The Last Cadre

The "war of books" over centuries and millennia is sometimes referred to as "the Great Debate".

It is more than a debate. It is more than just books. It is a real war, ruining and taking lives, destroying nations, destroying our world.

It is the eternal war against evil, in whatever form it takes over the centuries and millennia, monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy and partocracy, plutocracy, theocracy and psychosociocracy (the commissar, police or doctor state).

My moralist primer The Uncivil War (1984-2003, 2009) is intended to be a quick-'n'-dirty introduction to that war.

It has a number of features useful to such an introduction: It covers the fundamentals; its chain-argument extends to a huge number of subjects, each briefly; it replaces the major premise of the argument modus ponens by its contrapositive (but presenting it for lit'ry reasons predicate-first), which form of argument seems peculiarly suited to arguing outward from a central premise, in this most supreme of all cases the existence or reality of morality; it confers tremendous analytical power by its two grand equivalences, morality, responsibility, choice and individuality, and (public) morality, justice, liberty and government, the first explicitly invoked, the second passim (twice); it affords tremendous moral and intellectual clarity by its reductions of various popular contradictions of the existence or reality of morality; it provides a splendid and revealing test for evil; and above all it is concise, its quite quite deliberate honing-unto-invisibility maximizing the chance of its being inhaled in one fell bolus.

No publisher will touch the primer.

But it is available at present as a free Lulu.com PDF, and a Lulu.com POD paperback (email me for bulk purchases).


Keywords: aristocracy, evil, good, Great Debate, monarchy, moralism, morality, normative moral philosophy, oligarchy, partocracy, philosophy, plutocracy, psychosociocracy, theocracy, war of books

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (USA): The Oil Bubble Cover-Up Continues

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been called upon to examine the financial and economic crisis that has gripped our country and explain its causes to the American people. We are keenly aware of the significance of our charge, given the economic damage that America has suffered in the wake of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Our task was first to determine what happened and how it happened so that we could understand why it happened. Here we present our conclusions. We encourage the American people to join us in making their own assessments based on the evidence gathered in our inquiry. If we do not learn from history, we are unlikely to fully recover from it. Some on Wall Street and in Washington with a stake in the status quo may be tempted to wipe from memory the events of this crisis, or to suggest that no one could have foreseen or prevented them. This report endeavors to expose the facts, identify responsibility, unravel myths, and help us understand how the crisis could have been avoided. It is an attempt to record history, not to rewrite it, nor allow it to be rewritten . . . .

The subject of this report is of no small consequence to this nation. The profound events of 2007 and 2008 were neither bumps in the road nor an accentuated dip in the financial and business cycles we have come to expect in a free market economic system. This was a fundamental disruption—a financial upheaval, if you will—that wreaked havoc in communities and neighborhoods across this country.

As this report goes to print, there are more than 26 million Americans who are out of work, cannot find full-time work, or have given up looking for work. About four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure and another four and a half million have slipped into the foreclosure process or are seriously behind on their mortgage payments. Nearly $11 trillion in household wealth has vanished, with retirement accounts and life savings swept away. Businesses, large and small, have felt the sting of a deep recession. There is much anger about what has transpired, and justifiably so. Many people who abided by all the rules now find themselves out of work and uncertain about their future prospects. The collateral damage of this crisis has been real people and real communities. The impacts of this crisis are likely to be felt for a generation.

"CONCLUSIONS OF THE
FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION"


While the criminal irresponsibility of the Wall Street and London City "investment bankers" and other "financial services" crooks and the politicians and regulators and lobbyists who serve and protect them and the corrupt wealth they all front for outlined in short in the report above is sickening enough; and their complete immunity to prison, still less the executions and total confiscations of assets they all so thoroughly deserve, even more so; and their rewards in "bail-out money" afterward even more so; and their going on since to more of the same in "bidness as usual" even more so—

Most sickening of all is what you'll not find in the report above:

Any mention whatsoever of the Oil Bubble of 2006-8, which greatest economic attack on the world in history stole $3T dollars and quite deliberately wrecked the world (and US) economies—unless you believe all those poor innocent naive Wall Street and London City "investment bankers" and other "financial services" crooks and the politicians and regulators and lobbyists who serve and protect them and the corrupt wealth they all front for didn't know exactly what they were doing—and imploded not only itself but all the lesser bubbles or distributed Ponzi schemes as well as ordinary Ponzi schemes like Bernie Madoff's in that collapse.

I repeat:

Any mention whatsoever of the Oil Bubble of 2006-8.

The fix is in, the lid is on, the greatest economic attack on the world in history is a non-event, dropped right down the global plutocratic memory hole . . . .

