Thursday, July 12, 2012
More family history - education
Further Confessions
"You can't live in the world as it ought to be. You must live in the world as it is."
This statement, in various forms and contexts, is literally "the story of my life." Like, I'm not the realist. I'm not the one who has lived in grinding poverty in the streets and fields of Amerika all my life.
But I have learned from it.
Of course, most people have no idea. They can't even imagine what it's like to be hungry (something I have admittedly never been - unless, of course, by choice); to have no home, no land, no friends, no "support group", no one who even cares if you live or die. Or to be fighting against an implacable robot army, which kills indiscriminately and without warning or reason. To have your land, your home, your business, your government humiliated and destroyed, replacing it with some sort of "democracy" controlled by the Zionists.
Or to have a family which is so ingrown and reactionary that even one born and raised here has no idea what the hell they are doing except that it's some sort of faux monarchy or theocracy, and somehow, we're part of it.
Such is the reality I inhabit. I didn't choose it; I found it. It was already there. I didn't invent it. Other "realities" I have inhabited include the World of Ayn Rand, which fictionalizes (satirizes) several major Montanans, as well as the Russian-Jewish aristocracy which controls so much of Amerika, today. If you're familiar with the character of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, I know her well. I think she was modeled on my mother, who was Jean Arthur's cousin, and looked a lot like her - an actress very familiar to Ayn Rand.
Just to give you an idea, both Jean and my mother, Vivian, had a favorite aunt, Palma Nelson. Guess what she did? She was the first licensed woman railroad engineer (train driver) in the country, and she worked for the NP out of Billings. I have yet to see an NP museum which displays this fact, or anything about her, but I'm hoping I'll see it before I pass on. We're all counting on Mr. Buffett to save us from The Octopus.
Here is another "reality" I occupy or share.
Perhaps I was autistic (we lived directly down-wind from the Anaconda Smelter in Great Falls, so who knows how much lead and mercury -and even uranium, polonium, etc. - I inhaled and ingested as a child?). Or perhaps I had a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome. I've certainly been a "social moron" all my life, having little or no idea why most people think and act as they do. And this would prevent me from being in the honors math and science classes in high school, even though I tested at the highest levels in those subjects, and desperately wanted to be an astro-physicist until I actually arrived at college, when I changed my major to Economics with a minor in Philosophy. By that time, I had developed severe blocks against learning math in a classroom. The numbers were just not adding up.
From the school's persepective, I was a very slow learner, basically unteachable, yet my first IQ test given in the 2nd grade recorded a score of 145 - well into the genius level. I couldn't read at all until I was midway through the 2nd grade, and only did that by comparing a story (about dinosaurs) I already knew almost by heart with the printed text. I also had an excellent 4th grade teacher who recognized my innate intelligence and potential. It's interesting to reflect that both she and my second grade teacher were Jewish - Miss Green and Miss Amman (are there Jordanian Jews? I think so!).
Of course, I didn't know that I was "a slow learner" at the time, anymore than I knew I was a genius, and only found that score by getting a copy of my GFPS records in the early 1990's. Having come from what was then called "a broken home" and family plagued by alcoholism and other addictions, I was always short on self-esteem. But I was a "gifted underachiever," and once I learned to read, I spent several hours a day on my own researches, and always tested several grade levels above my own.
As with Isaac Asimov, the public library was my salvation, along with comic books. That library no longer exists, so any young person with similar "issues" will be SOL. Of course, they were probably on the internet by the age of 6, so it really won't make much difference, except that they will be cyborgs while I was just a simple American farmer with delusions of grandeur. Not too far from Luke Skywalker, actually.
My handicaps were poor handwriting, lack of physical coordination, and very poor social skills, so I was considered semi-retarded by most of my teachers. And I never participated in sports, nor was I any sort of "team player." I would have liked to skip a grade or two, as my father had in his one-room country school at Upper Highwood, but that was no longer "done". And so, I continued to struggle along, wasting time being taught stuff I had already mastered years before, and being discouraged from pursuing other studies on my own.
Fortunately, I usually had one or more peer friends who was on the same track, and when in high school, my friends were among the elites - both working class and professional - and they were all high achievers. So, it was the books and discussions I shared with them which shaped my later development. And of course I was always part of the "landed aristocracy" as well as Masonic and other societies. That was a time when a political campaign called "the Great Society" could actually flourish and win.
