Fighting Faux

Since so many essayists and commenters are interested in the activities and consequences of people espousing ideology of false patriotism, dominionism, fundamentalism and other -isms, I thought I’d play with the principles a bit and explore what can be done to counteract the effects.

The framework of a preferred paradigm that I’m using is that of embracing the classic virtues. Don’t remember them?  You’re not alone.

But along with rediscovering our shared history, we might do worse than to rediscover and revisit the classic virtues.

A caveat for those of you who aren’t familiar with my posts:  I am very dyslexic, myopic, and arthritic.  I re-read my posts and most often continue to edit them for wrong words, poor grammar and unclear sentences after I post. I appreciate it when readers point our errors, and I do my best to make posts works-in-progress which reflect commenters’ participation and contributions.
 

There are many scholarly texts which outline characteristics of cults and attributes of members. This isn’t a post to regurgitate or criticize those foundational works.

Essentially, the things that most people look to cults to fill are factors of socialization:

Clear rules of membership
Delineation of US and OTHERS
Reward system for compliance
Punishment and threat of shunning/ostracism for noncompliance
Clear normative values

The Morning News

The Morning News is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News THE TOP STORY

And the only one-

1 US says Iran smuggling missiles to Iraq
By SAMEER N. YACOUB, Associated Press Writer
59 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – The U.S. military accused Iran on Sunday of smuggling surface-to-air missiles and other advanced weapons into Iraq for use against American troops. The new allegations came as Iraqi leaders condemned the latest U.S. detention of an Iranian in northern Iraq, saying the man was in their country on official business.

Military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox said U.S. troops were continuing to find Iranian-supplied weaponry including the Misagh 1, a portable surface-to-air missile that uses an infrared guidance system.

Other advanced Iranian weaponry found in Iraq includes the RPG-29 rocket-propelled grenade, 240 mm rockets and armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, Fox said.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

2 United Auto Workers threaten strike
By DEE-ANN DURBIN, AP Auto Writer
52 minutes ago

DETROIT – The United Auto Workers set a deadline of Monday morning to strike General Motors Corp. if a new contract isn’t reached, even as the two sides continued bargaining late Sunday night, according to a local union Web site.

A local UAW official said earlier Sunday that negotiators have wrapped up work on most issues and were determining how much money GM must put into a trust fund for retiree health care that will be managed by the UAW. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private.

The health care fund – known as a Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association, or VEBA – would be a groundbreaking change for the auto industry and has been the major issue in this year’s negotiations. GM has around $51 billion in unfunded retiree health care costs but the company isn’t required to put the full amount into the VEBA. The UAW and GM have been wrangling over how much GM should put in and how much can be paid in cash or in stock.

3 China seizes on Mattel apology to emphasize safety
Reuters
1 hour, 1 minute ago

BEIJING (Reuters) – China highlighted Mattel’s apology over its recall of huge numbers of toys on Monday to press Beijing’s claim that its exports are generally safe and foreign politicians and media have unfairly hyped quality scares.

Before those recalls, a spate of complaints involving unsafe Chinese products ranging from other toys and seafood to toothpaste that entered EU and U.S. markets prompted calls on both sides of the Atlantic for stricter scrutiny of made-in-China goods.

Thomas Debrowski, executive vice president of worldwide operations for toymaker Mattel Inc, apologized on Friday following recalls of about 21 million Chinese-made toys over five weeks. The recalls stoked U.S. complaints that lax Chinese quality controls threatened foreign consumers.

4 Myanmar monks’ protest gathers steam
AFP
34 minutes ago

YANGON (AFP) – Thousands of monks were expected to march in Myanmar’s main city Yangon on Monday, piling the pressure on its military junta after a weekend that saw the biggest show of dissent in nearly two decades.

Some 20,000 people, half of them monks, thronged the rainswept streets here Sunday chanting prayers and shouting slogans, while other rallies took place across the country.

About 150 nuns joined the rallies for the first time since clergy members began marching one week ago.

5 Blackwater denies smuggling weapons to Iraq
AFP
Sun Sep 23, 8:20 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US military contractor Blackwater USA rejected Saturday allegations that it had been shipping unlicensed automatic weapons and military equipment to Iraq.

Blackwater’s denial came as the security firm has been embroiled in controversy over a fatal shooting incident in Baghdad last Sunday that resulted in the deaths of 10 people.

“Allegations that Blackwater was in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities are baseless,” Blackwater, which guards US embassy officials in Iraq, said in a statement.

6 Scientists: Brain injuries from war worse than thought
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
Updated 2h 13m ago

Scientists trying to understand traumatic brain injury from bomb blasts are finding the wound more insidious than they once thought.

They find that even when there are no outward signs of injury from the blast, cells deep within the brain can be altered, their metabolism changed, causing them to die, says Geoff Ling, an advance-research scientist with the Pentagon.

The new findings are the result of blast experiments in recent years on animals, followed by microscopic examination of brain tissue. The findings could mean that the number of brain-injured soldiers and Marines – many of whom appear unhurt after exposure to a blast – may be far greater than reported, says Ibolja Cernak, a scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

7 Brzezinski: U.S. in danger of ‘stampeding’ to war with Iran
CNN
updated 3 hours, 25 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski likened U.S. officials’ saber rattling about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions to similar bellicose statements made before the start of the Iraq war.

“I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq,” Brzezinski told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday.

In October 2002, five months before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was toppled for what the United States said was his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, President Bush said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

From Yahoo News Most Popular, Most Recommended

8 Bush to ask 195 billion to fund Iraq, Afgan wars: report
AFP
Sun Sep 23, 10:15 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The White House will ask Congress next week to approve another massive spending measure for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totaling nearly 200 billion dollars, The Los Angeles Times reported on its website late Saturday.

Citing unnamed Pentagon officials, the newspaper said if President George W. Bush’s spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war.

US war costs have continued to grow because of the additional combat forces sent to Iraq this year and because of efforts to quickly ramp up production of new equipment, such as mine-resistant trucks, the report said.