Who is your owner now?


Keywords: aristocracy, corruption, economic warfare, espionage, justice, Oil Bubble of 2006-8, plutocracy, subversion

Nothing for Nothing

The first time I met John W. McCormack, the then Speaker of the House of Representatives, he took me on a tour of his elegant offices in the Sam Rayburn Wing of the Capitol. McCormack didn't use these offices much, spending most of his time in his office directly across the corridor from the House chamber. But this was the end of the day, we had business to discuss, and he wanted me to see the layout. As the tour ended and we were standing near the double doors of the main entrance, Speaker McCormack put a hand on my shoulder and pointed to the paneling above the doors.

"And there is the motto for this place," he said. I looked at the paneling and saw nothing. I glanced at McCormack, waiting for the punch line. Still pointing, and in a monotone as though he were reading, he said:

"Nothing for Nothing."

Robert N. Winter-Berger, The Washington Pay-Off (1972)


More commonly expressed as "Money talks, and bullshit walks"—"bullshit", in this context, being anything and everything but money.

(And in Texas as "Bidness as usual".)

(See also "good friend", "very good friend" and "very dear friend".)


Keywords: aristocracy, corruption, plutocracy

Seeing the Purple Elephant

The essential feature of the orthodox interpretation of Locke is the reification of ideas. He is taken to have meant by 'idea' a special kind of thing, distinguished from other things such as tables and chairs in that, while they are material things, it is a mental thing locked up inside the mind. And everything that Locke says about ideas and their relation to what they are ideas of is then interpreted in acccordance with the presupposition of that basic model: the mind is regarded as if it were somehow the analogue of a box, into which ideas can be introduced or in which they can be produced, but from which they cannot escape. Consequently, all sense-experience, and whatever knowledge of belief may be acquired from it, is irremediably second hand. We never directly experience objects and happenings in the external world, but only our own ideas which serve as proxies for whatever goes on outside. Sense perception consists of having ideas which represent what goes on outside, some of the ideas actually resembling what they represent, others not, the first being ideas of primary qualities, the second being of secondary qualities. We can never break out of the circle of ideas, and knowledge, which Locke defines as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas, is inescapably bound within the circle as is sense perception itself. Two consequences follow: first the general consequence that Locke was an epistemological dualist, committed on the one hand to the world of ideas to which all human experience and thought is restricted, and on the other to a quite separate mind-independent world somehow causally related to the first; and secondly the special consequence that he held a crudely reprsesentative theory of perception, according to which we can never observe anything in the mind-independent world, but find out whatever we do find out about it solely by scrutinizing the proxy-ideas which are all that we have access to.

Now, if that was Locke's view of ideas, the objections to it are so elementary and so obvious that it hardly needed a Berkeley to point them out. If sense perception simply consists of having ideas, which are alleged to be literal pictures, some accurate and other inaccurate, of inaccessible originals, there would be no justification for supposing that there were any originals at all, let alone for supposing that some of the pictures did resemble them but others did not, still less for claiming to be able to say which were the accurate pictures and which were not. On such a view there would be no explanation how it could occur to anyone that ideas were pictures of originals, and no reason whatever for his thinking so, even if he did. For the picture-original thesis to have any ground at all, there would have to be some occasion of experienceing an original, and some possibility of confronting picture with original; but of neither, on this view of Locke, could there be any possibility at all. The condition of his thesis being true would be precisely that we could have no possible ground for supposing it to be true, nor even rational explanation of one's entertaining it. It would be hard to understand why anybody should want to rate Locke as an important philosopher if his whole theory rests on errors so elementary that a first-year student in philosophy has no difficulty in spotting them.

A. D. Woozley, Introduction to John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding


Well, now, Professor, let's see:

If I were sitting in my screen-enclosed porch and saw a purple elephant go wheeling by and that was that, I might conclude that I had finally had that flashback I was promised all those decades ago.

But if I saw that elephant go wheeling by, and heard it trumpeting, and felt the thunder of its feet transmitted through the ground and porch, and, upon walking out into the yard, no doubt with eyes a-bulge, saw its footprints in the grass, and saw and smelled as well obviously fresh and steaming evidence of an elephant's passage, I would conclude that some idiot had been painting an elephant purple, and it got loose.

The concepts here, Professor, are induction, cross-comparison or -checking of senses, and exploration/experiment, all of which you surely have heard of before.

Would I flunk your first-year philosophy course over this, Professor?

And if not, what would that say about your no doubt keen first-year philosophy-student you so highly tout, and no doubt helped manufacture by the score?

The real problem here, perhaps, is that the questions in question are in fact questions of neurology, not philosophy or academic philosophastering, on which subject I have more to say here and here.

