Take Nothing On Faith

The Real #revo11ution Action: Not in Libya, but in America with #OccupyWallStreet

2011-10-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

You probably already know about the brutal crushing of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Oakland and other American cities. It seems more like the revolution going on in Tunisia and Egypt than Libya, where the dictator was finally overthrown by armed guerrilla forces backed by NATO bombers. Rumor has it that Qaddafi was put down because he proposed a new currency to replace the dollar. Well, guess what? Back in the imperial homeland, the issue is still the dollar. But this time, the people — yeah I know, the liberal commie hippie traitors, not the Real Americans commanding the crackdown from their million-dollar penthouses — are the threat to the Almighty Dollar. Therefore, the American people must be crushed. If, of course, they do not march to their bankster masters' commands in the TEA Party. The problem: the TEA Party fell completely under corporate control. In fact, it actually began as an attempt to coopt the Ron Paul Revolution movement. Dr. Paul refused to cave, being the principled libertarian he is, so the banksters started their own astroturf movement catering largely to the most retrograde elements of White America. However, Occupy Wall Street is not under control, and refuses to submit to even Democratic control. That means it must be crushed. If the Ron Paul movement had gained mass support, it too would have been attacked the same way. After all, it opposed the Wall Street dictatorship to the point of calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, a call taken up by OWS. Okay, you tell me, isn't America a democracy? No. It never was a democracy, and was never intended to be one. The Constitution was designed to establish an oligarchic republic. In fact, it was intended to prevent democracy. In The Federalist #10, the Constitution's author, James Madison, states:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

The oligarchic republic Madison worked to establish no longer works. It has fallen under the control of an increasingly militant and terroristic faction which believes that its possession of most of the world's money entitles them to rule by divine right. The American Revolution was fought, and the Republic established, to abolish the divine right of kings. However, the constitutional protections against the divine right of oligarchies have all been nullified, so we're back where we started in 1776. I'm not saying this is going to turn into a revolution. Fact is, it already is. The more terrorism the divine-right oligarchy commits against the people, the more the oligarchs deserve to be overthrown. Face it, America is the new Soviet Union. It's already too late. Sorry, conservatives, you can't erase the past and bring back the good old days. The Law of Entropy is already at work bringing the whole tottering edifice to the ground in smoking ruins. The oligarchic republic no longer works. It's merely monarchy with more rulers who are equally clueless. Democracy is the future. The future is already here. This is what the 2011 Revolution is all about.

As New York Legalizes Gay Marriage...

2011-06-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

There's a reason I separated this opinion blog from my main blog. It's because I link that one to Facebook. Most of my Facebook friends are relatives. Half of them (my late father's side) are born-again Christians. I am happy that the state of New York just legalized same-sex marriage. They aren't. This blog is not for them.

After a long dry spell, the legislature of the third biggest state in the Union extended full marriage rights to same-sex couples. This is a major development in the continuing struggle. There is no danger that the law will be repealed because: one, New York has no initiative process that religious opponents can use to repeal it with; two; since a Democratic-dominated legislature shot down the first attempt two years ago, opposition has collapsed to the point where a Republican-dominated legislature approved it.

The next challenge will be in liberal states with an initiative process, particularly the three on the West Coast. Previously, direct democracy was still conservative on the issue of same-sex marriage, as witness Proposition 8 in California in 2008. Can same-sex marriage rights prevail at the ballot in 2012 in states like California and Washington? I'd say my own state (Washington) is already ahead on it because it's a civil-unions state. It's also behind because it has a "Defense of Marriage Act" on the law books, and it needs to be repealed. That's what any marriage-rights initiative will have to do. You know I'll be voting for the marriage-rights initiative as soon as my ballot comes in the mail.

The struggle continues...

A Belated Postmortem of the 2010 Election: In Which I Temporarily Eat My Words

2011-06-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

I think the 2010 election was a bit traumatic for non-conservatives like me, to say the least. That's why I'm writing about it right now, instead of right after the disaster happened.

The problems: One, the Republican Party has gone so far to the right that I vowed never to vote for them again (except for Ron Paul, of course) years ago. Two, the Republicans swept the election, big time. The Democrats got their butts handed to them.

So what happened? Basically, when the candidate of hope and change actually became president, he proved to be more conservative than the people who elected him. Barack Obama even turned out to be more conservative than Richard Nixon, of all people. Since few American politicians seem to remember Nixon, let's give a bit of context here: Nixon, for all his professed conservatism, was responsible for the kind of socialist policies Obama refuses to touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole, such as "affirmative action" a.k.a race quotas and — believe it or not — price controls. Any TEA Party Republican who claims that Obama is the "most socialist president ever" doesn't know Nixon, or Eisenhower for that matter (Interstate Highway System, among other unforgivable acts of socialism). "Most socialist president ever" is really code for "that black guy who had the gall to become Great White Father".

So Barack Obama, the desperate liberals' Great Black Hope, turned out to be a Clintonite Blue Dog conservative who clings to Bush-era neofascist policies starting with the imperial wars. So, in the mid-term election, the angry young liberals stayed home in droves, allowing the angry old conservatives to carry the election. The TEA Party claims the American People gave it a mandate. So what do they do? Impose corporatist dictatorship wherever it holds power.

I predicted the Democrats' losses would be minimal in 2010. I never figured on the Democratic liberal and antiwar base turning against President Obama. That's why I'm eating my words. I'm temporarily eating my words because the way the Republicans are acting — that is, like the arrogant ruling party of a one-party dictatorship — 2012 is theirs to lose, and they will lose it. They've already given the Democrats more than enough rope with which to hang them. And if Michele Bachmann wins the GOP nomination, consider them already beaten. But if Jon Huntsman wins — he's the former Utah governor who was Obama's ambassador to China — his former boss will get a real contest, precisely because Huntsman is not as extreme as the TEA Party wants.

Stay tuned...

The #revo11ution Comes to America

2011-02-18T20:23:00.000-08:00

That wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East? It didn't stop there. The revolution that started with the toppling of America's Soviet-style satellites, the oil plantations of the Middle East, has come to the homeland at last! It started, interestingly enough, in Wisconsin.

The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has declared war on the civil service unions. He wants to strip them of all collective bargaining rights. Needless to say, in the Midwest's great stronghold of Populism, his action has provoked massive protests in Madison and Milwaukee. Cairo has come to Wisconsin.

What he's doing, of course, is good old-fashioned union busting, what the Robber Barons of Gilded Age I did in the late 19th century. Like them, he intends to call in the National Guard to crack down hard on the protests. If the National Guard doesn't work, he will likely attempt the Robber Barons' other solution: call in the mercenary enforcers: Pinkerton back then, Blackwater today.

Here's Walker's scheme:

Give massive tax cuts to giant corporations and ultra-rich corporate welfare kings.
Fudge the numbers, the same way the Conservative Book Club games the bestseller lists, to make it look like there's a huge deficit.
Blame the public sector unions, call in the enforcers and the ~~Pravda~~ Fox News propaganda machine, and SMASH!

There's some evidence that the 2010 elections were themselves gamed, the same way the Iran election of 2009 was rigged. Vote rigging, of course, is a venerable American political tradition ("Bring out the dead!"). But in this case, the problem is bait-and-switch: run on jobs, then screw the workers over and wage culture and class war. That's what Ahmadinejad did.

Way to go, Governor.

Now witness the TEA Party. What are they doing? Heeding the siren song of the Fox News propaganda machine and rushing to Madison to support Governor Walker! You know what this looks like: the pro-Mubarak counterdemonstrators who rushed the protesters in Liberation Square, on foot and on camelback, and attacked — at precisely 2:15 in the afternoon. I suspected the TEA Party would be their American counterpart. Now we have absolute proof.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian workers are calling for the resignation of all those corrupt union leaders who were in bed with Mubarak. American workers should do the same; after all, the union brass here are in bed with the Wall Street bankster oligarchy.

The 2011 Revolution continues, and the empire of Corporatism had better watch out...

EDIT: Ole Ole Olson at News Junkie Post debunks the TEA Party's defense of Walker here.

The Revolution Wasn't in Iran; or, The Revenge of the Arab Street

2011-01-19T16:04:00.000-08:00

Here I was, thinking that there was going to be some sort of revolution in Iran. I'd even saved a draft entry just for that purpose. But that was not to be. The mullahs crushed the opposition and sent it back down into the underground. I get the feeling that when revolution finally does come to Iran, it won't be the "greens" doing it, and the American Empire will probably have collapsed first like an unwieldy business conglomerate, leaving the mullahs with no more "Great Satan" to build their dictatorship up against.

