The Bill of Non-Rights

The following has been attributed to State Representative Mitchell Kaye from GA. This guy should run for President one day...

"We the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid more riots, keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior, and secure the blessings of debt free liberty to ourselves and our great-great-great-grandchildren, hereby try one more time to ordain and establish some common sense guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt ridden, delusional, and other liberal bed-wetters.

We hold these truths to be self evident: that a whole lot of people are confused by the Bill of Rights and are so dim they require a Bill of NON-Rights."

ARTICLE I:! You do not have the right to a new car, big screen TV, or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but no one is guaranteeing anything

ARTICLE II: You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone -- not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc.; but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.

ARTICLE III: You do not have the right to be free from harm. If you stick a screwdriver in your eye, learn to be more careful, do not expect the tool manufacturer to make you and all your relatives independently wealthy.

ARTICLE IV: You do not have the right to free food and housing. Americans are the most charitable people to be found, and will gladly help anyone in need, but we are quickly growing weary of subsidizing generation after generation of professional couch potatoes who achieve nothing more than the creation of another generation of professional couch potatoes.

ARTICLE V: You do not have the right to free health care. That would be nice, but from the looks of public housing, we're just not interested in public health care.

ARTICLE VI: You do not have the right to physically harm other people. If you kidnap, rape, intentionally maim, or kill someone, don't be surprised if the rest of us want to see you fry in the electric chair.

ARTICLE VII: You do not have the right to the possessions of others. If you rob, cheat, or coerce away the goods or services of other citizens, don't be surprised if the rest of us get together and lock you away in a place where you still won't have the right to a big screen color TV or a life of leisure.

ARTICLE VIII: You do not have the right to a job. All of us sure want you to have a job, and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we expect you to take advantage of the opportunities of education and vocational training laid before you to make yourself useful.

ARTICLE IX: You do not have the right to happiness. Being an American means that you have the right to PURSUE happiness, which by the way, is a lot easier if you are unencumbered by an over abundance of idiotic laws created by those of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights.

ARTICLE X: This is an English speaking country. We don't care where you are from, English is our language. Learn it or go back to wherever you came from!
(finally....)

ARTICLE XI: You do not have the right to change our country's history or heritage. This country was founded on the belief in one true God. And yet, you are given the freedom to believe in any religion, any faith, or no faith at all; with no fear of persecution. The phrase IN GOD WE TRUST is part of our heritage and history, and if you are uncomfortable with it, TOUGH!!!!

If you agree, share this with a friend. No, you don't have to, and nothing tragic will befall you if you don't. I just think it's about time common sense is allowed to flourish.

Wolves in sheep's clothing...

In anticipation of the remake thriller of the "Manchurian Candidate", I rented the original version released in 1962 with Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury. and so forth. I'd not seen it before, so rather than just watch it as entertainment, I turned on my political filters. The main reason I did that was because Sinatra had kept it locked away for such a long period of time, apparently because of the strong political statements it made and perhaps because of the proximity, time-wise, to the Kennedy assassination.

Without going too much into the plot, it portrayed the hysteria associated with the then prevailing "red scare". What really stood out was one of the opening lines by Lansbury complaining about who her son was going to work for..."That Republican...That communist!", liberally paraphrased. This was a crafted facade to mask that she was a very active communist party member. Another oddity in the film was one of her political enemies had sued her for defamation of character and had contributed all the proceeds to the ACLU, an organization that supposedly had strong ties to the party in the '30's. The other scene that was an epiphany of sorts was when one of the actor's meal was being liberally coated with "Heinz" ketchup. Anyway, given the two conflicting events above, the movie had a little less credibility in terms of an implied agenda.

What sunk in, however, was the opening line of Angela Lansbury and her portrayal of Republicans being communists. We have many groups on the radical left that are wolves in sheep's clothing. They have been using our legal system and mainstream media to spout the conservative attack on human rights and freedom of speech as a diversion to actually suppress both by their actions and long-term agenda. Don't let your guard down!

Why I don't...

I'd recently written about the manipulation of the language at the convenience of those with a specific agenda. So it also goes with concepts and ideas. The rhetoric gets so convoluted that underlying principles are missed. While what I am about to state may be controversial in some circles, nonetheless, I am compelled to add my perspective to the raging topics of the day.

Faith-based initiatives - I am against the current course of faith-based initiatives. Since the definition of "faith" is no longer a common sense understanding in our populous, it will open the doors to funding cults and every other sort of marginal group with support from our legislative bench (not branch) and the ACLU. In business transactions, we try to minimize the impact of middlemen. In governmental transactions, each department our tax money passes through takes more than its unfair share of allocations, handling fees, etc. Why do we have to send our money all the way to Washington to loose ninety cents or more on the dollar (a guess) to have it reallocated back to our faith-based organizations? The solution is to keep the money here in the first place, and this relates back to the need to cut Federal spending in half.
 
Gay marriage amendment - I am against a gay marriage amendment. While I am against gay marriage, the legal wrangling associated with promoting a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage or prohibiting gay marriage would be a total waste of time and money and, in the end, the proponents will lose anyway. It goes back to an old saying of the '60's and '70's, "You can't legislate morals." Look what happened to Prohibition. What is missing is the reference back to The Bible as the moral basis of our society. I realize that there are many forces trying to excise reference to religion at every turn, however, arguments of man are weak against the inspired Word of God. Being a bit silly about the whole thing and looking at Prohibition, the Bible does not explicitly forbid consumption of alcohol, but it gives guidelines and admonishes those that care to consume alcohol not to cause others to stumble through their actions. Demon rum, by its prohibition, caused organized crime to blossom and to what end. The amendment was repealed.

Similarly, there are few solid secular arguments that hold up well against gay marriage. We must ultimately couch our protest in Biblical teaching, and through that, make it very clear the impact this activity will have on children and future generations of humanity...let alone the warning signs in the story of Sodom and Gomorrha.

Abortion - I am pro-choice...not pro-abortion. Again, the legalism and opinion of man has been trumped by God. God gave us free will. Certainly, we need to educate person seeking advice on the long-term implications of abortions and suggest alternatives, of which there are many. Admittedly, I also have a "stealth" pro-life position, but the point of the argument is to make the individual responsible for her action.

On the surface, these positions may not ring well with many religious conservatives, but the more you think about it, all positions are not left or right, there are other directions, as well.

Let me hear your opinions.

Lie or Truth Decoder

Are any of you old enough to remember those "decoder rings" that either came in your favorite cereal box or Cracker Jack box?

Faced with increasing distortions in "scientific" research, news, the Internet, the mainstream media, etc., how can one discern truth from lies (or fiction). A new version of the famous decoder ring has not been introduced yet to assist with this situation, so I will give you three methods I use on a daily basis to sort the wheat from the chaff (A caveat: To become proficient at using these methods, there is a lot of background work you must do and practice on.):

1. Anchor yourself in the Bible. There is no other source that is a better reference for decoding right from wrong, good versus evil, truth versus a lie.

2. Read voraciously. Rely less on TV and visual images than on the written word. Also read material you don't agree with...except that which you are admonished to avoid from Item 1.

3. FOLLOW THE MONEY!! Often, today's "truth" is sold to the highest bidder. Find out who is paying for studies, who is backing an organization, who sponsors a particular candidate. If it is a corporation, determine what they will lose if they don't spend this money. If an individual, probe into his ideology (Most are selfishly motivated because of the corrupting power of excessive wealth.)

An Observation On The Political Milieux

It never ceases to amaze me how persons so set on getting George Bush out of office will so easily sell their soul to the devil to do it (I should put a sarcastic caveat in here that the concept of the devil is foreign, as is the concept of good and evil, to most of the persons involved in this "selling" activity). While the Republican Party has warts on its policies and actions, the alternatives are truly frightening. These days, voters necessarily must vote for the lesser of two evils and for a candidate that only roughly approximates their values or ideals.

While those selling out seem to have their own version of the truth, it is also astounding how many people subscribe to things as true which are out and out lies.

This evening, while listening to Barbara Simpson on the radio, she made a very profound statement about this conundrum. She said that persons caught in this situation accept things as true if it aligns with the way they think things should be, not as they really are. I now see why Michael Savage is so insistent on labeling persons in this realm (primarily radical liberalism with a surprising amount of moderate adherents) as suffering from some sort of mental disease or drug induced hallucinations.

The temper tantrums of Dean, Kennedy, and Gore perhaps are the leading indicators that these manipulators are being finally caught at their game. I truly hope so.

I'd previously written about Goebbels' propaganda techniques about focusing on something and repeating it over and over until it is accepted as the truth. I am also frightened by the number of persons I respect that are starting to mouth some of this dogma, either as a sick joke or with conviction. This is nothing short of mass brainwashing in my opinion.

