Green may become the most powerful piece of political propaganda the world has ever known. Using this potent symbol, the various socialist, environmental and earth first extremists are poised to do what seventy years of world communism could not; destroy property, free market capitalism and with these personal liberty.
If you think me wrong, just listen for twenty minutes to any of the news networks, Green is the headline day after day after day. Green is a perfect icon; there is in it nothing at all objectionable. Green evokes powerful images of peace and tranquility that are almost universal. The 23rd Psalm invokes “green pastures” as a heaven like place of rest. The beauty of the forests and green hills is undeniably moving.
The real power of the Green brand however lay in its appeal to suburbanites, particularly women. Home is the center of the family and whatever the architecture of one’s house, the color of home is green. Ivy covered walls, the lawn and garden stir up feelings of pride, harmony and security. When a suburban homeowner is offered a policy promoting more green space or woodlands or protecting the rain forest she has an immediately favorable reaction. Perception of any threat to the green environment becomes a threat to home and hearth resulting in stiff and often fanatical opposition.
The environmental movement has never, until now, been able to fully integrate this large, wealthy, and mostly conservative demographic. Today, through the charm of Green, that critical job has been accomplished. This massive voting bloc if added to the existing left leaning coalition of interest groups could give the socialist-environmentalist collective hegemony in American politics for some time to come. The tragic irony of this development is that the suburban lifestyle is a primary target for Green inspired elimination.
Poor Boy Rich Man
William Ayers is a winner of the sperm lottery. The son of former Commonwealth Edison CEO, Thomas Ayers, he grew up in the tony Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn and attended the very private Lake Forest Academy. In 1968, he was awarded a B.A. in American Studies from The University of Michigan. He showed his gratitude by becoming a terrorist. Joining the Weather Underground in 1969 Bill Ayers manufactured and set bombs in the Capitol Building and The Pentagon. His most infamous act however was trying to blow up innocent GI’s at a Fort Lee, New Jersey dance.
After his girlfriend, Diana Oughton was and three other well-heeled thugs were killed in 1971 by their own bomb, Ayers and future wife Bernadette Dorn went missing. No doubt drawing on wealthy contacts and donors, they avoided capture for 10 years before surrendering in 1981. After an allegation of prosecutorial misconduct during the long search for Ayers and Dorn, a friendly judge tossed all charges. Bernadette Dorn went on to become a Chicago lawyer. The unrepentant Ayers who regrets only that he, “did not do more” is now Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois- Chicago.
Jonathon “Bud” Mackey grew up in the Scroggins housing project in Georgetown, Kentucky, a small manufacturing town 12 miles north of Lexington. Essentially, he has no father. Bud Mackey however was not entirely without blessing. He possesses extraordinary basketball talent. He led his Scott County Cardinals to a 34-2 record and the Kentucky high school championship. He accepted a scholarship to Indiana University. Just prior to graduating Mackey was arrested within 1000 yards of a school with 1.6 grams of rock cocaine in his shoe. The weight of the drugs carries a charge of trafficking whether or not Bud intended to sell the crack or not. His once bright future now a black hole, Bud Mackey is in jail.
I couldn’t care less that Ayers and Dorn are big supporters of Barack Obama or that the candidate may be friendly with them, who should one expect the most left wing Senator in Washington to hang around? What is unacceptable is that a cowardly, self-congratulatory domestic terrorist who only by Providence is innocent of mass murder is a Distinguished Professor of Education while a 19 year old boy with a promising future and poor judgment languishes in jail for a first offense possession of five rocks of crack cocaine!
Now is the time for me to ask; where is the outrage. However, I don’t have to ask. The outrage lies at the feet of all Americans who are more fearful and condemning of a poor, thoughtless teenager with a pocketful of drugs than a high born, well-educated gangster with a pocketful of dynamite.
After his girlfriend, Diana Oughton was and three other well-heeled thugs were killed in 1971 by their own bomb, Ayers and future wife Bernadette Dorn went missing. No doubt drawing on wealthy contacts and donors, they avoided capture for 10 years before surrendering in 1981. After an allegation of prosecutorial misconduct during the long search for Ayers and Dorn, a friendly judge tossed all charges. Bernadette Dorn went on to become a Chicago lawyer. The unrepentant Ayers who regrets only that he, “did not do more” is now Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois- Chicago.