Here's the surprise. The revolution came to Araby first. Specifically, Tunisia.

If you've been paying attention to that part of the world, you know that the Arab countries are ruled by dictators and absolute monarchs propped up by American foreign aid and military power. The exception, of course, is Iraq, which is ruled directly by the US military as a colony, same as Afghanistan. The Arab kings and dictators are notoriously cruel and corrupt; many of them even use Islamists as symbiotic enemies or (in Saudi Arabia especially) as enforcers.

Now the dictatorship of Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali has fallen in Tunisia; he and his notoriously corrupt family have decamped to — surprise! — Saudi Arabia. Tunisians are a famously laid-back people. However, the Ben Ali/Trabelsi family mafia (there is no other word) enforced its absolute monopoly over the economy so brutally that they provoked their subjects to revolt. Now all the other autocrats in Araby are finding themselves at war with their own subjects, the fabled Arab Street. Expect more crowned heads to fall, and soon.

Why the Arab revolution came as a surprise to Americans: the image most of us have of Arabs is of savage headhunting barbarian jihadis battling Western Christendom over control of the Holy Land during the Crusades. You know, the crap they taught us in Sunday school. Al-Qaeda fits the Sunday-school stereotype all too well, perhaps even by design. Illusions fall hard, especially when they concern people outside our own petty tribe.

Some people are calling the revolution being fought in Tunisia the American Empire's 1989 moment. For those who remember, the 1989 Revolution was when the Soviet Union's "satellite" buffer colonies broke away from that rebranded Russian Empire. Keep in mind that the 2011 Revolution didn't start in American rival Iran, but in one of the more insignificant satellite régimes in a Mediterranean world turned American Mare Nostrum. And it's barely even begun...

Wikileaks: World Infowar I

2010-12-09T16:00:00.000-08:00

The article: WikiLeaks: Winning the Info War Despite Assange's Arrest (Time)

Since I posted last, Julian Assange has been arrested. Wikileaks' original sites, hosts, and funding sources have been ripped away from them by an enraged American imperial government. The government and the "lamestream" corporate media have lined up behind Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly in calling for Assange's head on a platter, preferably bloody, with his mangled corpse paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in a Roman-style military triumph.

The outcome is already clear to see. Wikileaks is already winning.

The hacker underground's anarchist statement of faith is: Information wants to be free. Sure enough, faced with an escalating worldwide US government crackdown, the Internet is striking back. Wikileaks may not have a host anymore, but it now has over 500 mirror sites, and the number will only grow. The guerrilla hacker group Anonymous are attacking the online operations of corporations complying with the crackdown using denial of service attacks just like the one the US government attacked Wikileaks itself with before the Cablegate release. It's no longer the American Empire against one pesky leaker of government secrets. It's now the American Empire against the entire hacker underground. To them, Julian Assange is a hero. And now he is also a martyr. His arrest may well be his "Martin Luther King in Birmingham Jail" moment.

If you're trying to defeat an enemy, the worst thing you can do is turn him into a martyr. The US did just this to a psychopath named Osama bin Laden by invading Iraq in order to steal its oil for America's oilman elite. Now they've done this to Assange, making him the David to America's Goliath.

When he was president, American revolutionary John Adams declared that America did not go out looking for monsters to fight. Today, America exists for no other reason than to fight monsters, and even mass produces them in order to fight them. Many vested interests and infinite profits depend on this. The war between the US and Wikileaks was not only necessary, it was inevitable.

For the first time, the decentralizing force of the Internet is beginning to show its full power. The ancient tradition of government, even "democratic", is military-based command and control, in which the people know their place and the rulers make sure they stay there. The Internet, on the other hand, was purposely designed to be decentralized; in the ultimate irony, the US military insisted on creating it that way, so that it could withstand a Soviet nuclear attack, during the Cold War. For security reasons, the Internet is structured to avoid what is called a single point of vulnerability. In a system with such a vulnerability, take out that single point and you take out the whole system with it. But if the system is completely decentralized, it becomes extremely difficult to destroy, if not impossible. Redundancy is security in cyberspace.

Now that Julian Assange is in jail and the original Wikileaks site is permanently down by American decree, the single point of vulnerability is now gone. 500+ hackers' mirror sites can't be taken down so easily. The Empire now faces a far more protean foe, one increasingly determined to bring the entire corporatist system down. The American rulers still think they can pull a Tiananmen and crush the revolt. The anarchists who saved Wikileaks are instead working to inflict on the ailing Empire the fate of another seemingly invincible Communist despotism: the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's more than just a clash between an angry empire and an empowered rebel underground. For the first time, the traditional world system is facing its successor. America is now fighting the future. But now a growing international revolt is fighting for the future. And yes, believe it or not, I can even quote Ayn Rand on this:

"Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today."

Obama's Neocon Turn Makes A Peace Movement Possible Again

2010-12-08T22:49:00.000-08:00

The article: Is a Peace Movement Finally Awakening? by Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation

We know what the New Right is all about: corporate socialism. They call it Big Government Conservatism, and it consists of corporate welfare at home, imperial expansion abroad, and a national security state powered by religious fanaticism worthy of Al-Qaeda. The liberal Left, however, was all but defanged by the election of a black president who talked the liberal talk. But now we know that he walks the neocon walk. Liberals are actually starting to come out of their closets and protest again.

Guess what this means? Now that the Great Black Hope has proved to be just another tyrannical Great White Father, a left-wing peace movement has become possible once again. We antiwar libertarians are starting to believe we won't be so lonely for long.

Where liberals and libertarians part, of course, is in their opinion of government. Liberals, descending from the social democrats of the 19th and 20th centuries, believe that government can be used as a force for good, a weapon against the oppression of the masses. Libertarians are far more cynical: expansion of government welfare leads inevitably to the supreme corporate welfare of war and empire, or the other way around if the empire wants to buy the masses' loyalty. The supreme statement of the libertarian position comes from early 20th century libertarian Randolph Bourne: "War is the health of the state."

But now Obama has shown his true colors. He is indeed bent on destroying America — but on behalf of his real owners: the banksters who lead the New Right and fund the TEA Party. He sold us a bill of goods, you see. The liberals are now a constituency without representation. Some of them are beginning to complain. As the war between the US and Wikileaks escalates, and as an increasingly frustrated US government threatens to abolish freedom of speech and unleash Soviet-style secret police tactics in order to defend the empire and its war policy, they may actually start to realize they may have to take to the streets again, perhaps all the way to the barricades.

But until then, antiwar libertarians and socialists will remain the proverbial prophets crying out in the wilderness...

Barack Obama Jumps the Shark

2010-12-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

The article: Obama Channels Reagan, and Risks Becoming Carter

Remember when I said, before the election catastrophe, that Rand Paul was over? Well, allow me to eat my words: he's not. In fact, he won. There can be only one reason why Rand Paul is not over:

Barack Obama is.

This time, he's gone too far. He's extended Bush's disastrous tax cuts for the rich! And without spending cuts to compensate. You know, Big Government Conservatism. Remember voodoo economics, the religion of Wall Street? You know, the magical thinking that claims tax cuts for the rich without spending cuts will cut deficits? He's now its most ardent acolyte. He's now defending his support of the Republican agenda against the liberal base that elected him. The people who voted for hope and change in 2008 are now every bit as unrepresented as the British colonials who started the American Revolution.

Even earlier, not long after he rode the wave of hope and change into office, he betrayed the millions of actual liberals who voted him into the White House by going to West Poing to announce a George W. Bush surge in the Afghan war. This war, like any other colonial war against the Middle East, has never been for the purpose of preserving freedom. Its only purpose is profit for the corporate welfare kings, particularly the oil barons and war profiteers. That's when he strangled all his beautiful promises in the crib, promises he never had any intention of ever keeping.

Now the man the TEA Party thinks is a Kenyan-born agent of Osama bin Laden has completed his transformation into a neocon. Yes, he is determined to destroy America. But with enemies like Obama, do Al-Qaeda even need friends? His plan for the destruction of America was written by America's corporate owners on Wall Street and their agents in the Republican Party. This is the beginning of the end of Obama's one and only term as president, for he has now definitively jumped the shark. Only the neocons are left in government now. There is only one party left, the party of corporatism and empire. The US government does not belong to the people, and never has; it is democratic only in theory, but oligarchic in design. Today, America is not its people but its corporations.

Obama's failure is the failure of the Democratic Party. The Republicans may be at each other's throats to the point that it threatens to split in two; but it's the Democratic party that's collapsing. The Democrats are an echo of the Republicans. An echo, not a choice. If the GOP is the Evil Party in the 1 1/2-party system that H.L. Mencken described almost a century ago, then the Dems can only be the Stupid Party.

