The prophesy of envy

The essence of the neo-Conservative philosophy is rooted in a self-delusional hypocrisy -- that since all human beings are naturally fallen, sinful, and weak (a projection of their own psychology to others), then it is impossible for a secular human being to do good for others. And yet because the neo-conservative believes their own selves to be redeemed (exceptionally) by deity and therefore entitled to the individual blessings bestowed to me by the loving moral deity, they must protect their success and hoard their material blessings from those ostensibly lesser mortals who would only squander it. It is this way no matter how much suffering such lowly persons must endure, unless I, in my imagined righteousness, deign to stoop low so as to administer my condescending charity.

And therefore, because the basis of social justice and community is a collective loyalty and commitment to mutual liberty and equality, those who would rather distrust and exclude themselves from the global community on the basis of a conviction of their own unique exceptionalism, do thereby create a self-fulfilling prophesy which causes envy and classism defined by their very own selfishness, greed, and false righteousness.

Because after all, if others are actually only interested in their own personal well-being, but I assume that they are lying about their good-intentions (because after all, that is what I would do), then the only logical course is to pre-empt their exploitation of my trust by exploiting them first. This is the cold and calculating application of Merrill Flood's Prisoner's Dilemma game to not only world politics, but to people who's condemnable offense was not being born to a wealthy family in the Exceptional United States.

"As I watched the behavior of the nations of the U.N. (including our own), I found no reasonable ground to expect any one of those governments to transcend permanently their own national interests for those of another country."
-- Jeane Kirkpatrick, American ambassador and ardent anti-Communist

Conservatism: The assumption by psychological projection that others must think and behave as selfishly and as evilly as you do.

UC Davis students pepper sprayed

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Philanthropist Thieves

I think that we're well advanced into a corporate dictatorship.

My opposition to this began about nineteen-six or nineteen-seven when my daddy was a little boy, and his father had sent his tobacco crop to market, in Louisville, and we went down the next day to see it sold on the boat. And when he came back that night he didn't have a dime, because it had cost everything that the crop had brought to pay the sale commission on.

Now I was down at Duke University not very long ago. Duke University has the only medieval Methodist chapel in the world. And out in front is a statue where the saint would ordinarily be: a statue of James B. Duke. Standin' there with a cigar. And I walked all around that statue. On one side it said, "businessman". And on the other side it said, "philanthropist".

And I said, "Yes, you son-of-a-bitch, I understand exactly what that means: You steal enough money from people like my grandfather in order to be generous with it, and get the reputation of a philanthropist."

-- Wendell Berry

More on the police state

Re: Re: I the Person

For example when healthcare is nationalized everybody feels a need to control what others eat because it's costing society (who are referred to as taxpayers usually) money when an individual is overweight.

-- ChristopherBurg, in response to Wendy McElroy's piece at Mises Daily

I disagree. The enlightened citizen takes pity on the individual who is compelled to make decisions that not only damage the individual's own health, but also the economic health and ultimately the actual physical health of neighboring citizens. An over-consumer is a parasite, not an activist for personal liberty. The individual who acts contrary to self-interest (by choosing to routinely avoid moderation) is not a beacon of individualism, but rather, an aberration of the natural order of things. Were such an individual to behave in such a way in a more primitive tribal culture, the individual would be culled from the society -- for the greater good. Or, such an individual would easily be dealt with by nature itself, saving the tribe the trouble.

Unfortunately, today, it is impractical (not to mention morally dubious) for society to expel or eliminate parasitic or criminal individuals. So instead, we have to imprison, rehabilitate, or marginalize them. This is just one of the the many costs of an advancing civilization that can only be brought about practically by the shared sacrifice between members and the distribution of such costs amongst its peoples.

And so we can see that the utopia of anarcho-capitalism in a modern civilization is an unrealistic fantasy. Following such reasoning to its conclusion, the application of deified individual liberty can only result in a regressive reductionism that culminates in a reversion to primitive tribalism at best, and the extinction of the human species at worst.