Jonathon “Bud” Mackey grew up in the Scroggins housing project in Georgetown, Kentucky, a small manufacturing town 12 miles north of Lexington. Essentially, he has no father. Bud Mackey however was not entirely without blessing. He possesses extraordinary basketball talent. He led his Scott County Cardinals to a 34-2 record and the Kentucky high school championship. He accepted a scholarship to Indiana University. Just prior to graduating Mackey was arrested within 1000 yards of a school with 1.6 grams of rock cocaine in his shoe. The weight of the drugs carries a charge of trafficking whether or not Bud intended to sell the crack or not. His once bright future now a black hole, Bud Mackey is in jail.
I couldn’t care less that Ayers and Dorn are big supporters of Barack Obama or that the candidate may be friendly with them, who should one expect the most left wing Senator in Washington to hang around? What is unacceptable is that a cowardly, self-congratulatory domestic terrorist who only by Providence is innocent of mass murder is a Distinguished Professor of Education while a 19 year old boy with a promising future and poor judgment languishes in jail for a first offense possession of five rocks of crack cocaine!
Now is the time for me to ask; where is the outrage. However, I don’t have to ask. The outrage lies at the feet of all Americans who are more fearful and condemning of a poor, thoughtless teenager with a pocketful of drugs than a high born, well-educated gangster with a pocketful of dynamite.
Does Shakespeare Prove God?
Those who believe in the existence of a Creator God that made all things are routinely denounced by secularists and Darwinists as, among other things; “anti-science, superstitious fools”. The supernatural features of God, they say are an affront to science. God cannot exist because He cannot be verified by the scientific method. You cannot see, feel or measure Him. Well there you have it. Science rules, has spoken and all you superstitious, knuckle dragging, cretins had better get out of your Bibles and into the 21st century!
Well I have some bad news for the Bright Ones. Science is not The Master of Knowledge but only one among the tree of academic branches which are subject to Logic, The Great Organon, the set of formal principles which govern all knowing. One cannot investigate, know or communicate anything without the order established by Logic. Science is lost without it. What Science cannot do its Master can. To illustrate Logic’s lordship, let’s use it to try and prove God by the unscientific disciplines of Literature and Music.
“To be or not to be; that is the question”. So said the noble Dane. In his lament reposes the answer to the question of God’s being. As a matter of logical law, a thing can be nothing other than what it is. A dagger cannot be a flower and remain a dagger. As the distraught Prince agonizes over fate, he understands that he must either be [alive] or not be [dead], a person or a corpse. By this we know that neither a prince nor anything at all can create itself. To do so it must be and not be at once. If he was to be, Hamlet must have been created by someone else. Of course he was created by William Shakespeare who did not at all spring from himself.
One cannot create without thinking and Descartes great truth, cognito ergo sum places thinking and thus creating as personal characteristics. Hence, we know from the existence of the play Hamlet that The Bard was at one time a living, thinking, creating person who was, himself, brought into being by another.
Jumping forward a few hundred years we come to another creative man. Billy Preston extolled in song the iron Law of Logic, ex nihilo nihili fit; “nuthin from nuthin leaves nuthin." Not even the “fifth Beatle” or for that matter, all The Beatles together could craft something from nothing. Preston’s song leaves no doubt that there must be, from eternity, something, for if there was ever nothing [no thing], neither Shakespeare nor The Beatles nor you and I nor anything else could be.
From the above flows the inevitable conclusion that men exist and have life. Men think and write and sing and they record their thoughts on inanimate material like vinyl and paper which in turn are created from some other substance. Undeniable also is the truth that men are not eternal, and did not create and endow themselves with life. Whence then, cometh man?
There is in the study of knowledge a formal proof called The Argument from Necessity. This argument takes the form of the syllogism: If A is true and B is true then C - by necessity - must also be true. If [A] Spot is a dog and [B] all dogs bark then [C] Spot must bark. That Spot barks is true whether or not anyone at anytime hears his croon. Using this formal investigative tool in the current case we can write stipulating that men are living beings, did not create themselves and are made of something:
If men are beings and are alive [A]
And;
If men did not create themselves [B]
And;
If men are made of something [C]
Then:
[D] There must be – by necessity of sufficient cause – some thinking, creating, personal, being, eternal, possessed of both matter and life and the will and power to create and give life. God. The conclusion is irrefutable. It is formally true and must be true whether or not anyone at anytime has ever seen or heard God.
