Friday, August 3, 2012
Question Authority - and oppose it
Who are the Agents of Authoritarianism?
The Law of Unintended (or concealed) Consequences
A phenomenon of great importance
Few people seem to recognize this "category", but it is part of the ethical "dark matter" which seems to permeate our positive moral universe. We can see it everywhere, from drug prohibition (actually designed to maximize both criminal activity and the state police authority which supposedly "opposes" it) to our health care system, which is surely a disease and revenue producing system (actually designed to cause and perpetuate illnesses and unhealthy lifestyles), since doctors and other providers are now paid on the basis of how many "treatments" they provide, and thus have little or no incentive to actually make people healthier. Indeed, that becomes a threat to their economic survival, which is compensated for by decreasing supply and increasing the monopoly power of the providers, thus leaving half or more of the population untreated or underserved.
The very principle of "insurance" is based on this. Essentially, we are betting that bad things will happen. And it is very difficult to prove causality when they actually do. Thus, insurance is way more expensive for the prudent and safety-conscious than they would otherwise pay in a pool made up entirely of people like themselves.
It used to be hard to get insurance if you are a "high risk" person with lots of claims. The idea of compulsory insurance actually negates the very idea of insurance and risk-pooling, on a voluntary and market-regulated basis. Instead, it becomes a government diktat which costs everyone two or three times more than an optimal distribution of the same resources and services would provide. And so it goes with almost everything these days.
Public education is the most significant manifestation of this phenomenon. I'm not talking about real public, community-based education. I'm talking about our present system of vicious, coercive state monopolies utterly controlling a unified content of obedience, ignorance, and subservience, with some sort of lip service to "human rights" and "job training." Our public education is so bad that many of us, when it was only 20% as bad as it is, today, despaired of ever fixing it, although we certainly had dozens of excellent plans and policies which could have transformed it into something approaching the "real public community-based" system.
Site-based management (each school being autonomous and run by those on site, not a central bureaucracy), parent-teacher co-ops, neighborhood open schools where learning is available for everyone of all ages - these are just a few of the cogent and workable solutions which various groups and scholars have supported consistently for as long as there has been "public education."
The fact is, American public education is based on an earlier Prussian model, which derives from the post-Napoleonic paranoia to create superstates with super armies to either be like Napoleon's Empire, or to be able to effectively counter and oppose it. The educational arms race was on. And it has never been more focussed than it is, today, with the competition between China and the US for global hegemony.
The role of economists
Economists exist to sort these things out, and make the proper, scientific and rational determinations of what our economy should and must provide, and how best to go about it. Economists agree among themselves much more than the general public might suspect. And we are not "socialists" or "free-marketeers" or even "pro-business." We are SCIENTISTS - observers, researchers, predicters, truth-seekers, not dictators or "sycophants of the bourgeoisie," as Marx, himself a philosopher and economist, put it. But of course we are. Someone has to pay us, and it is, by definition, the bourgeoisie who control the money, jobs, and the rest of the economy.
Another way to look at it is that economists are "engineers of the economy." We're supposed to understand the nuts and bolts of how the economy works, so we can maintain it, and protect it from the many assaults, both foreign and domestic, which are launched against individual firms, sectors, or the economy as a whole.
Perhaps we should pause a bit and consider the idea of "whole" and "parts". Most people have heard of something being "more than the sum of its parts." Yet, all the parts together must equal the whole. That's a definition. So, if more comes out of the "whole" than might have been predicted merely by looking at the parts, that is called "synergy" - created energy and power (wealth, influence, healthfulness - whatever we are dealing with). It is something that entrepreneurs as well as social engineers accomplish regularly.
The genius of the market (which hardly any leftists understand at all) is that it's all voluntary, and it coordinates all the disparate supplies and demands for goods and services. YOU, the individual, decide what you want to do, what kind of education you want, what sort of transportation, food supply, health care system, retirement plan, etc. And you get a fixed quantity of resources (called the "social product") - the earth itself, the free energy all around us, etc, plus the legacy of knowledge and techniques which is our common inheritance.