True liberty arises from the enlightened projection of the primitive and natural morality of the ideal tribal society to the gross mass of civilization with all of its deviation and extraordination, tempered by the pragmatic morality of the equilibrium of universal self-interest.

Pedantic libertarian is pedantic

In true capitalist fashion, this guy abuses Hans Rosling's beautiful gapminder.com animated statistical charts in a dubious attempt to support his reactionary rebranding as "market empowerment" of the first-world capitalist exploitation of people in developing countries.

What Davies fails to grasp, or (likely) attempts to conceal, is this crucial fact:

Life expectancy in countries throughout the globe would likely have risen at a similar rate regardless of a lack of any so-called "market empowerment". It certainly would have risen at a noticeably more stable rate without the dramatic roller-coaster dips and drops seen in Hans Rosling's animated charts (that are so casually hijacked in this theatrically-produced, yet low-rent, obviously bought-and-paid-for, capitalist apologism video from the YouTube LearnLiberty user channel).

Such adjustments and swings represent huge tolls on human lives and well-being, since they are only represented here in the aggregate. Do you have any idea what sort of death and despair are indicated by these handful of years' worth of negative deltas? We're talking thousands of people who suffered an undoubtably brutal demise (starvation, war/mass-murder, disease) in each of those dots (likely hundreds of millions in sum) that are being repeatedly yanked backwards and downwards on that innocuous-looking chart.

Those plunges have in fact been caused almost exclusively by exploitative colonial powers expanding their empires into foreign cultures, or by depressions caused by corrupt first-world financiers and ravenous industrial barons. It is a matter of historical theory whether the Two World Wars could have been avoided entirely had colonialism been restrained by the establishment of true liberal democracies earlier than the late 17th century. But it is very likely -- every single other conflict in history has a clear and direct line that can be drawn from it to some predatory and gluttonous capitalist colonial empire.

The only disasters to human civilization that even come close to the unfolding global catastrophes that are European Colonialism and Western Capitalism -- were plagues. (I only neglect to include Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and Maoism in this category because they have been resoundingly subdued by the dramatic imperial triumph of Capitalist Power.) But even most epidemics of influenza and cholera can be attributed to the uniquely capitalist/feudalist socio-political causes of industrialization and agriculturalization.

Mushy pacifist Germans

Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is just a result of "the mushy pacifist mindset that has taken hold of the German people since World War II", according to Uwe Siemon-Netto, in a World Tribune.com article editorial. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

The World Tribune.com is partnered with the following sites:
DrudgeReport.com
Middle East Newsline
GertzFile.com
Breitbart.com
The Washington Times
Hoover Institution
NewsMax.com
Geostrategy-Direct.com
Hudson Institute
WorldNetDaily.com
East-Asia-Intel.com
Int. Strat. Studies Assoc.

Here's a message to all you World Tribune, DrudgeReport, and Washington Times fascists from a mushy-mindset pacifist:

Fuck Uwe.

The police state

I am going to start collecting more and more footage like this. I will be storing it on my file server. If anyone ever challenges the notion that we live in a war-mongering country with a brutally oppressive police state, I will just dismiss them as a liar and a fool and an idiot, knowing that I have evidence like this to confirm my position.

Source: Adam Kokesh, anti-war veteran is arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. Dancing was banned at the memorial by US District Court Judge, John D. Bates.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Fuck the police state.

Reddit user dheretic nails it

In an article from Reuters, House Speaker Representative John Boehner suggested that oil subsidies "ought" to end. Reddit user dheretic indicates the reason why Boehner would swerve into such Republican contrary waters by quoting one sentence from the article. He then predicts what will most likely happen if Boehner's advice is taken seriously.

"Boehner also suggested that Obama could lose the 2012 election if gas prices do not decline."

Hi, I just explained this move with one sentence from the article.