And if it's a matter of bandying non-neurological authorities on the nature of the world and our experience of it, Professor, I'll take Locke or Planck over Bishop Berkeley any time:

It is important to realize that the outside world is something independent from man, something absolute.

Max Planck

Me and Planck flunk again, I guess, Professor?


Keywords: academic bullshit, Berkeley, checking, comparison, elephant (purple), experiment, exploration, induction, Locke, neurology, perception, philosophastering, philosophy, Planck, real world, sensation, sensory transforms

New Blog: EMDblog

I've started a new blog, EMDblog, dedicated to empirical mechanomeric development (EMD).

Enjoy.

[Now "MeseBlog" and "mechanomeric selection (MeSe)".]

American Degeneration: Legislatures and Privileges

[Legislatures] can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny. If it be asked, what is to restrain the [legislature] from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America—a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.

If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty.

(James Madison), The Federalist Papers


Yet the Federal Congress exempt themselves from Social Security, and OSHA, and the EEOC, and their staffs are not Civil Service, and . . . .

And of course we see them handing out tax-exemptions galore to the wealthy and the corporations, the most notorious of which, before "the Bush tax cuts" of 2001/2003—the single greatest transfer of wealth in American history, to the wealthiest from everyone else, championed by "both" political "parties"—were the "depletion allowances" under which oil-well owners and oil companies typically deduct ten to twenty percent of gross incomes from their Federal taxes, just as typically amounting in the end to far more than their capital investments (it must be remembered that both the "depletion allowances" and "the Bush tax cuts" are championed by "both" major American political "parties"—the quote-marks are to indicate the sham of pretending there is any difference between the "two" "parties", "both" being utterly servile to wealth, no matter how corrupt, and whether domestic or foreign).

And of course we are still reeling from the "Enron exemption" in the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, not so much from the fraud and bubble that Enron ran as from what that exemption and additional others became in the hands of the engineers of, profiteers off and coverers-up-afterward of the Oil Bubble of 2006-8.

And, naturally, we see State legislature after State legislature not only aping Congress in similar regards, but even actually handing out exemptions to the criminal laws, such as the usury laws, so that local governments can levy usurious interests upon late tax-payments, and tax-farmers likewise:

Yes, even that most ancient form of racketeering, with its bribery, usury, extortion and grand larceny, battening on those by definition already in financial difficulties, now operates with legal impunity in America . . . .

Plainly, as Madison plainly feared, the American people have long been "prepared to tolerate any thing but liberty."

But he did not extend his argument as far as he could and should have, to the critical point with regard to the Constitution:

Such exemptions and privileges are the very substance of aristocracy, which is prohibited by the Constitution, in Article I Section 9:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States . . . .

Unless, of course, one interprets that to mean that only formal titles of aristocracy are forbidden, and not the substance.


Keywords: aristocracy, bribery, class, corruption, extortion, grand larceny, legislature, liberty, plutocracy, privilege, racketeering, servility, tax-farming, usury

Celebrating Perihelion, Aphelion and the Mesohelia

The ancients believed that the Sun moved across the sky on a daily basis, and later, after Ptolemy, and Aristotle adopting Ptolemy, that the sky rotated around the Earth in a series of perfect concentric spheres, and Copernicus first correctly inferred that the Earth orbits around the Sun but retained the incorrect notion that that orbit was circular, while Kepler (somewhat reluctantly) inferred from observational data that the orbits of the planets (in particular and first, Mars) are ellipses, each planet with its own yearly closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, and farthest departure from the Sun, or aphelion.

Why therefore do we not celebrate the perihelia and aphelia of Earth, and the halfway points in between, or mesohelia, as we do the solar solstices and equinoces?

Four more holidays!

Perihelion occurs in early January, about two weeks after the Northern Hemispheric Winter/Southern Hemispheric Summer solstice; aphelion in early July; and of course the two mesohelia occur halfway in between:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis

And if Solar-Earthly relationships have any influence in Earthly affairs, as astrology maintains, then shouldn't Perihelion, Aphelion and the Mesohelia, as well as Earth's approaches or recessions therefrom, likewise? (heh.)

Let's bring all this folklore stuff up to date!


Keywords: aphelion, astrology, astronomy, equinox, folklore, pagan, perihelion, solstice, wicca, holiday

Geocide

Our gross overpopulation is destroying our planet, through our massive and ever-growing extraction of fossil fuels from beneath the surface of our planet and burning them, releasing ever-greater quantities of carbon dioxide, water vapor and heat into the atmosphere, causing a geologically-speaking fantastically rapid warming of our atmosphere, to the point that the polar ice-caps are melting before our very eyes, while at the same time we are ever more rapidly deforesting our planet and poisoning our oceans, which forests and oceans are the only means of removing that carbon dioxide at least from the atmosphere, and at the same time are overfishing our oceans to the point that many if not most commercial fishery species are facing extinction by the middle of the century.