I am a poor philosopher with woefully little training. Those who will attack me as sophomoric, foolish or worse are likely to be very educated men and women with advance academic and scientific degrees. Until these great minds, however, can explain man and his attributes and explain away the necessity and sufficiency of God without traversing the limits of coherent thought, they might do well to consider just whom the fools are?
Well I have some bad news for the Bright Ones. Science is not The Master of Knowledge but only one among the tree of academic branches which are subject to Logic, The Great Organon, the set of formal principles which govern all knowing. One cannot investigate, know or communicate anything without the order established by Logic. Science is lost without it. What Science cannot do its Master can. To illustrate Logic’s lordship, let’s use it to try and prove God by the unscientific disciplines of Literature and Music.
“To be or not to be; that is the question”. So said the noble Dane. In his lament reposes the answer to the question of God’s being. As a matter of logical law, a thing can be nothing other than what it is. A dagger cannot be a flower and remain a dagger. As the distraught Prince agonizes over fate, he understands that he must either be [alive] or not be [dead], a person or a corpse. By this we know that neither a prince nor anything at all can create itself. To do so it must be and not be at once. If he was to be, Hamlet must have been created by someone else. Of course he was created by William Shakespeare who did not at all spring from himself.
One cannot create without thinking and Descartes great truth, cognito ergo sum places thinking and thus creating as personal characteristics. Hence, we know from the existence of the play Hamlet that The Bard was at one time a living, thinking, creating person who was, himself, brought into being by another.
Jumping forward a few hundred years we come to another creative man. Billy Preston extolled in song the iron Law of Logic, ex nihilo nihili fit; “nuthin from nuthin leaves nuthin." Not even the “fifth Beatle” or for that matter, all The Beatles together could craft something from nothing. Preston’s song leaves no doubt that there must be, from eternity, something, for if there was ever nothing [no thing], neither Shakespeare nor The Beatles nor you and I nor anything else could be.
From the above flows the inevitable conclusion that men exist and have life. Men think and write and sing and they record their thoughts on inanimate material like vinyl and paper which in turn are created from some other substance. Undeniable also is the truth that men are not eternal, and did not create and endow themselves with life. Whence then, cometh man?
There is in the study of knowledge a formal proof called The Argument from Necessity. This argument takes the form of the syllogism: If A is true and B is true then C - by necessity - must also be true. If [A] Spot is a dog and [B] all dogs bark then [C] Spot must bark. That Spot barks is true whether or not anyone at anytime hears his croon. Using this formal investigative tool in the current case we can write stipulating that men are living beings, did not create themselves and are made of something:
If men are beings and are alive [A]
And;
If men did not create themselves [B]
And;
If men are made of something [C]
Then:
[D] There must be – by necessity of sufficient cause – some thinking, creating, personal, being, eternal, possessed of both matter and life and the will and power to create and give life. God. The conclusion is irrefutable. It is formally true and must be true whether or not anyone at anytime has ever seen or heard God.
I am a poor philosopher with woefully little training. Those who will attack me as sophomoric, foolish or worse are likely to be very educated men and women with advance academic and scientific degrees. Until these great minds, however, can explain man and his attributes and explain away the necessity and sufficiency of God without traversing the limits of coherent thought, they might do well to consider just whom the fools are?
Rope-a-Dope on the Left
The left of center media seem to be enamored of John McCain. They laud his “centrist” and “maverick” tendencies. So far [this will surely change] they have spared him the brutal reviews normally forthcoming Republican candidates. The New York Times, long comfortable with the senator from Arizona endorsed him for the Republican nomination. The political pundits praise him as the GOP’s best chance to claim four more years in the White House. They say he will be able to take independent and “swing voters” away from the Democratic candidate, whoever that may be. All this may be true but at what cost to the Republican Party? Perhaps, the left is practicing a little political rope-a-dope.
The GOP rose from the ashes in the 1980’s on the back of Ronald Reagan and movement conservatives. The Reagan years were misery for the left and its toadies in the mainstream media. The party began descent from the summit in 1992 when George Bush 41, a mainline “country club” Republican squandered a ninety per cent post Gulf War approval rating and lost a second term to then unknown Bill Clinton. Even though Clinton proved such a disaster to his own party that Republicans swept to control of Congress in 1994, Kansas Senator Bob Dole, an aging war hero and centrist, could not unseat “The Boy President” in 1996. In 2000 self professed conservative, George W. Bush wrested that disputed election from Albert Gore.