The San Francisco Comical and the San Jose Murky News are partners in this brainwashing scheme, either knowingly, or victims of the brainwashing themselves. How can one tell? ...Strong focus on political invective and complete or partial deemphasis on real local issues (Gay marriage IS NOT a real local issue, unsolved murders are). In other words, priorities are turned upside-down according to rational and logical thinking.

Another aspect of this "schizophrenia" or brainwashing, whichever tag seems more appropriate, is complete and unquestioning trust in certain sources or persons and a breakdown of trust of old established standards or guidelines. Normally, when the human situation borders on chaos, people tend to go back to their roots or traditions to seek stability. This no longer seems to be the case, which strongly points out that at least one or two generations have not had this anchor position established, be it religion or tradition.

What are those sources of trust? While I take strong issue with the mainstream media (CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, The New York Times, The LA times, The Washington Post, etc.), sadly, many are taking their cues from Hollywood movie stars or... Jerry Springer-types.

Curiously, persons who think like I do (yes, there are a surprising number that do) are labeled as simplistic, racist, moronic, mean-spirited, hateful, you name it.

What is wrong with this picture?

The Beauty Of Argument

Dear Friends,

Once in a while, an OpEd really is on target such as the one by John Leo published in the June 21st issue of U.S. News & World Report copied below. Have you noticed how debate of ideas has died...especially when trying to cross the great red and blue or left and right chasm? There certainly was a time when people would try to convince another party of their plan or idea, but now one group considers the other group morons, idiots, mentally ill, or some other unflattering label and immediately throws in the towel. I am becoming increasingly convinced that God has created a modern day Tower of Babel situation. Think about it. When ancient man cooperated to build a "stairway to Heaven", God intervened by causing chaos with everyone suddenly speaking different languages. Fast forward to modern times, we still have many different languages, and when one tries to make himself understood, he either raises the volume of his voice or walks away in disgust. Sound familiar? What we are dealing with is a result of building new towers to man, materialism, and money. The thought police came in with their politically correct controls and actually changed the meaning of many words. A few examples...gay, tolerance, inclusive, compassion, equality, racism, and now marriage. Since we have lost or are losing the common understanding of the most basic words, we might as well be speaking ancient Greek to each other. Political differences aside, we really have a mess on our hands...a modern day Tower of Babel.

Mr. Leo's article expresses the resulting frustration.

Gary

Link: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040621/opinion/21john.htm

On Society
By John Leo
The beauty of argument

I gave an informal talk the other night and got a very odd reaction. I was speaking at a small dinner--16 people--of a cultural group here in New York. My topic was the sometimes-demented culture of American universities. I talked about the repressive speech codes, stolen newspapers, canceled speakers; the defunded Christian groups; the distortion of the curriculum by powerful diversity bureaucracies; and the indoctrination of students, starting with freshman orientation and introductory writing courses.

Nothing in my remarks would have come as a surprise to readers of this column, and it turned out that maybe two thirds of the people at the dinner strongly agreed with my talk. But it shocked one man--a former university president of some note--who denounced my comments as "the most intellectually dishonest speech I have ever heard." I think he meant to say that he disagreed. Or maybe he thought I was attacking his old university. Nobody knows what he thought because he just repeated his "intellectually dishonest" remark and left, closing the door quickly behind him.

This will stick in my mind as a good example of what has happened to debate in this country. Given a chance to speak his piece, the college president just got mad and got out. It never used to be this way. As many reporters reminded us last week, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan fought sharply during the day but enjoyed having the occasional drink or two together after work. In the old days, William F. Buckley Jr. would hold public debates with all comers (I recall Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Steve Allen), then go out to a pleasant dinner with his opponent. Nowadays, Buckley or his adversary would probably be required to take umbrage, hurl some insult, then stomp out in a snit. I caught the tail end of the civil-argument culture when Garry Wills and I started out many years ago as the original columnists in the National Catholic Reporter. We would frequently attack each other's ideas, but it never affected our friendship. Why should it?

In the current Atlantic, P. J. O'Rourke says that, "Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone." O'Rourke doesn't pay much attention, he says, to talk radio, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Al Franken, or Michael Moore because they just shout things at partisan audiences that already agree with their chosen shouter. Technology reinforces the decline of serious argument--now we can all go to a TV channel, a radio show, or a website that will protect us from those aliens across the moat who disagree with us.

It's true that we have more semistructured Crossfire-style debates than ever before. But much of this is rigidly preprogrammed sniping. (I was once chastised by a TV producer for not interrupting other speakers more. What a failure!) Even when the sniping is downplayed, TV demands sharp sound bites, which pushes all talking heads toward more vehemence and simple-mindedness. Instant certainty becomes mandatory, a delivery style many talking heads start to regret before they're even out of the studio. Where is the real debate?

Listening--and learning.

In my remarks at the dinner, I talked about the birth of a "no debate" style on many campuses. When sensitivity and nonjudgmentalism are the dominant virtues, raising arguments can be perilous--you never know which unauthorized campus opinion will turn out to be a sensitivity violation. Better to keep your head down. This is particularly true now that some speech codes explicitly say that challenging another student's beliefs is forbidden.

This is yet another perverse campus trend. Arguing is crucial to education. It's a kind of intellectual roughhouse that lets students try out new ideas. E. J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist, sometimes tells his class at Georgetown that he intends to support the argument of whichever group in the class is in the minority. He does this because he wants his students to argue as passionately as possible without fear of intimidation by a dominant group.

In his book The Revolt of the Elites, the late Christopher Lasch wrote that only in the course of argument do "we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn . . . we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others." If we wish to be engaged in serious argument, Lasch explained, we must enter into another person's mental universe and put our own ideas at risk. Exactly. When a friend launches an argument and your rebuttal starts to sound tinny to your own ears, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out that something's wrong--usually, that you don't really agree with the words coming out of your own mouth. Arguing can rescue us from our own half-formed opinions.

What was that they said about the President and how often?

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over"

Author: Joseph Goebbels

Somebody has learned from the master.

The Capitalist Threat...An Open Letter

Dear All,

So often our e-mail boxes are filled with "stuff" passed on from others. The reason it is passed on is usually because it is either humor or it is something the sender is in agreement with. Today, I am passing something on that I vehemently disagree with (BLOGGED below).

Before I get to that, I wanted to note that I just finished reading "The Vision of the Anointed" by Thomas Sowell. Written in 1995, this book, in my opinion, has gained an immediacy that can be second only to the Good News. What it reveals is the systematic unraveling of our society that gained unopposed momentum starting in the '60's and leading to the heated cultural wars we are having with our international "friends" AND the run-up to the November election. To entice you to read it, I've excerpted the key tenets of the Vision of the Anointed here for you:

1. Painful social situation ("problems") exist not because of inherent limits to knowledge or resources, or inadequacies inherent in human beings, but because other people lack the wisdom or virtue of the anointed.

2. Evolved beliefs represent only a "socially constructed" set of notions, not reflections of an underlying reality. Therefore the way by which "problems" can be "solved" is by applying the articulated rationality of the anointed, rather than by relying on evolved traditions or systemic processes growing out of the experiences of the masses.

3. Social causation is intentional, rather than systemic, so that condemnation is in order when various features of the human experience are either unhappy or appear anomalous to the anointed.

4. Great social or biological dangers can be averted only by the imposition of the vision of the anointed on less enlightened people by the government.

5. Opposition to the vision of the anointed is due not to a different reading of complex and inconclusive evidence, but exists because opponents are lacking, either intellectually or morally, or both.

After reading the attached PDF file, I came to realize that man, as he ages, even if he was a scoundrel in youth, really tries to search for the meaning of life and attempts to pass that "wisdom" on to the younger generation. I recently learned that Earl Warren, a past Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, signed the internment order for Japanese in World War II. That really must have been a burden for him. In the sixties, in an effort to counteract social injustice, he set the stage for the current plague of judicial activism which overturns decisions of Congress and the President at the drop of a hat.

Similarly, George Soros, with a virtual price on his head for currency manipulation in many countries, now has taken pause, above the fray, wallowing in his wealth, to become one of the anointed ones, as a closer read of the attached article will make clear.

For the "Who is George Soros?" crowd, he is presently spending his millions to undermine, in any way he can, the Bush presidency. In this paper, he lays out his "Open Society" as a vision of the future. You can imagine that it is one-world in nature AND George Bush represents the biggest threat to that vision, even though Soros admits the UN is a failure (He just wants his vision to be put in its place.) While, I am the first to argue that there are problems with capitalism, as manifested in soulless multinational corporations, Soros strongly states that Capitalism, with no opposing economic philosophy, will be (or is) as big a threat as communism and/or Naziism (fascism) to the society at large.

Soros really focuses on "laissez-faire" capitalism and the spread of market forces as anathema. Not only have the most vibrant examples of this existed in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere, it generally has worked very well in more controlled economies (not ignoring Singapore's tight social control). What really gives Soros' self-aggrandizement scheme away, however, is that, in my opinion, "laissez-faire" capitalism really returns the "power to the people" with unpredictable results (for George Soros). He can no longer play his currency manipulation games and may have to make an "honest" living from now on.