1. Just threaten to consider cutting oil subsidies.
2. Oil companies bitch and moan and pitch a fit and the futures exchange goes insane about prices, sending PpB skyrocketing unlike anything we've seen since OPEC used the Oil Weapon in the 70s.
3. Gasoline prices in the US approach the world average.
4. Americans go nuts because they can't get their fix (oh, and incidentally, underfunded public transportation and public institutions like fire/police/municipal first responders take a big thick one up the behind, too-- unsustainable big government, right?)
5. Fox News gives it a fancy name like Obama's Oil Blunder and claim he's trying to create an underclass unable to resist his communist fascism or whatever. The rest of the idiot box crowd report on Fox News' outrageousness instead of doing any mental heavy lifting because, to be honest, they are completely unused to effort at this point.
6. GOP: Why does Obama hate industry?
7. Forbes Magazine and WSJ: Why u do this Obama?
8. Obama: "Completely reasonable response implicating GOP using facts and logic."
9. GOP & ETC: "OMG USE SOME TACT RESPECT CIVILITY YOU FUCKING HITLER CLONE FROM KENYA"
10. Obama caves in the name of bipartisanship. Oil prices stay high.
11. 2012 goes to whatever mouthbreather wins the GOP primaries this time around.
12. OIL PRICES MAGICALLY GO DOWN EVEN THOUGH AT NO POINT WERE THE SUBSIDIES CUT

Welcome to American politics. Enjoy your stay, and don't mind that full feeling you have in your colon...that's a completely natural by-product of rich people fucking you in the ass. They know what they're doing, and they like it when you clench tight with impotent rage.

Collapse

Take it with a grain of salt, of course, but...

I found Michael Ruppert's movie Collapse compelling.

He bases his superficially paranoid argument primarily on the mounting evidence supporting the Peak Oil theory from the 50s and 70s that was derided as leftist/environmentalist hysteria at the time.

He answers the questions about why it has taken so long for the predicted effects of Peak Oil to begin to become manifestly apparent in the world economies, and expounds on the implications of a world with the ostensibly diminishing instances of accessible oil reserves.

Re: Re: The PATRIOT Act is unconstitutional

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Congressman Lamar Smith wrote:

The PATRIOT Act is vital to our intelligence community's ability to track terrorists. The three expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act are the roving wiretap authority, the authority to obtain certain business records held by third parties, and the definition of a "lone wolf" terrorist. These specific intelligence-gathering procedures comply with constitutional protections and have been consistently upheld by the courts. I am confident that Congress has crafted these laws to protect both our civil liberties and our national security.

You are incorrect, Representative Smith. The infringement of my constitutional rights as a citizen of the US to due process under the law in hopes of deterring a "lone wolf" terrorist, is not only foolish, it is a slap in the face of justice.

You clearly do not have any idea what is vital to the protection of our civil liberties.

I will no longer recognize you as my representative.

You must be recalled.

You, Mr. Smith, are a tyrant, and a traitor.

-Nels

Adam Curtis' The Trap

Adam Curtis is a producer, writer, and documentarian. He is British, and he works for the BBC.

In 2007, Curtis produced a series of programmes called The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom for the BBC Two Television Network.

The series includes contributing interviews with a number of economists, writers, psychiatrists, philosophers, and political scientists.

These include John Nash, Friedrich von Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Enthoven, Alexander Haig, and Madsen Pirie.

The videos incorporate newsreel footage from the Cold War decades, the Reagan-Thatcher Eras, and the 1990s and 2000s. It does so to dramatic effect, mixing soundtrack music from various movies particularly, movies by John Carpenter. It also makes use of dramatic typeface in the titles of segments. One critic has even suggested that Curtis' work is "propagandist", presumably because of his employment of the dramatic typefaces and music found in his films.