9 Beaked whales focus of Navy sonar study
By AUDREY McAVOY, Associated Press Writer
Sun Sep 23, 9:19 PM ET

KAILUA-KONA, Hawaii – Robin Baird’s research team members stare at the horizon for hours, searching for rarely seen beaked whales.

The small, gray marine mammals have been at the center of the dispute over the Navy’s use of high intensity sonar ever since several washed ashore with bleeding around their brains and ears during naval exercises in the Bahamas seven years ago.

“They appear to be the most susceptible group of cetaceans to impacts from Navy sonars,” said Baird, a marine biologist based in Olympia, Wash., whose team recently spent three weeks off Hawaii’s Big Island studying whales.

From Yahoo News Most Popular, Most Viewed

10 Why Stuff Stinks: Secret Sniffed Out
Dave Mosher, LiveScience Staff Writer, LiveScience.com
Sun Sep 23, 10:10 AM ET

Our noses can quickly distinguish a pleasant smell and a stench, but until now the chemical cues that help us make such decisions had not been understood.

Researchers have found that heavier, more spread-out molecules tend to smell worse than lighter, more compact molecules, although exceptions to the rule exist. The finding can be used to predict how good or bad a molecule smells before anyone takes a whiff of it.

Rehan Khan, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, thinks evolution selected for pleasantness of smell as a gut reaction to guide us through our environments.

11 Afghan president reaches out to Taliban

By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 32 minutes ago

UNITED NATIONS – Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday his government is working very hard on peace talks with the Taliban that would draw the insurgents and their supporters “back to the fold.”

Karzai said the government and an independent national commission have been trying to bring back those Taliban supporters who are not part of al-Qaida and were “forced or found in a position to leave Afghanistan or to pick up guns.”

“It is extremely important that this process will go on,” he told reporters after a high-level meeting of 24 of the country’s supporters and neighbors, which he co-chaired with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

From Yahoo News World

12 Iraqi PM fears for nation’s sovereignty
By JOHN DANISZEWSKI and TAREK EL-TABLAWY, Associated Press Writers
2 hours, 12 minutes ago

NEW YORK – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki walked a fine line Sunday: confronting his American backers over what he sees as violations of Iraq’s sovereignty while stressing that his relations are rock solid with the country on whose support he still relies.

“Success is shared,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press, referring to his deeply intertwined partnership with President Bush and the U.S. government. “God forbid, failure is also shared.”

In a half-hour talk conducted in his Manhattan hotel suite, the 57-year-old politician from Iraq’s Shiite heartland said it is unacceptable that U.S. security contractors would kill Iraqi civilians, a reference to a Sept. 16 shooting incident involving company Blackwater USA that left at least 11 Iraqis dead.

13 Ruling party picks Fukuda to lead Japan
By Linda Sieg, Reuters
Sun Sep 23, 7:03 AM ET

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s ruling party on Sunday picked Yasuo Fukuda, an advocate of warmer ties with Asian neighbors, to be the next prime minister, but the 71-year-old lawmaker faces a likely policy deadlock in a divided parliament.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rallied behind Fukuda, who is seen as a competent moderate, hoping he can bring stability and stave off calls for an early election after a year of scandal and missteps that ended in the sudden resignation of Shinzo Abe.

The bespectacled Fukuda, almost overcome with emotion, bowed to applause from LDP lawmakers and officials when the result of the vote was announced at the party’s Tokyo headquarters.

14 Anti-Musharraf protesters clash with Pakistan police
AFP
55 minutes ago

ISLAMABAD (AFP) – Scores of Pakistani Islamists scuffled with riot police and pelted them with stones on Monday in a new protest against President Pervez Musharraf’s plan to win another term in office.

The clashes erupted as police stopped activists from Pakistan’s main coalition of religious parties, the Muttahida-Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), or United Action Front, from getting to the Supreme Court in Islamabad.

Around two dozen protesters were arrested and dragged into police vans by riot police wearing helmets and carrying shields and batons, an AFP reporter said.

From Yahoo News U.S. News

15 Cheney mulled luring Iran into war with Israel: report
AFP
2 hours, 41 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Vice President Richard Cheney has considered provoking an exchange of military strikes between Iran and Israel in order to give the United States a pretext to attack Iran, Newsweek magazine reported in its Monday issue.

But the weekly said the steady departure of neoconservatives from the administration over the past two years had helped tilt the balance away from war.

One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney’s Middle East adviser, the report said.

16 Confidence in dollar sags in wake of Fed rate cut
by Rob Lever, AFP
Sun Sep 23, 8:17 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The dollar’s weakness and the euro’s rise to record highs have raised questions about confidence in the US currency following a surprising Federal Reserve half-point rate cut, analysts say.

Some are concerned that the dollar’s woes may prompt central banks to cash in their greenbacks, provoking a further downward spiral for the world’s largest reserve currency.

The Fed’s surprisingly large half-point cut in the federal funds rate to 4.75 percent Tuesday prompted some expected selling of the dollar. But it also caused unexpected weakness on the bond market by heightening fears about inflation. Gold meanwhile surged in another sign of concern about the US currency.

17 Tales from a Minnesota Toilet
By MITCH ANDERSON/MINNEAPOLIS, Time Magazine
Sun Sep 23, 6:35 AM ET

It’s only been three weeks since a bathroom sting operation made U.S. Sen. Larry Craig a household name, but already Royal Zeno is sick of talking about it. “I don’t know nothing about what goes on in no bathrooms,” he says whenever asked about the infamous stall where the Republican senator from Idaho was arrested. Unfortunately for Zeno, it doesn’t look like the talk will stop anytime soon, as the shoeshine shop he’s run for the last 45 years adjoins the newest tourist attraction Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has to offer.

Since the Craig scandal first made headlines Aug. 27, the airport has been fielding requests for directions to the men’s room in question. “I get the question daily,” says Barb, a newsstand employee who declined to give her last name per her manager’s request. “Normally they just want to know where it is,” she says, “but one guy asked me to take a picture for him. It really has become quite the spectacle.” Although men and women both show interest in the bathroom, Barb says, it’s mostly the men who work up the nerve to ask for directions. “By the food court, next to the lottery stand,” she tells them without batting an eyelash.