No wonder they got clobbered by the TEA Party reactionaries in the '10 election! But said rebels are also signalling their eagerness to sell out to our corporate slavemasters. They shouldn't expect to be immune from the populist backlash, either, when the reckoning comes in two years.

I tell you, it's going to get ugly come 2012. Watch the Democratic primary. And don't bet on the incumbent winning it.

Back to Take Nothing On Faith...

Wikileaks: The Pentagon Papers Escalating into Watergate -- and More

2010-12-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

Remember the BP disaster, America's Chernobyl? It gets better! All this year, Wikileaks has been posting all kinds of classified US government material that was leaked by a single disgruntled Army private named Bradley Manning. I haven't been keeping track of the disaster that's been snowballing for the American Empire here, since in recent months I've been too busy retweeting the news. Thus, I missed the opportunity to comment on what I immediately recognized as the Iraq/Af-Pak War counterpart to the Pentagon Papers (which you can read here). Now that this new Pentagon Papers scandal is exploding into a full-blown Watergate, I have to say something. First: a quick rundown of the events:

On April 5, Wikileaks released classified video of an American helicopter attack intended to massacre Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, and for no other reason. Wikileaks' name for the incident: Collateral Murder.
On July 25, they released over 90,000 classified US military documents on the Afghan war, collectively known as the Afghan War Diary. This was what reminded me of the Pentagon Papers. Once again, the Empire got egg on its collective face.
On October 22, they released nearly 400,000 secret US Army field reports in the biggest leak in American military history, known as the Iraq War Logs. This leak focused not just on American massacres of unarmed civilians, but the occupation authorities' tolerance of murders by the Iraqi police and military.
November 28 was the first day of the most embarrassing leak yet, which Wikileaks has dubbed Cablegate and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com calls simply The Big Dump. The first 291 of over 250,000 diplomatic cables from the US State Department were released. In an attempt to stop it and hopefully destroy Wikileaks, the US government had a cyberagent codenamed "Jester" pull a massive denial of service attack against the site. The attack failed; the site was back up within hours and began releasing the cables. Still, Obama and Clinton warned every single government leader in the world about the leak right before it started.

Sure enough, all the world's governments and the entire corporate media establishment have declared war against Wikileaks. Interpol has declared Wikileaks' founder and mastermind, Julian Assange, to be global public enemy #1, ostensibly over a sex crimes charge in Sweden but really because he is now considered the most dangerous threat to the world system itself. The US government is charging Assange with espionage charges; like Manning, Assange faces execution by firing squad for treason. It's likely the American imperial authorities will get impatient and simply have the CIA send a sniper to summarily execute him, possibly even before the year's out.

Right now, Julian Assange is the most important person in the world.

This is bigger than just spilling government secrets. The current world system of government, technocracy, is based ultimately on keeping as many things secret from those lower in the hierarchy as possible. Currently, all governments keep all their diplomacy as secret as their espionage. Cablegate blows the lid off this. Secrecy, it turns out, is a cover for hypocrisy: the governments are saying one thing to their ~~subjects~~ citizens, but another to each other. Authoritarianism and citizenship do not mix, and the current system of government is every bit as authoritarian as the previous one (absolute monarchy).

Wikileaks' slogan is: We Open Governments. In a sense, Wikileaks is the democratic ideal of open government taken to its logical extreme. What government and big business are doing to their ~~subjects~~ ~~victims~~ ~~suckers~~ citizens/customers, Wikileaks is now doing to the governments and corporations. The end of privacy is now cutting both ways.

I completely agree with Assange when he demands that Hillary Clinton must resign as US Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton, the goddess of war. She claims that the latest leak "attack[ed] America's foreign policy interests" and the "international community". But what are "America's foreign policy interests?" Here's what they're really are: "Full Spectrum Dominance", which in basic American means invading the whole damn world. In this, Obama and Clinton are no different from Bush and his neocon cabal. We saw what Clinton was capable of when her husband put her in charge of his health care proposal back in 1993, and it wasn't pretty. And if flaky Christian Right neocon sex symbol du jour Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell wants Clinton to run for president, Clinton's bad news indeed. I've already talked about Obama here, here, and here. And I've been vindicated: George W. Bush is praising Obama. This is not a good thing.

And don't think Big Business is safe. The Trafigura scandal? That was Wikileaks' doing, too. Their next corporate victim? The Bank of America.

Can the US government with all its resources take Wikileaks out? No. In fact, all the DDoS attack did was to convince Wikileaks to move into the cloud, which is invulnerable to such attacks.

I guessed I missed the big news because I was thinking it would merely embarrass the American Empire. Well, the leaks keep coming, Wikileaks keeps posting millions of embarrassing documents online, and sooner or later it's going to reach the tipping point. What is now a matter of a few lonely voices crying out in the wilderness is going to lead to mass protests in the streets and ultimately some big changes in the political system.

This is bigger than you think. Stay tuned...

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

Al-Qaeda Is A Cult

2010-06-21T17:00:00.000-07:00

The article: "Can Utilizing Knowledge of Cults Help Us with Terrorist Groups?" by Steven Hassan

Some of you will surely dispute me on this, the same way people disagree when I insist that there is no such thing as a split infinitive. Some will insist Al-Qaeda is strictly a "terror organization". As with the alleged split infinitive in English, this is really a semantic quibble. I look at it structurally. The Manson Family and Aum Supreme Truth committed some of history's most infamous acts of terrorism, but they have always been seen as what they are: doomsday cults. Structurally, in organization and doctrine, Al-Qaeda is clearly a cult.

The author of the linked article, Steven Hassan, is a former Moonie (Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church cultist) turned cult expert. His experience in a cult allows him to know a cult when he sees it. I decided to write this entry when I read his article and realized that he was saying publicly what I already believed but hadn't told anybody yet (except maybe my mother and brother). He begins: "When is it time to start recognizing that Al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups are cults?"

What makes a cult? First: an authoritarian organization taken to the totalitarian extreme. Second: a charismatic and all-powerful leader who believes with absolute conviction that he alone can cure the world's ills, if everybody bows down and worships him. Outsiders see him as a power-hungry maniac. This leader is generally called a "messiah" in the Abrahamic religions and a "guru" outside them. Third: a doctrine that is seen as the one and only absolute truth that must be believed in every particular if you want to be saved; those who doubt even one particular are, by the cult's definition, servants of Satan in whatever form the Fiend takes. If you have all three of these structural elements in place, you have a cult.

A cult doesn't have to be religious. Lyndon LaRouche, for example, is generally regarded as the guru of a political cult. There have been many books and articles on the Ayn Rand cult; to this day, the Objectivist movement hasn't fully shaken the accusation of cultism (and the antics of the Ayn Rand Institute seem intended to prove such accusers as Albert Ellis and Murray Rothbard right). Dictators tend to reinforce their power by deliberately building cults around themselves. When a cult actually takes power, it replaces the entire political and social structure of the society with the cult's own totalitarian power system.

Conversely, religious cults have a strong tendency to interfere in politics, sometimes violently. 9/11 should be considered the canonical example. When a cult commits terrorism, don't interpret it as anything but a demand to the people and their leaders for unconditional surrender to the cult and its leader. Aum's 1995 nerve-gassing of the Tokyo subways was intended as a coup d'état; its guru, Shoko Asahara, was trying to overthrow the Japanese government by trying to kill as many civilians as possible to force them to hail him as their messiah. Instead, he and his lieutenants got the death penalty.

Al-Qaeda is an Islamic fundamentalist doomsday cult of the dominionist variety, that is, its eschatology demands that the cult take over the world and exterminate the infidels. Similar Christian cults plague the US, though most of them are still politically powerful enough, through the Republican Party and the TEA party movement, that they don't yet feel the need to declare holy war against the American people (though some Dominionist cults, such as the recently arrested Hutaree, already have). Its messiah, Osama bin Laden, is absolutely convinced that his is the Mahdi, or the Messiah of the End Times. He believes that God commanded him to conquer the world. Actually, Al-Qaeda strongly resembles Aum Supreme Truth in its structure. It has reorganized into an underground cell structure only to keep itself from being annihilated by its ever more numerous and enraged enemies. Its tactics are terroristic because it has only one goal: total world domination, required by its dominionist eschatology.

Steven Hassan is exactly right. In its totalitarian structure, fundamentalist doctrine, and dominionist eschatology, Al-Qaeda is a cult. We already know how to deal with cults. So why don't we deal with them like the cults they are? The answer is that the US government is set up to see them merely as military threats. That's how it handled the Branch Davidians, for example, and it explains the perceived difference between "cult" and "terror organization" — a strictly military classification. A "terror organization" is classified by the US military as an army (of a paramilitary variety), not a mere fundamentalist religious group. But the militarization of the US government's response to practically everything is a subject for another post...