All the more difficult, I suppose, for people I grew up with in Montana (family and friends/associates alike) to understand what I am doing, now. Gone entirely from their view is the young man I was in California, handsome, popular, and even athletic. Or the struggling writer and intellectual I became in Boulder, CO, or the esthete I would become in Missoula 3 years later. In Great Falls, I have worked as a substitute teacher, cab driver, and perhaps best-known of all, a public-interest activist and 3-time candidate for local office (never getting more than 10% of the vote, against people who weren't even born here, and never went to college).
So, you have to call me an abject failure in all worldly respects. The world "as it ought to be" is of no interest to anyone. We just want to play the same old games of "who do you know?" and "how much money do you have?" Those determine everything. And even if I know more people than I thought, apparently I don't know "the right people," although I still know many of the leading families and individuals in town (most of whom apparently have a very low opinion of me, by now).
It always amazes me in these blogs and the comments to news stories just how few of these "bold and beautiful" civic leaders ever say anything at all. Apparently they are all following Lincoln's maxim (or was it Mark Twain's?) that "It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Obama and the Nuclear Conundrum
Obama and the Nuclear Conundrum
[The following essay was written last year, and may have been circulated in a sightly different form]
We are in a war of principles and ideas, and the means to communicate them, yet most of our leaders have no concept of what a principle or idea might be, and how to reconcile it either with personal ethics or public policy. I wonder what Pres. Obama's teachers must be thinking. Is he doing what they taught him, or is he "the bad boy" who is trying to make everyone look corrupt and stupid?
Is he a proud black American, or has he become the weak, fearful, slavish pawn of "the dark side" of town, or the universe? What corporate gang bosses does he listen to, or does he think that he's actually the boss? Is he afraid for his family and reputation? He should be. He is following policies and principles which will allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to wipe him out by contract or some other form of "remote control," since those are the policies and practices he is inflicting on others (targeted assassinations with no legal proceedings or basis in law). As we used to say in the wild west, his life isn't worth a plugged nickle, and in the Nuclear Age, neither is the life of anyone else.
For more than 3 decades, I've been saying that the primary focus of all political action has to be the elimination of nuclear weapons. As long as we have this "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads by a thread, nothing else is worth doing or even thinking about. We are all an hour away from complete annihilation - literally vaporization and irradiation to a level of death within a few week's time. And here in Great Falls, we live, eat, sleep, and dream with the people who are poised to unleash this holocaust. Yet, no more than a few dozen of our "heroic Montanans" have ever been willing to stand up and confront it. Indeed, most of our appointed and elected officials are hell-bent on increasing the risks and even certainty that this will happen.
President Obama spoke out forcefully for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It was the one good reason people had to vote for him. So, who does he appoint as his Secretary of Energy? One of the foremost proponents of nuclear power, Mr. Chu (and this was a fact which was well-concealed in the confirmation process). The same is true of the Pentagon. What used to be a powerful faction there in favor of unilateral or universal nuclear disarmament, with the U.S. taking "the moral high ground" and leading this process, has been totally eliminated. The Nuclear Doctrine reigns supreme, even extending to the further development and deployment of nuclear warheads to counter the various "new members of the club" - Israel, Pakistan, and India. Besides those, there are dozens more countries with mature nuclear power reactor technologies and fuel cycles. It's only a few month's work to re-process or enrich enough plutonium or uranium to make some Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons. And there are still hundreds or thousands of Soviet-era nukes (as well as U.S. stockpiles overseas) which could be (or have been) stolen, diverted, or taken over by local forces and used in a matter of hours or days. So, even if you have total faith in the U.S., Russian, British, French, and Chines governments and military command and control systems, you have not yet begun to understand or appreciate the gravity of the situation.
