fossil fuels and were rapidly destabilizing the situation.I’m going to provide an overview of what has happened since, but first, here’s the latest. A prominent skeptical climate scientist in Canada named Tim Ball accused Mann of fraud in generating the Hockey Stick graph. The famous quote, from a February 2011 interview of Ball, was “Michael Mann should be in the State Pen, not Penn State.” In March 2011, Mann sued Ball for libel, focusing on that quote, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver. Here is a copy of the Complaint. (Note: In British Columbia, the Supreme Court is not the highest appellate court, but rather the trial-level court for larger cases.) The case then essentially disappeared into limbo for eight plus years. But on Friday, August 23, the British Columbia court dismissed Mann’s claim with prejudice, and also awarded court costs to Ball. As far as I can determine, this was an oral ruling, and no written judgment nor transcript of the ruling yet exists. I have asked Ball to send them along as soon as they exist.The story of Ball’s vindication, and of Mann’s shame, is a somewhat long one, and turns on Mann’s flat refusal to share publicly the data and methodology by which he constructed the Hockey Stick graph. In about 2003 a very talented Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre began an effort to replicate the Mann/Bradley/Hughes work. McIntyre started with a request to Mann to provide the underlying data and methodologies (computer programming) that generated the graph. To his surprise, McIntyre was met not with prompt compliance (which would be the sine qua non of actual science) but rather with hostility and evasion. McIntyre started a blog called Climate Audit and began writing lengthy posts about his extensive and unsuccessful efforts to reconstruct the Hockey Stick. Although McIntyre never completely succeeded in perfectly reconstructing the Hockey Stick, over time he gradually established that Mann et al. had adopted a complex methodology that selectively emphasized certain temperature proxies over others in order to reverse-engineer the "shaft" of the stick to get a pre-determined desired outcome.Then came the so-called ClimateGate disclosures in 2009. These were emails between and among many of the main promoters of the climate scare (dubbed by McIntyre the "Hockey Team"). Included in the Climategate releases were emails relating specifically to the methodology of how the graph was created. From the emails, skeptical researchers were then able to identify some of the precise data series that had been used by Mann et al. Astoundingly, they discovered that the graph's creators had truncated inconvenient data in order to get the desired depiction. A website called Just the Facts has a detailed recounting of how this was uncovered. As a key example, consider this graph:The bright pink plus the dotted line in between the two pink portions shows one of the data series used in the construction of the Hockey Stick graph; but the pink portions were deleted when the graph was presented. Obviously, inclusion of these pink portions would have thrown off the nice, flat "shaft" of the stick, while also revealing that this particular group of "proxies" had totally failed at matching the twentieth century rise in temperatures derived from the thermometer record, thus undermining the whole idea that these were valid proxies at all. In other words, Mann et al. had truncated inconvenient data that failed to match the narrative they wanted to present. Most would call this kind of data truncation a clearcut instance of "scientific fraud."This was the state of play in early 2011 when Ball uttered his famous line, “Michael Mann belongs in the State Pen, not Penn State.” Mann then immediately sued Ball for libel.Now, as readers here know, I spent my life in the litigation business. My practice was in the U.S. rather than Canada, but I have good reason to think that many of the basic ground rules would be the same. And one of the basic ground rules is that a plaintiff in civil litigation needs to provide “discovery” to the defendant of whatever factual information is in his possession that would either support or undermine his claims. When Mann brought his case, I was frankly amazed, because it was obvious to me that Ball would request as “discovery” the very data and methods that Mann had been aggressively resisting giving to anyone to check his work. How could Mann’s case survive if he refused to provide this information?Sure enough Mann absolutely refused to provide the underlying information in the Ball litigation. For better or worse, when a litigant does that, a court will try every possible avenue to try to get the parties to resolve the matter, before it will take the ultimate step of resolving the case against the non-compliant litigant. And that is in fact what happened in the Mann/Ball case. The court repeatedly tried to get an agreement that something would be produced that would satisfy Ball, and repeatedly gave Mann more time to comply. Could this really go on for eight years? In the U.S., that would be extraordinary, but not impossible. Maybe in Canada it is less extraordinary. It appears that in 2017 Mann actually agreed (under court pressure) to produce to Ball within 21 days the key technical information about construction of the Hockey Stick graph that Ball was requesting. But the information was not produced. Undoubtedly there have been multiple returns by Ball to the court since then to enforce compliance, finally seeking the dismissal of Mann’s claims as the ultimate sanction. On Friday, the court granted that relief.Here’s a twist that is simply beyond belief. On February 17, 2018, the American Association for the Advancement of Science — the largest professional association of scientists in the world, claiming to have more than 120,000 members — gave its supposedly prestigious “Public Engagement with Science” award to none other than Michael Mann. Here is its announcement of the award. Some choice excerpts:The honor recognizes Mann’s “tireless efforts to communicate the science of climate change to the media, public and policymakers.” In the past year, Mann has had 500 media interviews and appearances and directly reached public audiences via social media. . . . He has also advised actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who spoke about climate change during a 2014 speech delivered to the United Nations.The AAAS did this in the face of the clear demonstration of Mann’s misconduct from the ClimateGate revelations, and in the face of Mann’s ongoing obstruction of proper discovery in the Ball litigation. This whole “climate” thing is truly unbelievable in how it warps the minds of seemingly sane people.Anyway, the bottom line is that, after eight long years, Mann’s lawsuit against Ball has been dismissed “with prejudice” — meaning that he has no right to reinstitute the case. Also, the court has said that it will award at least some “costs” to Ball, although the amount has not yet been determined. Presumably, written opinions and a final judgment will follow, and I will update this post with links to those if and when I receive them. I would expect some triumphant claims of vindication from Ball and his supporters. In light of the court’s decision, Mann will be severely constrained in what he can do in response. Hey — why not produce your data and methods?Will any of this embarrass or rein in the likes of the IPCC, the AAAS, or any of the many mainstream climate-hoax-promoting outlets that continue to publish Mann’s screeds? (Examples: New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post). Don't bet on it. As of today, I can’t even find any coverage of the court result in any “mainstream” outlet.Meanwhile, note that this is only a trial court decision. Theoretically, Mann can appeal, and an appeals court might send this back. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that, even if an appeals court reverses and sends the case back, that it won’t condition further proceedings on Mann producing his data and methods. I can’t believe that he will ever do that. The only fair inference at this point is that the Hockey Stick is and always was a scientific fraud.Michael Mann "Hockey Stick" Update: Now Definitively Established To Be Fraud — Manhattan Contrarian”CLIMATE}CLIMATE CHANGE HOAX COLLAPSES AS MICHAEL MANN’S BOGUS “HOCKEY STICK” GRAPH DEFAMATION LAWSUIT DISMISSED BY THE SUPREME COURT OF BRITISH COLUMBIAAUGUST 27, 2019 KEN BILLINGSFacebookTwitterEmailShareNatural News – August 26, 2019 by: Mike AdamsFor the past two decades, much of the hysteria about global warming — later re-labeled “climate change” — has been based on the so-called “hockey stick” graph produced by Michael Mann. The graph, shown below, has been used by the IPCC, the media and governments to push global warming hysteria to the point of mass mental illness, where Democrat presidential candidates claim humanity only has 12 years remaining before a climate apocalypse will somehow destroy the planet.But the hockey stick graph is a fraud. A man-made computer software algorithm generated it, and the algorithm is rigged to produce a hockey stick shape no matter what data were entered. Like everything else found in the rigged world of “climate science,” the hockey stick graph was a fraud the day it was generated.Michael Mann didn’t like being called a fraud by his critics, so he sued them for defamation. And late last week, one of those lawsuits was concluded by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, which threw out Mann’s lawsuit against Dr. Tim Ball. But there’s more. According to Principia-Scientific:Not only did the court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. A detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course.This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are “unprecedented.”Support our mission and enhance your own self-reliance: The laboratory-verified Organic Emergency Survival Bucket provides certified organic, high-nutrition storable food for emergency preparedness. Completely free of corn syrup, MSG, GMOs and other food toxins. Ultra-clean solution for years of food security. Learn more at the Health Ranger Store.Michael Mann refuses to turn over the data behind the graph, insisting on secrecy instead of transparencyThis court decision reportedly stemmed from the fact that Michael Mann refused to turn over “R2 regression numbers” to the court, which would have revealed the data manipulations that led to the rigging of the hockey stick graph. This unwillingness to disclose the graph algorithm and data points reveals the total lack of transparency and scientific integrity that has plagued Mann’s supposed “science” work for decades. As American Thinker explains:Real science, not the phony “consensus” version, requires open access to data, so that skeptics (who play a key role in science) can see if results are reproducible.More from Technocracy.news:Mann’s now proven contempt of court means Ball is entitled to have the court serve upon Mann the fullest punishment. Contempt sanctions could reasonably include the judge ruling that Dr. Ball’s statement that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State’ is a precise and true statement of fact. This is because under Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. As such, the court must then dismiss Mann’s entire libel suit with costs awarded to Ball and his team.The spectacular rise and fall of climate alarmism’s former golden boy is a courtroom battle with even more ramifications than the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. To much fanfare at the time, Mann had sued Ball for daring to publish the damning comment that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State.” Dr Ball brilliantly backed up his exposure of the elaborate international money-making global warming scam in his astonishing book, ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science‘.In his books, articles, radio and television appearances, Dr. Ball has been resolute in his generation-long war against those who corrupted the field of science to which he had selflessly dedicated his life. Now aged 79, Ball is on the cusp of utter vindication. Despite the stresses and strains on himself and his family, Tim has stood at the forefront of those scientists demanding more openness and transparency from government-funded researchers.“Climate science community in crisis”Technocracy.news goes on to explain the ultimate ramifications of this court decision:A bitter and embarrassing defeat for the self-styled ‘Nobel Prize winner’ who acted as if he was the epitome of virtue, this outcome shames not only Michael Mann, but puts the climate science community in crisis. Many hundreds of peer-reviewed papers cite Mann’s work, which is now effectively junked. Despite having deep-pocketed backers willing and able to feed his ego as a publicity-seeking mouthpiece against skeptics, Mann’s credibility as a champion of environmentalism is in tatters. But it gets worse for the litigious Penn State professor. Close behind Dr Ball is celebrated writer Mark Steyn. Steyn also defends himself against another one of Mann’s SLAPP suits – this time in Washington DC. Steyn boldly claims Mann “has perverted the norms of science on an industrial scale.” Esteemed American climate scientist, Dr Judith Curry, has submitted to the court an Amicus Curiae legal brief exposing Mann. The world can now see that his six-year legal gambit to silence his most effective critics and chill scientific debate has spectacularly backfired.Principia-Scientific International also says a “criminal investigation” of Mann is now likely in the United States over allegations that Mann committed scientific fraud in faking his hockey stick chart:Penn State climate scientist, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann commits contempt of court in the ‘climate science trial of the century.’ Prominent alarmist shockingly defies judge and refuses to surrender data for open court examination. Only possible outcome: Mann’s humiliation, defeat and likely criminal investigation in the U.S.The defendant in the libel trial, the 79-year-old Canadian climatologist, Dr Tim Ball (above, right) is expected to instruct his British Columbia attorneys to trigger mandatory punitive court sanctions, including a ruling that Mann did act with criminal intent when using public funds to commit climate data fraud. Mann’s imminent defeat is set to send shock waves worldwide within the climate science community as the outcome will be both a legal and scientific vindication of U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that climate scare stories are a “hoax.”As can be seen from the graphs below; Mann’s cherry-picked version of science makes the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) disappear and shows a pronounced upward ‘tick’ in the late 20th century (the blade of his ‘hockey stick’). But below that, Ball’s graph, using more reliable and widely available public data, shows a much warmer MWP, with temperatures hotter than today, and showing current temperatures well within natural variation.The perpetrator of the biggest criminal “assault on science” has now become clear: Dr Mann, utterly damned by his contempt of the court order to show his dodgy data.There can be little doubt that upon the BC Supreme Court ruling that Mann did commit data fraud, over in Washington DC, the EPA’s Scott Pruitt will feel intense pressure from skeptics to initiate a full investigation into Mann, his university and all those conspiring to perpetuate a trillion-dollar carbon tax-raising sting on taxpayers.}Climate change hoax collapses as Michael Mann’s bogus “hockey stick” graph defamation lawsuit dismissed by the Supreme Court of British Columbia - "We shall succeed" - Shiv Chopra‘THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD : GLOBAL and PEER REVIEWEDACCORDING to multiple lines of “peer-reviewed science”, the Medieval Warm Period was indeed ‘global’ and was as warm, if not warmer than today.CLICK here for excellent interactive map of clickable peer-reviewed MWP studies in both North and Southern Hemispheres :THE Medieval Warm Period – A Global Phenomenon*THE ‘INCONVENIENT’ PASTTHERE is absolutely nothing unusual about today’s so-called aka Climate Change.LOOK at how many periods of warmth our planet has enjoyed during the past 10,000 years alone.CIVILISATIONS flourished during those warm periods (“climate optimums”), and collapsed when they ended.DID humans cause the Minoan warm period of about 3,300 years ago?DID humans cause the Roman warm period of about 2,100 years ago?DID humans cause the Medieval warm period of about 1,000 years ago?WHAT about all of those other warm periods? Should we blame Fred Flintstone, perhaps?via @BigJoeBastardi | TwitterIF the downward trend in temperature of the past 3,300 years continues, we could be in a heap of trouble. While our leaders keep on wringing their collective hands over global warming, we could be blindsided by an ice age.ALL this talk about human-caused global warming is sheer nonsense, if not downright fraud. The record shows that both periods of warmth – and periods of cold – hit our planet with almost consistent regularity.Peer Review studies that show the Medieval Warm Period was global and warmer than present :o Study: Earth was warmer in Roman, Medieval Times | The Daily Callero New paper finds more evidence the Medieval Warming Period was global — Published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecologyo Latest Research: EU & Russian Scientists Confirm Medieval Period Warmer Than Modern Global Warmingo Antarctic warmer than today – An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsulao THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: New paper finds Medieval Warming Period was ~1°C warmer than current temperatureso New Paper Finds Ocean Temps Were Warmer During Multiple Periods Over Last 2700 Years Than Today | GWPFo Medieval Temps warmer than today : Jenny Lake, Southwest Yukon Territory, Canada – CO² Scienceo Medieval Warm Period was real, global, & warmer than the present’ – China & World – Chinadaily Forumo Evidence for a Global Medieval Warm Period | Watts Up With That?hockey stick graph | Search Results | ClimatismThe Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXFebruary 19, 2019/ Francis MentonSince last October, this series has been sitting at the rather awkward number of 19 (or “XIX”) posts. Time to round it off at an even XX.For those new to this topic, the Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the systematic downward adjustment of early-year temperatures in order to create a fake enhanced warming trend, the better to bamboozle voters and politicians to go along with extreme measures to try to avert the impending “climate crisis.” Prior posts in this series have documented large and unexplained downward adjustments at hundreds of stations around the world that are used by official government organizations (in the US, primarily NOAA and NASA) to wipe out early-year high temperatures and thereby proclaim that the latest month or year is “the hottest ever!” To read all prior posts in this series, go to this link.You might ask, with the extensive exposure of these unsupportable downward adjustments of early-year temperatures by official government organizations — accompanied by highly credible accusations of scientific fraud — haven’t the adjusters been cowed by now into a smidgeon of honesty? It sure doesn’t look that way.The latest news comes