The series seeks to shed some light on the sense of entrapment, ensnarement, imprisonment that many people seem to have in this day and age. The modern dilemma -- all this freedom, and yet, millions of Americans are being treated for depression. Millions are obese. Millions of people report having feelings of purposelessness. And so on. Some people attribute these feelings to a number of causes, including technology, urban over-population, widening generation gaps, divisive politics, increasing economic class disparity, etc.

According to Curtis, all of these explanations can be seen as symptoms of a greater problem -- the notion that our freedom is defined by the pursuit of our desires.

Curtis explains how out of the nuclear strategies of the cold war, along with a fundamental shift of academic psychiatry into empiricism, the notion was formed that the individual -- as modeled by the economic theories of John Nash and adapted by military strategists -- is nothing more than a self-interested autonomous desire-fulfilling machine. This notion became the pivot for a new political revolution that supplants the old methods of societal control with a sort of irrevocable auto-pilot.

He goes on to demonstrate how this model became a self-fulfilling prophesy through the feedback reinforcement of modern marketing, media, and a corporatist-warped version of democratic politics -- ultimately trapping our society in ever more rigid and stratified constraints imposed presumably without explicit intention by not only our leaders, but by our own collective decisions and actions.

It's a remarkably in-depth attempt to analyze and explain the historical context of our modern dilemma. I like this series because it has multiple facets, and ties in many seemingly separate threads in our recent history to make a somewhat coherent whole.

It explains many things, including this paper on economic class disparity by Piketty and Saez.

Our national credit ponzi scheme since 2000? Just a symptom of this sort of thinking on Ayn Rand steroids (and by that I mean to say, the Randian market stimulant/intoxicant/performance enhancer known as Alan Greenspan).

I find it interesting that in Curtis' worldview, Reaganism and Thatcherism are just outgrowths of the deeper set of perverted ideas about what actually makes up a human being.

The Koch Brothers - Sociopathic Lying Murderers

The Koch brothers have been in the news lately for...

1. Being discovered as a major source of funding for tea party activist groups who had been portraying themselves as independent grassroots organizations.
2. In March of this year, Greenpeace published a report on Koch Industries and the significant and secretive financial role that they have had in the conspiratorial disinformation campaign and industry-exclusive denial of anthropogenic climate change.

A spokesperson for Koch Industries responded to the Greenpeace report. The Koch Industries response includes claims that the Greenpeace report "distorts the environmental record of [their] companies" and that they "have put tremendous energy into achieving sound environmental stewardship".

Here are just two examples that damningly contradict such statements. The safety and environmental record of Koch Industries could not be more clear.

From a January, 2000 report:

Koch Industries, Inc. unlawfully allowed some 3 million gallons of crude oil and related products to leak from its pipelines into ponds, lakes, rivers and streams, or onto adjacent shorelines, from 1990 to 1997.

Koch will pay the largest civil fine ever imposed on a company under any federal environmental law to resolve claims related to more than 300 oil spills from its pipelines and oil facilities in six states, the Justice Department and the U.S. EPA announced.

Source: The US Department of Justice

Koch Industries has also been found responsible for the deaths of two Texas residents.

In 1996, a pipeline managed by Koch Pipeline Company, LP (Koch) ruptured and leaked a butane vapor cloud into the surrounding residential area in the city of Lively, Texas. A teen-age boy and girl driving through in their pickup trunk were burned to death when the cloud ignited.

Source: The National Transportation Safety Board
Source: Serasota Herald-Tribune

On April 14, 2010 a spokesperson for Koch Companies Public Sector sent out an e-mail to a number of news organizations that preemptively and specifically denied any link to tea party activists, or foundations that provide them funding:

Because you have covered tea parties in the past and we imagine you will cover tomorrow's Tax Day Tea Party in DC, we want to reiterate some important facts.

Koch companies value free speech and believe it is good to have more Americans engaged in key policy issues. That said, Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch and David Koch have no ties to and have never given money to FreedomWorks. In addition, no funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.

Thanks for your consideration.