In the early 1990's, local peace activists held a "Town Meeting" at the Providence Forum at UGF and invited all local political candidates to come and state their views. That was where I first met Stuart Lewin, who gave a very strong and moving statement against our strategic nuclear arsenal, and the dangers it poses both to our local environment and economy, and to the world. Peggy Beltrone, at the same event (it was her first run for County Commissioner) expressed her "support for the base" and maintained that it is a liberalizing and progressive influence on the City of Great Falls and Central Montana. I doubt that she was, even then, an advocate for nuclear weapons or nuclear power generation (they are basically one and the same - you can't have one without at least the potenial for the other). But no one runs for office here without paying lip service to all the "benefits" which our local nuclear arsenal provides to Montanans, if not the rest of the world.
This is the reality we face - people hanging desperately on to a Doomsday Machine in the hopes of gaining wealth or other benefits from it. And that is what must be changed.
[The following essay was written last year, and may have been circulated in a sightly different form]
We are in a war of principles and ideas, and the means to communicate them, yet most of our leaders have no concept of what a principle or idea might be, and how to reconcile it either with personal ethics or public policy. I wonder what Pres. Obama's teachers must be thinking. Is he doing what they taught him, or is he "the bad boy" who is trying to make everyone look corrupt and stupid?
Is he a proud black American, or has he become the weak, fearful, slavish pawn of "the dark side" of town, or the universe? What corporate gang bosses does he listen to, or does he think that he's actually the boss? Is he afraid for his family and reputation? He should be. He is following policies and principles which will allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to wipe him out by contract or some other form of "remote control," since those are the policies and practices he is inflicting on others (targeted assassinations with no legal proceedings or basis in law). As we used to say in the wild west, his life isn't worth a plugged nickle, and in the Nuclear Age, neither is the life of anyone else.
For more than 3 decades, I've been saying that the primary focus of all political action has to be the elimination of nuclear weapons. As long as we have this "Sword of Damocles" hanging over our heads by a thread, nothing else is worth doing or even thinking about. We are all an hour away from complete annihilation - literally vaporization and irradiation to a level of death within a few week's time. And here in Great Falls, we live, eat, sleep, and dream with the people who are poised to unleash this holocaust. Yet, no more than a few dozen of our "heroic Montanans" have ever been willing to stand up and confront it. Indeed, most of our appointed and elected officials are hell-bent on increasing the risks and even certainty that this will happen.
President Obama spoke out forcefully for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It was the one good reason people had to vote for him. So, who does he appoint as his Secretary of Energy? One of the foremost proponents of nuclear power, Mr. Chu (and this was a fact which was well-concealed in the confirmation process). The same is true of the Pentagon. What used to be a powerful faction there in favor of unilateral or universal nuclear disarmament, with the U.S. taking "the moral high ground" and leading this process, has been totally eliminated. The Nuclear Doctrine reigns supreme, even extending to the further development and deployment of nuclear warheads to counter the various "new members of the club" - Israel, Pakistan, and India. Besides those, there are dozens more countries with mature nuclear power reactor technologies and fuel cycles. It's only a few month's work to re-process or enrich enough plutonium or uranium to make some Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons. And there are still hundreds or thousands of Soviet-era nukes (as well as U.S. stockpiles overseas) which could be (or have been) stolen, diverted, or taken over by local forces and used in a matter of hours or days. So, even if you have total faith in the U.S., Russian, British, French, and Chines governments and military command and control systems, you have not yet begun to understand or appreciate the gravity of the situation.
In the early 1990's, local peace activists held a "Town Meeting" at the Providence Forum at UGF and invited all local political candidates to come and state their views. That was where I first met Stuart Lewin, who gave a very strong and moving statement against our strategic nuclear arsenal, and the dangers it poses both to our local environment and economy, and to the world. Peggy Beltrone, at the same event (it was her first run for County Commissioner) expressed her "support for the base" and maintained that it is a liberalizing and progressive influence on the City of Great Falls and Central Montana. I doubt that she was, even then, an advocate for nuclear weapons or nuclear power generation (they are basically one and the same - you can't have one without at least the potenial for the other). But no one runs for office here without paying lip service to all the "benefits" which our local nuclear arsenal provides to Montanans, if not the rest of the world.
This is the reality we face - people hanging desperately on to a Doomsday Machine in the hopes of gaining wealth or other benefits from it. And that is what must be changed.
