Tag Archive | human rights

What Bertrand Russell May Have Missed

Feb13

A thought occurred to me yesterday just as Father Richard Rohr was reformulating truth in terms of Hellenistic (Greek) Thought versus the kind of thoughts that Jesus of Nazareth was allegedly spinning out of whole cloth with regards to the “holy trinity.”

Here are the three principles of Greek Thought that underpin all of western “civilization”:

1)      A = A (principle of identity)

2)      A != !A (principle of noncontradiction)

3)      A or !A = unary truth (principle of the excluded third)

Russell goes on to suggest that, “nothing can both be and not be,” and “everything must either be or not be.”

Interesting choice of words, “everything,” and “nothing.”

What if “nothing” has some existence, however temporary?  What if “nothing” can both be and not be?   That is, after all, what Russell said, did he not?  And what happens to the unfortunate soul who confuses “nothing” with “everything?”

Welcome to humanity.  In this mindscape, we both confuse everything with nothing and then go on to build gigantic infrastructures designed to sustain our commitment to nothing as being everything anyone could possibly find valuable.  The Greeks might, “want no freaks,” but even their superior cultural will was incapable of sustaining a bivalent, binary, black or white universe of which humans could be a part.  It seems the very act of excluding the possibility of tripartite reality made the Greeks into the freaks they wished to have removed from relevant consideration.

As modern phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl might assert, observation is composed of the observer, the observed and the process of observation.  Or, if one prefers, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  All three can be considered inexhaustibly separate, and yet it is only when our understanding of each has been brought together that any human person begins to make meaning out of their human experience.

More plainly, those who would choose to focus on only the godhead, or only on the Creation or only the processes relating godhead to Creation can only manifest their own apriori “arrangement” of tripartite reality.   So if we believe the godhead, Father or the Observer is what manifests reality, we see a reality where a First Cause by some process manifested a universe.  Completely irrelevant to these folks, then, is the possibility that there is no First Cause, there has only been an eternal process grinding out causes and effects.  Even more unlikely, the godists could spare no time for the serious consideration of a universe that has been forever and eternally engaged only in observing itself with no particular guidance or rules of process to obey or hold in abeyance.  And yet, when we say that nothing can both be and not be, the possibilities for arranging a tripartite ontology number at least eight.  And this is because, as human beings, our lack of an eternal pedigree, or stake in the same, renders us homeless and truly free to decide how we might wish to construct our reality for ourselves.

Left unsocialized or divided against one another, these eight possibilities all form closed systems of sanity that could well exclude the remaining seven possibilities from ever being seriously considered for any merits they might offer our buggered little minds.  Our Greek-infiltrated cerebellums might see choice six of eight as the only possible rational arrangement of tripartite reality, which polarizes the other seven worldviews as decidedly, “insane.”

I mention all of this confusing ontological and epistemological chatter because it forms the basis from which human thought arose in response to a decidedly confusing, decidedly chaotic lived experience, many eons ago.  People killed one another with little provocation save the need to preserve a certain amount of foodstuff for personal survival.  People murdered their fellows because they wanted their mates or any of their other resources.

Into this bubbling cauldron of anxious uncertainty came the precepts of religion and the beginnings of a universal moral code of human behavior.  The hope in this case would be that human beings would no longer have to walk about with one eye over their shoulder peeled on their neighbor’s curiosity or envy.  We would all come to value peace and harmony as principles for good orderly living.

As always happens when geography and human limitations manifest themselves, those who huddled together to form klans or villages became isolated from the rest of their fellows.  And so the defense we erected against our own avaricious natures manifested itself in the distrust and disdain we held for those outside of our klan or our village.  It simply did not matter if we all subscribed to the same texts of moral behavior; the proof could only be found in the putting of observable behavior.

Once the desire to impose volition upon communal hope manifested itself in the form of large concentrations of churchly wealth, institutions of moral authority began serving only themselves and not the greater good of human beings.  Tortured logic and the logic of torture began to remanifest itself in human beings representing institutions whose initial purpose was nothing akin to contemporary behavior.  When nothing can be confused with everything, imaginary crimes can be punished by death and threat of death, all with impunity.