When an oil or coal company moves in and strips out a billion dollars worth of oil or coal, and maybe leaves the local community with a few hundred (now redundant) jobs and a mess of pollution, they have looted the "social product." They have claimed our common heritage for their own. And we agree with them - even "liberal Democrats", who trade off such pillage for a stay of execution for Social Security and Medicare.
We need to rethink everything about "property", incomes policy, and what the rightful functions of a just and free state might be (if any). Anarchists have long contended that it is the state, itself, which is the problem. We don't need any "government" bigger than a rural county or urban neighborhood. Anything else is likely to represent "capital" instead of people; war instead of peace, control instead of community.
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.
===========
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.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Waldegren - Ward Churchill and Julian Assange
This is one of my other persona's - the 4th Duke of Waldegren, based on the science fiction of A Bertram Chandler. It's just as much me as anyone else, and should be of interest to those with Gothic proclivities...
When the Legends Die .... and all that rot
Further dispatches from the Duke of Waldegren
Ward Churchill's Defense
I don't suppose Ward is on Facebook - at least, I've never even seen a link to him here, among my elite radical friends. I owe him one, so here goes.
The failure of the intellectual community, the ACLU, and all the other defenders of truth and justice (not to mention The American Way - maybe that was the stickler) to go ballistic over the U of Colorado's and the Regents/Governor's handling of this issue marked a turning point. Ward was very widely known. We used to discuss his books and articles at the local coffeeship - Cattin's (which, of course, was headquartered in the old Wobby stronghold of Centralia, WA). He probably inspired more Native Americans to head for Academia than anyone in his generation. And yet, he was treated like a traitor - in the great tradition of his forebears - and driven from his tenured professorship for the most venal of motives - to placate the imperialists who suffered an overwhelming defeat to their plans of global domination.
I've recently been reading Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, and this is the basic text for Ward's defense. If you've read that long essay, later published as a book, you'll understand what Ward was talking about. Eichmann was the Third Reich's link to the Zionists, chosen especially because he liked Jews and had many Jewish friends. He saw his job as saving Jews, and helping them emigrate. Later, he took charge of the Holocaust, itself, which is why the later Israeli government put him on trial. He was certainly guilty of the crimes as charged, but he was "only following orders" - a defense we often hear, today. So, indeed, whoever perpetrated 9-11 was "just following orders." They were "little Eichmann's" - what they called "Aparatchiks" in the Soviet System. They were not morally responsible for their actions.
Perhaps we should promote Ward to the rank of Brigadier General (the Brevit period is long past) in the Royal Waldegren Intelligence Services. Code Name - Kierkegaard
=========================
Duke's Proclamation on the Assange/Wikileaks Issue
We hereby call for an All-Goth's Council, to meet, of course, on Gotland, featuring Julian Assange, Chieftain of the Antipodal Goths, and whatever Scandinavian Royalty wants to show up. We especially request and welcome the participation of HRH Princess Marthe, and whatever other "hip Royals" want to participate. This is frankly a Monarchist matter, since it is a monarchy which threatens to detain, extradite (to the US or other hostile power), and thus destroy the very foundations of our cybernetic existence.
And with the recent capitulation of various Scandinavian governments to the NATO Menace, it is more important than ever that we maintain our political sovereignty and integrity.
As you know, I occupy a sort of intermediary role. I make my views very well known, but then I must fight for them. They don't fit into any "chain of command." In this sense, I am more of a shaman or prophet than a statesman, and that's what this proclamation maintains. No Authority, All Truth.
We are teetering on the brink of the worst global dictatorship and torture-slave pen in the history of the world. They're actually competing for that honor. And at the same time, we're an hour away from global nuclear holocaust and environmental degradation (including global climate change - the Curse of Loki) unimaginable in any previous age or existence. And we're not getting any better.
We have a sub-culture in the U.S. which was known as "the Goths." They were the kids (warriors) who did Columbine, and similar incidents. They're like more sophisticated punks and skinheads. But more libertarian and "heroic" in their outlook and behavior. So, they still exist, and I have always befriended them, for whatever reasons, seeing myself in much the same terms and traditions.
Mr. Assange is clearly in the same tradition, along with Bradley Manning. These are People's Heroes to us, and we insist that you treat them as such. This has been passed along to the Swedish ambassador, whence I'm sure it will receive high-priority consideration.