From Yahoo News Politics

18 Turkmen leader seeks to warm US relations
by Anton Lomov, AFP
11 minutes ago

ASHGABAT (AFP) – The head of the energy-rich Central Asian state of Turkmenistan is to meet US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week as hopes mount for a fresh start in relations.

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov flew to the United States on Sunday and was to meet Rice during the week, as well as address the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, officials said.

The mainly desert ex-Soviet state is regarded as a crucial piece in a wider power struggle as it holds roughly the 10th largest gas reserves in the world and borders both Afghanistan and US foe Iran.

19 Fla. Dems reaffirm early primary date
By RASHA MADKOUR, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 1 minute ago

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. – The Florida Democratic Party is sticking to its primary date – and printed bumper stickers to prove it.

State party leaders formally announced on Sunday their plans to move ahead with a Jan. 29 primary, despite the national leadership’s threatened sanctions.

The Democratic National Committee has said it will strip the Sunshine State of its 210 nominating convention delegates if it doesn’t abide by the party-set calendar, which forbids most states from holding primary contests before Feb. 5. The exceptions are Iowa on Jan. 14, Nevada on Jan. 19, New Hampshire on Jan. 22 and South Carolina on Jan. 29.

From Yahoo News Business

20 Investors eye elevated inflation signs
By MADLEN READ, AP Business Writer
Sun Sep 23, 5:42 PM ET

NEW YORK – Last Tuesday, Wall Street got exactly what it was angling for: a half-point reduction in interest rates. Now it wants to make sure rates will stay low.

This week, investors will be looking for signs that inflation is under control. If prices accelerate, the Federal Reserve may bump rates back up. The market is also hoping that readings on durable goods demand, the housing market and consumer spending power will show that the economy isn’t heading for recession.

The risk of inflation is why the Fed didn’t cut rates for four years. Last week, it finally lowered the target fed funds rate by half a percentage point “to forestall some of the adverse effects on the broader economy” of recent housing, credit and stock market turmoil, and “to promote moderate growth over time.” The Fed added, “it will continue to monitor inflation developments carefully,” however.

21 Housing, confidence data in focus
By Simon Falush, Reuters
1 hour, 17 minutes ago

LONDON (Reuters) – After a hefty cut in interest rates and the dollar’s plunge to new record lows against a surging euro, investors will closely watch data for clues on how seriously problems in credit markets are affecting the real economy.

An ailing property market and weaker consumer confidence may herald signs that the credit crunch stemming from problems in the subprime mortgage market may be dragging the economy down making more interest rate cuts a near-certainty.

Consumer confidence data on Tuesday is forecast to show a slight fall in August from the previous month while existing home sales are also forecast to be down slightly.

From Yahoo News Science

22 Scientists hopeful despite climate signs
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Sun Sep 23, 7:31 PM ET

WASHINGTON – Climate scientist Michael Mann runs down the list of bad global warming news: The world is spewing greenhouse gases at a faster rate. Summer Arctic sea ice is at record lows. The ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica are melting quicker than expected.

Is he the doomsayer global warming skeptics have called him?

Mann laughs. This Penn State University professor – and many other climate scientists – are sunny optimists. Hope blooms in the hottest of greenhouses.

Climate scientists say mankind is on the path for soaring temperatures that will melt polar ice sheets, raise seas to dangerous levels, and trigger mass extinctions. But they say the most catastrophic of consequences can and will be avoided.

They have hope. So should you, Mann said.

23 Deal will speed cuts in greenhouse gas
By CHARMAINE NORONHA, Associated Press Writer
Sat Sep 22, 9:10 PM ET

TORONTO – Governments of almost 200 countries have agreed to speed the elimination of a major greenhouse gas that depletes ozone, U.N. and Canadian officials said Saturday, describing a deal they said was a significant step toward fighting global warming.

The agreement reached Friday night will accelerate a treaty to freeze and phase out hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) which are used in home appliances, some refrigerators, hair sprays and air conditioners, said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program.

“With this plan of an accelerated freeze and accelerated phase-out, we could have potentially significant benefits arising in terms of combating climate change and ozone loss,” Nuttall said. “It’s a remarkable change in how we view the issue of climate change.”

24 Federal report shows sea turtle declines
By BEN EVANS, Associated Press Writer
Sat Sep 22, 1:22 PM ET

WASHINGTON – After encouraging gains in the 1990s, populations of loggerhead sea turtles are now dropping, primarily because of commercial fishing, according to a federal review.

The report stops short of recommending upgrading the federally threatened species to “endangered” status. But scientists and environmentalists say it should serve as a wake-up call about the future of loggerheads, which can grow to more than 300 pounds and are believed to be one of the oldest species.

“We are very concerned,” said Mark Dodd, a wildlife biologist for the state of Georgia. In 2006, the state counted the third lowest loggerhead nesting total since daily monitoring began in 1989.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

State of the Onion X

(We return to our regularly scheduled series after a brief hiatus Friday to honor the Moratorium, so for people playing at home, the previous piece of this series was last Thursday.)

Art Link
Shades

Uncommon Wisdom

“Gender is ENTIRELY a social construct”
How easily is my existence denied
my experience dismissed
squashed like a bug
my motivations questioned
in front of everybody

How different are
testosterone and estrogen?
I know

–Robyn Elaine Serven
–March 7, 2006

I know you have talent.  What sometimes is forgotten is that being practical is a talent.  I have a paucity for that sort of talent in many situations, though it turns out that I’m a pretty darn good cook.  🙂 

Let your talent bloom.  You can share it here.  Encourage others to let it bloom inside them as well.

Won’t you share your words or art, your sounds or visions, your thoughts scientific or philosophic, the comedy or tragedy of your days, the stories of doing and making?  And be excellent to one another!

Suggested Improvements for America…

Suggested Improvements for America in No Specific Order

When it comes right down to it all we have are our thoughts:

1. American television needs to modernize and by that I mean it needs to get away from entertainment and into filling needs.  Ex: An Employment Channel – it would list jobs available in different cities, explore union issues, explain apprenticeship programs and promote job fairs.  Ex 2. The Real Estate Channel – it would list real estate real time and give quick tours of the select properties, explain the ins and outs of home ownership in various regions, explore public and private home ownership programs, etc.