Friday, July 6, 2012
Peace, Emerson, Transcendentalism, WWII. Objectivism
Objectivism- A philosophy for automatons - slave labor
It just occurred to me that it is Objectivism, a non-denominational faith system bent on some sort of "aristocracy of ability", which now rules the world. The trouble is, this totally materialistic, life-choking system doesn't agree on what constitutes "ability." Is it the ability to destroy whole species? Is it the ability to melt the polar ice caps? Is it the ability to destroy human civilization entirely? We can sure do that! What kind of "abilities" are we talking about, here?
Or is it the ability (to quote the late Rodney King) to "get along?" Can't we all just get along? Why do we have to fight and destroy each other? And where are our "respectable" philosophers to tell us this, and help us "get it done?" They must be on sabbatical.
"Peace is Our Profession"
(the official "motto" of the USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) until the late 1980's)
It seems that the philosophy and spirituality taught and expressed at our military academies is somewhat different. In the 1980's, "Peace is Our Profession" was posted in huge letters at the Orwellian gateway to our local military garrison - Malmstrom AFB - and its "mission" of being prepared to launch up to 200 Minuteman Missiles, each of them carrying up to three nuclear warheads of 120-320KT yield (I've got the numbers somewhere, but that's close), nearly half-way around the world.
But don't tell anybody. "Ain't gonna study war no more" and all that rot. We need to learn it from direct experience, right?
Launching all (or one "Flight" of 10) only takes about 5 minutes, before any war or attack has actually happened, but if submarines launched a "first strike" attack off the coast near Seattle, it would only take 12 minutes for them to get here. That's how they figure it. It's called "launch on warning" - a doctrine which is now discredited, but still might be implemented in any of the world's strategic nuclear missile facilities, or by whomever ends up with them after a coup or revolution.
Indeed, the whole doctrine of "deterrence" has been utterly discredited, too, but that is still the official Pentagon and Congressional rationale for having a nuclear arsenal here, or having any at all. The classic "Committee of 100" doctrine is that to have developed nuclear weapons in the first place was a mistake, and with the Abolition movement of the 1980's (of which I was a peripheral, and I must say neglected, participant), the use of uranium fission to produce electricity was also thoroughly discredited, once it was understood that any such facility and its associated technologies (like uranium enrichment) are immediately transferable to bomb production.
No amount of "treaties" or "inspections" can conceal or negate that fact. Israel, India, Pakistan, and DPR Korea have all done it. And, indeed, that is exactly the rationale being applied to Iran, today, while all the other nations which have produced bombs out of their "nuclear power industry" are among the accusers and attackers of one country, Iran, which likely has no evil motives whatsoever. Just to shed some light, so to speak, on what everyone else is doing, Iran has become the designated scapegoat for the crimes of Israel, the Baathists, the Saudi's, et al. It's time to stop that nonsense before someone really gets hurt.
The importance of rationality in a world of nuclear hair-triggers
This is why many of us were so taken with Objectivism. Even though it is largely 19th century materialist doctrines which are now exploded, it struck all sorts of responsive chords. We were the new Abolitionists, the Freedom Fighters, the Revolutionaries who ended war and corrupt tyrants in a process of unifying and uniting the entire planet. We were Utilitarians. We were going to fix things that capitalism or Fascism or Bolshevism had thrown askew. It was the Happy Time!
But the discipline of reason, of understanding, remains supreme. It must be this way, or something like this. We can make those kinds of judgements based on reason and science, a sub-category. (Originally, it all came out of theology, so there was no sense that the two were in conflict, except that the theologians felt threatened by findings which questioned their dogmas and practice).
I took enough philosophy to have a minor in it, and one of the Upper Division/Grad courses I took was entirely devoted to Immanual Kant, a philosopher whom Ayn Rand professed to particularly despise. Like so many others, it was her characterization of the History of Philosophy, and many of the great figures in it (indeed, most of them - there are few philosophers whom Rand had anything good to say about, whatsoever) - it was this particularly obnoxious material which drove me out.
I'm sure that was intentional, but the deeper or "more structural" reason is that Kant's Categorical Imperative is perceived as the opposite of Rand's "Egoism", which is a later development in ideas culminating in Max Stirner and Nietzsche, as well as the New England Transcendentalists, who were close intellectual cousins. --particularly Margaret Fuller, who translated Kant professonally, and Emerson, who read and studied the complete works of Goethe in the original German.