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

American Chernobyl: The BP Disaster

2010-06-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

You've heard all about the BP oil spill, on TV and online, in the business and environmental and political news. Well, guess what? The Republican Party and the TEA Party are loudly defending the sovereign right of BP's corporate raider owners to destroy whatever the hell they damn well feel like, in the name of the "free market". The problem with BP is that the "free market" is hardly free at all. The problem is corporatism.

Corporatism, a form of synarchism, is socialism for giant corporations and the financial elite. Its core policy consists of privatizing profit while socializing risk and harm. To that purpose, the government enacts protectionist laws to restrict competition. Private business is completely embedded in government and should be considered a branch of government.

Yes, free markets exist, even in America. But the oil industry is not one of them. It is controlled by a corporatist monopoly cartel, some of whose members (most notably ARAMCO) are owned by fundamentalist Islamic dictatorships and absolute monarchies.

Corporatism requires state socialism in order to prevent competition. But competition is the lifeblood of any true free market. No free competition means no free market. The oil cartel bought the US presidency for Enron executive George W. Bush with corporatist state socialism as its mandate to him. He corporatized the US government faithfully, going so far as to use the US armed forces as the cartel's mercenaries to pirate the oil from Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon (and this will be faithfully carried out by future corporate lawyer Barack Obama) Iran.

Chernobyl was the inevitable result of Russian state socialism under the Soviet Union. I've heard tweets that the BP disaster is Obama's Hurricane Katrina. It is not. It is American corporatism's Chernobyl. It is destroying the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea the same way that nuclear meltdown destroyed a corner of Ukraine. It's not just BP that's to blame. The entire oil cartel, the US government, the irresponsible financial elite, and the entire system of corporatism are to blame. The bad karma is theirs, and that of their "populist" apologists for corporate dictatorship.

Chernobyl was the omen of Communism's collapse. The BP oil disaster, the American Chernobyl, is the same thing. Soon American Corporatism will follow Russian Communism into the trash compactor of history.

Rand Paul Is Over: or, Why Conservative Libertarianism Is a Contradiction in Terms

2010-05-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

The article: "Rachel Maddow Demolishes Rand Paul" by Joan Walsh, Salon

Yesterday, "fighting liberal" MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow interviewed Kentucky senatorial candidate and "TEA Party" favorite Rand Paul on her show after he crushed his establishment opponent, secretary of state Trey Grayson, in the Republican primary election. Joan Walsh insists Maddow won big. Ray Beckerman is not so sure. Me, I had to see for myself. So I read Walsh's article and watched the interview. When it was over, I realized that Walsh was spot on. Toward the end of the interview, I got the feeling that I was witnessing a fatal car wreck as it was happening and watching the driver die right in front of me: what I witnessed was the complete self-destruction of the New Right's rising superstar in the span of half a minute. In effect, even despite himself, Paul defended the nasty racial protectionism called Jim Crow, convicting himself of not just racism but statism. He outed himself as a conservative. He didn't sound libertarian to me: he extolled the economic freedom of corporations, pointedly including racist owners of lunch counters, while spitting on individual freedom in the form of consumer choice, which Jim Crow was designed to restrict. My verdict: Maddow crushed him, ending his political career in front of the whole world. Rand Paul is over.

Paul did defend the 1964 Civil Rights Act — except for one section, the one that was used to desegregate privately owned public places such as the lunch counters that were the site of so many of the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Revolution. He rightly said that the owner of a private company has the right to serve whoever he wants, excluding, say, blacks or women or Dallas Cowboys fans. What he should have added, but neglected to, is that in a truly free market free of such protectionist restrictions as Jim Crow forced-segregation laws, the owner of a private company also has the right to include whoever he wants. In that way, free from such restrictions, someone could open a competing lunch counter, the selling point of which is precisely that it is integrated. Since the 1950s and '60s were a time when popular culture in the form of rock & roll and rhythm & blues was a revolutionary force, an integrated diner would have a built-in cool factor, which in the capitalist age has been a surefire way to success. He never once mentioned the amazing destructive power the free market had on segregation through popular culture. No less than Karl Marx hailed the revolutionary force of capitalism in that famous passage in which he proclaimed that under capitalism, "all that is solid melts into air." Paul should have pointed out that Jim Crow laws were a protectionist scheme intended to keep out those who would upset the Southern feudal caste system through free competition, and that the Civil Rights Act should have enabled such free competition by overturning such protectionist regimes. By omitting that one very important aspect of a genuinely free market, namely its destruction of ancient moral absolutes such as racial hierarchies, he belittled the free market he claims to support and showed the limits of his libertarianism.

His namesake, the libertarian novelist and individualist philosopher Ayn Rand, upheld the morality of the trader who refuses to let petty prejudices get in the way of his pursuit of profit; indeed, she explicitly denounced racism as the lowest and most bestial form of collectivism, the collectivism of mindless subhuman brutes. By defending the right of diner owners to ban customers by mere race, and by refusing to attack Jim Crow as a statist assault on market freedom, Rand Paul showed how few of Ayn Rand's principles he actually adheres to. He also showed how little he actually understands the free-market economics of the Austrian School no matter how much of the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard (his father's close associate) he knows by heart. Instead, he proved himself to be just another right-wing Southern Republican, a mere conservative rather than a true libertarian.

The fact the conservatives evade: libertarianism is the anti-statist form of radical liberalism — indeed, the very word "liberalism" itself was coined to mean what we now call libertarianism (also still known as classical liberalism). If there is an extremist form of libertarianism, it is anarchism. Indeed, it was anarchists such as Emma Goldman who coined the word "libertarian". Both words come from liber, the Latin word for "free". What most self-described libertarians don't realize is that there is nothing conservative about libertarianism. Conservatism, by its very nature, requires a strong dictatorial state designed to prevent progress; the foremost example today is the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. "Conservative libertarianism" is a contradiction in terms. This contradiction forced Barry Goldwater, that more famous opponent of (the very same provision of) the Civil Rights Act, to become less conservative and more libertarian over his long political career. Yesterday on Maddow, the contradiction collapsed on Rand Paul.

Libertarianism was and is the core of Ron Paul's appeal to the American masses. His son, however, is resorting to a suspiciously Confederate style of conservatism. That, in fact, is what his alleged "libertarianism" really boils down to. People have accused Rand Paul of being a "neo-Nazi". This is wrong; he is a retro-Confederate, a man of the feudal past destroyed by the Civil Rights Revolution he pays lip service to. Remember that capitalism, the free-market system he claims to support, was what allowed the North to destroy the Confederacy in that failed feudalist counterrevolution, the Civil War. The reason the neo-Confederates latch on to "capitalism" today is that American capitalism has since degenerated into corporatism — neofeudal socialism ruled by giant corporations like the ones that fund the "astroturf" TEA Party — so that now corporatism is to our decaying Imperial Republic what slave-based feudalism was to the antebellum South.

Liberals have been calling Rand Paul "crazy", "insane", a "nutball" or "wingnut" or "right-wing nutjob". This is the same juvenile name-calling that (yes) Trey Grayson and his neoconservative GOP establishment allies indulged in during the primary election campaign. Paul is not insane. But in one career-destroying instant, he revealed himself to be disturbingly reactionary. By implying his support for statist segregation laws so strongly, he put doubts in genuinely libertarian minds that he is even a libertarian at all, rather than just another FreedomWorks-owned neocon corporatist shill like Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck.

Rachel Maddow set a brilliant trap. Rand Paul fell right into it. As I saw it happen on the screen before me, I realized that Joan Walsh is absolutely right: Maddow scored a crushing victory over Paul. By taking a position so reactionary and so racist, he guaranteed that from now on he will be considered too dangerous, too close to the terrorist fringe of the TEA Party, to ever be allowed into public office. I predict the Democratic nominee, Jack Conway, will beat him handily in the general election. Face it: Rand Paul has just destroyed his political career. He is over. And he knows it. We, and he, should know the reason for his fall: conservative libertarianism is a contradiction in terms.

For more on the firestorm burning Rand Paul's campaign to ashes, here's the Google search page.

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

Ayn Rand, Religion, and the Problem with the New Atheists

2010-05-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard of the so-called "New Atheists": Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Their books against religion are red-hot in a still religion-mad America. However, there's a shrillness about their tone that outrages even many atheists. That shrillness, especially in Harris, struck me immediately as very familiar. It's the same tone you find in a figure I discovered three years after her death (i.e., in 1985); one whose books have been remarkably consistent bestsellers ever since they were published in the mid-to-late 20th century; one whose heavy influence Harris openly acknowledges: Ayn Rand. Problem is, Rand is notorious as the guru of a cult.