Source: Talking Points Memo

On July 25, 2010, New York Magazine published this article about the Koch brothers that completely contradicts such denials. In the New York Magazine article David Koch is quoted as saying, "I’ve never been to a tea-party event." And yet here he is speaking at a fundraiser event for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation that was attended primarily by the members of tea party activist groups. The video clip is from a recent documentary called (Astro) Turf Wars that exposes how supposedly "grassroots" political organizations have over the years been funded by big-business billionaires such as Charles and David Koch.

Then, on August 30, 2010, the New Yorker printed this article detailing how the Koch brothers have directly supported and bankrolled tea party activists through a chain of foundations and institutions. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation has been created by the Koch brothers for the sole purpose of secretly providing funding for the promotion of their self-professed Libertarian political agenda through the Heartland Institute which directly funds tea party activists.

The Heartland Institute insists that it is independent, and is not affiliated with any political party or business. And yet, on the very same website on which they make such denials, the Heartland Institute has a web page dedicated to talking points specifically for Republican tea party activists.

In the past, the Heartland Institute has worked with Big Tobacco to conduct disinformation campaigns about the damaging health effects of smoking. In the 1990s the group worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking secondhand smoke to health risks. Of course the official response from the Heartland Institute is to deny this too, in a patently similar fashion to the "set the record straight"-style of Koch Industries. Obviously, they are fully aware that the court of public opinion has ruled against Big Tobacco.

Koch Industries official website has a page dedicated to "setting the record straight" and combating the inevitable public perception that they are a criminal corporate citizen. There you will find paragraphs of double-talk and a narrative that makes no mention of the people it has injured and killed. It lists legitimate environmental organizations with whom it has affiliated itself and contributed to, but neglects to mention that such contribution was a court-ordered $15 million compensation stipulation as part of their settlement with the Justice Department.

Charles and David Koch are killing people, lying about it; destroying the environment, lying about it; and funding political organizations that promote legislation that allows them to do so, and lying about it. All while keeping a straight aristocratic face.

This behavior can only be described as sociopathy.

The Koch brothers will tell you that they have worked hard for their station in life. Perhaps. They inherited their wealth and ownership of their company from their father. Still, they must have worked very hard at staying out of prison, being the sociopathic, lying murderers that they are.

America, meet Karen Handel

This woman will be the next governor of Georgia.

Okay Mrs. Handel, we get it. You're a bad ass.

Ladies and gentlemen, the likes of these will be our elected officials. How does this image make you feel? Does it make you feel a little uneasy? Maybe it makes you feel secure and in charge, knowing that a strong white woman with an assault weapon is gonna be in charge of things. Aww.

Yep, she can carry that thing around with her wherever she wants. It's Georgia.

Update: The Vanity Fair article to which I link in this article is outdated as of August 2010. Nathan Deal faced Karen Handel (who had already resigned as Secretary of State of Georgia) in a tightly contested August 10, 2010 Republican gubernatorial candidate primary and won by fewer than 2500 votes. The following day Handel declined to pursue a recount and conceded. In recent polling, Nathan Deal holds a 10-point lead over Democrat Roy Barnes in Georgia's gubernatorial race.

Tax dollars by caucus

When the Tea Party-augmented Republican party takes over the House and the Senate this November, I think the Dems will have to take from the experience the following lessons:

1. Don't piss off folks living in rural America...
   1. by levying Federal taxes on rural America,
   2. and calling them uneducated rural Americans.
2. Stop subsidizing rural America with Federal tax dollars and just let the residents of the rural states live with indigence and the neglect of public services. One of two things will happen:
   1. Either they will fulfill libertarian expectations by
      1. independently replacing public services with private ones and
      2. somehow surviving the depression of their agriculture-based economy free from Federal subsidy
   2. or they will continue to live in indigence until they revolt or die.
3. Meanwhile, if Federal taxes are eliminated (LOL), then Democratic states can modestly increase their own state income taxes to replace their own relatively modest Federal subsidies, and to cover their state budget deficits.