And what is our response?

We have a rush starting to exploit the coming newly-melted Arctic Ocean to PUMP MORE OIL! and CATCH MORE FISH!

Truly, we deserve the extinction we are bringing upon ourselves, through our stupid and vicious refusal to curb our own numbers.


We really really do.


[See also "The Overpopulation Equation", "Photonomics: The Photosynthetic Economy" and "Population Law: the 1% Approximation".]

Wealth and Power

If wealth is power—and as long as we can be corrupt, corrupting and corrupted, then that conclusion is inescapable—then should not wealth, like all power, be checked, limited in both magnitude and concentration, and prevented from being inherited, as much as possible?


Keywords: aristocracy, corruption, democracy, libertarianism, plutocracy, power, republicanism, wealth

"Economics": The Premier Plutocratic Pseudoscience

Have you noticed how "economics" invariably considers labor to be a cost or expense rather than income?

No bias there, comrades.


Keywords: academic flacks, aristocracy, corruption, economics, plutocracy, profstitution, pseudoscience

Cue the "Pastorale"

"Wall-Street Green is people!"


Keywords: aristocracy, banksters, bubbles, cannibalism, cartels, class war, corruption, economic warfare, illegal immigrant labor, investment-bankers, London City, mansions, monopolies, Oil Bubble of 2006-8, oligopolies, organized crime, out-sourcing, palaces, plutocracy, plutocratic subversion, slums, tax-havens, tax-shelters, Wall Street

Lawyers, Accountants, Ethics, Justice, and Business—No, Just Plutocracy

What American lawyer or accountant would advise his or her employer or client not to take advantage of a tax-break because it was inherently corrupt or corruptly-won—eg, via lobbyist campaign-donation bribes?

There are, of course, exceptions, but, in general, American lawyers and accountants are whores of wealth (however corrupt) posing as virgins of justice and business, respectively.

(And then there are the economists . . . .)

Keywords: accounting, aristocracy, business, corruption, ethics, justice, law, plutocracy, profstitution

Freud, Fraud, Resistance and Denial

Neurology is the knottiest of biological sciences, and as such still far from mature, and in the "knowledge gap" left by that immaturity, frauds flourish, from the ancient animist and "spirist" theories (respectable enough in their time as first gropings), to the modern pseudoscience psychology and pseudomedicine psychiatry, to the newest totalitarianism Scientology.

And the most towering figure in modern times in that "knowledge gap" must be considered to be Freud's:

Leaving aside his early "work" with animal magnetism, electrotherapy, and the "nasal reflex" (tweakable by cocaine), let us turn to his "mature" and what he himself considered his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he maintains that dreams represent wish-fulfillment, and, to meet objections involving cases like, say, The Shark Dream, came up with the splendid weaseling that in such cases you must look not at the "manifest" but the "latent" content of such dreams—that is, whatever interpretation the interpreter wishes to levy on them that makes them wish-fulfillment.

But Freud was only getting started there, because, after the splendid invention of the distinction between the "manifest" and "latent" content of dreams, he came up with what must be regarded as the central fraud of all the modern "psychist" pseudosciences, the perfectly splendid concept of the "unconscious" or "subconscious" mind (think about it, if you're capable and willing), which allows the "analyst" to impute any motives or desires he or she desires to the "analyzee" (see, famously, Freud's own further invention, the "Oedipus complex", in which he imputes parricidal and incestuous longings to everyone).

And if the "analyzee" disagreed or disagrees, why, that was and is "resistance" to a good Freudian psychoanalyst, which he or she takes to be just "another" "symptom" of the analyzee's "mental illness".

"Resistance", however, seems to've been a little too frank for the modern practitioners and polity of the psychosociocratic doctor state, and so "resistance" has been re-dubbed "denial".

And, indeed, have you noticed how the world today is filled with snap and long-distance "diagnoses" of "mental illnesses" ("phobias" and—for some reason—"addictions"/"dependences" rather than "philias") of various kinds, accompanied by a perfect storm of auxiliary "diagnoses" and cries of "denial"?


Keywords: addictions, dependences, denial, doctor state, Freud, fraud, "mental illness", phobias, pseudomedicine, pseudoscience, psychiatry, psychism, psychoanalysis, psychology, psychosociocracy, resistance, socism, spirism, Szasz, totalitarianism, totalitarian studies