In the intervening years W has quietly and steadily abandoned conservatism and like his father, allowed an approval rate nearing one hundred per cent to evaporate. Bereft of original thought Bush the Younger has since followed the purposeless, neither fish nor fowl policies of his father. The decimation of solid majorities in both the House and Senate during Bush 43’s watch is hard to fathom. The desolation is so complete on the right that a book entitled How the Bush Family Destroyed the GOP is likely soon to be published.
Given the mismanagement of the Iraq War, housing in free fall and $4 gas, the press has declared not only Bush to be a failure but conservatism as well. Throughout the past four years we have been treated to a continuous assertion that GWB is a knucklehead, a conservative of the whacked out fringe, when in fact he abandoned early on any pretense to conservative ideals. President Bush has neither promoted such conservative goals as comprehensive tax relief and reform nor used his veto against such dubious legislation as Ted Kennedy’s, No Child Left Behind and McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform. Neither has he imposed discipline on a wild spending Republican Congress got drunk on majority.
The left has only to win the Presidential election of 2008 to effect a total repudiation of The Reagan Revolution. Enter Senator John McCain, the aging war hero and centrist. Co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold, the Senator is a champion of No Child Left Behind. McCain joined the “gang of 14” to block Republican judicial nominees and has supported amnesty for illegal aliens. The presumptive GOP standard bearer joined Democrats to stop [by one vote] drilling in ANWAR and voted against Bush’s post 9/11 tax cuts. He vows he will follow the fiscally catastrophic Kyoto Protocols on global climate change. Most conservative Republicans can’t stand him and may support him only under duress. Many see him as a greater threat than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama!
In stealthily supporting McCain’s march to the nomination, the left has accomplished a great strategic victory. It has demoralized the Republican base vastly improving the chances of victory in November. And just in case the Democrats do the unthinkable and somehow manage to lose the election, in President John McCain they will have someone the record shows will be easy to co-op. Regardless of what happens on the first Tuesday in November, one thing is for sure, the right will be in tatters.
The GOP rose from the ashes in the 1980’s on the back of Ronald Reagan and movement conservatives. The Reagan years were misery for the left and its toadies in the mainstream media. The party began descent from the summit in 1992 when George Bush 41, a mainline “country club” Republican squandered a ninety per cent post Gulf War approval rating and lost a second term to then unknown Bill Clinton. Even though Clinton proved such a disaster to his own party that Republicans swept to control of Congress in 1994, Kansas Senator Bob Dole, an aging war hero and centrist, could not unseat “The Boy President” in 1996. In 2000 self professed conservative, George W. Bush wrested that disputed election from Albert Gore.
In the intervening years W has quietly and steadily abandoned conservatism and like his father, allowed an approval rate nearing one hundred per cent to evaporate. Bereft of original thought Bush the Younger has since followed the purposeless, neither fish nor fowl policies of his father. The decimation of solid majorities in both the House and Senate during Bush 43’s watch is hard to fathom. The desolation is so complete on the right that a book entitled How the Bush Family Destroyed the GOP is likely soon to be published.
Given the mismanagement of the Iraq War, housing in free fall and $4 gas, the press has declared not only Bush to be a failure but conservatism as well. Throughout the past four years we have been treated to a continuous assertion that GWB is a knucklehead, a conservative of the whacked out fringe, when in fact he abandoned early on any pretense to conservative ideals. President Bush has neither promoted such conservative goals as comprehensive tax relief and reform nor used his veto against such dubious legislation as Ted Kennedy’s, No Child Left Behind and McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform. Neither has he imposed discipline on a wild spending Republican Congress got drunk on majority.
The left has only to win the Presidential election of 2008 to effect a total repudiation of The Reagan Revolution. Enter Senator John McCain, the aging war hero and centrist. Co-sponsor of McCain-Feingold, the Senator is a champion of No Child Left Behind. McCain joined the “gang of 14” to block Republican judicial nominees and has supported amnesty for illegal aliens. The presumptive GOP standard bearer joined Democrats to stop [by one vote] drilling in ANWAR and voted against Bush’s post 9/11 tax cuts. He vows he will follow the fiscally catastrophic Kyoto Protocols on global climate change. Most conservative Republicans can’t stand him and may support him only under duress. Many see him as a greater threat than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama!
In stealthily supporting McCain’s march to the nomination, the left has accomplished a great strategic victory. It has demoralized the Republican base vastly improving the chances of victory in November. And just in case the Democrats do the unthinkable and somehow manage to lose the election, in President John McCain they will have someone the record shows will be easy to co-op. Regardless of what happens on the first Tuesday in November, one thing is for sure, the right will be in tatters.