Out of the bubbling cacophony of churches and nonsensical assertions of power and control came the voices for reason, voices who held the contradiction between goal and present behavior up for all to see, offered up a third way to manifest both morality and civilized progress: the scientific method.  Science could somehow superimpose itself atop all of the noise and chaos of civilizations learning to become more civil and humans learning to become more humane.

But old institutions do not die until long after they are buried, and old ways of thinking outlive even the institutions responsible for bringing them to the fore.  So science became as perverse and dogmatic as those religions it claimed to be defending humanity against.   Absent has been the ability of human beings to regard religion and science as tools for social progress; instead, each must be held to the heart of conviction as one holds both sword and shield in an imaginary battle of all or nothing.  Except human beings have long since forgotten their confusion of everything with nothing, nor do they recall their realization that nothing is the ONLY thing that can both be and not be at the same moment of eternity.

You, me and the motility provided by our physical bodies – these things come and go, rise and fall, come to be and just as quickly pass away because no thing cannot last for anything like an eternity.  That which is perfect outlasts all things and there is no thing in this universe of ours that has ever been known to have always been and observed to always be true.

The hope lies with our thoughts on all of these matters both now and into the future.  Our thoughts and ideals transcend the bounds of time and space, defy the laws of conservation of energy, and grow more and more abundant as they are shared one to another over time.  It is in our thoughts that our imaginations are fired and our relevant truths highlighted so as to ensure our future survival.  We may pass away as a species, but the ideas we share with whatever Life turns out to be should preserve what we have learned about what it means to pass this way, to feel as we feel and to do as we must do.

No thing can both be and not be, but nothing can do both.   Even Bertrand Russell said so, without actually realizing it.

America the Dutiful

Dec13

Feasting On The Whitey House

My senior year in high school (no, I will not tell you) I won the Veterans Affairs Voice of Democracy speechwriting competition for the central section of California.  When I think back to the soaring prose and metaphors I used to describe how I felt about the land of my birth in those days, I can almost hear the mortars and gunfire on the beaches of Normandy, juxtaposed with the granite faces of El Capitan and Half Dome.  In those days, veterans ate that sort of naïveté up.  The horror of the treatment of Korean War and Viet Nam War veterans had yet to fully sink in to the brains and nervous systems of the veterans of “the Good War.”  Now that the handiwork of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have hit home for the veterans of the Gulf War, I don’t think we need to be shrieking our disappointment at the veterans coming home from Afghanistan; we need to be preventing our children from volunteering for the slaughter in the first place.

You see it was not the alleged incidents of spitting on returning Viet Nam veterans by Californian peri-adults, nor the warnings by commanding officers to vets heading stateside to “remove your uniform,” that represented the real threats to veterans of the US military.  The military-industrial complexes’ desire to hide the evidence of its misdeeds coupled with its burning desire to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of its actions represents the real and grave danger to America’s citizens in uniform. 

I bring this point to the floor not because it will motivate you to vote or not vote this Tuesday.  I mention the love affair America’s elites have had with fascism (corporate power coupled with governmental authority) because it is the real arch-enemy of every sentient being walking the planet at this very moment.  It is not just the willing defenders of “freedom and democracy” around the world who have been placed in mortal danger, but everything any of us have ever lived for, smiled for or bothered to live another day because of that we are placing at risk by refraining from engaging in a repeat performance of the voter turnout of 2008.

No, the Democrats are not any better at defending their constituents than are the Republicans; they are, however, slower in the uptake and more likely give America’s grass roots more time to secure a suitable response to what the global power structure has had in mind for our country since, at least, the mid 19th century; since, at least, the beginnings of the formation of the nation-state of Israel in the mid-19th century.  Since, at least, the return to hegemony of the global banking establishment at the conclusion of the American Civil War we have all been conditioned to believe had to do with a difference of opinion between North and South over the issue of “slavery.”  

No one who presently works in or around a large corporation in 2010 can seriously, consciously believe “America the Beautiful” gives a tinker’s damn about anyone’s freedom much less whether that freedom is morally dispensed.  More likely the divide between North and South had to do with the South’s willingness to accept Feudalism as a mode of operation while the Northern establishment remembered all-too-well what had happened when the British East-India Company had the Colonies in its talons.  It was a social fissure that the global banking establishment, also known as the House of Rothschild, wanted to exploit for the purpose of furthering its plans for global enslavement.