Was World War II "Emerson's Revenge?"
I was joking the other day (like 5 years ago, maybe) with a descendent of RW Emerson whose father was a Mustang pilot over Europe during WWII. "It didn't get any better than that for the Emerson's," I told her. "That was the culmination of two centuries of history."
Later, reflecting on this exchange, it almost seemed as though WWII was a direct result of the Emerson and Forbes dynasty, and their "construction" of our own Civil War (not to mention AT&T or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Berkshires Railroad).
Most people who read Emerson, today, don't like him. He is far too stiff, condescending, and maintaining the persona of a prophet - truly Nietzsche's Zarathustra. [Oh, and by the way, Zoroastrianism is the ancient, pre-Islamic religion of Persia (Iran), and is practiced in India and elsewhere, today - especially the Parsis (who speak a Farsi dialect) and include many famous people in the West, like Zubin Mehta. So, all this hatred of and threats against Iran is personal for some of us.]
The Mustang pilot's love was - you guessed it - airplanes, so he went to work for Pratt and Whitney after the war. And he married a midwest wind-generator heiress, but the family called him back, and persuaded him to put his 8 children through college by managing the Forbes Bank trust, which the merged family members all participate in. I'd heard of "trust fund babies", but I really didn't have a referent for it until I met these people (who, I think, were considerably burdened by this fortune, although it is now diluted down to maybe half or less of what a working person would earn in a lifetime).
Several other Emerson's I met were pilots, builders, small entrepreneurs, musicians, and the like - not really interested in "academics, " but intelligent and creative (and very morally acute!) in their speech and actions.
What about Fukushima?
As for TEPCO and its Fukushima power plants, the truth has finally been released in an official parliamentary finding. Everything we said all along has been verified - in somewhat muted form, but the main point, that the plants were not well-designed or subject to reasonable oversight and regulation, is well-documented. And it's not over. Nearly every week I read some new story about how the on-site fuel storage could combust at any time, with devastating consequences for the whole Northern Hemisphere. On the Beach, indeed.
===========
Inside the Beltway
It's getting so I can barely stand to watch any TV interviews or discussions emanating from "inside the Beltway" - Washington, D.C. Great Falls (VA) is the richest town in the U.S., now, having recently surpassed the more famous ones nestled in the New York and California suburbs - like Scarsborough or Beverly Hills. But you would never know this in Great Falls, Montana - a far more powerful and visionary city, which is now on its knees to ALEC, the Pentagon, Wal-Mart, and the medical drug rackets which have destroyed our schools and families much worse than marijuana or cocaine dealers could have ever imagined, and paid for with YOUR MONEY (Medicaid, CHIP, etc.).
Notice that Denny Rehberg is now proclaiming his record of support for these kinds of "Drugs in the Schools" programs (and every other totalitarian, mind and thought control measure). He might have said the word "libertarian" a few times, but he certainly doesn't know what it means. Dems and Reps alike are all big fans of Homeland Scurity, and keeping everyone under surveillance lest they look at pictures of naked children, or check out a Koran, or something. And the WWI Sedition laws, never repealed but thought to be dead letters, are being revived to suppress all criticism and dissent.
Seriously, the politicians and their respective power brokers and financial supporters are 90% or more behind all this stuff. Look at the recent Attorneys General, and how they only got worse under Obama. Whatever these people's conception of the law and Constitution, it is very different from what most people understood by them even 30 years ago. It's like the actual meaning and application of our once-fine legal system is now merely a game of social and economic warfare, where the "best-connected" usually win - often by simply avoiding any real legal or moral arguments and decisions, entirely.
I've been intending to write a lot about ethics and how our society's social and economic decline is the consequence of a prior ethical decline, which occurred during and after our participation in World War II. And that, of course, was only a follow-up to World War I, which was itself the consquence of various empires jostling each other over boundaries and treaties, natural resources, and the control of governments which possessed them.
It's been going on for more than a century, if not forever, and we're rapidly approaching the centennial of "the Guns of August" (1914) which began this calamity for Western Civilization and the rest of the planet. The interesting thing for us is that Montana has been in the thick of it since the late 1800's, and perhaps as early as the 1840's and '50's, when the people and landscape of what is now Montana first became known to the rest of the world.