Rand was one of the true founders of the New Atheism, one of its two twentieth-century godmothers. The other was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists, who dedicated her life to relentless struggle against religion. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris aren't fighting a new battle; they have simply picked up the swords left by the founding mothers of their movement.

I was once a closet believer in Rand's philosophy, unknown to anyone in the movement. (In my first decade on the Internet, roughly 1995-2005, I was strictly a lurker, keeping my presence hidden; I similarly didn't reveal myself to the online Objectivists.) I'm familiar with her writings, not just her three major novels but her many books of essays. I also studied the history of Rand, her philosophy which she named Objectivism, and the movement she founded on it. I'm as familiar with the philosophy as just about anybody in the movement. My entire realist worldview derives to a very large degree from Rand's. But there's something about how Rand led the movement, and in how she wrote, that is suspiciously religious. Many have gone so far as to call Objectivism a cult: Murray Rothbard (the free-market economist and a former Rand associate), Michael Shermer, Albert Ellis, and Jeff Walker, among others. Even no less a figure than Rand's one-time protégé, Nathaniel Branden, has made a detailed critique of Rand's philosophy, pointing out its weaknesses, which happen to be the most religious of her tenets.

Recently, while reading up on Lyndon LaRouche's conspiracy theories, I realized that Objectivism is a cult because it is in fact a sect of a religion. This religion has no supreme being of any kind, or even any gods. It doesn't even recognize the existence of the supernatural. It's called Rationalism, which is defined as the cult of reason. It's actually quite ancient, and Rand rightly credits Aristotle with the origin of her philosophy, for he and his mentor Plato founded the religion. But Rationalism took its modern form during the Enlightenment, the period between the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions that, along with them, created modern Western civilization, and with it the modern world as we know it. Modern secularism was born then. But the eighteenth-century West was just coming out of the Wars of Religion, and there was still a heavy religious tinge to the philosophies of the day. Descartes and the English and German philosophers were openly religious. It was the French who first broke with Christianity, as the Roman Catholic Church had vast political power within the Kingdom of France and used it to destroy its opponents, including Protestants and reformers. This is the reason for the French Enlightenment philosophers' antireligious fury (summed up in Voltaire's war cry, "Écrasez l'infâme!") and the bloodthirsty ferocity of the ensuing French Revolution. Rand had the same crusading fury because she came from Russia, a totalitarian Christian kingdom which got taken over by the new "Catholic Church" of Rationalism, which by the time she fled to America in 1926 had become known as Stalinism.

Rand found her following in America. She found it among Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals from oppressive religious backgrounds but who had come to reject religion. They took to their new creed, Objectivism, like a new faith, in the same ardent way Russians had converted to Hegel, Marx, and scientific rationalism the previous century. Similarly, many Catholic nuns would reject their faith and become militant feminists in the 1970s. Like those ex-nuns and Rand's Russian forerunners, the Objectivist converts brought a fiercely religious spirit to secular philosophy. They became what others called a cult, and Ayn Rand was their all-knowing guru, the avatar of the Goddess of Reason. The Objectivists were crusaders for Reason.

I stopped being even a closet follower of Rand when both the Ayn Rand Institute and its less dogmatic rival, the Atlas Society, became gung-ho supporters of George W. Bush's colonial adventurism in the Middle East. They became thoroughly infected with the neoconservative virus. By then I had been inoculated by the dialectical approach of Chris Matthew Sciabarra. The addition of dialectics had the effect on me of removing the religious Rationalism from Objectivism. Also acting as a vaccine was Richard Brodie's popular book on memetics and mind viruses, Virus of the Mind, which explains in detail, in memetic terms, exactly how religion works. (Dawkins himself is the father of memetics.) So even as the Objectivist movement followed its religious impulse into neoconservatism and the hero-worship of Great Leader Shrub, and in fact partly because of it, I became completely irreligious. I was now very much a secular humanist, with an emphasis on "secular".

There is a religious element of Rationalism in the New Atheism because the great guru Ayn Rand put it there. I know it is religious because people have converted from Objectivism to other religions, from Evangelicalism to Scientology to New Age guruism, without changing their mindset. Their mindset may have been rational, but it was not secular. And so now I can explain the peculiar intolerance that the New Atheists have toward religion: they are themselves transitioning out of religion, with Rationalism as the transitional stage between theistic religion and complete secularism. That's why they treat those who hold to the old religions as their personal enemies. They explain their militant opposition to religion by pointing to the bloodthirsty Al-Qaeda cult (for it is a cult) and using it to point out that religious intolerance is a mortal threat to civilization, with 9/11 in America, 3/11 in Spain, and 7/7 in England as proof. But in doing so, they have adopted their enemies' intolerance. Ayn Rand, the great hater of mysticism, is the example they follow. And admittedly, Islam remains extremely dangerous; it has not yet been weakened by the secularizing trend that has undermined Christianity, itself once (and, in some places, still) a ferociously crusading cult. (I blame 500 years of Ottoman Empire for preventing the modernization of the Middle East. Christian Russia, the mystic-ridden kingdom Rand hated with all her heart, has the exact same problem, and cults still run rampant there, from the revived Black Hundreds to Aum Supreme Truth.)

The problem with the New Atheism is that it has allowed itself to be infected by the fundamentalist Rationalism of Ayn Rand and Madalyn Murray O'Hair (and, to a lesser degree, Lyndon LaRouche). They didn't just want to advance the dominion of reason; they wanted to destroy the old religions altogether. However, they didn't know that they were doing exactly what Rand's mortal enemy Stalin did: crusading for a different religion entirely, one they believed defines Western civilization now that God is dead. But in so doing, they adopted the religious intolerance of the infidel. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the New Atheists have likewise adopted the militant intolerance of their Muslim enemies. They have adopted as their own the war cry of French Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot: "Man will not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest!" If they had their way, some of them would massacre religious people like Stalin did. (He also massacred Communists, but that's a subject for a future entry.)

I focus on Rand because I'm so familiar with her. I have no such familiarity with O'Hair. But much of what I said about Rand also applies to the equally irascible and egomaniacal O'Hair, who was also accused of being the guru of a cult. The important thing is the hatred of religious people — not just religion, but religious people — that they passed on to their New Atheist successors and which they ironically share with their religious enemies.

It's not enough to say "no religion is my religion." To be truly secular, much less humanist, one must reject the religious mentality altogether, including its hatred of infidels. It's not enough to be an atheist — Buddhism, like Rationalism, rejects the concept of a supreme being — rather, one must, as the name of this blog states, take nothing on faith, not even reason itself. As I myself am a former Christian, a former New Ager, and a former Rationalist (of Rand's sect), I know religion when I see it. Even Nathaniel Branden himself came to see the religion in Rand, and ultimately (after being cast out of the cult by Rand personally) rejected it. And many people over the years have likewise rejected Objectivism because of the religious fanaticism of the movement. Rand was every bit as much a guru as any of the Hindu swamis she scorned so contemptuously.

What made me see the religious elements of Rationalism in the New Atheism was its harsh intolerance for the religious. That is, for people who stick to the old religions. But even before the Objectivist movement's embrace of imperial Bushism during the Iraq invasion of 2003 led me to reject Objectivism (as, among other things, being not objective enough), I could see that Objectivism was conspicuously lacking in humanism. Rand considered contempt a virtue. Butler Shaffer of LewRockwell.com even goes so far as to compare Atlas Shrugged to the infamous neo-Nazi screed The Turner Diaries, claiming that in her magnum opus Rand called for the extermination of the entire human race with the exception of the egoist/capitalist elite she celebrates. Rationalism and secular humanism are both atheistic, but one is religious in mentality and the other is not. Humanism does not crusade. Marxism and Objectivism do. Crusaders set up dictatorships. Look at the neo-tsarist state socialism of twentieth-century Russia — and the neoconservative corporate socialism of today's America.

An atheist is simply one who has no belief in a supreme being, or (in its stronger sense) any supernatural beings. But as the example of Buddhism shows, a religion can reject God and still be a religion. So Rationalism. I am, of course, an atheist myself. However, I have no faith. I don't need faith. And I certainly don't need to put faith in reason. Instead, I use it. That's why my arguments with defenders of religion never degenerate into screaming matches. All too often, many of the New Atheists are content to scream. Rand certainly did, spewing such creative invective as "rotters", "witch doctors", "Attila-ists", and "moral cannibals".