The ugly truth of so-called “capitalism” is that it does not work as an economic system.  G’head.  Go back to that Junior Chamber of Commerce project you did as a naïve child and rather than paying yourself zero dollars for your time and effort setting up your “little business,” pay yourself and your employees a “living wage” and see how successfully your little project turns out. 

Without significant subsidies on the part of government and/or labor, capitalism is simply a rehashing of the Feudalism from which it was spawned.  Capitalism IS Feudalism in disguise and Feudalism is all about “earning your keep.”  Those who become too old to remain gainfully employed or who begin a “search for truth” at an inconvenient time, are deemed to be unable to “earn their keep,” are left outside the castle’s walls and battlements, and become the perennial victims of evil knights, disease and the elements of nature we thought we had become civilized to ameliorate. 

“Earning your keep,” was the reason why America became, “like a dream,” to working people all around the world.  Here, in America, surrounded by the twin motes of the Atlantic and Pacific, a person who felt a need, as most of us do, to give something back to a world that is worthy of their efforts, could feel fulfilled and motivated to do so.  Most people who live and work under the auspices of the global banking establishment do so because they are forced to do so under a real and significant threat to their lives.  Not so in the America that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had envisioned and begun to build.  Here, sir, the People govern.

Not anymore.  Get over it.  Accept it.  Move beyond the limitations of perception and ego and dare to live that original dream. 

Vote for Greens and Democrats on Tuesday.  America the Dutiful will work on how to deal with all the moral lepers once the awareness of a national nervous breakdown, punctuated by Jon Stewart’s closing remarks this past Saturday, begins to sink in to foment the catalyzing event that needs to transpire to undo the damage done by the feudal fascists on September 11, 2001.

Some Jokes Aren’t That Funny

Dec13

Knock-knock.
‘Who’s there?”
Jew.
“Jew, who?”
Silly goy, don’t cry because I own all the good knock-knock jokes.

The United States owes a debt to the Jews of Europe that can never be repaid. The United States allowed morons like Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, Irenee Du Pont, Grayson Murphy, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Kennedy, the Bush Crime Family, Averill Harriman, the Dulles brothers, the Brown Brothers and, of course, Father Coughlin – a Canadian, but close enough – to a) rise to prominence and b) spew vile anti-Semitism on a global basis for multiple decades. Much of what transpired against European Jewry during the Nazi and Stalinist regimes had its roots in the machinations of the financial class in the early 20th century by 19th and 20th century American tycoons. If I were a Jew and names like the aforementioned hated my ethnicity out of some sort of weird bigot-reflex, I believe I would be quite paranoid regarding the negative events transpiring in my personal life and the lives of my family members. Certainly nothing good could come from the economic, political, social and psychological pressure a coordinated attack by America’s kabillionaires against my ethnicity would cause. Contemporary proof of my point can be found in the scattered fellowship of millions of former homeowners robbed absolutely blind by America’s latest crop of avaricious robber barons.

And yet, the United States cannot will itself a better past nor repay an irreconcilable debt.

But we can make some amends.

We can fire Rick Sanchez from CNN.

Anyone who has ever listened to Rick Sanchez confront the porcine purveyors of political poppycock on his former CNN show knew well enough that this day might come. Lead by the journalist Helen Thomas, Rick had had enough tap-dancing around the subject of what is truly wrong with America. Something needed to be said and, by god, Helen Thomas should say it. Even if it killed her, which it most likely did.

Rick Sanchez, like Governor Rick Perry of Texas, has terrific hair. The two Ricks would make a great political team – one, thoroughly compromised by the killing of innocent human beings and in the sleeping with a man not his wife; the other, plaintively looking for a pigeon-free ledge where he can piss and moan about the coming apocalypse from a relatively safe height above the great unwashed masses.

Before I become too deeply ensconced in “Rickishness” and miss what I really want to write about, let me see if I can’t offer a dash of empathy-training-in-a-bottle for the newly unemployed, future traffic-tracker of the morning commute, Rick Sanchez – a Cuban-American by ethnicity and a veritable Horatio Alger by his own humble admission. I need some closure.