Surely those are the lessons that should be learned from this tax infomap at infographic.com:

Source: Tax dollars by caucus

So, Tulsas of America, go ahead and keep on whining about your taxes. You will just be cut off from the Federal teat.

Remember the 2008 election? Just two years ago? This map reveals the dramatic difference in rural and metropolitan political leanings in that election:

Source: NY Times (click "County leaders")

Does it not beg the question: Why are metropolitan areas so much more better off than rural areas in terms of income and welfare, and why are they also more democratic? Are those two things somehow related?

Even a broken clock...

Until today there has been absolutely nothing that Glenn Beck has said that I did not wish I had never heard in the first place. His rhetoric is usually so inflammatory and stupid that it is impossible to escape it from either the reverent right or the lampooning left.

Surely you've heard about the plan hatched by Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Florida to hold a good old-fashioned down home book-burning of exclusively the Islamic holy book the Quran on September 11th.

Apparently so has Mr. Beck, and he weighed in with his opinion in this blog post.

What is wrong with us? It’s just like the Ground Zero mosque plan. Does this church have the right? Yes. Should they? No. And not because of the potential backlash or violence.

Update: Okay, no. The mosque is not being planned to be built on Ground Zero, for one thing. If it was, that might be a little weird. Calling it the "Ground Zero mosque" is just a straight up lie.

And besides, burning the Quran, and building a mosque two-blocks north of Ground Zero are not the same things at all.

But go on...

We must be the better person. We must be bigger than our problems. Bigger than the times in which we live. Burning the Koran is like burning the flag or the Bible. You can do it, but whose heart will you change by doing it? You will only harden the hearts of those who could be moved. None of those who are thinking about killing us will be affected, but our good Muslim friends and neighbors will be saddened. It makes the battle that they face inside their own communities even harder.

What?

This sounds measured and calm. It sounds well-reasoned. It actually sounds rather Christian in the idealistic turn-the-other-cheek sense of the word.

Well (almost) good for you Mr. Beck. You (almost) got one right this time.

Ron Paul: Obama is a 'corporatist', not a socialist

Here's the text of an e-mail I sent to Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) today.

Dear Representative Paul:

I have been an admirer of yours for years now. I was very disappointed that you did not win the presidential nomination of your party in 2008. I wish you the best of outcomes in the coming election. I believe our country needs people like you in our government, and it makes me hopeful that our government can be reigned in by the people, when we have representation like you.

I have a question regarding something that you apparently said during your time at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, as quoted in a Wall Street Journal piece a month ago in April.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/04/10/ron-paul-barack-obama-is-not-a-socialist/tab/article/

You said, regarding President Obama, "In the technical sense, in the economic definition, he is not a socialist, [...] He’s a corporatist, [meaning he takes] care of corporations and corporations take over and run the country."

I was wondering, could you please expound on this?

I am also against corporate interests having as much influence as they do on our country, particularly how much influence corporations seem to have over the USDA, the FEC, the FDA, the FCC, and the Federal Reserve.

I understand how you might believe that President Obama is interested in continuing a government-planned economy (which I am against in principle), but I am having trouble understanding why you think that the President is a corporatist in light of his response to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. (2010) during his State of the Union Address this year.

Can you help me understand your opinion on this matter?

Thank you, and God bless,
-Nels

The pressure mounts on defrauder Blodget to explain why he is such a moron

Any failure of NBC to adequately cover the Olympic Winter Games is not a big deal for me.

What is a concern to me, is language like this: "Pressure builds on NBC to explain why it's ruining the Olympics"

The so-called pressure to which the author of this weird article refers, is the article that he wrote the day before in which he "asked" the very questions of NBC that he is claiming NBC is being pressured to answer.

This kind of illogical self-referential editorial "journalism" feedback is typical of the sort of dancing-with-smurfs nonsense talk for which certain entertainment-news channels are known.