If you've lived anywhere else, and told people you are from Montana, you know what I'm talking about. There's a lot of mystique and status to it, as well as suspicion from more urbane types, who can't help but think we're all gunfighters and savages. If so, we've apparently converted the urban centers and even other countries to our "vision" of a future full of war and barbarism.
Sen. Tester ran, initially, on a platform of repealing the PATRIOT Act entirely, and like Gov. Schweitzer, drew a firm line in the sand against "Real ID" and stuff like that - chip implantation in animals, for example.
Rehberg actually had a better record pre-2008 than Tester has now on this stuff - because of pressure from the Right - the Gun Lobby, military lobbies, TEA's, etc. Tester was doing fine until the Baucus people (including Jim Messina, who was running the Obama Campaign last I heard) started giving "advice." Now, the Baucusite controllers have thoroughly "Borged" him - he was taken over and made to act and speak and vote in ways which didn't "reflect badly" on Baucus's most deplorable record. And so, his record is very similar to Rehberg's, who is the real Republican, while Baucus and Tester are simply pandering to what they take to be the Republican position, hoping to attract Republican voters to their equally "conservative" (totalitarian) policies.
But, hey, one YD Dem is as good as another, right? Meanwhile, the rest will dig in as BD's and make sure that nothing "liberal" or "unpatriotic" gets by them.
I grew up with and still know strong Democrats and strong Republicans - who really believe in and will fight for this stuff - whatever their "side" and its bosses tells them to do.
I have a question. What if it's the same side? What if we're all in this together, and we'd better start listening and thinking straight or there won't even be one side left to hang on to? Most people, I've learned, actually fear one or both parties, and want nothing to do with supporting either of them, or if they are the timid type, will say or do nothing to oppose either "evil." And so, they suffer grievously in silence and submission. Isn't this a great country?
If that's the way people feel, I really have nothing more to say to them. We have to want to fix things and change for the better. If we don't have that, and a willingness to stand up to evil and oppression, then to hell with it. Just have a good time, and don't worry about tomorrow.
It just occurred to me that it is Objectivism, a non-denominational faith system bent on some sort of "aristocracy of ability", which now rules the world. The trouble is, this totally materialistic, life-choking system doesn't agree on what constitutes "ability." Is it the ability to destroy whole species? Is it the ability to melt the polar ice caps? Is it the ability to destroy human civilization entirely? We can sure do that! What kind of "abilities" are we talking about, here?
Or is it the ability (to quote the late Rodney King) to "get along?" Can't we all just get along? Why do we have to fight and destroy each other? And where are our "respectable" philosophers to tell us this, and help us "get it done?" They must be on sabbatical.
"Peace is Our Profession"
(the official "motto" of the USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC) until the late 1980's)
It seems that the philosophy and spirituality taught and expressed at our military academies is somewhat different. In the 1980's, "Peace is Our Profession" was posted in huge letters at the Orwellian gateway to our local military garrison - Malmstrom AFB - and its "mission" of being prepared to launch up to 200 Minuteman Missiles, each of them carrying up to three nuclear warheads of 120-320KT yield (I've got the numbers somewhere, but that's close), nearly half-way around the world.
But don't tell anybody. "Ain't gonna study war no more" and all that rot. We need to learn it from direct experience, right?
Launching all (or one "Flight" of 10) only takes about 5 minutes, before any war or attack has actually happened, but if submarines launched a "first strike" attack off the coast near Seattle, it would only take 12 minutes for them to get here. That's how they figure it. It's called "launch on warning" - a doctrine which is now discredited, but still might be implemented in any of the world's strategic nuclear missile facilities, or by whomever ends up with them after a coup or revolution.
Indeed, the whole doctrine of "deterrence" has been utterly discredited, too, but that is still the official Pentagon and Congressional rationale for having a nuclear arsenal here, or having any at all. The classic "Committee of 100" doctrine is that to have developed nuclear weapons in the first place was a mistake, and with the Abolition movement of the 1980's (of which I was a peripheral, and I must say neglected, participant), the use of uranium fission to produce electricity was also thoroughly discredited, once it was understood that any such facility and its associated technologies (like uranium enrichment) are immediately transferable to bomb production.