Now, "predictably", we can conclude that the majority of the "anointed" reside in the currently defined Democratic Party, and "predictably" we know why George Soros is such a strong supporter of that party. Interestingly, "The Vision of the Anointed" emphasizes the position of the infallibility of the anointed, however, Soros is now promoting man's fallibility in the ending statement, "The time is ripe for developing a framework based on our fallibility. Where reason has failed, fallibility may yet succeed." Goodness, I thought that's what all the noise was about regarding "Under God" and "In God We Trust." ...The infallible anointed clashing with the Judeo-Christian ethic and the falibility of mankind...

Another wolf in sheep's clothing, my friends, trying to displace ancient wisdom with boutique visions of the anointed.

GEA

====================

The Capitalist Threat

What kind of society do we want? "Let the free market decide!" is the often-heard response. That response, a prominent capitalist argues, undermines the very values on which open and democratic societies depend.

by George Soros

In The Philosophy of History, Hegel discerned a disturbing historical pattern -- the crack and fall of civilizations owing to a morbid intensification of their own first principles. Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.

The term "open society" was coined by Henri Bergson, in his book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), and given greater currency by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper showed that totalitarian ideologies like communism and Nazism have a common element: they claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth. Since the ultimate truth is beyond the reach of humankind, these ideologies have to resort to oppression in order to impose their vision on society. Popper juxtaposed with these totalitarian ideologies another view of society, which recognizes that nobody has a monopoly on the truth; different people have different views and different interests, and there is a need for institutions that allow them to live together in peace. These institutions protect the rights of citizens and ensure freedom of choice and freedom of speech. Popper called this form of social organization the "open society." Totalitarian ideologies were its enemies. Written during the Second World War, The Open Society and Its Enemies explained what the Western democracies stood for and fought for. The explanation was highly abstract and philosophical, and the term "open society" never gained wide recognition. Nevertheless, Popper's analysis was penetrating, and when I read it as a student in the late 1940s, having experienced at first hand both Nazi and Communist rule in Hungary, it struck me with the force of revelation.

I was driven to delve deeper into Karl Popper's philosophy, and to ask, Why does nobody have access to the ultimate truth? The answer became clear: We live in the same universe that we are trying to understand, and our perceptions can influence the events in which we participate. If our thoughts belonged to one universe and their subject matter to another, the truth might be within our grasp: we could formulate statements corresponding to the facts, and the facts would serve as reliable criteria for deciding whether the statements were true.

There is a realm where these conditions prevail: natural science. But in other areas of human endeavor the relationship between statements and facts is less clear-cut. In social and political affairs the participants' perceptions help to determine reality. In these situations facts do not necessarily constitute reliable criteria for judging the truth of statements. There is a two-way connection -- a feedback mechanism -- between thinking and events, which I have called "reflexivity." I have used it to develop a theory of history.

Whether the theory is valid or not, it has turned out to be very helpful to me in the financial markets. When I had made more money than I needed, I decided to set up a foundation. I reflected on what it was I really cared about. Having lived through both Nazi persecution and Communist oppression, I came to the conclusion that what was paramount for me was an open society. So I called the foundation the Open Society Fund, and I defined its objectives as opening up closed societies, making open societies more viable, and promoting a critical mode of thinking. That was in 1979.

My first major undertaking was in South Africa, but it was not successful. The apartheid system was so pervasive that whatever I tried to do made me part of the system rather than helping to change it. Then I turned my attention to Central Europe. Here I was much more successful. I started supporting the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia in 1980 and Solidarity in Poland in 1981. I established separate foundations in my native country, Hungary, in 1984, in China in 1986, in the Soviet Union in 1987, and in Poland in 1988. My engagement accelerated with the collapse of the Soviet system. By now I have established a network of foundations that extends across more than twenty-five countries (not including China, where we shut down in 1989).

Operating under Communist regimes, I never felt the need to explain what "open society" meant; those who supported the objectives of the foundations understood it better than I did, even if they were not familiar with the expression. The goal of my foundation in Hungary, for example, was to support alternative activities. I knew that the prevailing Communist dogma was false exactly because it was a dogma, and that it would become unsustainable if it was exposed to alternatives. The approach proved effective. The foundation became the main source of support for civil society in Hungary, and as civil society flourished, so the Communist regime waned.

After the collapse of communism, the mission of the foundation network changed. Recognizing that an open society is a more advanced, more sophisticated form of social organization than a closed society (because in a closed society there is only one blueprint, which is imposed on society, whereas in an open society each citizen is not only allowed but required to think for himself), the foundations shifted from a subversive task to a constructive one -- not an easy thing to do when the believers in an open society are accustomed to subversive activity. Most of my foundations did a good job, but unfortunately, they did not have much company. The open societies of the West did not feel a strong urge to promote open societies in the former Soviet empire. On the contrary, the prevailing view was that people ought to be left to look after their own affairs. The end of the Cold War brought a response very different from that at the end of the Second World War. The idea of a new Marshall Plan could not even be mooted. When I proposed such an idea at a conference in Potsdam (in what was then still East Germany), in the spring of 1989, I was literally laughed at.

The collapse of communism laid the groundwork for a universal open society, but the Western democracies failed to rise to the occasion. The new regimes that are emerging in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia bear little resemblance to open societies. The Western alliance seems to have lost its sense of purpose, because it cannot define itself in terms of a Communist menace. It has shown little inclination to come to the aid of those who have defended the idea of an open society in Bosnia or anywhere else. As for the people living in formerly Communist countries, they might have aspired to an open society when they suffered from repression, but now that the Communist system has collapsed, they are preoccupied with the problems of survival. After the failure of communism there came a general disillusionment with universal concepts, and the open society is a universal concept.

These considerations have forced me to re-examine my belief in the open society. For five or six years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, I devoted practically all of my energies to the transformation of the formerly Communist world. More recently I have redirected my attention to our own society. The network of foundations I created continues to do good work; nevertheless, I felt an urgent need to reconsider the conceptual framework that had guided me in establishing them. This reassessment has led me to the conclusion that the concept of the open society has not lost its relevance. On the contrary, it may be even more useful in understanding the present moment in history and in providing a practical guide to political action than it was at the time Karl Popper wrote his book -- but it needs to be thoroughly rethought and reformulated. If the open society is to serve as an ideal worth striving for, it can no longer be defined in terms of the Communist menace. It must be given a more positive content.

THE NEW ENEMY

POPPER showed that fascism and communism had much in common, even though one constituted the extreme right and the other the extreme left, because both relied on the power of the state to repress the freedom of the individual. I want to extend his argument. I contend that an open society may also be threatened from the opposite direction -- from excessive individualism. Too much competition and too little cooperation can cause intolerable inequities and instability.

Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system -- which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society -- is liable to break down.

I want to emphasize, however, that I am not putting laissez-faire capitalism in the same category as Nazism or communism. Totalitarian ideologies deliberately seek to destroy the open society; laissez-faire policies may endanger it, but only inadvertently. Friedrich Hayek, one of the apostles of laissez-faire, was also a passionate proponent of the open society. Nevertheless, because communism and even socialism have been thoroughly discredited, I consider the threat from the laissez-faire side more potent today than the threat from totalitarian ideologies. We are enjoying a truly global market economy in which goods, services, capital, and even people move around quite freely, but we fail to recognize the need to sustain the values and institutions of an open society.

The present situation is comparable to that at the turn of the past century. It was a golden age of capitalism, characterized by the principle of laissez-faire; so is the present. The earlier period was in some ways more stable. There was an imperial power, England, that was prepared to dispatch gunboats to faraway places because as the main beneficiary of the system it had a vested interest in maintaining that system. Today the United States does not want to be the policeman of the world. The earlier period had the gold standard; today the main currencies float and crush against each other like continental plates. Yet the free-market regime that prevailed a hundred years ago was destroyed by the First World War. Totalitarian ideologies came to the fore, and by the end of the Second World War there was practically no movement of capital between countries. How much more likely the present regime is to break down unless we learn from experience!

Although laissez-faire doctrines do not contradict the principles of the open society the way Marxism-Leninism or Nazi ideas of racial purity did, all these doctrines have an important feature in common: they all try to justify their claim to ultimate truth with an appeal to science. In the case of totalitarian doctrines, that appeal could easily be dismissed. One of Popper's accomplishments was to show that a theory like Marxism does not qualify as science. In the case of laissezfaire the claim is more difficult to dispute, because it is based on economic theory, and economics is the most reputable of the social sciences. One cannot simply equate market economics with Marxist economics. Yet laissez-faire ideology, I contend, is just as much a perversion of supposedly scientific verities as Marxism-Leninism is.