1a. Mandatory Free Air Time for Candidates – the time could be used in ads, campaign infomercials, one on one discussions with other candidates, interviews etc. Each candidate is given the same amount of airtime on any stations they choose.

2. Late Night Delivery Vans for College Towns – they would sell beer, condoms, tampons, smokes and snacks.

3. State Worker Dorms – save the environment and a few lives each day in your  State Capitol.  State Workers must live in the dorms 5 days a week.  :P~

4. Republican Detainment Centers – in order to save us all from non-stop verbal abuse and pathological incompetence on a grand scale each town will convert a defunct Magnet School Campus into a republican detainment center.

5. Resort Reclamation – Resorts of all sorts do not add to the bottom line of local economies, in fact they often are a drain on local economies, push taxes higher, ruin the local ecology and increase traffic 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the area surrounding the resort.  Every year for the next 10 years every resort in America must turn over 15% of it’s properties for lower income families to live in. 

6. Disposable Socks – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, who wants to wash socks?  Time for biodegradable disposable socks America!

7. Solar Jiffy Pop – Just leave it in the sun for 3 minutes and ya got fresh popcorn minus the toxic butter flavoring.

8. America’s Walk of Shame – a sidewalk paved with the mugshots of Enron Officials, Crooked Attorney Generals, Impeached Presidents etc.  That way ya could at least stomp on ’em.

9. Drive Thru Liposuction Windows at Every McDonald’s. No explanation required.

10. Abolishment of College Fraternities – all they do is teach you how to cheat and manipulate.

11. National Picnic Day – Everyone goes to the park for a barbecue.

12. TieDye the Moon – this would effect people other than Americans but all we’d need is a giant paintball gun.

13. Gag The Hollywood “Liberals” – gags should be handed out to the following:
Jane Fonda, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen

14. Hippy Retirement Homes – just like Chong proposed.

15. Breezeways Between City Buildings – to reduce pedestrian traffic on the street level

16. Make Dianetics Illegal – ’nuff said

17. Eliminate School Boards – instead allow department heads to act as a school board.  They know the students, the teachers and what is needed.

18. Business Incubator Zones – free rent for new businesses for 2 years, shipping areas, show rooms, conference areas, etc. Some cities have them but each town should look into doing this.

19. Local Produce Only – if a supermarket wants to do business in your town, demand that they buy only local, organic produce.  Supplementing off-season produce with other sources is fine.

20. Importer Price Controls – if a product is imported for x dollars the importer is only allowed to charge up to 2x dollars here in the states.

Ok, I’m tired, going to bed.  Add your own to the list and I’ll check them when I get up. Sex and hugs and rock-n-roll.

My 9/11 Theory Vol.2: 9/11 Changed Everything

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After all before 9/11 you had to count like this

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 12 etc.

That sucked.
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If you are thinking that this sequence of numbers is somehow significant…..then it is.

A basic Pamphlet for Non-voters and Republicans alike

This is a work in progress. To say the least.  I tapped this out this morning. Basically, I can only feel my heart drop when I hear uninformed people making comments about what is going on in the country and about all of our futures.  I don’t even debate them. But I want to have something to hand them. A pamphlet. Something that paints the entire picture.

Below the flip is just the introduction to pamphlet I am creating. If you care to read through some or all of it (I know it’s long), I would appreciate any critiques or advice.  I got to where I stopped today… the part where I start to go into what the Bush Administration has been up to. I am going to have to tackle that more methodically; there are so many crimes!

For Your Eyes Only!

This is a manifest for the non-voting public who likely consider themselves conservatives. Now, if you think I will ultimately tell you to ‘vote democrat’ then your assumption is wrong.  There is no group or party in existence today that I could recommend you vote to vote for.  I can only hope for the American public to wake up so that we can evolve into a nation that cares enough to be informed about what our identity is and whether we might need to come together to create an ideal national identity. 

I live and work in a sea of ‘conservatives.’ Their pre-Great Depression ‘attitudes’ about race & gender, social welfare, taxes, unions, civics, law enforcement, civil rights, and the citizen role in a democratic republic is almost too much to take sometimes. The only consolation is that the majority of them don’t bother to vote.  It’s fair to say that 50% of those eligible to vote don’t bother.  Yet 65% of the population has claimed that they voted in national elections since the 1960s. That’s good news in a way. At least they feel they should have voted. So I am talking to that 15% of the population – or 15 million people — who say they vote, yet don’t .  Al Gore won the 2000 popular vote by ½ million votes.  What if the 15 million who feel they should vote had bothered?  I would bet that George W. Bush, Jr. would have won in a landslide.

“America is swinging to the right.”  So ‘they’ say.  That’s correct, an uninformed population tends to be more conservative than liberal.  It’s safer to oppose ‘progress’ if you don’t know the first thing about an issue. Just stop ‘progress’ in its tracks if you care not to indulge your civic obligation to be informed. 

Well, non-voters, I am here to say that if you knew anything about the issues, you might do a bit more than just vote.  You may just find yourself looking back at some the history in this nation such as the Continental Convention and the Declaration of Independence and at the US Constitution itself.

What are some the issues that an informed and decent American might look into?  In no particular order:

Medicare Reform
Bankruptcy Reform
Telecommunications Reform
Free Trade
Military Force
Tax Cuts & Fee-based Government Services
Taxpayer-subsidized Healthcare Reform
Social Security Reform
Unitary Executive vs Checks & Balances
Privileged State Secrets for “National Security”
Voting Reform (HAVA, Help America Vote Act)
Voter Disenfranchisement (www.fairvote.org)
Publicly-funded Elections
Judicial Reform
Outsourcing vs Illegal Immigration
Unions
Environmental Policy
Climate Change vs Petrochemical-dependent Industries
Science
States’ Rights
Public Lands
Open Government
Contempt of Congress
The Patriot Act
FISA and Surveillance of Americans
Food & Drug Safety
Corporate ‘Farmers’
Public Education – funding, programs & policies
Politicizing Government Institutions expressly for Electoral Advantage
Separation of Church and State
Treason
Bribery of Elected Officials
The United Nations
World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund
The Federal Reserve (What is that anyways?)
The Budget, the Deficit and Use of your tax dollars
Tax & Spend vs Borrow & Spend
How a Congressional Bill Becomes Law
Corporatism and the Global Economy
Mortgage Crisis 2007 vs S&L Crisis in the 1980s
NAFTA