No amount of "treaties" or "inspections" can conceal or negate that fact. Israel, India, Pakistan, and DPR Korea have all done it. And, indeed, that is exactly the rationale being applied to Iran, today, while all the other nations which have produced bombs out of their "nuclear power industry" are among the accusers and attackers of one country, Iran, which likely has no evil motives whatsoever. Just to shed some light, so to speak, on what everyone else is doing, Iran has become the designated scapegoat for the crimes of Israel, the Baathists, the Saudi's, et al. It's time to stop that nonsense before someone really gets hurt.
The importance of rationality in a world of nuclear hair-triggers
This is why many of us were so taken with Objectivism. Even though it is largely 19th century materialist doctrines which are now exploded, it struck all sorts of responsive chords. We were the new Abolitionists, the Freedom Fighters, the Revolutionaries who ended war and corrupt tyrants in a process of unifying and uniting the entire planet. We were Utilitarians. We were going to fix things that capitalism or Fascism or Bolshevism had thrown askew. It was the Happy Time!
But the discipline of reason, of understanding, remains supreme. It must be this way, or something like this. We can make those kinds of judgements based on reason and science, a sub-category. (Originally, it all came out of theology, so there was no sense that the two were in conflict, except that the theologians felt threatened by findings which questioned their dogmas and practice).
I took enough philosophy to have a minor in it, and one of the Upper Division/Grad courses I took was entirely devoted to Immanual Kant, a philosopher whom Ayn Rand professed to particularly despise. Like so many others, it was her characterization of the History of Philosophy, and many of the great figures in it (indeed, most of them - there are few philosophers whom Rand had anything good to say about, whatsoever) - it was this particularly obnoxious material which drove me out.
I'm sure that was intentional, but the deeper or "more structural" reason is that Kant's Categorical Imperative is perceived as the opposite of Rand's "Egoism", which is a later development in ideas culminating in Max Stirner and Nietzsche, as well as the New England Transcendentalists, who were close intellectual cousins. --particularly Margaret Fuller, who translated Kant professonally, and Emerson, who read and studied the complete works of Goethe in the original German.
Was World War II "Emerson's Revenge?"
I was joking the other day (like 5 years ago, maybe) with a descendent of RW Emerson whose father was a Mustang pilot over Europe during WWII. "It didn't get any better than that for the Emerson's," I told her. "That was the culmination of two centuries of history."
Later, reflecting on this exchange, it almost seemed as though WWII was a direct result of the Emerson and Forbes dynasty, and their "construction" of our own Civil War (not to mention AT&T or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Berkshires Railroad).
Most people who read Emerson, today, don't like him. He is far too stiff, condescending, and maintaining the persona of a prophet - truly Nietzsche's Zarathustra. [Oh, and by the way, Zoroastrianism is the ancient, pre-Islamic religion of Persia (Iran), and is practiced in India and elsewhere, today - especially the Parsis (who speak a Farsi dialect) and include many famous people in the West, like Zubin Mehta. So, all this hatred of and threats against Iran is personal for some of us.]
The Mustang pilot's love was - you guessed it - airplanes, so he went to work for Pratt and Whitney after the war. And he married a midwest wind-generator heiress, but the family called him back, and persuaded him to put his 8 children through college by managing the Forbes Bank trust, which the merged family members all participate in. I'd heard of "trust fund babies", but I really didn't have a referent for it until I met these people (who, I think, were considerably burdened by this fortune, although it is now diluted down to maybe half or less of what a working person would earn in a lifetime).
Several other Emerson's I met were pilots, builders, small entrepreneurs, musicians, and the like - not really interested in "academics, " but intelligent and creative (and very morally acute!) in their speech and actions.
What about Fukushima?
As for TEPCO and its Fukushima power plants, the truth has finally been released in an official parliamentary finding. Everything we said all along has been verified - in somewhat muted form, but the main point, that the plants were not well-designed or subject to reasonable oversight and regulation, is well-documented. And it's not over. Nearly every week I read some new story about how the on-site fuel storage could combust at any time, with devastating consequences for the whole Northern Hemisphere. On the Beach, indeed.