The main scientific underpinning of the laissez-faire ideology is the theory that free and competitive markets bring supply and demand into equilibrium and thereby ensure the best allocation of resources. This is widely accepted as an eternal verity, and in a sense it is one. Economic theory is an axiomatic system: as long as the basic assumptions hold, the conclusions follow. But when we examine the assumptions closely, we find that they do not apply to the real world. As originally formulated, the theory of perfect competition -- of the natural equilibrium of supply and demand -- assumed perfect knowledge, homogeneous and easily divisible products, and a large enough number of market participants that no single participant could influence the market price. The assumption of perfect knowledge proved unsustainable, so it was replaced by an ingenious device. Supply and demand were taken as independently given. This condition was presented as a methodological requirement rather than an assumption. It was argued that economic theory studies the relationship between supply and demand; therefore it must take both of them as given.

As I have shown elsewhere, the condition that supply and demand are independently given cannot be reconciled with reality, at least as far as the financial markets are concerned -- and financial markets play a crucial role in the allocation of resources. Buyers and sellers in financial markets seek to discount a future that depends on their own decisions. The shape of the supply and demand curves cannot be taken as given because both of them incorporate expectations about events that are shaped by those expectations. There is a two-way feedback mechanism between the market participants' thinking and the situation they think about -- "reflexivity." It accounts for both the imperfect understanding of the participants (recognition of which is the basis of the concept of the open society) and the indeterminacy of the process in which they participate.

If the supply and demand curves are not independently given, how are market prices determined? If we look at the behavior of financial markets, we find that instead of tending toward equilibrium, prices continue to fluctuate relative to the expectations of buyers and sellers. There are prolonged periods when prices are moving away from any theoretical equilibrium. Even if they eventually show a tendency to return, the equilibrium is not the same as it would have been without the intervening period. Yet the concept of equilibrium endures. It is easy to see why: without it, economics could not say how prices are determined.

In the absence of equilibrium, the contention that free markets lead to the optimum allocation of resources loses its justification. The supposedly scientific theory that has been used to validate it turns out to be an axiomatic structure whose conclusions are contained in its assumptions and are not necessarily supported by the empirical evidence. The resemblance to Marxism, which also claimed scientific status for its tenets, is too close for comfort.

I do not mean to imply that economic theory has deliberately distorted reality for political purposes. But in trying to imitate the accomplishments (and win for itself the prestige) of natural science, economic theory attempted the impossible. The theories of social science relate to their subject matter in a reflexive manner. That is to say, they can influence events in a way that the theories of natural science cannot. Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle implies that the act of observation may interfere with the behavior of quantum particles; but it is the observation that creates the effect, not the uncertainty principle itself. In the social sphere, theories have the capacity to alter the subject matter to which they relate. Economic theory has deliberately excluded reflexivity from consideration. In doing so, it has distorted its subject matter and laid itself open to exploitation by laissez-faire ideology.

What allows economic theory to be converted into an ideology hostile to the open society is the assumption of perfect knowledge -- at first openly stated and then disguised in the form of a methodological device. There is a powerful case for the market mechanism, but it is not that markets are perfect; it is that in a world dominated by imperfect understanding, markets provide an efficient feedback mechanism for evaluating the results of one's decisions and correcting mistakes.

Whatever its form, the assertion of perfect knowledge stands in contradiction to the concept of the open society (which recognizes that our understanding of our situation is inherently imperfect). Since this point is abstract, I need to describe specific ways in which laissezfaire ideas can pose a threat to the open society. I shall focus on three issues: economic stability, social justice, and international relations.

ECONOMIC STABILITY

Economic theory has managed to create an artificial world in which the participants' preferences and the opportunities confronting participants are independent of each other, and prices tend toward an equilibrium that brings the two forces into balance. But in financial markets prices are not merely the passive reflection of independently given demand and supply; they also play an active role in shaping those preferences and opportunities. This reflexive interaction renders financial markets inherently unstable. Laissez-faire ideology denies the instability and opposes any form of government intervention aimed at preserving stability. History has shown that financial markets do break down, causing economic depression and social unrest. The breakdowns have led to the evolution of central banking and other forms of regulation. Laissezfaire ideologues like to argue that the breakdowns were caused by faulty regulations, not by unstable markets. There is some validity in their argument, because if our understanding is inherently imperfect, regulations are bound to be defective. But their argument rings hollow, because it fails to explain why the regulations were imposed in the first place. It sidesteps the issue by using a different argument, which goes like this: since regulations are faulty, unregulated markets are perfect.

The argument rests on the assumption of perfect knowledge: if a solution is wrong, its opposite must be right. In the absence of perfect knowledge, however, both free markets and regulations are flawed. Stability can be preserved only if a deliberate effort is made to preserve it. Even then breakdowns will occur, because public policy is often faulty. If they are severe enough, breakdowns may give rise to totalitarian regimes.
Instability extends well beyond financial markets: it affects the values that guide people in their actions. Economic theory takes values as given. At the time economic theory was born, in the age of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Alfred Marshall, this was a reasonable assumption, because people did, in fact, have firmly established values. Adam Smith himself combined a moral philosophy with his economic theory. Beneath the individual preferences that found expression in market behavior, people were guided by a set of moral principles that found expression in behavior outside the scope of the market mechanism. Deeply rooted in tradition, religion, and culture, these principles were not necessarily rational in the sense of representing conscious choices among available alternatives. Indeed, they often could not hold their own when alternatives became available. Market values served to undermine traditional values.

There has been an ongoing conflict between market values and other, more traditional value systems, which has aroused strong passions and antagonisms. As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of nonmarket values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them. Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.

SOCIAL DARWINISM

By taking the conditions of supply and demand as given and declaring government intervention the ultimate evil, laissezfaire ideology has effectively banished income or wealth redistribution. I can agree that all attempts at redistribution interfere with the efficiency of the market, but it does not follow that no attempt should be made. The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism. It claims that if redistribution causes inefficiencies and distortions, the problems can be solved by eliminating redistribution -- just as the Communists claimed that the duplication involved in competition is wasteful, and therefore we should have a centrally planned economy. But perfection is unattainable. Wealth does accumulate in the hands of its owners, and if there is no mechanism for redistribution, the inequities can become intolerable. "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread." Francis Bacon was a profound economist.

The laissez-faire argument against income redistribution invokes the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The argument is undercut by the fact that wealth is passed on by inheritance, and the second generation is rarely as fit as the first.

In any case, there is something wrong with making the survival of the fittest a guiding principle of civilized society. This social Darwinism is based on an outmoded theory of evolution, just as the equilibrium theory in economics is taking its cue from Newtonian physics. The principle that guides the evolution of species is mutation, and mutation works in a much more sophisticated way. Species and their environment are interactive, and one species serves as part of the environment for the others. There is a feedback mechanism similar to reflexivity in history, with the difference being that in history the mechanism is driven not by mutation but by misconceptions. I mention this because social Darwinism is one of the misconceptions driving human affairs today. The main point I want to make is that cooperation is as much a part of the system as competition, and the slogan "survival of the fittest" distorts this fact.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Laissez-faire ideology shares some of the deficiencies of another spurious science, geopolitics. States have no principles, only interests, geopoliticians argue, and those interests are determined by geographic location and other fundamentals. This deterministic approach is rooted in an outdated nineteenth-century view of scientific method, and it suffers from at least two glaring defects that do not apply with the same force to the economic doctrines of laissez-faire. One is that it treats the state as the indivisible unit of analysis, just as economics treats the individual. There is something contradictory in banishing the state from the economy while at the same time enshrining it as the ultimate source of authority in international relations. But let that pass. There is a more pressing practical aspect of the problem. What happens when a state disintegrates? Geopolitical realists find themselves totally unprepared. That is what happened when the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia disintegrated. The other defect of geopolitics is that it does not recognize a common interest beyond the national interest.

With the demise of communism, the present state of affairs, however imperfect, can be described as a global open society. It is not threatened from the outside, from some totalitarian ideology seeking world supremacy. The threat comes from the inside, from local tyrants seeking to establish internal dominance through external conflicts. It may also come from democratic but sovereign states pursuing their self-interest to the detriment of the common interest. The international open society may be its own worst enemy.

The Cold War was an extremely stable arrangement. Two power blocs, representing opposing concepts of social organization, were struggling for supremacy, but they had to respect each other's vital interests, because each side was capable of destroying the other in an all-out war. This put a firm limit on the extent of the conflict; all local conflicts were, in turn, contained by the larger conflict. This extremely stable world order has come to an end as the result of the internal disintegration of one superpower. No new world order has taken its place. We have entered a period of disorder.

Laissez-faire ideology does not prepare us to cope with this challenge. It does not recognize the need for a world order. An order is supposed to emerge from states' pursuit of their self-interest. But, guided by the principle of the survival of the fittest, states are increasingly preoccupied with their competitiveness and unwilling to make any sacrifices for the common good.