We will cover each of the above issues shortly. But, first, let’s take a trip down memory lane to view Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” for America and the environment that unified the masses to implement it.  Oh, history is so ‘yesterday’s news!’  Trust me, it isn’t.  Every single one of the above issues is an attack on The New Deal.  Why? Because the New Deal is what made America great. It created the healthiest middle class in the history of the world.  It gave a name to every country in the world on grounds of whether a country was 1st, 2nd or 3rd world nations.  (If you think the USA still covets the first place ribbon for being a First World Nation you are gonna be really pissed!)

Back to FDR and The New Deal.  From the Prologue of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s, The Crisis of the Old Order, 1957.

1933

The White House, midnight, Friday, March 3, 1933.  Across the country the banks of the nation had gradually shuttered their windows and locked their doors.  The very machinery of the American economy seemed to be coming to a stop.  The rich and fertile nation, overflowing with natural wealth in its fields and forests and mines, equipped with unsurpassed technology, endowed with boundless resources in its men and women, lay stricken.  “We are at the end of our rope,” the weary President at last said, as the striking clock announced the day of his retirement.  “There’s nothing more we can do.”

Saturday, March 4, dawned gray and bleak.  Heavy winter clouds hung over the city.  A chill northwest wind brought brief gusts of rain. The darkness of the day intensified the mood of helplessness.  “A sense of depression had settled over the capital, “reported the New York Times, “so that it could be felt.”  In the later morning, people began to gather for the noon ceremonies, drawn, it would seem, by curiosity as much as by hope.  Nearly one hundred thousand assembled in the grounds before the Capitol, standing in quiet groups, sitting on benches, watching from rooftops.  Some climbed the bare, sleet-hung trees.  As they waited, they murmured among themselves, “What are those things that look like little cages?,” one asked.  “Machine guns,” replied a woman with a nervous giggle.  “The atmosphere which surrounded the change of government in the United States,” wrote Arthur Krock, “was comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in war time.”  The colorless light on the cast-iron skies, the numb faces of the crowd, created almost an air of fantasy.  Only the Capitol seemed real, etched like a steel engraving against the dark clouds.

  . . .

  The fog of despair hung over the land. One out of four American workers lacked a job.  Factories that had once darkened the skies with smoke stood ghostly and silent, like extinct volcanoes.  Families slept in tarpaper shacks and tin-lined caves and scavenged like dogs for food in the city dump.  In October the New York City Health Department had reported that over one-fifth of the pupils in public schools were suffering from malnutrition.  Thousands of vagabond children were roaming the land, wild boys of the road.  Hunger marchers, pinched and bitter, were parading cold streets in New York and Chicago.  On the countryside unrest had already flared into violence.  Farmers stopped milk trucks along Iowa roads and poured the milk into the ditch.  Mobs halted mortgage sales [i.e., foreclosure sales], ran the men from the banks and insurance companies out of town, intimidated courts and judges, demanded a moratorium on debts.  When a sales company in Nebraska invaded a farm and seized two trucks, the farmers in the Newman Grove district organized a posse, called it the “Red Army,” and took the trucks back.  In West Virginia, mining families, turned out of their homes, lived in tents along the road on pinto beans and coffee.

  In January, Eward A. O’Neal, an Alabama planter, head of the Farm Bureau Federation, bluntly warned a Senate committee, “Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside within less than twelve months.”  Donald Richberg, a Chicago lawyer, told another Senate committee a few weeks later, “There are many signs that if the lawfully constituted leadership does not soon substitute action for words, a new leadership, perhaps unlawfully constituted, will arise and act.”  William Green, the ordinarily benign president of the ordinarily conservative American Federation of Labor, told a third committee that if Congress did not enact a thirty-hour law, labor would compel employers to grant it “by universal strike.”  “Which would be class war, practically?” interrupted Senator Hugo Black.  “Whatever it would be,” said Green, “it would be that. … That is the only language that a lot of employers ever understand – the language of force.”  In the cities and on the farms, Communist organizers were finding a ready audience and a zealous following.

  . . .

  Elmer Davis reported that the leading citizens of one industrial city – it was Dayton, Ohio – had organized a committee to plan how the city and the country around could function as an economic unit if the power lines were cut and the railroads stopped running.  Over champagne and cigars, at the Everglades in Palm Beach, a banker declared the country on the verge of revolution; another guest, breaking the startled silence, advised the company to “step [outside] the [borders] of the United States of America with as much cash as you can carry just as soon as it is feasible for you to get away.”  “There’ll be a revolution, sure,” a Los Angeles banker said on a transcontinental train.  “The farmers will rise up.  So will labor. The Reds will run the country – or maybe the Fascists.  Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.”

  . . .

  The images of a nation as it approached zero hour:  the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits before the Senate committee; the confusion and dismay in the business office and the university; the fear in the country club; the angry men marching in the silent street; the scramble for the rotting garbage in the dump; the sweet milk trickling down the dusty road; the noose dangling over the barn door; the raw northwest wind blasting its way across Capitol Plaza.

“Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.”  Well, he did.  He turned us into a nation that worked, that cared for the least among us, that ultimately became the richest nation on earth due to our agricultural and manufacturing might. Every (white) citizen stood a chance.  The promise of The American Dream would soon become a promise paid out strictly by virtue of one’s own sweat and tears.

The New Deal was put in place in the first 100 days of FDR’s presidency.  (Yes, the precedent for gauging the first 100 days of a new presidency was set by FDR, because of the incredible work he accomplished in his first 100 days.) 