The cure for Rationalism, or religion in general, can be summed up in three short words. Strangely enough, they come from Ayn Rand. I live by these words, far better than Rand, trapped in the role of guru, ever could. They are:

Check your premises.

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

It's Official: No, Obama Can't, And He Never Wanted To Anyway

2009-12-19T17:00:00.000-08:00

The articles:

And now it's official at last:

Barack Obama is not a progressive.
Barack Obama is a bought and paid-for conservative Clintonite corporate shill who is selling out American democracy to corporatist dictatorship.
Barack Obama has officially jumped the shark.

Progressives, you've been had. Big time. That "change agent" you (and, shamefully, I too) elected? Not to be seen. He suckered the American people for everything. The ex-community organizer just proved himself to be one of the worst of the neoconservative Blue Dogs. For all we know, he planned the total abortion ban in the corporate welfare health care "reform" (sic!) bill. Turns out the libertarians were right after all.

It turns out that we're getting what Obama (and Rahm Emanuel, leader of the Blue Dogs and our new Dick Cheney) wanted in the first place: pure corporate welfare that puts Shrub Bush himself to shame. Basically, they and their corporate-owned Congress are enslaving us to the health care monopoly cartel. What they are doing is repealing both democracy and capitalism, and replacing them with corporatism.

What is corporatism? The control of government by corporations. In other words, corporate dictatorship.

Now we know who owns Obama, and who he wants to sell America to. He's the property of Goldman Sachs, PhRMA, the war profiteering industry, and who the hell knows what other corporatist factions he wants to sell out the American people to. He's not a man of the people; he only acts the part, and he's one hell of a good actor. But he was totally and completely bought and paid for by the time he started running for president. Every single promise he's ever made to us has been a lie. He hasn't even bothered to stop the Iraq war, and he's about to strengthen USA PATRIOT (a.k.a. the Repeal of Freedom Act) too. He turned out to be just another predatory corporate lawyer in political office, just like all the others. He's no better than Billy Clinton.

Sure enough, the health care cartel's stock prices are soaring at the great news. So guess what, Operation Permanent Republican Administration? You've already won! Obama's proved himself your great black hope!

So now my opinion on health care "reform" is official: I'm with Howard Dean. I'm against this Republican corporatist wet dream masquerading as a Democratic reform bill.

Progressives: It's finally time to make Obama a lame duck. The president is nothing like the candidate was, except for the pretty way he can deliver the spin. The candidate was the illusion; the compromise-worshipping corporatist is the reality. We need to take back the power that the Republicrats are stealing from us and selling to the highest bidder. And remember:

No, he can't. He never wanted to, anyway. Only we can.

So how do we do it? I've got some ideas, and I'll be sharing them soon.

Back to Take Nothing On Faith...

On the other hand, he's actually done some things right...

2009-12-11T00:44:00.000-08:00

The page: The Obameter: Obama's Campaign Promises that are Promise Kept In previous posts entitled "No He Can't" (part 1 and part 2), I've harshly criticized President Obama's insistence on continuing his predecessor George W. Bush's imperial wars and white-elephant bank bailout, and his willingness to sign a health care reform bill that is little different from Bush's corporate-welfare Medicare reform bill. On the really big issues, then, it seems he's the typical cowardly Democrat who kowtows to Operation Permanent Republican Administration. It's the little issues where he actually succeeds, as this entry's featured link should prove. (And it helps that he doesn't like Bush any more than I do.)

Now click that link again and pay close attention. On the war, promises 134 and 167 are the ones I'm so harshly criticizing. But remember, he actually did promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan till Osama bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is annihilated, and the Taliban crushed. The last is impossible, though, since the war itself is empowering the Taliban extremists. Colonial war tends to do that. Think: Viet Cong. Still, he's criticizing the Bush-Cheney cowboy chauvinism and fundamentalist Americanism. But still, by escalating the Afghan war and spreading it into Pakistan, he's created his Vietnam. Remember, the Vietnam War destroyed not one but two presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Even so, he's promised to end Bush's pet war, the one in Iraq (promises 119 and 125), though so far he hasn't gone so far as to actually de-escalate it, at least not yet.

I like promise 222, loosening restrictions against Cuba. Still, he should end the embargo completely and restore diplomatic relations; that would eliminate the perceived necessity for all that Cold War nationalist bluster on both sides.

He's also kept his promises on other issues, some dear to liberals (or which should be), others reversing repressive, theocratic, and anti-scientific decrees and laws signed into law by Bush. So you can't say Obama hasn't done any good things as president — unless, of course, you're an irrational wingnut neocon or born-againer who hates his guts, thinks he's not even American, and maybe even wants to kill him (the Psalm 109:8 controversy).

It's only on the big issues that he's failed. (With one exception: little by little, he's starting to take little steps toward ending the long-standing and destructive policy of drug prohibition, though it's partly because of the increasingly violent drug war in Mexico.) But it's the big issues that threaten to destroy not just his presidency, but the country. Ultimately, the oligarchic republican system established in 1787 is unsustainable, and will have to be superseded by something far more democratic. The criticism and praise will continue as his term progresses and he keeps or breaks his promises. Keep your eyes peeled, your ears to the ground, and stay tuned...

No He Can't, Part 2: Obama Says War Is Peace, Jumps The Shark

2009-12-10T20:20:00.000-08:00

The article: Nobel-winning Obama defends war in call for peace - Yahoo! News

So the latest chickenhawk warlord who rules the world, who might as well be called George Bush III because he loves loves LOVES war so much, the neocon in liberal's clothing called Barack Hussein Obama, accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in order to defend the negation of peace. He pays lip service to the peacemakers, then defends his true calling, All-Conquering Khan of the World, his true title. Apparently God's got him on Shrub Bush's hotline! "Some will kill; some will be killed." But what's important is that the killing must must MUST continue, at all costs! For the infinite glory and profit of America's corporate welfare kings!

Barack Hussein Obama, the smooth-talking Chicago conman who convinced us that he's a liberal but is really the second coming of Emperor Shrub, has now definitively jumped the shark. If you remember the 2008 US presidential election, Obama was elected by an antiwar majority. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going badly and bankrupting the country. But not only did the new president continue Bush's bailout of his big banker friends, he escalated both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and is waiting like Bush for the perfect excuse to invade Iran in order to save damsel in distress Israel. He ended up being more of the same, only with the silver tongue of the Devil and a convincing liberal façade. The neocon warhawks are having multiple orgasms over their former seeming enemy's total conversion to the cause of empire.

Here's the truth. Forget the ludicrous claims that Obama is a noncitizen; birtherism, like creationism, is a cult. The problem is that the liberal savior we hailed just one year before has turned out to be little more than a kinder, gentler Shrub Bush. Unlike Bush, he can sweet talk not just his supporters but his enemies, at home and abroad. That's what he means by "diplomacy." But what he really stands for is the same old world empire of corporatism. He's not only escalating the Afghan war to the point of destabilizing Pakistan and turning it into (blowback alert!) a potentially deadly enemy (with nuclear bombs, no less), but he's also increasing the presence of the hated mercenary corporations such as the infamous Blackwater. The pied piper, provoking the "injuns" into savage fury, is leading the American people to the slaughter.

Plus, he's flubbing health care reform, which is also turning out to be the same old corporate welfare as Bush's health care reform. No wonder his popularity's falling through the floor!

Some hope. Some change. Obama, like John Kerry in 2004, has turned out to be an echo, not a choice. Just like any other politician who wants power in the corporatist dictatorship that is the American Empire.

As long as the empire exists, America will never be democratic. But remember that the empire, the colonial wars, and the corporate welfare bailout are bankrupting the country. The same imperial dynamic — external expansion leading to internal decline — destroyed the Soviet Union, America's Cold War foe. But the Cold War never ended in America. Which means that like the Soviet Union, the American Empire is also headed toward inevitable collapse. But will a free and democratic Fourth Republic rise from the ashes of the Third? That is not something any number of political saviors can settle. That's for the people alone.

(Note that I invoke the Myth of the West in its 20th-century Western-movie form. It's no coincidence that George W. Bush was proud to be known as the Cowboy President. He was John Wayne in the White House. The 19th-century "Indian wars" against the Native Americans, which inspired the Westerns, have finally reached the borders of India itself.)

Back to Take Nothing On Faith...

Obama? No. He Can't.

2009-10-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.

(Notice that I compared him to Neville Chamberlain the appeaser, not to Hitler like the neocon "deather" trolls crashing the health-care town hall meetings do, compulsively invoking Godwin's Law.)