There is no need to make any dire predictions about the eventual breakdown of our global trading system in order to show that a laissezfaire ideology is incompatible with the concept of the open society. It is enough to consider the free world's failure to extend a helping hand after the collapse of communism. The system of robber capitalism that has taken hold in Russia is so iniquitous that people may well turn to a charismatic leader promising national revival at the cost of civil liberties.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that the collapse of a repressive regime does not automatically lead to the establishment of an open society. An open society is not merely the absence of government intervention and oppression. It is a complicated, sophisticated structure, and deliberate effort is required to bring it into existence. Since it is more sophisticated than the system it replaces, a speedy transition requires outside assistance. But the combination of laissez-faire ideas, social Darwinism, and geopolitical realism that prevailed in the United States and the United Kingdom stood in the way of any hope for an open society in Russia. If the leaders of these countries had had a different view of the world, they could have established firm foundations for a global open society.

At the time of the Soviet collapse there was an opportunity to make the UN function as it was originally designed to. Mikhail Gorbachev visited the United Nations in 1988 and outlined his vision of the two superpowers cooperating to bring peace and security to the world. Since then the opportunity has faded. The UN has been thoroughly discredited as a peacekeeping institution. Bosnia is doing to the UN what Abyssinia did to the League of Nations in 1936.

Our global open society lacks the institutions and mechanisms necessary for its preservation, but there is no political will to bring them into existence. I blame the prevailing attitude, which holds that the unhampered pursuit of self-interest will bring about an eventual international equilibrium. I believe this confidence is misplaced. I believe that the concept of the open society, which needs institutions to protect it, may provide a better guide to action. As things stand, it does not take very much imagination to realize that the global open society that prevails at present is likely to prove a temporary phenomenon.

THE PROMISE OF FALLIBILITY

It is easier to identify the enemies of the open society than to give the concept a positive meaning. Yet without such a positive meaning the open society is bound to fall prey to its enemies. There has to be a common interest to hold a community together, but the open society is not a community in the traditional sense of the word. It is an abstract idea, a universal concept. Admittedly, there is such a thing as a global community; there are common interests on a global level, such as the preservation of the environment and the prevention of war. But these interests are relatively weak in comparison with special interests. They do not have much of a constituency in a world composed of sovereign states. Moreover, the open society as a universal concept transcends all boundaries. Societies derive their cohesion from shared values. These values are rooted in culture, religion, history, and tradition. When a society does not have boundaries, where are the shared values to be found? I believe there is only one possible source: the concept of the open society itself.

To fulfill this role, the concept of the open society needs to be redefined. Instead of there being a dichotomy between open and closed, I see the open society as occupying a middle ground, where the rights of the individual are safeguarded but where there are some shared values that hold society together. This middle ground is threatened from all sides. At one extreme, communist and nationalist doctrines would lead to state domination. At the other extreme, laissezfaire capitalism would lead to great instability and eventual breakdown. There are other variants. Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, proposes a so-called Asian model that combines a market economy with a repressive state. In many parts of the world control of the state is so closely associated with the creation of private wealth that one might speak of robber capitalism, or the "gangster state," as a new threat to the open society.

I envisage the open society as a society open to improvement. We start with the recognition of our own fallibility, which extends not only to our mental constructs but also to our institutions. What is imperfect can be improved, by a process of trial and error. The open society not only allows this process but actually encourages it, by insisting on freedom of expression and protecting dissent. The open society offers a vista of limitless progress. In this respect it has an affinity with the scientific method. But science has at its disposal objective criteria -- namely the facts by which the process may be judged. Unfortunately, in human affairs the facts do not provide reliable criteria of truth, yet we need some generally agreed-upon standards by which the process of trial and error can be judged. All cultures and religions offer such standards; the open society cannot do without them. The innovation in an open society is that whereas most cultures and religions regard their own values as absolute, an open society, which is aware of many cultures and religions, must regard its own shared values as a matter of debate and choice. To make the debate possible, there must be general agreement on at least one point: that the open society is a desirable form of social organization. People must be free to think and act, subject only to limits imposed by the common interests. Where the limits are must also be determined by trial and error.

The Declaration of Independence may be taken as a pretty good approximation of the principles of an open society, but instead of claiming that those principles are self-evident, we ought to say that they are consistent with our fallibility. Could the recognition of our imperfect understanding serve to establish the open society as a desirable form of social organization? I believe it could, although there are formidable difficulties in the way. We must promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth. But if ultimate truth is not attainable, how can we accept our fallibility as ultimate truth?

This is an apparent paradox, but it can be resolved. The first proposition, that our understanding is imperfect, is consistent with a second proposition: that we must accept the first proposition as an article of faith. The need for articles of faith arises exactly because our understanding is imperfect. If we enjoyed perfect knowledge, there would be no need for beliefs. But to accept this line of reasoning requires a profound change in the role that we accord our beliefs.

Historically, beliefs have served to justify specific rules of conduct. Fallibility ought to foster a different attitude. Beliefs ought to serve to shape our lives, not to make us abide by a given set of rules. If we recognize that our beliefs are expressions of our choices, not of ultimate truth, we are more likely to tolerate other beliefs and to revise our own in the light of our experiences. But that is not how most people treat their beliefs. They tend to identify their beliefs with ultimate truth. Indeed, that identification often serves to define their own identity. If their experience of living in an open society obliges them to give up their claim to the ultimate truth, they feel a sense of loss.

The idea that we somehow embody the ultimate truth is deeply ingrained in our thinking. We may be endowed with critical faculties, but we are inseparably tied to ourselves. We may have discovered truth and morality, but, above all, we must represent our interests and our selves. Therefore, if there are such things as truth and justice --and we have come to believe that there are -- then we want to be in possession of them. We demand truth from religion and, recently, from science. A belief in our fallibility is a poor substitute. It is a highly sophisticated concept, much more difficult to work with than more primitive beliefs, such as my country (or my company or my family), right or wrong.
If the idea of our fallibility is so hard to take, what makes it appealing? The most powerful argument in its favor is to be found in the results it produces. Open societies tend to be more prosperous, more innovative, more stimulating, than closed ones. But there is a danger in proposing success as the sole basis for holding a belief, because if my theory of reflexivity is valid, being successful is not identical with being right. In natural science, theories have to be right (in the sense that the predictions and explanations they produce correspond to the facts) for them to work (in the sense of producing useful predictions and explanations). But in the social sphere what is effective is not necessarily identical with what is right, because of the reflexive connection between thinking and reality. As I hinted earlier, the cult of success can become a source of instability in an open society, because it can undermine our sense of right and wrong. That is what is happening in our society today. Our sense of right and wrong is endangered by our preoccupation with success, as measured by money. Anything goes, as long as you can get away with it.

If success were the only criterion, the open society would lose out against totalitarian ideologies -- as indeed it did on many occasions. It is much easier to argue for my own interest than to go through the whole rigmarole of abstract reasoning from fallibility to the concept of the open society.

The concept of the open society needs to be more firmly grounded. There has to be a commitment to the open society because it is the right form of social organization. Such a commitment is hard to come by.

I believe in the open society because it allows us to develop our potential better than a social system that claims to be in possession of ultimate truth. Accepting the unattainable character of truth offers a better prospect for freedom and prosperity than denying it. But I recognize a problem here: I am sufficiently committed to the pursuit of truth to find the case for the open society convincing, but I am not sure that other people will share my point of view. Given the reflexive connection between thinking and reality, truth is not indispensable for success. It may be possible to attain specific objectives by twisting or denying the truth, and people may be more interested in attaining their specific objectives than in attaining the truth. Only at the highest level of abstraction, when we consider the meaning of life, does truth take on paramount importance. Even then, deception may be preferable to the truth, because life entails death and death is difficult to accept. Indeed, one could argue that the open society is the best form of social organization for making the most of life, whereas the closed society is the form best suited to the acceptance of death. In the ultimate analysis a belief in the open society is a matter of choice, not of logical necessity.

That is not all. Even if the concept of the open society were universally accepted, that would not be sufficient to ensure that freedom and prosperity would prevail. The open society merely provides a framework within which different views about social and political issues can be reconciled; it does not offer a firm view on social goals. If it did, it would not be an open society. This means that people must hold other beliefs in addition to their belief in the open society. Only in a closed society does the concept of the open society provide a sufficient basis for political action; in an open society it is not enough to be a democrat; one must be a liberal democrat or a social democrat or a Christian democrat or some other kind of democrat. A shared belief in the open society is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for freedom and prosperity and all the good things that the open society is supposed to bring.

It can be seen that the concept of the open society is a seemingly inexhaustible source of difficulties. That is to be expected. After all, the open society is based on the recognition of our fallibility. Indeed, it stands to reason that our ideal of the open society is unattainable. To have a blueprint for it would be self-contradictory. That does not mean that we should not strive toward it. In science also, ultimate truth is unattainable. Yet look at the progress we have made in pursuing it. Similarly, the open society can be approximated to a greater or lesser extent.