On a blog that also hosts articles supposed to have been written by Sarah Palin, I suppose I can't be very surprised to find such stupidity.

What to govern an information society?

In Texas, when I fail to casually express agreement with someone's expression of a conservative shibboleth, my less tactful friends and acquaintances will often interrogate me about my political views. Recently, some conservative friends of mine, still bitter and resentful from the 2008 election, have asked me if I still lean to the conservative side of political issues in general or not: "You aren't a liberal now, are you?" and, "You didn't vote for Obama, did you?"

Who I vote for is not your business.

Of my government I demand representation and reject constituency pandering. Political activism and party-alignment is just as filthy and foul as media bias, thinly-veiled bribery by lobbyists of public officials, and long-term office holders.

The other day someone said to me, "Everybody wants to think of themselves as independent." His point was that nobody is ever entirely free from bias or from the influence of their world or political views on their expressions and decisions.

Conservatives mostly insist that when it comes down to brass tax, everyone picks one side of an issue, and eventually their political bias is revealed. The notion that anyone can be without bias is a myth, to conservatives. This is a delusion -- the result of an egocentric refusal to set aside one's own selfish convictions and see the world from other perspectives. Of course many people let their political views affect their judgment, but this cannot be true of everyone. There are many who refuse to champion, let alone settle for, a single side of an issue or parrot the go-to focus group study conclusions paid for by political think-tanks, and instead choose to consider multi-faceted solutions that work under a myriad of circumstances for more than one group of people. Real-world social-economic problems rarely have a single best solution and yet our current system insists upon it and segregates those who suggest otherwise and labels them spoilers, "third-party" candidates, dark horses, independents.

Our political system is broken, so I reject it. You should too, and demand an actual meritocratic democracy. This of course requires metrics and endless careful and costly analysis and monitoring of the results of government programs and initiatives. Political theory is great, but until there are actual studies, experiments, and data, it's just some schmuck's fantasy.

Attempting to clarify what it is that I mean by "meritocratic democracy", a conservative friend of mine has asked me, "So, no electing presidents because they are black, right?" He had obviously bought into the conservative editorial rhetoric that Obama has been elected as the President simply because of the color of his skin. This is an employment of a logical fallacy known as a red herring, and it is a common tactic of the conservative media. The question is a leading one, and is designed to divert attention from the plenitude of good reasons why Obama might have been elected President other than his ethnic heritage.

Perhaps voters were fed up with a President who unprecedentedly expanded the power of the executive branch. Perhaps the American people were weary of a President who went to war without consent from Congress. Perhaps the public was tired of being lied to repeatedly about some very important things like the intelligence on the Iraq nuclear program, global warming data, torture of detainees, and warrantless wire-tapping. Perhaps the American people wanted to send a message of rejection to the Republican party in order to communicate just how disappointed they were with George Bush. Perhaps, just maybe, the American people believed Obama when he promised them change. Who knows.

But the suggestion supplanting those considerations with the idea that somehow Obama was nothing more than an affirmative action President, is twisted. It is a verbal slight-of-hand trick at best, and blatant racism at worst.

The democratic republic in which we live is a failure, not only because it fosters this kind of language, but because it is characterized by immobility, rigidity and is crippled by an inability to represent our citizens at a high resolution. Our democratic republic has proven that any asshole can get elected and stay elected if they just provoke or charm the right people.

The social democracy is in error because there can never be enough stopgaps and waste prevention criteria to prevent massive inefficiencies and missteps. Social democracy also fails at both the electorate level, and also at the bureaucratic level due to the fact that there are tons of people in any population who simply don't give a shit. Social democracy only works for small, invested communities with lots of transparency and accountability, but it doesn't seem to work very well for large organizations.

The foundation of any correct form of government and economy is information. Therefore, I am not a liberal, or a conservative. I am an informationist.