Now consider the actual structure of this oligarchic republic. The Founders intended to prevent democracy in their 1787 constitution that established an electoral oligarchy in the new United States. The result is that when the election's over, the citizens' role in government vanishes. Citizens have no voice in government except on election day. (This applies above all on the federal level. Some states and localities have limited direct democracy.) So neither the President nor Congress has to listen to the American citizens at all. Usually, they listen to the richest CEOs and their lobbyists instead.

Alas, Obama turns out to be no exception. He doesn't care about you, American people. He, like nearly all other American politicians, serves first and foremost those corporations that bought him into the White House. In the case of health reform, it's the very corporations that started and spread the "deather" conspiracy theory in the first place. With the war, it's the military profiteers who laugh at the powerless people's desire for an end to the war; after all, America's business is war. If he weren't such a pushover, we'd have Canadian- or European-style socialized medicine by now, rather than yet more taxpayer money crammed down the collective throat of the corporate welfare kings.

Also consider this: Obama is carrying on Bush's massive bailout of Bush's bankster buddies. Instead of helping the victims, he's helping the Wall Street crooks who crashed the economy and screwing the victims. He's letting AIG and Goldman Sachs give out even more obscene bonuses, and punishing those who criticize them for it. Worst of all, he's not only not stopping the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but escalating them — exactly like the hated Bush!

Is this the Barack Obama we thought we elected? Hell no! President Obama has already surrendered to the corporate health care lobby; the bill he's now pushing guarantees massive corporate welfare for them and a raw deal for us. The military-industrial complex all but owns him the same way it owned Bush, which is why he has been so eager to prove that he doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize by immediately acting like a warmongering Bush and escalating the Afghan war.

In an electoral oligarchy, politicians don't represent the people. They represent whoever buys them into office. In the corporatist system that currently controls the Western world, that usually means the biggest corporate welfare kings. Obama has turned out to be no exception.

That's why I'm afraid I have to say:

No, he can't.

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

Extra! AP Declares War On Internet!

2009-08-02T20:08:00.000-07:00

#Bloggers ap #censorship
In June, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort. The Retort claimed that citing an AP article falls under the fair use law. The AP insists that any citation other than a link constitutes plagiarism under the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (full text in PDF format here). Under the new AP copyright policy, it is forbidden to copy even one word from an AP article without payment. The cost for quoting? $2.50 per word!

You know what this means.

The Associated Press has declared war against the Internet.

Attention fellow bloggers! You can't quote from AP articles unless you want your asses to get sued for cost plus damages, and maybe even get thrown in jail for plagiarism (under the fascist DMCA, of course) while you're at it! So do what TechCrunch does, among others: ban AP! If you want to blog or tweet a news story, look at the byline; if it says "Associated Press" or "AP", do not blog or tweet it if you don't want the cartel suing you for copyright violations! This goes not just for newspaper websites, but also for such aggregators as Google News and the Huffington Post. I went even further: I blocked all of AP's accounts on Twitter, starting with @AP.

AP is a cartel not of our time. If you go to their history page, you'll find that it was started in 1846. It's nineteenth-century, folks! Older than the RIAA, the MPAA, and similar 20th-century media cartels! The newspaper cartel known as the Associated Press was founded in 1846. Its war against the blogs and news aggregators betrays the fact that its collective mentality is stuck in the 19th century.

Face it: the newspaper industry is dying. There's even a Newspaper Death Watch keeping track of the death of the industry. Like the RIAA's relentless fascist jihad against music file traders, AP's decision reflects the desperation of the so-called "mainstream media" (MSM) conglomerates and the print news outlets they own. Several newspaper publishers are even going so far as to make their websites accessible only through paid subscriptions — as if that would get them more viewers.

As with the now hated RIAA, the members of the AP are dying. They are trying to prevent the inevitable extinction of their medium by punishing the Internet. Great move, MSM. Just the thing that will accelerate your demise. As of April 6, the Associated Press has officially jumped the shark. Only decline is ahead of it now, before it inevitably ceases to exist, along with the entire industry it represents.

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

Going Public Again

2009-07-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

I've neglected my opinion blog here since, actually, Inauguration Day. For some reason, despite my strong opinions and my desire to keep up with current events, I couldn't think of anything to write. I've posted lots of entries on my main and opinion blogs in the past six months, but nothing here. Since then, my attitude has mellowed some; I'm no longer quite the "angry young man" I was last year (this post on my main blog explains part of the reason). But now I feel I'm ready to take on the world again, so I intend to post here regularly now.

Here's a few of the current events that I'm keeping up on right now:

The Iranian revolution in progress. Right now, the massive and frequently violent protests over the perceived rigging of the recent presidential election have died down considerably, but the theocratic régime is increasingly divided.
The anti-abortion movement seems to be breaking up because the "pro-life" organizations are increasingly far more conservative than the majority of Americans opposed to abortion.
The rise of the conspiracy theory of the "birthers", who claim that President Obama is not an American citizen and therefore cannot legally be President. They even have their own website! The big problem they have with Obama, it seems to me, is that he's black. The "birthers" are neoconservatives who are almost all white; they ruled America till January 20 this year, but now they are bitter and even willing to call for violent revolution.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, of course.

And other issues of the day, in their context.

But I'm not going to neglect my opinions and philosophy, either. This blog isn't purely political; I don't call it my opinion blog for nothing.

I hope to post at least once a week at minimum.

Update: Sarah Palin wants her own radio show! Interesting choice for someone who keeps attacking the media. Even so, whenever people ask me about the Alaskan ex-governor's future, I always tell them "Fox News". I have to say it: I told you so!

Inauguration Day 2009: The Day Everything Changed

2009-01-20T12:35:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or do you too think it highly significant that Inauguration Day this year came the day after Martin Luther King Day? MLK Day is an American government holiday established to honor the legacy of the martyred civil rights hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the famous "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the 1963 March on Washington, he gave voice to the idea of equality between Americans of African descent, most of whose original ancestors were brought to America as slaves, and their European-descended fellow citizens. Today, the dream has still not been fully achieved. However, today represents one big step closer.

Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African immigrant, has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Hell has officially frozen over.

Much of the credit for the seemingly impossible becoming reality rests with President Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who I like to call Emperor Shrub "Dubya" Enron (in honor of the corporation that bought him into the White House). He actually said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Bush ran for office under the slogan "compassionate conservatism" — whatever that was, other than a meaningless yet emotive duckspeak catchphrase coined by a hired ghostwriter. But when, during his first year in office, 9/11 came around and the gang lord Osama bin Laden sent his goons into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon using hijacked civilian airplanes, Shrub Enron at once placed the imperial crown on his head and proceeded to invade the world. At home, he had a rubber-stamp Congress pass laws aimed at curtailing freedom, and used executive orders (read: royal decrees) and signing statements to try to counteract the barriers the U.S. Constitution put in the way of his absolute power. However, he had no such barriers abroad, especially in the Middle East. The first thing he did as emperor of the world was to invade Iraq — a war still going on, and which will likely destroy America as well as Iraq.

Did I mention that Enron, of which he used to be a vice president, bought the presidency for him? Bush, like his father, declared war on "welfare queens", but he immediately became the sugar daddy to the corporate welfare kings, starting of course with his good buddy "Kenny Boy" Lay — who just happened to be Bush's owner, the chairman of Enron. It was orgy time for the financial oligarchy, and especially the infamous military-industrial complex. His vice president — Bush's, not Lay's (that would be his hitman, Jeffrey Skilling), was Richard Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton (corporate welfare watch here). Sure enough, with Shrub Enron and Dick Halliburton in charge, the military-industrial corporate welfare queens charged into Iraq like an all-destroying Mongol horde and proceeded to steal everything. Since one of Bush's top priorities was to outsource America's jobs to slave-wage countries, the American economy now rests upon the corporate welfare kings who rule Iraq, which is why American troops continue to occupy Iraq to serve them.

Bush may claim membership in the theocratic Christian Right, but his dictatorship was the high point of the neofascist political movement called neoconservatism. Besides being politically authoritarian, neoconservatism is also corrupt on principle.

I say: Good riddance to Emperor Shrub Enron, his chickenhawk cabal, and their gods, the corporate welfare kings.

Now, a whole lot of skeptical Americans, and countless millions of even more skeptical non-Americans, are doubtful that the new president will be able or willing to change much about this. However, this is only President Obama's first day on the job, he hasn't done anything yet. He's said a few things about what he plans to do; but we'll have to see whether or not he can actually reverse Bush's biggest mistakes.