“If it wasn’t for Teddy Roosevelt, your family would still be picking bananas, Sanchez.”

How did that one go down, Mr. Ethnic Sensitivity, Mr. Charismatic Clodpate?

Okay, enough about Rick. Mel Gibson he is not.

Sanchez should not have been fired for shedding light on an issue that should have been a major breaking news story thirty years ago. In addition to budget cuts in education, longer working hours for parents and dwindling elementary school test scores, “We the People” have become ethically paralyzed by our own uneducated, paranoid attempts at political correctness.

Our problem is so severe that we cannot recall, or even contemplate, that it was Israelis who were dancing near the van they were using to photograph the smoking Twin Towers on 9/11/2001, and it was the Israelis who murdered an innocent American boy during their raid on a humanitarian flotilla headed for Gaza. In 2010. AD. And, yes, it was the Israelis who murdered 34 American sailors in cold blood when they launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty in 1967.

Should allies intentionally fire on one another during a time of war for either side? Real allies do not. Nor do they run bulldozers over the bodies of nonviolent American protesters like Rachel Corrie. Non-violent protest was specifically designed to irritate the homicidal psychopaths among us and Israel has been irritated a lot in its short history.

I loved the non-violent persona that was John Lennon and I loved that he held out such hope that peace and humor would cure us all from looking and acting like Dick Cheney. I loved Martin Luther King, Jr for similar, if less sardonic, reasons. But non-violent protesters have never stopped a cabal of insane idiots from picking one culture up by its heels and beating another one to death with it; certainly not on a schedule driven by an extinction-level event like global climate change. Lucky for us that the same folks responsible for promoting global warfare are also supremely interested in delaying any significant action to functionally address the remediation of global climate change. The only solution all of these mentally and emotionally ill whack-jobs seem to have for any communal infirmity is, “lower the population, by any and all means necessary.”

What does any of this have to do with the Jews? The Jews of antiquity, the Jews of the Torah, the Jews who have stood up for Civil Rights and democratic principles have had nothing to do with any of this madness. In fact, prior to the Holocaust in World War II, European Jewry wanted nothing to do with a homeland in Palestine. Such a thing, were it to come to pass without a divine messiah, used to be considered sacrilege by the majority of European Jewry. Among truly conservative Jewry the existence of Israel is an apostasy, a mockery of everything traditionally Jewish.

How could the mass murder of six million Jews (not to diminish the import of the four or five million non-Jews who were also exterminated) vastly change the political landscape in favor of the abandonment of a key principle underpinning the rich and beautiful traditions of the Judaism and its tenets?

As rhetorical as this question might sound, the systematic extermination, in December, 2008, of the people of Gaza should give any beating heart outside of the IDF considerable pause and time for reflection. The ferocious assault on an unarmed and segregated people was largely viewed by the world as severely out of proportion with the provocation – a few handmade rockets were supposedly fired from an area in Gaza directly into Israeli territory, killing a few Israeli citizens according to Israeli reports. Given Israel’s historical willingness to sacrifice a few of its own in order to promote the “greater good” it is not out of the question that this “provocation” was entirely the work of the Israelis themselves.

Considerable evidence suggests that the people of Gaza populate an area to be utilized for the transportation of Caspian Sea oil and gas, bypassing the Suez Canal and keeping the Egyptians securely away from the potential windfall to be made transporting these resources to an oil-starved Indian economy. So rather than making a ferocious attack on an unarmed people due to some pretense out of accord with the size of the initiating threat, perhaps this attack on Gaza had more to do with securing the unfettered transportation of a valuable resource through an area potentially under the control of the “terrorist group” Hamas. One does wonder. Silly goy.

Many Jewish comedians and comediennes are hilariously funny. Many of these have traded in their Judaism for an Israeli-flavored form of Zionism that shares many of the fascist tenets of fundamentalist pseudo-religious traditions all over the world. Zionism in all its flavors seems to have swept the globe, polarizing human beings as either sane or insane, crippling some of our greatest talents with alternating bouts of sanity and insanity.