Since I'm not Swedish, but Norwegian with Icelandic and Danish connections (and brotherhood with Finns), I've got some bones to pick with you guys.. Especially Norway's Statoil (a public, but apparently not a royal, institution) and its participation in the NATO looting of Caspian oil as well as the (magnitudes worse) investment in and promotion of the Alberta Bitumen project. Who controls the Caspian oil is of little concern to anyone except the people who live there (and what about them?). But the Tar Sands promise to destroy more environment with less benefit than any project in history.
Of course, Canadians "think big," and will do anything for a buck, but it's time to get scientific and philosophical, here. And it's an absolute travesty for the Oil Barons of Trondheim (to which I am distantly related, I think - along with Liv Ullmann) to "invest" or otherwise profit from this disaster. This isn't state socialism you're practicing. It's Naomi Klein's Disaster Capitalism. (Hopefully, Ms. Klein will be a leading witness for the defense in the Assange hearing - I think she slept with him several times.) And what about the other Naomi I've suspected of that? Naomi Wolf. Surely she will participate, as well. In fact, I might make her my personal representative, since we're Facebook friends. Along with Paul Street and Glenn Greenwald (he and Robert Greenwald are Peers of the House of Waldegren, by the way).
So, the Russians have identified NATO as a "monarchist" institution. So, let's get it done. Let's be good monarchs instead of corrupt, degraded ones.
(signed)
4th Duke of Waldegren
==================
Here is a piece I recently wrote related to the above, dealing with intellectual and scientific honesty.
Are GMO's Lysenkoism?
I haven't taught biology lately (or ever, but I studied it quite a bit), but on some level, there must be a discussion going on about whether or not GMO's have "refuted" Darwin, and instead, vindicated his inheritist rival, Lysenko. (A Soviet biologist - Stalin's "biology czar" - who believed, along with established authoritarian dogma - not necessarily Marxism, but a lot of Leninism - that the State could mold any organism or even natural processes (like splitting the atom) to State purposes). They were also "futurists", who planned to control the future by - Yes! - molding the human genome, as well as plants and animals - to better-serve the purposes of the State (which, of course, is only the manifest Will of the People - the embodiment of the Volkgeist, or whatever).
All of these concepts were once considered "un-American", and more recently, referred to as "cultural Marxism", "Multi-culturalism", "Liberation Theology", and otherwise "bad things." They are exactly what Anders Breivik identified in his pogrom against "liberalism" and "social democracy" - Norway's present government and intellectual elite.
Breivik, by the way, should inspire dozens of PhD theses and other scholarly work. Here is a throwback to the Third Reich (but who thinks Hitler and the blind idiocy he inspired were wrong - obviously, the Zionists won that one, and should be recognized as powerful allies - what was actually the case between the Zionist organizations in the 1930's, and the Nazis. Eichmann was in charge of those negotiations, since he got on well with Jews). Or more like the very "terrorist" cadres which our modern National Security State is (supposedly) designed to deal with (by taking them over and adopting the same tactics, apparently). Perhaps Norway could exchange Breivik for Vanunu, the Israeli who merely verified what all the intelligence services already knew about Israel's nuclear program.
Of course, the Israeli's would never do it, not wanting to acknowledge their kinship with and support from such a "monster."
Speaking of which, why isn't the UN and IAEA examining Israel's completely illegal and criminal development and possession of nuclear weapons? Everyone in the Middle East (by a wide margin), and many Europeans (anti-Semites and other Nationalists) thinks that Israel is the nuclear threat, not Iran. So why are we defending the nuclear terrorist state? Because we are one, too, but the question remains: do we really want to be a nuclear terrorist state? And can we please have an open and complete discussion about it, before we spend one more dime on facilities like Malmstrom?
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Why we need local public radio - not NPR
The real history of KGPR
by Paul Stephens
(This was published in my Great Falls Tribune "greateco" blog on April 19, 2012)
Every year during pledge week, we get the same group of professional liars and UM alumni to tell us that we don't really have a local public radio station - we're just a satellite of KUFM, Missoula, and thus part of "Montana Public Radio." We can't have our own station in Great Falls because we're too stupid and apathetic. So, send your "pledges" to Missoula.