FDR accomplished a few things:

• The Emergency Banking act
• The Economy Act
• Establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps
• Abandonment of the Gold Standard
• Federal Emergency Relief Act, setting up a national relief system (Remember, 25 out of 100 Americans had no work or real home or food.)
• Agricultural Adjustment Act, establishing a national agricultural policy
• Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, providing for the refinancing of farm mortgages (Take note that GWB’s solution to the foreclosure crisis that has only just begun was to hand $35 billion dollars over to the bankers who issued bad loans. That was to keep the banks afloat.  The homeowners who are being foreclosed?  They lose their house. But at least the banks won’t go under!  They get the taxpayer dollars and the houses!)
• Tennessee Valley Authority Act, providing for the unified development of the Tennessee Valley. (I know the folks in Appalachia love their phones and indoor plumbing, yet Tennessee didn’t go to Gore in 2000.)
• Truth-in-Securities Act, requiring full disclosure in the issue of new securities. (How did Enron get away with what they did?)
• The abrogation of the Gold Clause in public and private contracts.
• Home Owners’ Loan Act, providing for the refinancing of home mortgages. (supra, note the payoff to the banks instead of help for the people losing their homes in 2007. In 1932, Hoover passed some ‘relief’ for home owners. Oh yeah, his plan was similar to GWB’s: give the banks an incentive to give more loans.  In 1932, more than 250,000 Americans lost their homes. On inauguration day, foreclosures were taking place at 1000 per day.)
• National Industrial Recovery Act, providing for a system of industrial self-government under federal supervision and for a $3.3 billion public works program.
• Glass-Steagall Banking Act, divorcing commercial and investment banking and guaranteeing bank deposits. (Note, that FDIC sticker on your bank’s front doors is a lovely sight today.)
• Farm Credit Act, providing for the reorganization of agricultural credit activities.
• Railroad Coordination Act, setting up a federal coordinator of Transportation.

Now, I am not too fond of several of the Acts in the New Deal.  Abandoning the gold standard and giving the President the express power to print money (worth nothing more than Monopoly money and a promise) doesn’t strike me, in hindsight, as all too prudent.  These should have been temporary.  But, interestingly, the only New Deal items the Republicans haven’t touched are these. 

FDR got really radical.  Social Insurance.  Western Europe had that tackled a generation earlier.  It was a mere idea in the USA in 1933.  What is social insurance?  It encompasses the foundation of true economic security in a nation:  unemployment compensation, old-age assistance, health insurance, workers’ compensation, specialized assistance for certain populations. You know, ‘the least among us” like the blind and disabled, the mentally handicapped, the elderly, children).

Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins, the first woman in a presidential cabinet, said:  “We shall have to establish in this country substantially all of the social insurance measures which the western European countries have set up in the last generation.” But she warned that there was no insurance more important than actual employment.

And Social Security was born.  It isn’t some entitlement program, folks.  All of us contribute to it everyday that we earn wages.  Remember the big brouhaha in D.C. for the better part of the Bush Jr. Administration?  Promises (threats!) of privatizing ‘Social Security?”  The Bush plan was to collect money from your paycheck (15%) and invest it in the stock market.  Ask all those professionals in this country who have tear-stained copies of their 401(k) statements stashed in their file cabinets if investing in the stock market is a good plan.  (We used to get pensions, btw, but that’s a whole other lonnnngggg essay).  Anyways, the single-most successful policy for the general security for the masses has been on the ‘conservative’ chopping block for decades.  So far, we have kept their grubby hands off our savings. I think. Who’s to say what the books look like?

Okay, enough of all that ‘ancient’ history.  It’s so boring anyhow but it was important to premise this manifest with FDR and the New Deal because the premier policy goal of conservatives in this country has been defined in one sentence by neoconservative Grover Norquist:

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” he says, “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

 

The Nation’s article entitled Grover Norquist: The Field Marshal of the Bush Plan  noted, “To Norquist . . . hardly an agency of government is not worth abolishing, from the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration to the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts.”  Lovely guy. And he has played a large role in the Bush ‘economic’ policies. 

It was Norquist’s idea to take the budget surplus that Clinton miraculously created after inheriting the Bush the First’s bankrupt treasury and turn that surplus over to ‘the people.’ What a populist that George Bush was for returning the $1.3 trillion dollars in checks.  Yeah, I remember the summer of 2001 and receiving my $300 check.  That was quite the ‘relief’ when I had to replace a $450 water heater in the house that was purchased with my now non-existent livable wages proffered by the William Jefferson Clinton economy.  Thanks George!  FDR turned an entire nation around, and you gave me a down-payment on a water heater!  Oh and cleaned out the treasury before implementing a plan for unending war that will be financed by our grandchildren and their children. What did you do with your $300?  I will tell you what you did with it. The very next tax day, April 15, 2002, you received $300 less in the standard deduction you normally take.  Get that?  It wasn’t a refund; it was an interest-free loan for a few months.  But was it interest-free?  Not if the government then had to ‘borrow’ money from around the world to pay for itself and pay interest to those foreign nations, it wasn’t.  He cleaned out the treasury to get back to the good ole days of Reagan when the only money the USA had to spend was money that was loaned to us by other nations!

Okay, so now we have a good picture of how the USA became a 1st World Nation and how the middle class was created. (I know… you have to take my word for it that it was the New Deal that made us strong.  If it takes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. two 500 page volumes to discuss FDR and the New Deal, I am certainly not going to try to cover it extensively.  Read it yourself .  Learn something about what made this country great.  Here’s a hint:  it isn’t because we were the first to get and twice use the nuclear bomb.  We weren’t great because the world was afraid of us. It was our productivity.  (Do we produce anything in this nation? Think about it. What do we produce in the USA?  And you think the illegals from Mexico is what threatens your economic security?  Au Contraire.)

No study of modern conservatism would be complete without covering the Cold War, the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK, Jr., Vietnam, Watergate, and Reagan and Bush 1’s ‘compassionate’ conservatism and the savings & loan, manufacturing sector and deficit crises of the 1980s.  But the issues at hand that should be getting your attention under Bush the Younger are so much greater than any of the atrocities and crimes committed by his predecessors that we really need to launch right into the present day to see if you 15 million ‘non-voters with a conscience about not voting’ can realistically call yourselves ‘conservative’ or ‘republican’ with any sense of dignity. 