But now the dictator is gone, having blown us off on his way back to Texas. Now a new era has begun. Even if everything continues to stay the same on the political level, at least at first, everything has changed on the symbolic level. The impossible has finally happened: a member of the former slave race is now presides over the country from the Oval Office. Some phenomena defy reason. President Obama may disappoint us in the next 4 or 8 years; some are even predicting that he will be an epic disaster in his own right; but on day one of the Obama presidency, hope still reigns.

Back to "Take Nothing On Faith"...

What I missed by not posting here for so long...

2009-01-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting here often. In fact, for almost four months last year, I didn't post here at all. And so I missed a whole lot of things, including some very important events. Here's what I missed:

First and foremost, the American election, and especially the long process that led to the historic election of Barack Obama as president.
The sudden and cataclysmic collapse of the American financial industry and the total extinction of the investment banks, which has all but plunged the world into economic depression. Recently, this was complicated by the collapse of Bernard Madoff's gigantic pyramid scheme.
The big December 2008 snowstorm that paralyzed Seattle and the Northwest, with its January sequel. (However, I did take pictures...)
And other things that happened, but which I've already forgotten.

There are advantages to keeping your readers informed about current events, or at least your take on these events. The tradeoff, however, is that this is time-consuming. I have limited time, and much of it is taken up by writing my novel. So I haven't really been keeping up lately. For almost four months, I hardly even touched my computer at all.

I hope to get myself informed enough to comment more often here. Since it takes time to do so — that is, to research what I'm writing about, for one thing — I probably won't post as often as I'd like. Still, I should at least try...

Finally: This Blog Gets Its Final Name

2009-01-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

At last, I found the right name for this opinion blog. It is "Take Nothing On Faith", which just happens to be the motto I live by, just as "with great power comes great responsibility" is Spider-Man's. Now, how did I come up with this title? Archetypically: it came to me while I was brushing my teeth.

Also, I found out why my recent posts look so screwy in their layout. I found out when I was preparing to post this very entry. It was the post template, something that can be corrected in my settings. Believe it or not, it's a bug in the regular Blogger, one that amazingly does not exist (or has been corrected) in Blogger in Draft. Somehow regular Blogger has been turning my newlines into spaces. I corrected the problem manually in this post, then I corrected it definitively in the settings menu — in Draft, of course. Problem solved. Now I'm ready to start posting here again. Stay tuned...

Nihilism and Three Levels of Mindsets

2009-01-01T18:16:00.000-08:00

In my previous entry Atheism Without Nihilism, a pious Christian posted an anonymous comment that, in retrospect, made me realize that between people with differing mindsets, no communication is possible. To the religious mind, atheism is defined as nihilism. Why? Because of religion's definition of "value": all value is of God, and is therefore supernatural by definition. If God doesn't exist, then value doesn't exist. Ergo, atheism = nihilism. period. And so if you deny the existence of a Supreme Being, to avoid nihilism you must redefine the meaning of value so that it refers to this world and not the world above. However, you can only make the redefinition if your mind has evolved to a sufficient level of complexity. Thus, I need to speak of mindsets.

I learned about three evolutionary levels of mind by reading Richard Brodie (his site here), specifically Virus of the Mind. These levels are:

gene-driven, meaning concerned only with one's instincts and appetites;
meme-driven, meaning concerned with one's ideology or religion, sometimes at the expense of life itself, one's own or others'; and
self-driven, of a sufficiently high level of consciousness that one can define the way one defines their life.

These three levels of consciousness are obvious enough if you observe people long enough. They were first described by, believe it or not, the ancient Gnostics, who were notoriously unworldly but who saw the effects of people's level of consciousness and divided them into "hyletics" or materialists, "psychics" or conventionally religious people, and "pneumatics" or truly spiritual people. Modern science made the "pneumatics" into objective realists, people who treat reality and themselves with objectivity. The religious mentality has become every bit as apparent among Gnostics as among more conventionally religious people. So the schema itself has evolved, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Now the thing about mindsets is that minds operating on a higher level can understand those at lower levels, but lower-level minds cannot understand those at higher levels. The religious mind cannot understand the scientific mind; people who operate according to dogmas (religious or ideological) defined as Absolute Truths cannot possibly conceive of the higher mindset in which people submit everything to objective inquiry and take nothing on faith.

So, to answer the question as to whether atheism is nihilism: yes &mdash but only on the second, meme-driven, dogmatic (religious and ideological) level of consciousness. But on the third, self-driven, scientific level of consciousness, definitely not. Indeed, the Level 2 belief in a Supreme Being, or at least Absolute Truth, strikes the Level 3 mind as itself nihilistic, because it drains all value from the world and leaves it a desolate wasteland from which Level 2 longs to escape to the world above. So Level 2 minds like my anonymous commenter's and Level 3 minds like mine are doomed to talk past each other. Less tolerant Level 2 minds simply declare "holy war" against all other minds that are like them, and become terrorists.

Why do I need a new opinion blog?

2008-12-28T18:02:00.000-08:00

Because, for one thing, I realized that the URL I chose for my original opinion blog, The Space Helmet Show, didn't quite fit the opinion blog mold. And the name "The Outside View" that I chose all the way back in 2001, when I was merely considering blogging (I didn't actually set up my first two blogs till March of this year), turned out to be so common as to be utterly cliché. And so I'm going to abandon that overly common name "The Outside View", repurpose The Space Helmet Show as a repository for my more miscellaneous stuff, and transfer the more political posts on TSHS here.

I like to keep each of my blogs focused on a single range of subjects. That way, I can keep them in order. I have a few more blogs I want to set up, since I have a few more subjects I can use them on, including myself. All of them will link to the other in my list of "Links to My Sites".

Soon, I will create both my main homepage and my project page. I'll use my main site as the central hub for all my sites, including my blogs and my future social network accounts. Some of this is in my list of Big, Fun, Scary goals I drew up for NaNoWriMo, and some are not. From now on, my politically incorrect opinions go here.

The Oligarchic American Constitution

2008-06-05T04:44:00.000-07:00

The official spin is that America is a democracy. It's a crucial part of the national mythology. Well, guess what: This is nowhere near the truth. The Founders never said they were setting up a democracy. In fact, in The Federalist, three of them argued repeatedly against democracy. The republic the Framers set up with their 1787 Constitution was intended to be an electoral oligarchy. What else would you expect from a constitution that originally gave slavemasters extra votes representing 3/5 of each of their slaves?

On the other hand, there is a lot of democracy below the federal level: in most states and localities, direct democracy has been implemented in the form of initiative, referendum, and recall. It's not quite as participatory as the Athenian assembly, in which all the citizens met every month or week to do what legislatures and city councils do today, but it's actually far more democratic than the US federal government, which restricts democratic participation to electing a limited number of officials and was far more restrictive in its unamended original version.

Naturally, there's a huge contradiction that is undermining the entire creaky 18th-century American system. On the one hand, you have the oligarchic federal government which has over the decades become increasingly monarchic. On the other, there's the long-term trend toward democratization which has led to the universal right to vote and to expanding civil rights for women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and immigrants among others. The democratic trend also involves the expansion of the vote until now all adult citizens can vote, where originally only propertied white males were eligible. Increasingly, these two opposite trends are working against each other. Eventually they will not be able to coexist, and one or the other must prevail at the other's expense. At that time, a revolution will be highly likely. That time will be when the colonial conquest campaign in the Middle East is lost and the troops come home.

The 1787 Constitution is obsolete. There might be a way to save it: state nullification, the right of any one state to veto or nullify any federal law, regulation, and decree. Thomas Jefferson himself came up with that, and insisted that it was the only thing that would ultimately prevent the American republic from degenerating into a tyranny. Now would be a good time to revive the idea. It would make an excellent 28th Amendment. Otherwise, it would be a good idea to scrap the dysfunctional federal system entirely, and replace the current 1787 Constitution with something at least as good at protecting rights but far more democratic.

The problem with an oligarchic constitution, you see, is that an oligarchy ultimately loses touch with the mass of ordinary citizens. Oligarchs are unaccountable to the people. Increasingly drunk on power, they lose touch with reality as well. In the democratic age, good government requires the rulers to be accountable to the citizens, or they will rule arbitrarily and tyrannically. So a modern constitution must make the government accountable. That means democracy in some form. Some critics of the current constitution advocate a European-style parliamentary system elected through proportional representation instead of the current setup. What was originally the equality of the executive and legislative branches has degenerated into the monarchic supremacy of the executive, or "Imperial Presidency". European-style parliaments subordinate the executive (usually called a "prime minster") to the legislature. This may be more workable. However, it still proves oligarchic in practice if it doesn't have at least some features of direct democracy (initiative, referendum, recall, nullification). But we won't know what we'll come up with till the revolution begins and the Fourth Republic is born.