Change Now, America Devolves
Every hour of every day in this political season, some candidate is either demanding or promising “change now”. It seems as if the public is very dissatisfied with the way things are. There is a lot to be dissatisfied with; four-dollar a gallon gas, house prices falling, foreclosures soaring, factories closing, high medical costs and more and more and more. The complaints are easy, everyone wants low gas prices, increasing values of our investments and secure jobs, but who or what do we want to change these things? The apparent answer is very troubling. The majority of Americans seem to want the government to change these things they are unhappy with and to solve all their other problems as well.
America was once known for its rugged individualism. Our founders established a classless society where each man or woman could rise to the highest level of his ability. No one was guaranteed anything and many failed to advance. Many more chose to remain as they began. The founders also understood government to be a dangerous threat to free people rather than a panacea. These ideals had propelled the United States to the top of the world at the end of The Great War. For the most part during this time [excluding the Civil War era] government for law-abiding people was inconsequential.
Despite the freedom and prosperity he saw in America in the mid nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher foresees in his seminal work Democracy in America, a gloomy prospect for this thriving republic. As he toured the United States he began to sense that democracy might spawn a despotism more oppressive and all encompassing than that of any king or emperor.
This absolute rule would take “a different character” than those of the past. It would be “more extensive and mild” and would “degrade rather than torment” its subjects. This new type of tyranny would be “unlike anything ever seen in history”. In his prophecy, Tocqueville saw a massive leviathan of power, “absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild”. Government so established would rule “as a parent” but one not working to prepare its people for manhood, but rather to keep them in “perpetual childhood”. He goes on: “For their happiness such a government willing labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities; facilitates their pleasures; manages their principle concerns; regulates the descent of property and subdivides their inheritances: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.” "Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent…. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits”.
Just as the ancient Israelites failed to heed the prophets of old so have Americans ignored this very prescient warning; for as indicated by the whining and pandering of this year’s Presidential campaign, here we have come in the year 2008. If we are not so already, we are surely becoming a nation of “timid industrious sheep of which the government is the shepherd”.
Every American ought be ashamed of this condition and terrified of its portents. Surely each of us would feel obliged try to reverse and undo the processes and ideas that have led to this forlorn state. Yet I fear that if Toqueville’s prophecy were presented in special prime time editions of the several news networks - as having been fulfilled in our time - the vast majority would react with strong indignation and denial! Let us all cry out together: “Baaa! Baaa!
America was once known for its rugged individualism. Our founders established a classless society where each man or woman could rise to the highest level of his ability. No one was guaranteed anything and many failed to advance. Many more chose to remain as they began. The founders also understood government to be a dangerous threat to free people rather than a panacea. These ideals had propelled the United States to the top of the world at the end of The Great War. For the most part during this time [excluding the Civil War era] government for law-abiding people was inconsequential.
Despite the freedom and prosperity he saw in America in the mid nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher foresees in his seminal work Democracy in America, a gloomy prospect for this thriving republic. As he toured the United States he began to sense that democracy might spawn a despotism more oppressive and all encompassing than that of any king or emperor.
This absolute rule would take “a different character” than those of the past. It would be “more extensive and mild” and would “degrade rather than torment” its subjects. This new type of tyranny would be “unlike anything ever seen in history”. In his prophecy, Tocqueville saw a massive leviathan of power, “absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild”. Government so established would rule “as a parent” but one not working to prepare its people for manhood, but rather to keep them in “perpetual childhood”. He goes on: “For their happiness such a government willing labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities; facilitates their pleasures; manages their principle concerns; regulates the descent of property and subdivides their inheritances: what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.” "Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent…. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits”.
Just as the ancient Israelites failed to heed the prophets of old so have Americans ignored this very prescient warning; for as indicated by the whining and pandering of this year’s Presidential campaign, here we have come in the year 2008. If we are not so already, we are surely becoming a nation of “timid industrious sheep of which the government is the shepherd”.
Every American ought be ashamed of this condition and terrified of its portents. Surely each of us would feel obliged try to reverse and undo the processes and ideas that have led to this forlorn state. Yet I fear that if Toqueville’s prophecy were presented in special prime time editions of the several news networks - as having been fulfilled in our time - the vast majority would react with strong indignation and denial! Let us all cry out together: “Baaa! Baaa!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