And some of the people who actually started KGPR - especially Bruce McKenzie (who left GF in disgust decades ago) and Sidney Graham (now deceased) - were adamant that we should have an independent station, and not be under the control of "the dicatator" Terry Conrad and the Missoula Gang, who were only interested in expanding their own signal, revenues, and political influence.
In those days, Missoula had several Marxists on its City Council, and the meetings were broadcast in their entirety on Monday evenings. So, the first priority was to substitute "local programming" for this 2-hour slot on Monday evenings - because, obviously, the people of Great Falls weren't "ready" to hear a bunch of radicals talk about democracy and local self-rule, and besides, this was just about Missoula. But no one here wanted to do local programming, so they played tapes of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and other canned music during that time. (Our symphony conductor in the late 1970's, Mr. Winkler, came from there).
The honest thing to do would have been to have a local public affairs program at the same time, or perhaps broadcast the Great Falls City Commission meetings (or a tape of them from the week before) in the same slot. But we know that democracy is not a value in Great Falls, and that our government has never been "transparent" or "accountable" to the people.
I was one of the people who wrote the original letters to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting requesting they approve a license for a LOCAL, GREAT FALLS station. Missoula and KUFM weren't even in the loop - indeed, they couldn't be. CPB doesn't fund, and the FCC doesn't license networks - just individual stations, and we are, and always have been, an INDEPENDENT, self-governing station, able to contract with any sources for programming.
That was how we originally contracted with KUFM to use their signal TEMPORARILY until we could develop our own programming. I tried twice to get on the board to carry forward this process. The first time, Stever Doherty was selected over me. A year or two later, John Torstveit and Carrie Calahan-Bronson (sister-in-law of the City Commissioner) and I were all selected for the Board. We formed a "programming committee" and began broadcasting a "Local Origination Program" on Saturday afternoons - usually just tapes of recordings we made of local events - it was the era of the Great Falls and Montana Centennials, so there were lots of things to record and broadcast.
I know Arlyne Reichert is getting along in years, and her memory is failing, but much of what she said in her history of KGPR broadcast on Thursday during the Mid-day Music program is false. (Her daughter, Claire Baize, was a graduate of the UM broadcasting program, and her family has always had close ties with Missoula. Claire, for the first time ever, has recently began doing short, humorous commentaries for KGPR, and I still count her as a personal friend). Carrie is also a graduate of the UM J-School, and worked for Stan Stephens in his Havre station, KOJM. So of course those "public radio activists" were not interested in a real public radio station independent of Missoula and commercial broadcasters (or the Tribune) here.
That has been the battle all along. Do the same people continue to control all of our "news" and civic discourse, or do we have a variety of independent sources with complete freedom to disagree and discuss the important issues of our lives?
The answer with the KUFM-dominated KGPR is clearly "No."
I was the first to do local broadcasts of original material in Great Falls. I was the first to broadcast the Great Falls Symphony and chamber music programs, here. That is all elided from the "official history" because I was twice kicked off the air - the first time for broadcasting a recording of the Easter anti-nuclear demonstrations at the Malmstrom Main Gate (at John Torstveit's insistance), and the second time for promoting the independent KGPR in 2001, when I was classical music director (at the insistance of one of the "Golden Triangle" UM alumni, who eventually shut us down, and made us revert to a KUFM satellite station). In neither case was there any "due process" or the right to defend myself, although I did so extensively in writing - all of which was suppressed. Arlyne and Carrie didn't even mention our two-year attempt to establish KGPR as a fully-independent local station, which they both helped to eliminated under the "leadership" of Dan Rice and some other UM Alums.
I have spent half of more of my working life for the past 30 years supporting public interest causes in Great Falls, and local public radio has been the greatest one. You can imagine how I feel during this "pledge week" to see this whole history distorted and made to conform to the gangster politics of the local political machines.
Thanks to Tom Halvorsen who at least has the guts to have long advocated that we broadcast Democracy Now!, and that failing, is featuring a descendent of Al Capone (Tom, like Terry Conrad, is from Chicago) as an advocate for our local station.