First, what do conservative power-holders want you to care about?  Homosexuals.  Anna Nicole Smith.  Survivor/Big Brother/So you think you can dance?/Lauren Conrad, Heidi and Spencer.  Missing white girls.  American Idol. Whether someone is a Christian and, if not, how to keep them away from your kids.  Ipods.  Remodeling your house so it will be the bling bling of the neighborhood.  Spending. Debt Accumulation.  Eating fast foods.  Abortion.  Welfare Moms soaking the system.  The damn illegal Mexicans stealing your jobs! Liberals.  God.  Scary Muslims that want to kill you.

What do I and other progressives want you to care about?  The issues.  The ones listed above.  There are countless more. 

I can’t say that I can cover every single issue but I hope that by covering some, you might come to the same conclusion I have, which is:

A radical group of anti-American, anti-democracy criminals have taken over the US Government. Their policies are designed to drive down the wage base of the American public and transfer as much or all of the wealth of the nation into the hands of a very, very few.  They are succeeding.  They have visions of world domination via multi-national corporations.  They want a two class system comprised of the elite who will hold all of the wealth and power and a working class that will serve the elite.  (Put it this way, the conservatives are close to being communists.  Communism is defined simply as who controls or owns the means of production.  Karl Marx wanted the people to own it.  The conservatives in America want a few elite to own it.  Here’s a hint: you won’t be one of the elite owners of the means of production.)  This radical sect has made tremendous strides in moving the country in this direction with overt complicity of elected officials who are supposed to be their opposition and with the help of an complacent and sleeping populace. You. And me.

Will be adding info about what Bush and the neocons have been up to these past 6 years…..

It’s Confirmed: Dick Cheney is an official “Evil Genius”

Doctor Evil can’t hold a candle to this guy, both in the depths of his machinations and in his proclivity to do exactly the wrong thing strategically.

I did a quick search to see if anyone had noticed this little item buried deep in the
Newsweek article on Israel’s raid on Syria… didn’t see it anywhere, so here’s the money graph:

  One official who pushed a particularly hawkish line on Iran was David Wurmser, who had served since 2003 as Cheney’s Middle East adviser.

-snip-

A few months before he quit, according to two knowledgeable sources, Wurmser told a small group of people that Cheney had been mulling the idea of pushing for limited Israeli missile strikes against the Iranian nuclear site at Natanz-and perhaps other sites-in order to provoke Tehran into lashing out. The Iranian reaction would then give Washington a pretext to launch strikes against military and nuclear targets in Iran. (Wurmser’s remarks were first reported last week by Washington foreign-policy blogger Steven Clemons and corroborated by NEWSWEEK.)

Wurmser quit last month, so depending on how many months equals “a few,” Cheney would have been “mulling” all this right about the time our troops were starting The Surge next door.

Forget the ethics and legality of all this, and leave aside for the moment the fact that our current “preemptive war” isn’t working out so well, or that the military is pretty much tapped out, or that Iran’s leader is every bit as loopy and dangerous as ours.

At what level of incompetent assholery does it become a good idea to provoke a two-front war?

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

Kate Bush


Wuthering Heights

I didn’t like the music of the late 70s through the 80s very much.  But I found a few artists I did like.  I know the audience is not as geezeroid as I am.

Earlier today, in the 9am slot, I did CSNY.  Neil Young’s third album was entitled After the Gold Rush.  Free association happens, which led to Rush at 3pm.  Above the fold in that was Tom Sawyer.  Above the fold here is Wuthering Heights.

My brain may work funny.  Funny strange rather than funny Ha Ha.  Or maybe both.


Running up that Hill


Babooshka


Army Dreamers

Please do not recommend a Pony Party when you see one.  There will be another along in a few hours.

–The Man

Neo-Nazis Target Jena 6


The American National Socialist Workers Party has reportedly targeted the Jena 6 and called for some vigilante justice.

The FBI is reviewing a white supremacist Web site that purports to list the addresses of five of the six black teenagers accused of beating a white student in Jena and “essentially called for their lynching,” an agency spokeswoman said Saturday.

Sheila Thorne, an agent in the FBI’s New Orleans office, said authorities were reviewing whether the site breaks any federal laws. She said the FBI had “gathered intelligence on the matter,” but declined to further explain how the agency got involved.

CNN first reported Friday about the Web site, which features a swastika, frequent use of racial slurs, a mailing address in Roanoke, Va., and phone numbers purportedly for some of the teens’ families “in case anyone wants to deliver justice.” That page is dated Thursday.

I have been unable to find a functioning site associated with the national organization. I did, however, locate the blog of “the party’s” putative leader, Bill White. Apparently they’re IP jumping, because of being shut down. The blog also currently lists the address info, but I will not reprint that here.

   

Sunday, September 23, 2007

     

  Back On-Line 

  Comrades:

We are back up on an IP address:

http://208.74.xxx.x

and will move to this address:

http://67.159.xx.xx

shortly.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

There are a few technical issues involved in moving this, but be patient — things will be worked out today. Right now, we are waiting for the Overthrow.com DNS changes to resolve and setting up ASP on Hal’s Linux box.

—–

This information is still available all over the web and other ANSWP websites, but if anyone is missing it:

Looks like they’re pretty determined to get these guys killed.

The Allure of the Fake Everything

One

Let us all nod our heads sagely . . . 

The Axiom of Existence: “Existence exists.”

The first axiom states that something other than one’s own consciousness exists. If it did not, according to Rand, consciousness itself would be an impossibility. Rand believes that this principle is self-evident (its truth is given in perceptual experience) and such that any attempt to refute it implicitly assumes it. This axiom entails metaphysical realism, the view that things are what they are independently of the mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.) of individual cognizers.


— exposition of Ayn Rand

Now . . . you tell me.  I think I’ve just been told that a tautology entails “metaphysical realism”.  In other words, if you’ve ever scratched your head wondering if maybe you haven’t lived your life in a dream, or in the Matrix, you can rest assured you have not, because, well, “existence exists” and whatnot.  This is heady stuff!   Ice cream headspike heady.

Moving on . . .

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom. This is the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character. 