To derive a political and social agenda from a philosophical, epistemological argument seems like a hopeless undertaking. Yet it can be done. There is historical precedent. The Enlightenment was a celebration of the power of reason, and it provided the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The belief in reason was carried to excess in the French Revolution, with unpleasant side effects; nevertheless, it was the beginning of modernity. We have now had 200 years of experience with the Age of Reason, and as reasonable people we ought to recognize that reason has its limitations. The time is ripe for developing a conceptual framework based on our fallibility. Where reason has failed, fallibility may yet succeed.

Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; February 1997; The Capitalist Threat; Volume 279, No. 2; pages 45-58.

Heard on the street...

Walk lofty and Kerry a big shtik

Another Nigerian E-Mail Scam Example

Dear Brethren,

Calvary greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I am former Mrs. Grace Adamu a widow to Late Sheik Ojo. I am 72years old, I am now a new Christian convert, suffering from long time cancer of the breast. From all indications,my condition is really deteriorating and is quite obvious that I may not live more than six months, because the cancer stage has gotten to a very severe stage.

My late husband was killed during the Gulf war, and during the period of our marriage we had a son who was also killed in a cold blood during the Gulf war.Mylate husband was very wealthy and after his death, I inherited all his business and wealth. My personal physician told me that I may not live for more than six months and I am so scared about
this. So, I now decided to divide part of this wealth, by contributing to the development of evangelism in Africa,America,Europe and Asian Countries. This mission which will no doubt be tasking had made me to recently relocated to Nigeria, Africa where I live presently.

I am willing to donate the sum of $10,000,000.00 Million US Dollars to your Church/Ministry for the development of evangelism and also as aids for the less privileged around you. Please note that, this fund is lying in a Security Company in Europe and the company has branches all over. To enable you and your ministry get this funds, my lawyer will file an immediate application for the transfer of the money in the name of you and your ministry.

Lastly, I want you/your ministry to be praying for me as regards my entire life and my health because I have come to find out since my spiritual birth lately that wealth acquisition without Jesus Christ in one's life is vanity upon vanity. If you have to die says the Lord, keep fit and I will give you the crown of life.

May the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you.

Yours in Christ,

Mrs Grace Adamu
Kaduna-Nigeria

The UNnatural...

As much as I or some other conservative may carp about the UN, an Indian friend of mine added a bit of clarity to this issue. The UN's charter is to keep the peace and cannot take warlike actions to keep the peace. Keeping the peace includes endless negotiations and appeasement.

Where this clarity falls apart is when UN forces are deployed to keep the peace and they cannot or will not do it.

The Wisdom of Churchill

The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the Government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Men stumble over the truth from time to time but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.

The maxim "Nothing but perfection" may be spelled "Paralysis."

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.

It is better to do the wrong thing than to do nothing.

Everybody's Stupid

How does it go... "Everybody's stupid, but on different subjects". The liberal elite are so intelligent, however, that they can claim proficiency in all subjects, even those they've never heard of before. Awesome. No clear-cut decisions, only statements supported by every possible obfuscation to thoroughly confuse and lord over we common folk.

What happens when conservatives call liberals on their verbal gymnastic games? We get Howard Dean's roar. Teddy Kennedy's orbital responses including calling an African American judicial appointee a Neanderthal. Give us a break!

Camel's Nose Under The Tent

Remember when only Las Vegas had legal gambling other than card rooms and race tracks? Then there was Atlantic City. Then there were the Indian Casinos. Then...Then...

So it is with the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts. The only thing missing is the false economic incentive that carried gambling into a building next to you.

Writing Pet peeve

If we are the sum of our experience, why is there this insistence that everything be thoroughly referenced and footnoted? Facts or substantiation never got in the way of the progressive thought processes, so why waste the time?

Clearly, if one lifts other's words or ideas, one must give credit where credit is due, but for the most part, this continual need to substantiate ones theories or writings undermines its originality and relegates the piece to some sort of incremental blip to the knowledge of man.

As it states in the Bible book Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the sun." So it would seem that anything accumulated in our gray matter and then regurgitated in a BLOG such as this is nothing more than a restructuring of that which has gone before. How sad.

The truth of the matter is that man is seldom convinced by a footnote, but by the deeper meaning of the words he is reading. It is quite popular to publish book after book of facts and footnotes to support arguments with very little space given to vision. This admonishment applies to both sides of the political spectrum.

The trouble we have now is that some group's vision is pretty screwed up! Q.E.D.

Liberalism

One of many issues with liberalism or progressive thought is its total lack of response to facts which determine a line of thought or program are invalid or ineffective. Instead, the standard response is to increase funding justified by the fact that unachieved results were due to underfunding or inadequate resources applied. A perfect example of this is the horrible state of public education bastardized by the perverted influence of the teachers unions.

The resistance to change in the government bureaucracy is strong no matter what the politics of the situation is, however when progressive policies take a strangler, it becomes like a spreading cancer consuming all healthy structures, public and private, in its path.

Why does this happen? It is actually quite simple. When subjective thought processes (progressivism) and objective thought processes (conservatism) clash or cross, the subjective dialog usually wins by attrition. The objective thinker cannot logically follow or counter such chaos and is more given to throwing up his or her hands, finally, or losing his or her temper due to the silliness of it all.

There is hope, however. The attack dog of conservatism, Sean Hannity, will not let his opposition change the subject or evade a direct response to his questioning. He needs to "Hannitize" more of us on this one aspect of his repertoire.

All The News That's Fit To Print

Listening to the radio today, I heard Donald Rumsfeld state he no longer reads the newspapers, but is inclined to read books on history, etc. These comments tend to track my thinking pretty well. Only when there is a local story in the San Francisco Comical or the San Jose Murky News will I purchase a single copy. My current refuge is the Wall Street Journal for daily news consumption, first, for its conservative editorial leaning, and second, because it tends not to get carried away on various topics.

The other source of news is on the Web where I triangulate every news bit to "trust but verify." Of recent interest are the weekly writings of Dennis Prager. This week's blurb ties in well with the comments above. It is reproduced below for your convenience.

==========================================

townhall.com

Shame on the news media, too
Dennis Prager

May 11, 2004

During the very same 10 days that every newspaper and television news program in the world featured photo after photo, day after day, of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated, a government not far from Iraq engaged in mass murder, mass rape and ethnic cleansing of approximately 1 million people.

Is that more serious, more evil and more scandalous than a handful of Americans sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners?

Not to the world's news media.

To the world's (including America's) news media, the Nazi-like, racist, mass ethnic cleansing warranted minuscule attention as compared with the humiliation of some Iraqis.

Why?

The answer is as obvious as it is painful.

The world's news media are, with almost no exceptions, agenda-driven rather than news-driven.

The agendas are:

1. The political bias of the news reporting organization.

2. The monetary need to attract readers/viewers.

3. The desire to be the center of society's attention.

4. Not to be too different from other news media. As one who peruses up to a dozen American newspapers a day, I am struck daily at how virtually identical international news articles are. International reporters are like baseball players -- they all do the same thing, just on different teams.

In the case of the massive attention the news media have been giving to the stripping and humiliation of Iraqi male prisoners, all four agendas play a role, but the first one predominates.

How does this explain the tiny amount of news media coverage devoted to the near-genocide in Sudan (and North Korea and Tibet) as compared with the massive 24/7 coverage of the Iraqi prisoners?

The primary reason is the political bias of the news reporting organizations. Virtually every major newspaper in the world is anti-Bush, and most are anti-American. The desire to humiliate America (or George Bush) has deep roots. The America of those who support President Bush portrays itself as a moral beacon, and it has contempt for the moral authority of the United Nations and "world opinion." Therefore, those who loathe this American self-appointed moral role cannot pass up the chance to portray America as morally no better or even worse than other countries.

The virtually monolithic ideology that drives the world's news media should be a major concern among all those who treasure independent thought, not to mention moral clarity and America's well-being. For example, though free of governmental control, the reporting of the BBC has been almost as predictably leftist as Soviet newspapers.

The news media are numbing the human mind. The anti-American and anti-Israeli news reporting that saturates the European media is the major reason for the recent polling results that show most Europeans regard America and Israel as the greatest threats to world peace.

There is a second and related reason for the mind-numbing coverage of the Iraqi prisoners. The world's Left, which sets the United Nations' and the news media's priorities, is only interested in human suffering when it is caused by whites, Christians or Jews, especially Americans and Israelis. That explains the world's and the media's indifference to the decimation of Tibet -- it was perpetrated by Chinese; to the genocide in Rwanda -- it was perpetrated by black Africans; to the genocide of blacks in Sudan -- it is perpetrated by Arab Muslims; to the genocide in North Korea -- it is perpetrated by Koreans. On the other hand, when Israelis killed Palestinian terrorists and bystanders in Jenin, the world press was fixated on it, and the BBC declared it a "massacre."