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Inside the Beltway
It's getting so I can barely stand to watch any TV interviews or discussions emanating from "inside the Beltway" - Washington, D.C. Great Falls (VA) is the richest town in the U.S., now, having recently surpassed the more famous ones nestled in the New York and California suburbs - like Scarsborough or Beverly Hills. But you would never know this in Great Falls, Montana - a far more powerful and visionary city, which is now on its knees to ALEC, the Pentagon, Wal-Mart, and the medical drug rackets which have destroyed our schools and families much worse than marijuana or cocaine dealers could have ever imagined, and paid for with YOUR MONEY (Medicaid, CHIP, etc.).
Notice that Denny Rehberg is now proclaiming his record of support for these kinds of "Drugs in the Schools" programs (and every other totalitarian, mind and thought control measure). He might have said the word "libertarian" a few times, but he certainly doesn't know what it means. Dems and Reps alike are all big fans of Homeland Scurity, and keeping everyone under surveillance lest they look at pictures of naked children, or check out a Koran, or something. And the WWI Sedition laws, never repealed but thought to be dead letters, are being revived to suppress all criticism and dissent.
Seriously, the politicians and their respective power brokers and financial supporters are 90% or more behind all this stuff. Look at the recent Attorneys General, and how they only got worse under Obama. Whatever these people's conception of the law and Constitution, it is very different from what most people understood by them even 30 years ago. It's like the actual meaning and application of our once-fine legal system is now merely a game of social and economic warfare, where the "best-connected" usually win - often by simply avoiding any real legal or moral arguments and decisions, entirely.
I've been intending to write a lot about ethics and how our society's social and economic decline is the consequence of a prior ethical decline, which occurred during and after our participation in World War II. And that, of course, was only a follow-up to World War I, which was itself the consquence of various empires jostling each other over boundaries and treaties, natural resources, and the control of governments which possessed them.
It's been going on for more than a century, if not forever, and we're rapidly approaching the centennial of "the Guns of August" (1914) which began this calamity for Western Civilization and the rest of the planet. The interesting thing for us is that Montana has been in the thick of it since the late 1800's, and perhaps as early as the 1840's and '50's, when the people and landscape of what is now Montana first became known to the rest of the world.
If you've lived anywhere else, and told people you are from Montana, you know what I'm talking about. There's a lot of mystique and status to it, as well as suspicion from more urbane types, who can't help but think we're all gunfighters and savages. If so, we've apparently converted the urban centers and even other countries to our "vision" of a future full of war and barbarism.
Sen. Tester ran, initially, on a platform of repealing the PATRIOT Act entirely, and like Gov. Schweitzer, drew a firm line in the sand against "Real ID" and stuff like that - chip implantation in animals, for example.
Rehberg actually had a better record pre-2008 than Tester has now on this stuff - because of pressure from the Right - the Gun Lobby, military lobbies, TEA's, etc. Tester was doing fine until the Baucus people (including Jim Messina, who was running the Obama Campaign last I heard) started giving "advice." Now, the Baucusite controllers have thoroughly "Borged" him - he was taken over and made to act and speak and vote in ways which didn't "reflect badly" on Baucus's most deplorable record. And so, his record is very similar to Rehberg's, who is the real Republican, while Baucus and Tester are simply pandering to what they take to be the Republican position, hoping to attract Republican voters to their equally "conservative" (totalitarian) policies.
But, hey, one YD Dem is as good as another, right? Meanwhile, the rest will dig in as BD's and make sure that nothing "liberal" or "unpatriotic" gets by them.
I grew up with and still know strong Democrats and strong Republicans - who really believe in and will fight for this stuff - whatever their "side" and its bosses tells them to do.
I have a question. What if it's the same side? What if we're all in this together, and we'd better start listening and thinking straight or there won't even be one side left to hang on to? Most people, I've learned, actually fear one or both parties, and want nothing to do with supporting either of them, or if they are the timid type, will say or do nothing to oppose either "evil." And so, they suffer grievously in silence and submission. Isn't this a great country?
If that's the way people feel, I really have nothing more to say to them. We have to want to fix things and change for the better. If we don't have that, and a willingness to stand up to evil and oppression, then to hell with it. Just have a good time, and don't worry about tomorrow.
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