out of Australia, via the website of Joanne Nova. Nova’s February 17 post is titled “History keeps getting colder — ACORN2 raises Australia’s warming rate by over 20%.” “ACORN2” is a newly revised and updated temperature series for Australia, with temperatures going back to 1910 based on records from 112 weather stations on the continent, some 57 of which have records that go back all the way to the 1910 start date. “ACORN” stands for Australian Climate Observations Reference Network. The ACORN2 data compilation is so called to distinguish it from ACORN1, which was only released some 7 years ago in 2012. The people who put out these things are the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.According to Nova, the latest temperature adjustments were released “oh-so-quietly.” I guess that the plan is just to start using the new figures as the historical comparisons and bet that journalists will be too stupid or ignorant to figure out that the earlier temperatures have been altered. That’s actually a pretty good bet. However, down in Australia they do have a hard-working group of independent researchers who are on top of this issue. One of them is Nova, and another is Chris Gillham. Gillham has done his own very detailed analysis of the adjustments in the ACORN2 report, and has also put up a post on same at Watts Up With That. So there is plenty of information out there for intelligent people to make an independent judgment.A few excerpts from Nova:Once again we find that the oldest thermometers were apparently reading artificially high, even though many were newish in 1910 and placed in approved Stevenson screens. This is also despite the additional urban warming effect of a population that grew 400% since then. What are the odds?! Fortunately . . ., sorry scientists have uncovered the true readings from the old biased thermometers which they explain carefully in a 67 page impenetrable document. . . . The new ACORN version has nearly doubled the rate of warming in the minima of the longest running stations.Nova has put together several charts to show the magnitude of the adjustments, not only from ACORN1 to ACORN2, but also from the prior AWAP compilation to ACORN1. To no one’s surprise, each round of adjustments makes the earlier years cooler, and thus enhances the apparent warming trend. Here is Nova’s chart showing the amount of warming from the beginning to the end of the series, for each of AWAP, ACORN1 and ACORN2, and for minimum, mean and maximum temperatures:For example, the average minimum temperature had increased over the century covered by 0.84 deg C in the AWAP series. That increased to 1.02 deg C in the ACORN1 series, and to 1.22 deg C in the ACORN2 series.You need to go over to Gillham’s work to see how these changes derive mostly from decreases in early-year temperatures. Here is a chart from Gillham on the changes to minimum temperatures at the 57 stations that go back all the way to the 1910 start:As you can see, the “raw” and “v1” temperatures tend to be close — sometimes one higher, sometimes the other. But v2 is significantly lower across the board in the earlier years. Then, suddenly, in the recent years, it tracks the “raw” almost perfectly.Do they offer a justification for these downward adjustments? Yes, but nothing remotely satisfactory. The one-word explanation is “homogenization.” OK, we understand what that is. For example, sometimes a station moves, and that causes a discontinuity, where, say, the new location is systematically 0.1 deg C lower than the old. An adjustment needs to be made. But these sorts of adjustments should cancel out. How is it possible that every time some official meteorological organization anywhere in the world makes some of these “homogenization” adjustments, the result is that earlier years get colder and the supposed “global warming” trend gets enhanced — always to support a narrative of “climate crisis.”Well, fortunately, this time the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has put out a very long 57-page document explaining what they have done. Here it is. Is it any help?As far as I am concerned, this is the definitive proof of the fraud. If this were even an attempt at real, credible science, the proponents would put out a document complete with the details of the adjustments — and all of their computer code — so that an independent researcher could replicate the work. Nothing like that is here. This is pure bafflegab. Nova calls it “impenetrable,” which is way too nice a word as far as I’m concerned. Let me give you a small taste:3. HOMOGENISATION METHODS3.1 Detection of inhomogeneities - use of multiple detection methods in parallelIn version 1 of ACORN-SAT, a single statistical method for detection of inhomogeneities was used (Trewin, 2012). This method was based closely on the Pairwise Homogenisation Algorithm (PHA) developed by Menne and Williams (2009), and involves pairwise comparison of data between the candidate station and all sufficiently well-correlated stations in the region, with the Standard Normal Homogeneity Test (SNHT) (Alexandersson, 1986) used to identify significant breakpoints in the difference series. The test was carried out separately on monthly mean anomalies (as a single time series with 12 data points per year), and seasonal mean anomalies, with a breakpoint flagged for further assessment if it was identified in either the monthly series, or (within a window of ± 1 year) in at least two of the four seasons. Further details of the implementation of the PHA in the ACORN-SAT dataset are available in Trewin (2012).A range of other detection methods have been developed in recent years, many of which were the subject of the COST-HOME intercomparison project (Venema et al., 2012). Three of these methods were selected for use in ACORN-SAT version 2, the selection primarily based on ease of implementation. These methods were:• • HOMER version 2.6, joint detection (Mestre et al., 2013)• • MASH version 3.03 (Szentimrey, 2008).• • RHTests version 4 (Wang et al., 2010).All of these methods, which use different statistical approaches, have been successfully used across a range of networks since their development. Further details on their implementation are given in Appendix C.My favorite part is that reference at the end to “Appendix C.” This document has no Appendix C. There are three appendices, numbered Appendix 1, Appendix 2 and Appendix 3. That’s about the intellectual level we are dealing with.Anyway, try going to this document and see if you can figure out what they are doing. Believe me, you can’t.And finally: over the years as I have accumulated posts on this topic, several commenters have suggested that I must be alleging some kind of conspiracy among government climate scientists in making these adjustments. I mean, without that, how does it come about that the Australians just happen to be making the exact same kinds of adjustments as NASA, NOAA, and for that matter, as the Brits at the Hadley Center in the UK?If your brain is wondering how that could be, I would suggest that we have the same kind of phenomenon going on here as the hate crime hoax phenomenon. How does Jussie Smollett just happen to fake a hate crime playing right into the progressive narrative of the moment — just as did the Duke lacrosse team hoaxer, and the Virginia fraternity hoaxer, and the Harvard Law School black tape hoaxers, and many dozens of others? (Here is a compilation of some 15 recent hate crime hoaxes.) Did they all coordinate in one grand conspiracy? Or did they all just realize what was needed from them to support their “team” and its narrative?The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XX — Manhattan Contrarian”

This is a very serious subject, I’m charged with talking to you a little bit about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and what’s happening these days with the literature on the subject.I think most of you have seen, if not all of you, have seen a tremendous upsurge in publications on this atrocity. Hard to tell exactly why that has happened. I think there are a number of ways to understand that. One is that increasing attention came upon the state of Utah because of the Olympics; there were numerous mainstream national publications that paid much more attention to Utah and Mormonism than normally do. You may have seen some of the articles that appeared pretending to be balanced views of the state and Mormonism.Some of you may have noticed in magazines like The New Yorker that, in that particular case as I recall, an 11-page article on the state–six pages devoted to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and two pages to polygamy, the rest about the state of Utah and its wonders.This event has become in recent years something that a lot of people know about who didn’t know about it before. Part of the reason for that is President Hinckley who, in 1998, decided to build a new monument at the Meadows on the spot of the original army cairn that held the partial remains of 34 victims buried there by the army in May of 1859; and I want to get back to that story in a minute but I’m trying to outline for you a few reasons in my mind that this has gained so much attention recently.Another reason of course is the publication of Will Bagley’s book. Will began work on his book well before the Hinckley initiative on the Meadows. He was employed by a former Mormon in California who, frankly, wanted to pin the Massacre on Brigham Young. He put an ad in the Salt Lake Tribune asking for applicants to write a new history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and in the course of interviewing several who applied (inaudible) except for Br. Bagley. Will was, by his own words to me–this is first hand words–the only one who said that he could and would