So, too, the deaths of Arabs at the hands of Arabs -- the tens of thousands in Algeria, the hundreds of thousands in Iraq, the tens of thousands in Syria, the thousands of Arab and other Muslim young women in "honor killings" -- are of little interest to the news media, the Arab world, the United Nations and the Left. But Americans stripping male prisoners in Iraq? It is the most important story on earth.

It is essential to note that it is precisely because I believe America's role is to be a moral beacon to the world that those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison so anger me. Americans are not dying in Iraq so that other Americans can pile naked Iraqi men on each other and smile for photos next to them. The harm those pictures have done to the cause of good may be incalculable.

But it is not moral revulsion, let alone newsworthiness, that is animating the news media. One day, a Sudanese black will scour the world press archives to find out what the world was preoccupied with while her family and hundreds of thousands of other Sudanese blacks were raped, enslaved, ethnically cleansed of their lands and murdered. She will learn the world was deeply concerned with a couple of dozen Iraqi men photographed in humiliating sexual positions.

©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

In Your Dreams

More Nigerian Mail/E-Mail Scams Redux...

Dr. Slater Lukoto,
DEPARTMENT OF MINERALS AND ENERGY,
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA.
Tel No: +27-73-380-4943
Fax No: +27-

ATTN: President/CEO,

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL & URGENT

It is my great pleasure to write you this letter on behalf of my
colleagues. Your information was given to me by a member of the South African
Export Promotion Council (SAEPC) who was with the Government delegation
on a trip to your country for a bilateral conference talk to encourage
foreign investors. I have decided to seek a confidential co-operation
with you in the execution of the deal hereunder for the benefit of all
parties and hope you will keep it confidential because of the nature of
this business.

Within the Department of Minerals & Energy where I work as a Director
of Audit and Project Implementation and with the co-operation of two
other top officials, we have in our possession an overdue payment in US
funds.

The said funds represent certain percentage of the total contract value
executed on behalf of my Department by a foreign contracting firm,
which we the officials over-invoiced to the amount of US$26,500,000.00
(Twenty-Six Million Five Hundred Thousand US Dollars). Though the actual
contract cost has been paid to the original contractor, leaving the excess
balance unclaimed.

Since the present elected Government is determined to pay foreign
contractors all debts owed, so as to maintain good relationship with foreign
governments and non-government agencies, we included our bills for
approvals with the Department of Finance and the South Africa Reserve Bank
(SARB). We are seeking your assistance to front as beneficiary of the
unclaimed funds, since we are not allowed to operate foreign accounts.
Details and change of beneficiary information upon application for claim
to reflect payment and approvals will be secured on behalf of you/your
Company.

I have the authority of my partners involved to propose that should you
be willing to assist us in this transaction your share as compensation
will be US$6.625m (25%), while my colleagues and I receive US$17.225m
(65%) and the balance of US$2.650m (10%) for taxation and miscellaneous
expenses incurred.

The business is completely safe and secure, provided you treat it with
utmost confidentiality. It does not matter whether you/your Company
does contract projects, as a transfer of powers will be secured in favour
of you/your Company. Also, your area of specialization is not a
hindrance to the successful execution of this transaction. I have reposed my
confidence in you and hope that you will not disappoint us.

Kindly notify me by telephone on 27-73-380-4943 or my email address: slaterlukoto@yahoo.ca
for further details upon your acceptance of this proposal.

Thanks for your co-operation.

Regards,

Dr. Slater Lukoto

I Have A Dream...

Actually, I have a nightmare! It goes like this... Because the sheeple are so used to being led around via the mass media, they become programmed to vote for John Kerry. As a result, John Kerry wins by a landslide and has a mandate to...??? Anyway, once in office, he immediately starts a program to socialize medicine, raise taxes, allow unlimited lawsuits against corporations for alleged wrongdoings, resumes partial-birth abortions, stop private ownership of guns, increase the power and influence of the teachers' union, forces Wal-Mart to unionize, penalizes companies for exporting jobs, raises taxes on SUV's by 2X, allows gay marriage to be enshrined in the Constitution, etc., etc...

The remaining conservatives, realizing their way of life has been utterly destroyed, begin to emigrate from the blue states to the red states in droves. Shortly, a secession movement begins, primarily due to completely different world views and vision for our country.

Vitriol continues to build and suddenly anarchy takes over the street, and an open civil uprising and war begins. It started with a war of words, but when federal troops controlled by the blue states are deployed, the various militias that had formed in the red states take them to task.

Does this sound like a cheap Hollywood movie? No, it may be coming to a state near you. When you vote in November, 2004, use your brain, not your heart.

It's Deja Vu All Over Again!

We keep hearing this term "mainstream media" being discussed by conservative talk-show hosts as radical liberalism's main vehicle of communication. I was very suspicious of this usage since many of the talk-show host are talking on stations owned by none other than "mainstream media". I've come to the conclusion that the talk-show hosts are sheltered as long as the ratings keep coming in. After all, the media men are, first and foremost, businessmen.

Nonetheless, after following news and editorials in the San Francisco Comical, the Murky News, the Crescent News Network, and the other alphabet soup networks, there is a constant undertow of self-righteous indignation that borders on sedition the treason in these difficult times. There is really no other way to say it. Headlines are inflammatory and grossly exaggerated and outright lies. The Comical states that the President didn't apologize to the Arab states for recent prisoner problems, but I heard "Sorry" with my own ears several times. What doesn't the Comical understand about the word "Sorry"?

What are other people thinking of this? I am aware of many persons that continue to wallow in this manure. I remember the days when Time magazine used to present a balance and slightly conservative picture of things. Now it and nearly all the weekly "mainstream" magazine have strong leftward leaning editorial staff. People who live in the San Francisco Bay Area must take pause and look at themselves and see how unipolar their thought processes have become. This IS NOT the creative and open minded place I came to over thirty years ago.

These are very sad days for our country. I pray that people will come to their senses and finally take a stand against this incrementalism that is destroying our country.

Why?

It is very difficult for me to talk or write of my feelings about the U.S. war in Iraq. No matter what is said, the pain people feel over this affair will mostly put what is said in a bad light or in a light that was not intended. As a result, there is more silence than discussion. This is not good. We need to talk about this and we need to unify opinion into something meaningful that will not put our troops in a dangerous or demeaning situation.

As just stated, it is often a case of damned if I do and damned if I don’t when expressing my support for what we are doing in Iraq. Note that I did not use the “W” word (War). So often the anti-war folks would accuse those supporting our activities as “pro-war”.

Daily, we are reminded of the body-bags coming back from Iraq. When we try to delicately remind people that the total deaths is just 1/40th of the number of people killed on our highways, we are suddenly cast in one of those “bad” lights. Even one life taken due to decisions made by others is too much, but still we have this battle of perspectives.

My principles are simple:

1. We must take the battle to the enemy’s turf and focus on “why they hate us” later.
2. Israel (even with all its warts) has a right to exist.

What is disturbing to me is the absolute and total politicization of this effort, which is undermining progress and hurting our soldiers. At the center of this is the irrational hatred of President George Bush. It is beyond the scope of this writing to explore the reasons for that, but I must restate this is irrational and slightly psychopathic in nature as it blocks reasonable discussions about threats and solutions to our safety and future of the country.

How did we get into this mess…or why do they hate us?

The progressive or liberal voices would say that it is our multinational cultural imperialism mixed with our excessive consumption of world resources coupled with our unnatural need to be the world’s policeman.

Certainly, conservative megalomania manifested in multinational corporations is a problem which is causing increasing worker displacement, when management drops the ball. Secondly, a total lack of alternative energy planning which doesn’t cripple our economy is a problem. Regarding being a world policeman, there is also some truth to that.

Now, as a conservative libertarian, I’ve come clean.

What really, really lies at the heart of the matter is progressive or liberal thought and the general populace’s inability to properly deal with it. Liberal thought is very compelling, however, left to those not using their minds, moral degradation is the result. I could derisively say that this also applies to progressive intellectuals, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Moral degradation has taken and increasingly larger sweep across our nation and the world in the last forty years.

I remember when a local jurisdiction could ban pornography from the shelves of the local stores, but the ACLU will now force it back on there based on 1st Amendment rights. Then, victims had less rights or respect than the criminals…since the criminals are victims and could not control themselves due to their past upbringing. Later, lotteries were instituted with promises of funding our schools. Now the states push immoral activity to keep the system running. Then Indian casinos started. Then, then, then… Even common sense regarding guns is whacky. When I was younger, a gun collector friend told me that any machine gun has to have certain parts disabled or welded to prevent fully automatic operation. Now, it seems everyone can buy a fully automatic AK-47 or other “WMD’s”.

Certainly, conservatives can be hypocritical about these issues, however, progressives cannot even begin to understand that there is even a problem with any of this except the one with guns.

With such a gap of thinking, only some sort of shock treatment will bring these intellectual elites back into line with reality. With them, unfortunately, there will be never ending discussions on what is reality and your reality is OK for you, etc. etc..