— Ayn Rand herself

I enjoy being told that my character is “determined” by my “only freedom” (drum roll please): the freedom to not think.  Self-improvement with a good mallet.  Well, it worked for Harrison Ford in “Regarding Henry”, though he needed a bullet. 

On the list of sentences I get a real kick out of, the first was pointed out by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison: the Frugal Gourmet reminding us that “Irish immigrants came to this country wishing to maintain their love for the potato.”  But, “Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival,” is a close second, for sheer moxie.  Objectivists do like their “reason”, dontcha know.

One would have thought that a person willing to trumpet her view as “Objectivism” would have the decency never, ever, to say that “reason” is the “only source of knowledge”.  The world can go take a hike, apparently — a hike in an objective park, I hope.  Love dem objective boids.

(Continued . . .)

Two

Whatever “reason” is supposed to mean to Objectivists, they also like to say “facts” and “evidence” a lot — as if everyone else were taking a bath in pure stupid.  Devoted expositor of Rand, “Dr. Leonard Peikoff” (the surest sign that you’re about to get bamboozled by a white guy is an insistent reference to a non-medical doctorate) writes:

Its [Objectivism’s] opponents are all the other major traditions, including Platonism, Christianity, and German idealism. Directly or indirectly, these traditions uphold the notion that consciousness is the creator of reality. The essence of this notion is the denial of the axiom that existence exists.

In the religious version, the deniers advocate a consciousness “above” nature, i.e., superior, and contradictory, to existence; in the social version, they melt nature into an indeterminate blur given transient semi-shape by human desire. The first school denies reality by upholding two of them. The second school dispenses with the concept of reality as such. The first rejects science, law, causality, identity, claiming that anything is possible to the omnipotent, miracle-working will of the Lord. The second states the religionists’ rejection in secular terms, claiming that anything is possible to the will of “the people.”

For those of you keeping score at home, neither Platonism nor German idealism say anything at all about “the will of [here come the scare quotes] ‘the people'”.  And none of the philosophical or religious views at the receiving end of the above grande mal, “dispenses with concept of reality as such”.  Plenty of Christians think God is bound by the rules of logic — and they may well have an account of how God isn’t if God isn’t.  Existence and the all the existing and the shizzle with the bizzle.  It’s all good.

Neither school can claim a basis in objective evidence. [Here we go!]  There is no way to reason from nature to its negation, or from facts to their subversion, or from any premise to the obliteration of argument as such, i.e., of its foundation: the axioms of existence and identity.

I read this and get the vague impression I’m supposed to shove something metal up my ass. 

Three

If what is wanted is feel-good gibberish and can-do spirit, an easy-to-read fake everything, one can go to the works of Edgar Casey, the psychic.

The spirit is life.

The mind is the builder.

The physical is the result.

Neat-o. 

But nobody reads Edgar Casey and then claims a heady, smoggy-skulled right to fuck the working class.

Four

New York Times — September 15, 2007, “Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism” by By Harriet Rubin:

“I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don’t agree with all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,” said John A. Allison, the chief executive of BB&T, one of the largest banks in the United States.

“It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete,” he said.

Some people read “A = A” (Rand’s “Axiom of Identity”, dontcha know) and think they’ve learned something.  The read “A = A” and suddenly feel gloriously oppressed by the ignorant masses: the vast swathe of humanity who doesn’t know that “A = A”.  What are you supposed to do with boobs like this?  People who not only read Atlas Shrugged in high school and thought it was neat, but hang on to it like grim death for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Greenspan met Rand when he was 25 and working as an economic forecaster. She was already renowned as the author of “The Fountainhead,” a novel about an architect true to his principles. Mr. Greenspan had married a member of Rand’s inner circle, known as the Collective, that met every Saturday night in her New York apartment. Rand did not pay much attention to Mr. Greenspan until he began praising drafts of “Atlas,” which she read aloud to her disciples, according to Jeff Britting, the archivist of Ayn Rand’s papers. He was attracted, Mr. Britting said, to “her moral defense of capitalism.”

Five

When you’re writing serious philosophy, as a general rule, it is a good idea to write sentences that meet, at a minimum, three conditions.  Your sentences had better:

(1) Be meaningful — have some sort of clear unambiguous sense to them.

(2) Not be obviously false.

(3) Express ideas with which someone, somewhere in the world, might conceivably disagree.

A sentence with violates (1) is nonsense.  A sentence which violates (2) is wrong.  A sentence which violates (3) is trivial. 

“Existence exists” manages a three-bagger, I think.  It’s, to put it mildly, ambiguous; it’s utterly trivial (who is supposed to disagree with “existence exists” on some interpretation or other?); and since Randites think it leads straight like a bonk on the head to metaphysical realism (a substantive technical claim in serious philosophy), it’s false.

There are various kinds of writing that are sometimes called “philosophy”, but which at various points stupendously violate one, two, or all three of the above strictures.  These kinds of writing we generally call “fuzzy headed mysticism”; “soothing nonsense”; “obscurantist triumphalism”; “motivational speaking”; “bullshit”.


Which would then be a five-bagger for Objectivism, if I’m counting correctly.

Six

I understand the allure of the fake everything.  It can be innocuous fun, as when we read a fantasy novel with a coherent and all-encompassing world-system that describes everything at once — everything, that is, in a fantasy world.  It’s engaging.  Such fake everythings are attractive because they are graspable, they are coherent, they make sense, and they do it in less than a lifetime.  But one ought to be very careful about one’s everythings in real life.

Philosophy means “love of wisdom”.  It does not mean, “Go thyself and molest an axiom.”  People who have no idea what wisdom is tend to get the two confused.  I don’t mind that they do.  I mind that they are so smarmy about it.  And I especially mind that they think because they’ve read “Existence exists” they can thereby lower taxes on the super-rich.

Cigar-lounge play is fine.  I don’t begrudge the right-wing rich their yachts.  I do begrudge them their isolation, their freedom from correction of small-mindedness and simple error.  And I feel disgust at their feeling that a novel they read in high school is all there is to philosphy, or wisdom, or, dare I say, reason.

“Shared National Sacrifice” and ‘The War’ Tonight on PBS