pin it on Brigham Young. So Will was hired, he quit his job at Evans and went to work full-time writing a new history which was published by the University of Oklahoma Press last year.I must tell you up front (you can throw tomatoes or whatever you want at me) that I was one of the readers that the University of Oklahoma Press sent a manuscript and I recommended publication because I believed very strongly and still do that Br. Bagley had done intense research and that it was fairly exhaustive. He solved whatever he could see and looked very deeply, plumbed very deeply, to find much information that Juanita Brooks did not have when she published her landmark book in 1950. And so I was impressed with that and recommended that the Oklahoma Press publish the book but I cautioned the Press that it was an anti-Mormon polemic and that I did not agree with Will’s conclusions and we’ll talk more about that some more here if time allows.His book did very well in the first printing, it was very quickly into a second printing, and then shortly after all the hoopla over his book which ascribes the motivation of the murderers to Brigham Young ordering these people killed to avenge not only Joseph and Hyrum but also Parley P. Pratt who had been murdered in Arkansas the May before the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred in September–by the way on September 11. The anti-Mormons on the web are making a whole lot out of that right now–the two atrocities happening on the same day and so on all committed by mad fanatics, religious fanatics.In any case, we could probably waste the whole time here talking about why there is so much interest today in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I grew up in Ogden, Utah. The first time I heard about it was from a Catholic classmate who was feeling pressure at having to take Utah history in the seventh grade which really turned out to be half a year of Sunday School (laughter) and his parents who to immunize him against Utah history told him about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and I was told about that when I was in the 7th grade and I dismissed it and later in high school heard about it again, went to my seminary teacher who said, ‘It’s a lie, it didn’t happen,’ and pretty much forgot about it until I was a history student and found out that it did indeed occur.So I think there’s been a long period since the execution of John D. Lee in 1877 where Mormons would just as soon not talk about this and successfully did not. But beginning in 1990 when President Hinckley supported the building of the monument up on the hill there, if you’ve been there, the Dan Sill Hill monument which has all the names of the people we know were killed there; and then in 1999 when a second monument was built at the bottom of the draw on Church property with Church funds suddenly it became alright to talk about that and so there’s much discussion in Mormon circles about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.I’ve been invited to speak in stake priesthood meetings on the subject. I’ll never forget one evening, a chapel packed as full as this room and more, I was supposed to speak for forty-five minutes and was there with them for an hour and forty-five minutes; and finally had to say that I was tired and wanted to go home! The Institute director at Weber called his staff together and had me give them a two-hour presentation on this so they’d know about it.So it’s okay now to talk about this but let’s be honest, for years and years, this was a subject that we just didn’t talk about and when we did we either said, ‘Well that was John D. Lee and a bunch of renegade Indians,’ or we’d try to ascribe it to some external force rather than to face the fact that some 50 Mormons taking orders from local ecclesiastical leaders actually went out and tricked these 120 people out of their encampment with a white flag and then proceeded to murder them in cold blood with the exception of 17 small children.So it’s a very, very hard thing to discuss especially if you’re a Mormon and especially as I know some of you are descended from people who were involved in this.But anyways, we could talk about the history–I’ve got my own perspective on this. I think most of you know the great historian Carl Becker said (this was pre-feminist days) “every man is his own historian,” I guess we could say ‘every person is his or her own historian.’ And we all have to make up our own minds about what happened there that week.It’s an awful story, you can’t put a smilie face on it. This was cold-blooded murder of innocent people. Occasionally someone will come up to me and say, ‘Well don’t you think they deserved it?’ And, no I don’t think they deserved it. I don’t care how many of the stories you believe about whatever the immigrants did to get killed, nothing they did came anywhere close to justifying the murder of little children and the oldest child saved was six-years and 11 months old. Everyone older than that was murdered. In fact most of the murdered people were women and children. So there’s no justification. Even if you wanted to make some justification for killing the men, it breaks down pretty fast. It’s just- there’s no justification for the murder of these people.So it’s an ugly, ugly story.Then we get to the place where, alright what are we faced with today in 2003 as non-Mormons and ex-Mormons and anti-Mormons and others take a look at this story and try to make sense out of it? I think you also, in this group are much more aware than I am, there are a lot of people out there who find not only Mormonism to be abhorrent but find religion itself to be not healthy at all, in fact not benign but dangerous.I have not had a chance to read Krakauer’s book Under the Banner of Heaven but it’s getting lots and lots of attention. It’s selling like hotcakes, particularly in the east and California where people are more aware of Mormons and it is a sensational story about the Lafferty case. The message seems to be there, as I’ve talked with friends who have read it and read the reviews, that religion–organized religion, in this case Mormonism–can and too often is dangerous and a bad thing rather than just something that if you’re not religious you might want to ignore.So we’ve got a big problem here as historians and in your case, if you want to defend Mormonism. I’m a practicing Mormon, I don’t smoke, drink or chew or go with girls who do (laughter). I give of my excess income once a month to the guy with the suit on at Church and so forth. So I’m with you to a point.But as a historian, our job is to let the chips fall where they may and I’ve looked at this story for many years, long before I became involved in the Mountain Meadows Association in 1998 so I’ve been involved in this whole mess for the last five years and I think I know what happened there.I don’t agree with Will Bagley. I certainly don’t agree with Sally Denton. Her book outsold Bagley’s book in a couple of weeks; I’m sure Will’s hurting over that. Denton’s book is just trash frankly. The first chapter is about stuff that I know about first hand and I barely got through it with my stomach contents intact. But, it sells well and I’m getting e-mail from people all over the country because I’m on our website linklist, all the e-mail that people write into the Mountain Meadows Association’s website I get their message and dozens and dozens of people writing in and saying, ‘I just finished Sally Denton’s book.’ One man said, ‘I hope that the American people within the next ten years wake up and drive the Mormon Church out of existence.’ Two sentences in his message: ‘I just finished Sally Denton’s book’ and then ‘let’s drive them out of existence.’It’s pretty hard to look at this story without having revulsion against the men who did it. I don’t have ancestors who were there. Mine were here in Utah but they were all up north, and some of you who have ancestors who were there, it’s awful! And, I must tell you that I become very angry when people want to excuse what these men did.Do I understand why they did it? I think I do. But I still don’t excuse it and I’ve got a friend with whom I spent hours and hours and hours discussing the Mountain Meadows Massacre–he’s a non-Mormon who has read voluminously on the subject and it’s interesting to get his perspective. And he doesn’t agree with Bagley or Denton.We have a similar view of what happened but… I don’t know, I’m trying to make you see this is just not fun. It just isn’t fun. I’ve told my wife who was about to divorce me over it sometimes, ‘I wish (a) that it had never happened, and (b) that since it did I don’t know about it.’ I mean I really wish ignorance on myself which being a college professor makes me something of a sinner! Ignorance is bliss (the old clichÈ).What I’d like to do for a few minutes and then we’ll open this up to questions is refer you to a particular incident that occurred–well two instances that occurred–that I think puts a perspective on how the non-Mormon/anti-Mormon quote/unquote or slash/slash–whatever you want to call people–how they view this.In October 1998 I was invited with the rest of the Mountain Meadows Board–including descendants of the Bakers and the Fanchers and the Dunlaps and others–to visit with President Hinckley in the Church office building. President Hinckley was with us for about fifty-five minutes. It was an amazing event. He talked about his history with the mass graves, taken to the Meadows the first time in 1947 by his father; they walked the ground silently, shed tears. President Hinckley said he walked away knowing that this was a sacred place and so he had a feeling for the incident.And then in 1998, President Hinckley was at Dixie College to dedicate the pioneer camping ground there on the campus, asked his folks to take him up to the Meadows, was ashamed at the condition of the Church property there. Called us together to say, ‘What do you want to do?’ and the result was we built this beautiful monument down there that some of you I’m sure have seen and I hope most of you have seen. It is a replica of the original cairn that the army constructed over the rifle pit where 34 partial remains were chucked in May of ’59.In the course of preparing to put that new monument there, we made every effort in the Association to discover where the remains were because we knew that cairn had migrated a bit over the years–farmers had knocked it down, vandals had carried off rocks and so forth. Brigham Young ordered it knocked down once according to Dudley Leavitt, he was there with a party in the 1860s and they came up to it and he ordered it destroyed.So we were worried that there were bones that we might discover and the descendants of the Bakers and the Fanchers and others had made it very clear that they did not want that to happen. So we did a lot of cores. We had an archaeologist from BYU, Shane Baker, come down and do some cores to try to find the- whatever graves might be there. Long story made short, he missed. He (inaudible) the grave by six inches and the second scoop of the backhoe dug them up. That was on August 3, 1999.This resulted in a firestorm of activities. The remains, and all kinds of confusion about what state law had to say about these things, the sheriff came immediately and pronounced it was not a recent murder site, so it was an archaeological site and et cetera.Eventually the remains wound up in BYU. I saw them just a few days after they were brought to BYU for the public archaeology folks to try to make some sense out of what they had. The partial remains, they found 29 individuals. We’ve known for years that some of that grave had washed away and we’ve had accounts of farmers seeing bones sticking out of the ground and so forth.So anyway, eventually because the BYU people didn’t have the people to take care of it they transferred the cranial matter to the University of Utah where an archaeology graduate student (now has her Ph.D.) Shannon Novak was commissioned to take a hard look at the cranial material to see what she could determine from the cranial matter.In the meantime, the descendants in Arkansas became very angry. They wanted them reburied immediately and enormous pressure began to come upon us in the Association to try and keep this whole thing afloat–to get the Church and the state and whoever else we could to get those bones back in the ground–so we worked hard to get that done.And finally, the week before the dedication of the new monument which was to take place on September 11, a Saturday, 1999, a man in Harrison, Arkansas named J.K. Fancher who is friends with Dixie Leavitt the governor’s father, got on the phone and called Dixie and said, ‘Your son’s got to intervene.’ So the governor called the state archaeologist and within a few hours the bones had been removed from the University of Utah and brought altogether and on Friday morning, the day of the funeral that had been scheduled for the bones, they were brought to St. George and brought to a funeral parlor where they were placed in four small little caskets and buried that afternoon in a Baptist funeral.You should’ve heard all the Mormons there trying to sing “Amazing Grace.” Then the next day you should’ve heard all the non-Mormons trying to sing “We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet.” There was some humor.Anyway and the end of that story is; then the story is that in March of 2000, a yellow journalist by the name of Chris Smith at the Salt Lake Tribune (he’s not; his skin’s not yellow it’s what he does) published a three-part series in which he announced rather bald-faced (he knew better) that the bones were full of secrets that would have been revealed if the archaeologists had been allowed more time with them and that the Mormon Church conspired with the governor, who was a descendant of one of the killers. (Although the governor’s ancestor claims that he was just a picket rider, most of the people who were there were just there. Picket riders, eh? Didn’t do anything!) That the bones were then, under this conspiracy, quickly replanted.The Associated Press and every other wire service in the world picked that up and here’s the message that went out to the world and which is now in all these books (Krakauer’s book, Denton’s book, et cetera): The bones came out of the ground, they were revealing the nasty truth that the Mormon Church didn’t want out there and so the Mormon Church conspired to get them buried quickly so those truths could not be revealed.That bit of misinformation has been enormously damaging. It is one of those myths that all of you who understand history know how these things happen shows up in one book and pretty soon a graduate student puts it in his dissertation and pretty soon it’s in ten other books and pretty soon it’s the truth.So the “truth” is, my friends, that we had twenty-nine partial remains that were going to tell us the Mormons–not Indians–killed these people and because the Mormon Church didn’t want that information out it conspired to get those bones buried quickly in order to hide the truth. That is the “truth” now.And if you want to stand up in front of a crowd like I’ve done over and over again and try to persuade folks that isn’t the truth–you’re wasting your time. But let me tell you in just a couple of sentences how you don’t have to take my word that it’s not the truth.In 1859 of May of that year, Major Carleton came up out of California with a bunch of guys. They’d met some other guys from Camp Floyd who were already there. And Carleton, surveyed the remains that were strewn all over the Meadows by wolves and wolverines or badgers or whatever they are. Major Carleton said this; it’s on our website,1it’s everywhere. It’s been public record for 144 years: “…nearly every skull I saw had been shot through with rifle or revolver bullets.”So what truths were there in the bones? Well were they smokers? Did they; were they malnourished? What did they eat? It didn’t tell us who killed them any better than we already knew. Who killed them? Who had guns in Iron County in 1857? Who? The Mormons. Did Carleton’s sentence tell how they were killed? Yes, a coup de gr‚ce, they were shot in the head. So the idea that there was a new truth here, that the Church had to be afraid of is just hogwash.And secondly, it is also hogwash there’s (in 10 minutes on the phone you can demonstrate this) J.K. Fancher is not a Mormon. He’s a distinguished citizen of Harrison. He has no sympathy for the Mormon Church. He’s a lateral descent of Alexander Fancher. He’ll tell you, ‘I called Dixie and said, you better get your son to bury those bones or there’s going to be hell to pay.’ That’s how it happened. And Mike Leavitt called the state archaeologist and said, ‘Turn them over to those people so they can bury them or there’s going to be trouble.’But the truth is not the truth anymore because Chris Smith said otherwise and so forth.Let me get to the last incident. I was not in favor of the Olympics. You say, ‘So what?’ Well what the ‘so what’ is, is as soon as I saw everybody celebrating about the Olympics and as soon as I heard from my president at the University that we would be dismissing classes so they could use the ice sheet there for something called curling my wife and I began to save our money and our sky miles and planned a trip to Maui for twenty-two days (laughter) figuring that, ‘Hey it’s the last chance I’ll ever have to go to Maui in February in my racket unless I take a sabbatical and even then I probably won’t be able to.So we were in Maui, and the second day before we came home, the Olympics were over. We were coming home on Tuesday, it was a Monday, I think the closing ceremonies were on Sunday. I’m sitting on the beach and this very piece of–whatever it is–rings. (Laughter) It rings and it’s John Hollenhorst, Channel 5 News, and he says, ‘Hey what do you think of this lead sheet they found down at Lee’s Ferry?’ I said, ‘What lead sheet?’ He says, ‘Where have you been man?’ I say, ‘In Maui, I’m still in Maui.’Well you’re all familiar with the lead sheet and my friend Steve Mayfield here and I have had a lot of conversations. I don’t know if you’ll be able to see this. You’ve probably seen this and some of you may not be able to see this real well, but here’s a pretty poor rendition of what this–but anyways here’s what the thing looks like and a park service worker at Lee’s Ferry before the Olympics found this thing in a building at an old fort there. Steve tells me they’re pretty sure it was put where they found it in about 1998 or ’99, something like that. Right Steve?It’s an old piece of lead; recent metallurgical studies have shown that it was mined in the (inaudible) Ozark Plateau in southern Missouri not far from the homeland of the massacred people before 1865. The script on it, in case you haven’t seen it, and I–this is my own attempt to try to copy it (Steve’s done better work) and his friends, George Throckmorton and others, says that basically, ‘Lee’s at the Paria River. It’s January of 1872, he’s sick, he’s tired, he knows he’s going to be taken pretty soon but he doesn’t really care–he’ll take the blame, he doesn’t fear death. Brigham Young through George A. Smith ordered this done.’Well of course this created an enormous media frenzy, ‘smoking gun,’ ‘boy this is it, now we know for sure, Lee admits it’ and so on. Well somebody right away, one of my friends, wrote and said, ‘Well didn’t Lee say that in the Confessions of John D. Lee/Mormonism Unveiled?’ and the answer is yes but nobody paid any attention because everybody knew his lawyer wrote that book. Got any lawyers in here? We won’t go further with that. (Laughter) But we’ll say this, I think you know that Lee’s lawyer was working pro bono ‘almost.’ The second trial, his deal with Lee was, ‘I’ll defend you but I get your book and the rights to your book.’ And then he had the book for several months after Lee’s death and no one doubts that he manufactured much of what’s in the latter part of it because it’s so inconsistent with the rest of his work.Anyway, long story made short, I jumped in really quickly and said, ‘It’s a hoax.’ And my reasons were (inaudible) handwriting analysis, my reasons were that the message is inconsistent with Lee’s diary at the same time. He was at the Paria but he was not saying stuff like this. In fact the day after this was supposed to be written Lee went on a five-day horse-packing trip with one of his sons looking for the location for a new ranch and was really looking forward to it. He’d just finished two houses, he put a (inaudible) in one of them and he had everything going for him at that moment–he really thought he was out of the woods and he was okay.And if you read the rest of his diary, and six months on either side, he’s very defensive about Mountain Meadows. If anybody suggests Brigham Young does it he calls them a damn liar, I could tell you some specific incidents but I read very carefully the whole journal and six months on either side when I finally got home. I told Hollenhorst from Maui that I thought it was a hoax and he read it to me over the phone, I said, ‘That’s not Lee. It just isn’t Lee.’Well later on–misspellings are another issue–later on, Steve and his friends in the criminal justice/criminology racket did handwriting analysis and so on and found it entirely inconsistent with Lee not only when he wrote on paper but when he writes things scratched into rocks and things like that–it’s just completely different.He used ampersands instead of the word “and;” he didn’t use the dashes. This hoaxster tried to imitate his double line of capital letters, didn’t notice that Lee only did it on the verticals instead of; and did not do it on the horizontal so it’s a clumsy hoax.Well, I bring this to your attention because to this day more than a year later people like Sally Denton and numerous others are still blowing this all over the place as the ‘smoking gun’ despite the fact that I think people like Steve and his associates and people in my end of things, historians like the late Dean May, he and I talked this a lot, are just utterly bemused that anyone with a brain in his head could continue to think that this is a genuine historical document. And there’s always the chance that it is, but if it is, boy there’s an awful lot of things we’ve got to explain to believe that it is.Now why is this? And I’m going to conclude with this. I find it enormously amusing that people who hate Mormons and who hate Mormonism believe that the best way to attack Mormonism is to attack somebody like Brigham Young. This may not be a popular thing to say but I think one could very easily look at what happened at Mountain Meadows–what really happened at Mountain Meadows. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was no order from Salt Lake to kill these people. What really happened at Mountain Meadows may call into question some other flaws that existed in the nineteenth-century Mormon Church; other flaws that exist in the way decision-making took place and so forth and make criticism that way. But for some reason people from Bagley to Denton to Krakauer and whoever else- Chris Smith; the web is full of this invective. The only thing they can do to satisfy their bloodlust is to go after Brigham Young on this. It seems to me stupid. If I were one of those people, so what? A conspiracy manipulated by a rotten guy like Brigham Young, it seems to me much less damning than if you try to call attention to some other things that may have been going on in Mormonism at the time that will allow ordinarily decent men to commit such a crime.Anyway the point is I think for you folks and your interest, this is a good example it seems to me of how people can pick up a piece of history, some of it accurate–much of it inaccurate–twist it, turn it just a little bit. It becomes a powerful tool and there are literally thousands of people out there now who reading these books think they now understand the real nature of nineteenth-century Mormonism and nothing could be further from the truth.And by the way Steve has a whole bunch of photographs where the Lee lead sheet was found and pictures of the location, the man who found it, better pictures of it other than I showed you, so Steve I’m sure you wouldn’t mind afterwards if people want to come up and ask you questions about it.The information just continues to come in–Steve nod your head or shake it if I’m right or wrong–is that this is a very, very bad clumsy hoax but nobody wants to believe that outside of Mormonism. Everybody wants desperately for this to be. We’ve got a former Mormon who is now a born-again Christian secretary down the hall from me and I was preparing some materials a year ago to give a talk and she came in and she saw that and she said, ‘Oh wow that’s great can I have copies of all that?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry Carol; it’s a hoax.’ And she said, ‘You’re kidding.’ That brought her down to tears!I don’t know what else you’d like me to say about that except that, and my own belief is, let me summarize this way–that looking at incriminating statements, corroborating those incriminating statements the participants made for years afterwards, looking at other evidence that is incontrovertible–this was a bad decision made by local leaders. One bad decision followed by another. It’s like you teach your kids: you tell a lie, you’ve got to tell another lie to cover up the lie you just told and another lie to cover up the lie that you told to cover up the first lie. It goes on and on and on and that’s what happened that week in September of 1857 in Cedar City.But I’ll also mention to you that the Glenn Leonard, Richard Turley and Ron Walker book is as I understand it finished. Some of you may have better information on that? Glenn Leonard, the Church Museum Director; Ron Walker from BYU; and Richard Turley, the Director of the Archives of the Church–they have had full access to everything the Church has including the Jenson papers, including the Morris affidavits and so on that neither Bagley nor Brooks were allowed to see and Denton didn’t even come to Salt Lake to ask if she could see.And those materials, by their promise in public, will be available for the public to peruse when their book has been published will actually mean (inaudible) and I’ve had the privilege of seeing much of that manuscript and I’m enormously impressed with what those men are doing. I think it’s going to be an honest, painfully accurate depiction of what happened there and the cascading series of bad decisions and events that led to this horrible atrocity committed by Mormons with the help of the Paiutes.I also believe without any question, even though the Paiutes might deny loudly that they were involved, that there indeed were. At the beginning of the attack; at the beginning of the week somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred Paiutes–there may have been only a handful left by the end of the week when the actual murders took place–but they were involved from the beginning and anyone who suggests otherwise is just missing enormous amounts of evidence.So that’s my view; and I also believe, when I was reading Will’s manuscript, that if you accept his thesis then you have to deny that just about everything we know about what happened down there. It doesn’t make any sense in light of what we know happened that week: the decision-making process, the people who were involved, all that has to be just entirely ignored if you believe that it was a conspiracy hatched in Salt Lake and conveyed there by George A. Smith.So that’s my own personal view on it. I hope this is the kind of presentation you were hoping for, I wasn’t really sure exactly what you wanted from me today but I think that summarized it pretty well.Q: I’m sorry but I’ve come to this discussion very late and I just want to know what is the evidence or non-evidence that there were rapes, that there were women and children who were seriously harmed before they were murdered?SESSIONS: Okay most scholars I respect don’t think there were such events occurred, unless there were Paiutes who took people away from the scenes of the killings. And the main reason that we don’t believe any of those stories is because it happened so fast. One scholar–Robb Briggs from California who has done a really fine study of this from the point of view of an attorney–made this statement which is kind of chilling. He said, ‘Whatever you say about the Mountain Meadows Massacre it was really carried out well. It was timed beautifully, it was carried out with precision, there was correlation. They wiped them out in just a few minutes and there wasn’t time for any of that to happen.’ So those who suggest that I think they’re going to have to revisit their thinking. I don’t accept the accounts of those kinds of events for me are specious. That doesn’t say they didn’t happen, but it doesn’t seem to be likely at all.Q: My question relates to Brigham Young’s involvement. Is there any; does the historical evidence vague enough that the connections to Brigham Young are based primarily on your bias? I mean just taking those vague events and if you’re against Mormonism well okay then maybe we can jump to this conclusion, or is it pretty much just bad research?SESSIONS: Some of all of that. In the case of Will Bagley, he started with the premise that Brigham Young ordered it done and that’s been suggested for years.Let me tell you this, if you go to Arkansas today and talk to the descendants–and I know dozens of them now–they all believe Brigham Young ordered it done. They all do and they’re; when you say well why did he order it done? They almost all of them believe it was done for greed. That Brigham Young was in a tough spot, and the Mormons were poor and this train comes through with all this money and cattle (inaudible) killed for their money.So if you decide that at the beginning obviously, and then you can go back and find–‘Oh aha! See, oh yeah, see?’ And that’s what, in my view, Bagley did. And I tried to change his mind about that for years as he was working on the book, I was pretty good friends with him and we took a couple of trips to the Meadows together, and we had a lot of time to sit in the car together. And I could see him making that very mistake you decide upon.As far as evidence, again, on the first of September Brigham Young met with a bunch of Paiutes; sub-chiefs brought up to Salt Lake by Jacob Hamblin. Dimick Huntington wrote in this journal (he was in the meeting) that Brigham Young said, ‘You can have the cattle on the California road.’ And Bagley makes a lot of that as a smoking gun kind of thing. In fact at one time he thought that was going to make his book. But as it turns out he also told the Utes that, he also told the Shoshone that. He was trying to get the Indians on his side in the coming Utah War; he thought there was going to be a big fight. Other than that, I don’t know of any verifiable evidence at all that Brigham Young ordered that.The only other piece of the story that might suggest that he did is that just before the massacre happened, George A. Smith was sent on a long speech-making trip through Southern Utah. We don’t know a lot of what he said in his speeches. We know about some of what he said but they were tough speeches about standing up to the army and the Americans and it was incendiary. And so, there are those who think that Smith was sent down there with that kind of invective and then when he got done with his speech, he’d pull a stake president or a few bishops aside and say, ‘And by the way don’t hesitate to kill anybody you can.’ But that’s all speculation.I think most scholars who are honest about this, the trail doesn’t lead to Brigham Young–it just doesn’t in my view at all.Q: For anyone who is interested in the context that this all took place, read Gene’s book on his biography of Jedediah Grant.2It’s an excellent background to all of this.SESSIONS: It’s out of print.Q: Go find it. I certainly agree with your assessment of Bagley’s book. As I read it I found it is all this prodigious research but Will just can’t seem to say probable, I mean, he always says probable when he should say possible if not definite. His bias would get in the way.What would your advice be to a roomful of LDS apologists when they are confronted with the argument that, okay, and this is argument certainly Brooks made and certainly Bagley made that, whether or not Brigham Young ordered it done, he was involved in the cover-up. What’s your advice?SESSIONS: I don’t think there’s a way to apologize for that because frankly, he was. And I think if you want to apologize for it, the only thing you can do is say, well let’s figure out why he committed the cover-up–and he did.In my view if the Civil War hadn’t happened, you and I might not be here today and the Cougars might not be playing football because the momentum generating in Arkansas in 1860 for example, to come out here and do a full scale investigation was getting really intense. Then the Civil War happened and the whole thing just went away and it wasn’t until the early ’70s that it kicks back up again and by that time the crime is 15 years old and so yeah, there was a cover-up and it was done well.In fact some people like Will like to point to statements Brigham Young made in the aftermath, like it had to be done and, when Dudley Leavitt in his diary described the tearing down of the monument there was a cross on it that quoted the Bible that, “Vengeance is mine…saith the Lord”3and Brigham Young said, according to Leavitt, ‘It should read, “Vengeance is mine, and I have taken some.” Bagley makes a big thing out of that as well.Now that’s all part, in my view, of the cover-up. He had to put forth this rhetoric that said, ‘Keep your mouths shut. This had to happen.’ But, it’s clear to me from other accounts that we have of Brigham Young in late ’57-early ’58 that he was furious about it. As you know he knew how to swear and he used a lot of nasty words to describe how mad he was that this had occurred.The Lee family tradition on… (I’m positive some of you are in the Lee family. They’re everywhere.) The Lee family tradition is that when Lee went to tell Brigham about the event, Brigham already had some inkling that his worst fears were true and that it had been done by Mormons and not the Indians.But he was very, very angry. And then in the aftermath of that meeting with Lee, he was despondent for days. We’ve got solid evidence for that. Then his reaction was, and to answer your question, well we’ve got to keep under- this would kill the Church. This is going to set the Church back, this could destroy it. So, surely, he did an excellent cover-up. The only thing he could do was say was there a good reason for it and if you were a practicing Mormon well, to save the Church. I guess that’s the best-Q: Why did the massacre happen?SESSIONS: In my view there’s one word that tells you why and the word is fear; these guys were scared. All the settlements had been pulled back, Cedar City was ordered to stand. It was the last major settlement between here and California going on the southern route. There were a couple of little, you know, Harmony and there were a few people living down in Washington down that way–but Cedar was it. There were six hundred people in all of Iron County between Parowan and Cedar City. These people were absolutely scared to death. They had been hearing for years the wind over the passes that the Californians were going to come and wipe them out.You want to have a great (inaudible) if you’re interested in this. You want to see how blessed you are to just get the anti-Mormon stuff that’s out there now. Pick up the Sacramento Bee for the 1850s–hardly a week goes by that in that paper, there isn’t an editorial saying, ‘We need to raise an army and go wipe the Mormons off the face of the earth.’ And the folks in Cedar were scared, in my view, out of their minds that that was exactly what was going to happen.On Wednesday, some militiamen who were coming out–the massacre happened on Friday–on Wednesday night some militiamen were coming out to- they were told when they were rounded up they were going to go out and bury some people that got killed by the Indians and some of them were coming out and near Pinto Junction they came upon three people from the party making their way back to Cedar City for help.And not knowing what’s going on, they killed them. They fired on these people. They killed young William Aiden who was, had been a Mormon and was leaving with the party to come to California. Two of these guys, there are various accounts, some say two got away there- or one got away, anyway at least one got away. They killed all three of them eventually. But on Wednesday when only one got away they were just convinced that he made it back to the wagon circle and were telling them, ‘This is not Indians, this is Mormons.’And I don’t doubt at all that that was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. The decision was made the next day to kill them and it was made out at the Meadows; and Major Higby reported in various accounts, ‘Kill everyone who is old enough to tell the tale.’ And Mormons interpreted that as people at the age of accountability so they tried to pick the kids who looked like they were under eight to save, and killed the rest.So in my view it was naked fear–they were just scared to death that these guys were going to go on to California and report that Mormons had attacked them and this would bring them in a mob out of California. That’s my view and the view of many other historians as well.Q: First of all who do they think did the lead sheet, is that still linked to Hofmann?SESSIONS: Steve? You can come up here. Steve’s done a lot more work on that than I have.STEVE MAYFIELD: First of all, it’s alright. As Scott mentioned, at Sunstone this next week on Thursday morning, the forensic examination that was done on the scroll and the background will be presented by George Throckmorton and myself. So that’s okay. First of all, does anybody not recognize George Throckmorton? George Throckmorton is a trained forensic document examiner; he’s presently the manager of the Salt Lake City Police Crime Lab where I work. He is also one of the two forensic document examiners that exposed the Mark Hofmann forgeries and he was invited by the Park Service to look at the scroll.Now back to your question, who did it and if it’s a forgery which to get to the end–yes it is. I can give you a hundred dollar answer or the ten-cent answer and they’re both the same!Who did it? I don’t know. Like Brother Keller said, ‘I don’t know. We don’t know.’ Part of my presentation next Thursday will be discussing the possibilities that Hofmann did it or not. After the discovery of the document last year, KSL TV and Deseret News asked Jack Ford down at the State Prison to, ‘Ask Mark.’ And so Jack Ford who is the PR man for the State Prison system, and who says he does this on a monthly basis where he’ll go over and ask Mark, ‘Will you talk to the press.’ And he says, ‘No,’ and he comes back and says, ‘Sorry.’So he, on behalf of the press went and asked Mark, ‘Did you have anything to do with the scroll? Yes or no question.’ And Mark’s answer was, ‘I have nothing to say about it at this time.’ That’s where it stands. I wrote a letter two weeks ago to Mark asking him the same question and it came back to me with a stamp on it. We cannot deliver without his full booking name and number, like you know, this famous guy in prison and they don’t know where he is (laughter). The letter came back okay so. Come to Sunstone and we’ll discuss the matter.SESSIONS: Linda Sillitoe who did the book Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders and now works at Weber in our library and I had a long chat. I asked her what she thought and she initially thought it could very likely be Mark. You may ask, ‘Well gosh he’s been in the slammer since ’86-7, but there was, Steve right? The possibility that it was put there…MAYFIELD: What I have here is a photocopy. In 1988-89, Mark Hofmann attempted suicide–this is the second one which they took him out to the hospital. At that time he was in the hospital in Salt Lake they did a shakedown in his cell. That’s basically where they search for things. They came across a one-page piece of paper on stationary from the prison in which Mark had listed: ‘Mormon and Mormon-related autographs I have forged’ and on the other side was ‘Non-Mormon forgeries’ and down near the bottom he has listed ‘John D. Lee.’You start asking anybody who have dealt with the forgeries says, ‘We have nothing that we are aware of that–John D. Lee.’This was in ’89. So when this comes up, the right reaction is, when you find something like this where was Mark and has he ever been down there? Now the problem you have down there at the Fort, down there at Page, one of the investigators, Farnsworth, says, ‘In their investigations, the background- his whereabouts, (inaudible) information that he was ever down in that area.’ I’ve even asked Mark’s ex-wife Doralee the same thing, she said, ‘No, he’s never been down there.’ So if he had anything to do with it he did not most likely did not put it down there.SESSIONS: Okay. Thanks Steve. The point that I was going to make was that Linda said, ‘Well if they ask him, he’ll say I don’t have any comment about that.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s too bad.’ Which is what he said. And then she said, ‘But it wouldn’t matter if he said yes or no, you still wouldn’t know! (Laughter) So that’s the fix we’re in with Hofmann.I don’t think…somebody said, ‘Oh it was probably done by Will Bagley.’ (Laughter) We disagree about a lot of things, in fact we’re not really very close anymore because he got angry because I was telling the story about, ‘I can pin it on Brigham Young’ I guess. But I don’t think…I really don’t think so.Q: I’m just wondering how well Will Bagley’s book has been received in the historical community?SESSIONS: Depends on who the historical person is. Dave Bigler who is a former Mormon, born-again Christian thinks it’s the best thing that’s ever been done or will be done. Dean May, who died a few months ago who was the Dean of Utah History in the state I believe (inaudible) Thomas Alexander, the two of them probably share that title, have little regard for it. Tom’s comment to me was, ‘This is history by rumor.’ And so it depends who you talk to about it.Q: You said that it was fear basically that caused the September 11 executions. They were afraid the wagon trains would get back to California and say it was the Mormons. But what caused the initial attack that started off the whole thing?SESSIONS: Good question. As I was answering the other question I realized I was skipping past that.There was a meeting held on Sunday, the High Council met, and the initial decision was not to attack and there had been a lot of trouble with these folks coming down the road and the same motivation, it seems to me, was involved: ‘If they get to California and tell the Californians how weak we are and how poorly defended we are, we’re in big trouble.’I think that also provoked the initial attack. There was a sense of anger at these folks for what they’d done but there was also this sense of, ‘Gosh, if they get out of here and tell the folks in California, ‘Yeah we went through there and we can do whatever we want. We think they’re poorly armed, they’re poor, they’re living in 10×10 dugouts–no problem.”See Brigham Young’s gamble was, and you know this in the Utah War, that he could bluff his way through to a good conclusion. Will (inaudible) he thinks Brigham Young thought that Christ was going to come and save us from the mob and that’s part of his thesis but most historians think he was trying to bluff his way by convincing people that the Indians were with us; that we had…we were well armed. That anybody who comes in here we’re going to use them up and the Fancher party knew that was all a lie and if they got to California, same thing.Q: You mentioned about a book that is just completed and will be coming out very soon on this and, by Greg Turley? I mean he’s-SESSIONS: There are three scholars.UNIDENTIFIED: It’s going to be awhile.SESSIONS: Is it?UNIDENTIFIED: From what I understand the final manuscript will be in the spring so it will be some time after that.SESSIONS: Okay, for those of you who can’t hear, that the final manuscript appears to be still being done.I met with those guys and did a commentary at Kirtland in May at the Mormon History Association–they were predicting then (inaudible) summer and I assumed it was done. I think they were finding more material and wanted to make sure they were very complete in what they’re doing.Q: I haven’t finished my question- because you know, I had briefly stopped (inaudible) Turley and some information, wanted to make sure that it was being utilized. Can you tell us who had, (inaudible) writing this book?SESSIONS: It’s defensive. The Church came to the conclusion with Bagley’s book that there had to be another version of the story that the Church brought forth. My advice to them was to bring in a non-Mormon scholar, for example, (inaudible) a highly respected historian in Arkansas. They chose not to do that. I think that was a (inaudible) mistake but, to make up for that they have announced rather loudly that, ‘Here’s our book, once you’ve read it, everything we looked at is available.’ It will be really hard for those guys to tell any lies even if they were inclined to do so.Q: Don’t you think there will be a lot of good information and, like, for us that are here now to not really form any conclusions until we–if we have a sincere interest in wanting to know what really is happening–to get a hold of that book and read it?SESSIONS: I’m telling everyone–friend or foe alike–hold your judgment until you read their book and it’s going to tell, I think, a very close story to the truth.Q: What were the three authors again?SESSIONS: [Glen] Leonard, [Richard] Turley, and [Ronald] Walker.Thank you.UpdateEditor’s note: The following information was provided by Gene Sessions on February 6, 2007:When I spoke at the FAIR Conference some time ago on the Mountain MeadowsMassacre, I talked about a good friend from Arkansas named J.K.Fancher. J.K. read the transcript of my speech on the FAIR Web siteand contacted me to correct a couple of statements I made about hisrole in the 1999 reburial of remains at the Meadows. I indicated inmy remarks that J.K. “is no friend of the Mormons.” I only meant bythat remark that he is not a Mormon apologist and on the other hand iscertainly a concerned member of the victims’ family. J.K. definitelyis a friend to the Mormon people and has spent his life kindly andpositively relating to Mormons and participating in bridging the gapbetween Mormons and descendants of the victims of the Massacre.I also reported false information I had received that J.K. had beeninvolved directly in getting Governor Leavitt to release victims’remains for reburial at the Meadow on September 10, 1999. J.K. tellsme categorically that he was not involved in that fashion at all andasked me to post a correction on the FAIR site that would fix this bitof mythmaking I had unwittingly perpetuated.In spite of thiscorrection to that detail of the story, I stand by my contention thatthe bones were reburied quickly to satisfy the wishes of their kin andnot to hide the truths they might reveal about the Massacre.Anti-Mormons continue to report that the Church conspired with theState and the Mountain Meadows Association to get the bones quicklyback into the ground because they threatened to tell a more damagingversion of what happened. This is a blatant falsehood that has becomeaccepted history. Thank you for allowing me to correct thesestatements.—Gene SessionsNotes1Brevet Major J.H. Carleton, Special Report on the Mountain Meadow Massacre, U.S.A. May 25, 1859.(last accessed on 9 December 2005).2Gene Allred Sessions, Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant (University of Illinois Press) 1982.3Romans 12:19.

The question of whether the United States is run by a Deep State and, if so, what the nature of that Deep State might be, is increasingly topical, thanks largely to the election of President Donald Trump but also because of growing awareness of the true facts behind the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which long have been hidden from the American people. Enormous misconceptions persist about the existence and nature of the Deep State, which only add to the confusion about the subject. My proposition is that the Deep State is real. It has controlled the United States for 53 years. And it is today fearing for its life because of the Trump presidency. Three days befor JFK’s inauguration in 1961, Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans in his Farewell Address that America was(more)