To settle this back and forth palaver, I would admonish people to refocus on God of the Bible, and the best way to do that is to get into his word, The Bible. There really is no other basis for discussion. It was the basis for this country and that is just fine with me.

Another Epiphany...

As the heading of this BLOG indicates, these are "Random Thoughts From A Chaotic Mind", for sure. How is Chinese Communism like Creationism? "Boy", you say..."Now that is a stretch!" Most certainly, but let me illustrate.

Both are taking extreme positions because of either fear or loathing of the other extreme which is occurring in Christianity or could occur with Chinese Communism.

Creationism - It is a belief in the literal reading of Genesis for the origin of the universe, the earth, earth's creatures, and finally man. They stand on the creation taking place in 6-24 hour days and the earth being only about 6,000 years old. This is the most extreme position that could be taken to counter the infiltration of the bad science associated with evolution. It is their tug-of-war against evolutionism's undermining of morality, break-up of family, etc within the modern world.

Communism - Perhaps the Chinese Communists have studied the Judeo-Christian model and seen the undermining of Western morality over time. They well understand that if they were to allow democracy to take hold that they would quickly lose their grip on power and eventually follow the Western model down the sewer. Hmmm...

The Communists (read neo-capitalists) don't want to open the box of possibilities. Creationism is desperately trying to figure out how to get it closed.

I leave it to the reader to connect the obtuse.

How to pass at San Francisco State

Listening to KSFO this morning while driving to work, there was this Russian Jew Immigrant whose accent was so strong that she could hardly be understood, but what came through clear as a bell was San Francisco State had zealot instructors that surpass anything she ever came across in the Soviet Union in terms of their hatred for America and their support of socialism/communism. In another incident on campus, she "insulted" some persons in a gathering that circled and taunted some other Jews, she was hauled away to jail for using "hate speech".

The conclusion that the caller, the host, and the listener came to was that these situations were ultimately being paid for by our tax dollars. These instructors have never really held a "real" job and live in some sort of dream bubble detached from reality steeped in self loathing and hatred. How else can this stupidity be explained? As noted in a previous BLOG, let's cut the government burden down to 20% from its current 40% and see how long these situations continue.

Zell Miller's Speech

(He's the best Republican any Democrat could be!!!)

On C-SPAN
THIS IS A SPEECH (April 8, 2004) BY SENATOR ZELL MILLER.

The PRESIDING OFFICER: The Senator from Georgia.

Mr. MILLER: Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

The PRESIDING OFFICER: Without objection, it is so ordered.

SUBJECT: THE 9/11 COMMISSION

Mr. MILLER: Mr. President, after watching the harsh acrimony generated by the September 11 Commission--which, let me say at the outset, is made up of good and able members--I have come to seriously question this panel's usefulness. I believe it will ultimately play a role in doing great harm to this country, for its unintended consequences, I fear, will be to energize our enemies and demoralize our troops.

After being drowned in a tidal wave of all who didn't do enough before 9/11, I have come to believe that the Commission should issue a report that says: No one did enough. In the past, no one did near enough. And then thank everybody for serving, send them home, and let's get on with the job of protecting this country in the future.

Tragically, these hearings have proved to be a very divisive diversion for this country. Tragically, they have devoured valuable time looking backward instead of looking forward. Can you imagine handling the attack on Pearl Harbor this way? Can you imagine Congress, the media, and the public standing for this kind of political gamesmanship and finger-pointing after that day of infamy in 1941?

Some partisans tried that ploy, but they were soon quieted by the patriots who understood how important it was to get on with the war and take the battle to America 's enemies and not dwell on what FDR knew, when. You see, back then the highest priority was to win a war, not to win an election. That is what made them the greatest generation.

I realize that many well-meaning Americans see the hearings as democracy in action. Years ago when I was teaching political science, I probably would have had my class watching it live on television and using that very same phrase with them.

There are also the not-so-well-meaning political operatives who see these hearings as an opportunity to score cheap points. And then there are the media meddlers who see this as great theater that can be played out on the evening news and on endless talk shows for a week or more.

Congressional hearings have long been one of Washington's most entertaining pastimes. Joe McCarthy, Watergate, Iran-Contra--they all kept us glued to the TV and made for conversations around the water coolers or arguments over a beer at the corner pub.

A congressional hearing in Washington, DC is the ultimate aphrodisiac for political groupies and partisan punks. But it is not the groupies, punks, and television-sotted American public that I am worried about This latter crowd can get excited and divided over just about anything, whether it is some off-key wannabe dreaming of being the American idol, or what brainless bimbo "The Bachelor'' or "Average Joe" will choose, or who Donald Trump will fire next week. No, it is the real enemies of America that I am concerned about. These evil killers who right now are gleefully watching the shrill partisan finger-pointing of these hearings and grinning like a mule eating briars.

They see this as a major split within the great Satan, America . They see anger. They see division, instability, bickering, peevishness, and dissension. They see the President of the United States hammered unmercifully. They see all this, and they are greatly encouraged.

We should not be doing anything to encourage our enemies in this battle between good and evil. Yet these hearings, in my opinion, are doing just that. We are playing with fire. We are playing directly into the hands of our enemy by allowing these hearings to become the great divider they have become.

Dick Clarke's book and its release coinciding with these hearings have done this country a tremendous disservice and some day we will reap its whirlwind.

Long ago, Sir Walter Scott observed that revenge is "the sweetest morsel that ever was cooked in hell.''

The vindictive Clarke has now had his revenge, but what kind of hell has he, his CBS publisher, and his axe-to-grind advocates unleashed?

These hearings, coming on the heels of the election the terrorists influenced in Spain , bolster and energize our evil enemies as they have not been energized since 9/11.

Chances are very good that these evil enemies of America will attempt to influence our 2004 election in a similar dramatic way as they did Spain's. And to think that could never be in this country is to stick your head in the sand.

That is why the sooner we stop this endless bickering over the past and join together to prepare for the future, the better off this country will be. There are some things--whether this city believes it or not--that are just more important than political campaigns.

The recent past is so ripe for political second-guessing, "gotcha,'' and Monday morning quarterbacking. And it is so tempting in an election year. We should not allow ourselves to indulge that temptation. We should put our country first.

Every administration, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, bears some of the blame. Dick Clarke bears a big heap of it, because it was he who was in the catbird's seat to do something about it for more than a decade. Tragically, it was the decade in which we did the least.

We did nothing after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring more than a thousand Americans.

We did nothing in 1996 when 16 U.S. servicemen were killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers .

When our embassies were attacked in 1998, killing 263 people, our only response was to fire a few missiles on an empty tent.

Is it any wonder that after that decade of weak-willed responses to that murderous terror, our enemies thought we would never fight back?

In the 1990s is when Dick Clarke should have resigned. In the 1990s is when he should have apologized. That is when he should have written his book--that is, if he really had America 's best interests at heart.

Now, I know some will say we owe it to the families to get more information about what happened in the past, and I can understand that. But no amount of finger-pointing will bring our victims back

So now we owe it to the future families and all of America now in jeopardy not to encourage more terrorists, resulting in even more grieving families--perhaps many times over the ones of 9/11.

It is obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps--the wimps and the warriors : the ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill them before they kill us. In case you have not figured it out, I proudly belong to the latter.

This is a time like no other time in the history of this country. This country is being crippled with petty partisan politics of the worst possible kind. In time of war, it is not just unpatriotic; it is stupid; it is criminal.

So I pray that all this time, all this energy, all this talk, and all of the attention could be focused on the future instead of the past.

I pray we would stop pointing fingers and assigning blame and wringing our hands about what happened on that day David Acuology has called "the worst day in all our history'' more than 2 years ago, and instead, pour all our energy into how we can kill these terrorists before they kill us--again.

Make no mistake about it: They are watching these hearings and they are scheming and smiling about the distraction and the divisiveness that they see in America . And while they might not know who said it years ago in America , they know instinctively that a house divided cannot stand.

There is one other group that we should remember is listening to all of this--our troops.

I was in Iraq in January. One day, when I was meeting with the 1st Armored Division, a unit with a proud history, known as Old Ironsides, we were discussing troop morale, and the commanding general said it was top notch.

I turned to the division's sergeant major, the top enlisted man in the division, a big, burly 6-foot-3, 240 pound African American, and I said: "That's good, but how do you sustain that kind of morale?''

Without hesitation, he narrowed his eyes, and he looked at me and said: "The morale will stay high just as long as these troops know the people back home support us.''

Just as long as the people back home support us. What kind of message are these hearings and the outrageously political speeches on the floor of the Senate yesterday sending to the marvelous young Americans in the uniform of our country?

I say: Unite America before it is too late. Put aside these petty partisan differences when it comes to the protection of our people. Argue and argue and argue, debate and debate and debate over all the other things, such as jobs, education, the deficit, and the environment; but please, please do not use the lives of Americans and the security of this country as a cheap-shot political talking point.

I yield the floor.