I found out just a couple of years ago that Amy Goodman, the founder of Democracy Now and still anchor of it, was college room-mates at Harvard with Cindy Herbig, a Missoula cellist who dropped out and was later killed working as a prostitute in Washington, D.C. Because of that, KUFM has steadfastly refused to broadcast Democracy Now! - an independent daily hour-long news program which is far superior to anything on NPR.
We also get the figures every year on how much KUFM spends for NPR programming - some $280,000, or nearly half the amount raised by our pledges. Democracy Now, the BBC, and other news programs (I'm sure we could get the CBC here, too, for little or no cost) are either free or very inexpensive. ATC and Morning Edition are about $100,000/year by themselves, while KUFM only pays $10,000 for the much better BBC, most of which is overnight. Many other independent news and public affairs programs are available free of charge. So even if you want to send money to Missoula for KUFM programming, you are not getting your money's worth.
Please support the repatriation of KGPR to the people of Great Falls, and don't send your money to Missoula, unless you want them to establish their own full-time translator here, which they have always been willing to do.
Now I'm really isolated
Now I'm really isolated
As a life-long "non-conformist" and otherwise a person who "keeps his own counsel" (although I also spend much of my time trying to determine what other people think, and why they think that), I lead a fairly isolated life. I've found it difficult, if not impossible, to live with other people - to "partner up" in whatever sense you want to take that. But like my friend Rik put it (a Norwegian by birth and family), "We're like blue whales. There are just aren't enough of us left to find suitable partners, and lead meaningful lives." Or, as we might put it now, our social networks have broken down or been co-opted.
The cyber-community persists, of course, and in fact, we're rapidly becoming mere accessories (or "applications") for our electronic hardware. How could this happen? Weren't computers and the internet supposed to be a kind of "equalizer", like the Colt 45 in frontier America? Even a little dumb guy could kill you, so you'd better be nice to him, and not try to rip him off.
We found that computers aren't "cultural". Or, they are "culture-neutral", a distant descendant of the "value-neutral" (Wertfrei) criterion in the social sciences. Arabs, Chinese, Hindus, and even the most "primitive" Africans and other black aborigines are all the same when it comes to math, science, and technology. White people, if anything, are inferior - if only because of our own self-aggrandizement and lack of ethical treatment of other nations and peoples.
Probably anyone who joined Mensa or some other exclusive club based on intelligence or ability was disappointed. These people aren't any different than my other friends and family - except maybe they are less ethical and more conniving. (Mensa has only one criteria - test scores. Call it the NCLB of social networks.) So, what's the big deal?
For libertarians, there isn't any. We already knew all this. Especially if we'd read and studied Ayn Rand. (Or many of her forebears, among whom I'll only name Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, but there are hundreds). We already knew that the "superior man" (as they say in the I Ching) must follow a different course from everyone else. We might find an ally here or there; we might maintain the dignity and reputation to be a respected teacher, writer, entrepreneur, or even statesman, but we are not usually electable to public office.
What about "the magic of everyday life" - what we might call "The Harry Potter Factor", or earlier, the bizarre supernaturalism of Stephen King? They work very well on film, but what do we do if we're "like that" in real life? What if we're like Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger? Can we survive and prosper? Can we "get respect" from anyone, or will we always be burned as witches or executed as "enemies of the people?"
We might use sophisticated psychotherapy techniques to "re-integrate" ourselves back into "natural society." Just act naturally - as the song says. Pretend to be interested in all the insanity that surrounds us. Pretend to understand. Say that often. "I understand." It really reassures people. And all the while LEAD BY EXAMPLE. Always try to do "the right thing." Talk about it, and why you did that. Let people know you are no threat to them, and might just be a lot of help. Try to be a family counselor whenever you are in a family situation. But not pedantically. Ask questions instead of making statements. Teach by Socratic inquiry. It really works.
Suddenly, you will be admired and respected by everyone who knows you. People will want to help you instead of kill or torture you. They will come to you for advice and consolation. You can get laid a lot if you want to, but in this day and age, with numerous uncurable venereal diseases, you'll probably want to avoid that part of this "Sixties" thinking.