Education. Education is the only path to a valid government. Only a population capable of educating itself and critically assessing information can be capable of governing itself. Self government is the only true government. Therefore, the bootstrapping of the new information republic -- a republic where everyone is their own representative -- will be accomplished through the complete and universal reform of education.

But how can a government with such a shift in focus towards education and communication of information ever be brought into power when the voting system in the United States only reinforces the two-party system? My friends Greg Lange and Cory Burkhardt both support a voting system based on multiple candidate ranking. Many people that I have spoken with who are interested in an alternative voting system are inclined towards the preferential voting system. Arrow's impossibility theorem, or Arrow's paradox, states that such a system would never be perfect and would never represent the wishes of every constituency, but if engineered carefully, it could come pretty close.

It's how the best restaurants in the world are compared. It's how the Godfather is selected as the best movie ever made at the movie database website, imdb.com. So what if the Godfather isn't really the best movie ever made? Well it's pretty damn good.

The only way our elections will ever support a ballot that uses a multi-candidate 10-point rating scale is with a public that is smart enough to understand how such a system actually works. Such voters must also be adequately informed and have an ability to accurately assess the true nature and aptitude of candidates. Public intelligence or stupidity is entirely a function of the efficiency, flexibility, tenacity of the education system and the commitment of the people in its ranks to be successful at an individual level. An education system undermined is a society that undermines its government's effectiveness.

Honestly, anyone against a universally educated and thoroughly informed public, should be considered a traitor. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who fosters confusion by creating false information or attempts to limit the communication of legitimate information should be condemned as a terrorist.

Of course, this raises the question, how is information determined to be legitimate? What is the litmus test for information? Testing. Experiments. Confirmation. Corroboration. Understanding. Usefulness. And most importantly, Karl Popper's test: falsifiability. Information should be redundantly verified, peer reviewed, and rated-by-reputation.

We need to move away from the democratic-republic/social-democracy mixed government form, and shift to an informational democracy. Information, and its accuracy is the cornerstone of all freedom. Liars and mutilators of fact and truth should not be tolerated.

People will inevitably reject these ideas saying things like, "That is too difficult." Or, "That will cost too much money." Or, "My tax dollars should not go towards educating someone else's child." Or, "Those who can't do, teach."

Other objections can be made as well. Someone might say something like, "So-and-so is poor, and cannot afford to be educated. Their parents should have worked harder." Such a person apparently values money above information and believes that obfuscation and confusion has a price. Such a person should be considered a traitor to our nation.

If someone says, "So-and-so is lazy, or refuses to be taught," they are only making excuses. Such a person is simply too lazy or too selfish to make the sacrifices necessary to help another person overcome their personal defects or obstacles and be educated despite those challenges.

People often tell me that things will never change because we are stuck with what we have.

False.

The choice of our government is in the hands of the informed population. To be against an informed population, in any way, is to be against the choice of government. Revolution comes from the ground up. Not through internal secession.

It all starts with yourself and your family. It is the movement of self-actualization and transcendence found reiterated innumerable times in eastern philosophy. First, master yourself. Then your family. Then your community. Then your state. Then your nation.

Absorption. The old generation will be eaten by the new. The stupid, old, doddering politicians and representatives will be displaced by the mass of the new informed populace.

There is no stopping it. Critical mass will be reached, and then there can be no reversal.

Information is unstoppable. Ideas cannot be killed. Truth cannot be subdued. Reality will destroy the actors and fiction writers that make up our government and media.

Information, education, and understanding is the new monarch.

The next generation is growing up with the Internet in their playpens.

The status quo "representatives" and legislators will be unable to pry this source of universal information access from the hands of this next generation. The technology to prevent tampering with that information is crystallizing into a perfect shield against meddlers and liars.

Soon all the liars will be silenced and muted. No more fiction. Only history.

The war on science

René Descartes: Cogito ergo sum.
Conservative Republican politicians and voters: Credo ergo est.