Using the enormous resources available to a post-world war global economy to split Jewish culture into fascist Israeli zealots on the one hand, or extinct Jewish non-Jews on the other, was not funny, is not funny and all the Israeli ire in the world will not wring a punch-line out of any of this: they have become that which they claimed to despise.

Ideas on the Path Towards Revolutionary Regression: Issue 2; Authoritarianism Has Never Been A Left-Right Issue

Dec13

I have always been a self-righteous, egocentric teller of tall tales, mostly to myself. A curious factoid crossed my path the other day as I was engaging in the tall-tale-telling that Texans like to engage in when they’re certain no one from out of state is listening in. While I prefer engaging those on the political left in my free time, I am basically surrounded by right-wingnuts most of my waking hours. Setting aside the perturbing thought of how I have managed to survive in this environment for any length time, I noticed that I seem to get along fairly well with these wingnuts provided I refuse to engage them in political chit-chat. I still want to choke them from time to time, but the urge seems to be, for the most part, manageable.

As I was indulging in my guilty pleasure of allowing a podcast of Mike Malloy’s show to scream into my ears, I realized something – finally. We’ve all become authoritarians. We’ve all allowed ourselves to be pushed, pulled, spindled and crowded into acting from this lizard-brained place inside our heads that has only been responsible for provoking or participating in open conflict, bloodshed and warfare. As I listened to Malloy scream about the relative powerlessness of observing the ignorance, selfishness and narcissism of the political right, I realized that the patron saint of political rants is every bit as authoritarian as any of my wingnut acquaintances.

Stalin was every bit as brutal from the left as the Nazis were from the right, perhaps more so. When this dam of political and social outrage from the left finally bursts in the US, I can see busloads of “freedom riders,” coming down here to Texas not as Cindy Sheehan did – in peace – but loaded for bear and spoiling for a fight. The outrage has already boiled over in Greece and France; Murdoch and his minions have been working overtime trying to keep the rioting and violence out of the media, while the US and Australian governments have been burning midnight oil to cut WikiLeaks and Julian Assange off from their sources of funding.

We have got to do something more, people.

We have no viable “press” acting as a watchdog over the misbehavior of governments, especially our own, and if the fascists succeed in finally squelching Assange’s voice, our internet IP providers will not be far behind them. Once Americans wake up to the fact that they have lost everything left to lose, they will come here to the promised land of Texas and start doing, if they had had the collective sense God gave a sack of doorknobs, what Texans should have done in 1963, and with extreme prejudice.

The curious entrapment of “we are this and that,” when “that” is defined as “not this” catches lefties and stuns them into inaction. Lefties tend to believe that language is reality, completely oblivious to the fact that their opponents on the right have disabused themselves of the quaint notion of communication’s importance. The Righties freely take Lefties into the proverbial round room, telling them to go urinate in one of the corners. Like any stunned human, Lefties just comply hoping that all the confusion ringing in our ears will soon stop. We may be passive, but at least we are not hypocrites. We are “this and only this,” but never, “that.”

The confused thinking and dissonant communications has only gotten worse over time, becoming absurd with Newt Gingriches’ “contract on America,” or whatever the hell the psychopath called it back in the mid-1990’s. Imagine your beautiful country railroaded into fascism by a man who waited for his wife and mother of his children to come out of cancer surgery before he told her that he was leaving her for a younger woman. If you can imagine a pathetic man living out that scenario, then you know the name of the man who delivered the coup de grace that actually brought the United States to its knees. Newt Gingrich possesses a diabolical intelligence not seen near a mantle of great power since the Nazis of World War II Germany. Had someone actually taken a stand against this creep back in college, the sonofabitch might never have made it to grad school or the Speakership of the US House of Representatives.

Clinton would probably still have slept with ugly women all the way to the Whitehouse, in any event.

The moral of the story is, I think, “embrace your authoritarianism.” Do not shy away from your authoritarian insistence that authoritarianism must never be anywhere near a mantle of power. Kick these fascist bastards out of power and do it before they have time to redecorate their new offices with the blood of your sons and daughters. The sooner the job is done, the safer everyone else will be. We might still need one or two to slip through the cracks just to keep the appreciation of the important work of ridding the world of insane megalomaniacs high on everyone’s agenda. We must never forget the banal horror these psychopathic monsters inflict on human lives and always have.