You might even "get lucky" and find someone to "partner up" with. But they will have all the same problems of identity and self-portrayal as you do. They will probably have a morally checkered past, if they have lived life to the fullest. There will be other obstacles, too - the worst of which I've found to be one's respective families. Whether your prospective partner's family likes you or hates you, you'll be in trouble with your partner. There are very few "well-adjusted" and mutually-supportive families, and those that are, probably won't have any rogue geniuses among them (although it depends on wider cultural values - in Sweden, this would be quite possible).
So, "soldier on," as they say in the Nuclear Garrison Town. We can win, but we've got to keep fighting. And loving, and talking, and listening. But the real victory is spiritual, not military or financial.
As a life-long "non-conformist" and otherwise a person who "keeps his own counsel" (although I also spend much of my time trying to determine what other people think, and why they think that), I lead a fairly isolated life. I've found it difficult, if not impossible, to live with other people - to "partner up" in whatever sense you want to take that. But like my friend Rik put it (a Norwegian by birth and family), "We're like blue whales. There are just aren't enough of us left to find suitable partners, and lead meaningful lives." Or, as we might put it now, our social networks have broken down or been co-opted.
The cyber-community persists, of course, and in fact, we're rapidly becoming mere accessories (or "applications") for our electronic hardware. How could this happen? Weren't computers and the internet supposed to be a kind of "equalizer", like the Colt 45 in frontier America? Even a little dumb guy could kill you, so you'd better be nice to him, and not try to rip him off.
We found that computers aren't "cultural". Or, they are "culture-neutral", a distant descendant of the "value-neutral" (Wertfrei) criterion in the social sciences. Arabs, Chinese, Hindus, and even the most "primitive" Africans and other black aborigines are all the same when it comes to math, science, and technology. White people, if anything, are inferior - if only because of our own self-aggrandizement and lack of ethical treatment of other nations and peoples.
Probably anyone who joined Mensa or some other exclusive club based on intelligence or ability was disappointed. These people aren't any different than my other friends and family - except maybe they are less ethical and more conniving. (Mensa has only one criteria - test scores. Call it the NCLB of social networks.) So, what's the big deal?
For libertarians, there isn't any. We already knew all this. Especially if we'd read and studied Ayn Rand. (Or many of her forebears, among whom I'll only name Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, but there are hundreds). We already knew that the "superior man" (as they say in the I Ching) must follow a different course from everyone else. We might find an ally here or there; we might maintain the dignity and reputation to be a respected teacher, writer, entrepreneur, or even statesman, but we are not usually electable to public office.
What about "the magic of everyday life" - what we might call "The Harry Potter Factor", or earlier, the bizarre supernaturalism of Stephen King? They work very well on film, but what do we do if we're "like that" in real life? What if we're like Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger? Can we survive and prosper? Can we "get respect" from anyone, or will we always be burned as witches or executed as "enemies of the people?"
We might use sophisticated psychotherapy techniques to "re-integrate" ourselves back into "natural society." Just act naturally - as the song says. Pretend to be interested in all the insanity that surrounds us. Pretend to understand. Say that often. "I understand." It really reassures people. And all the while LEAD BY EXAMPLE. Always try to do "the right thing." Talk about it, and why you did that. Let people know you are no threat to them, and might just be a lot of help. Try to be a family counselor whenever you are in a family situation. But not pedantically. Ask questions instead of making statements. Teach by Socratic inquiry. It really works.
Suddenly, you will be admired and respected by everyone who knows you. People will want to help you instead of kill or torture you. They will come to you for advice and consolation. You can get laid a lot if you want to, but in this day and age, with numerous uncurable venereal diseases, you'll probably want to avoid that part of this "Sixties" thinking.
You might even "get lucky" and find someone to "partner up" with. But they will have all the same problems of identity and self-portrayal as you do. They will probably have a morally checkered past, if they have lived life to the fullest. There will be other obstacles, too - the worst of which I've found to be one's respective families. Whether your prospective partner's family likes you or hates you, you'll be in trouble with your partner. There are very few "well-adjusted" and mutually-supportive families, and those that are, probably won't have any rogue geniuses among them (although it depends on wider cultural values - in Sweden, this would be quite possible).
So, "soldier on," as they say in the Nuclear Garrison Town. We can win, but we've got to keep fighting. And loving, and talking, and listening. But the real victory is spiritual, not military or financial.
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