Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

An Unbeliever’s Christmas Stocking of Quotations

So, what do confirmed agnostics do on Christmas Eve? Why, they wait for the lasagna to cook, 5PM to roll around so they can have a beer, and go through old quotation files looking for things that might offend religious people.

The lasagna is almost done.

By fearing whom I trust I find my way
To truth; by trusting wholly I betray
The trust of wisdom; better far is doubt
Which brings the false into the light of day.
Abdallah al-Ma’arri (973-1057)

These [Christian] principles seem to me to have made men feeble, and caused them to become an easy prey to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that the great body of men, for the sake of gaining paradise, are more disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

For if we could guarantee them their dogma of immortality in some other way, the lively ardor for their gods would at once cool; and… if continued existence after death could be proved to be incompatible with the existence of gods…they would soon sacrifice these gods to their own immortality, and be hot for atheism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

For those who live there insist, at least in our generation, on the total acceptance without reservation of their revealed religion. And I cannot surrender the liberty of my mind to any authority. Free reason, my son, is a heady wine. It has failed to sustain my heart, but having drunk of it, I can never be content with a less fiery draught.”
Milton Steinberg (1903–1949)

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

Maybe God does exist, but he is an underachiever.
Woody Allen

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear….If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and will love others which it will procure for you.
Thomas Jefferson

It is likely that the whole world is deceived in this common idea of immortality, for if we assume that there are three major religions – Christ’s, Moses’, and Muhammad’s – either all of them are false and the whole world is cheated or two are wrong and the greater part of mankind is deceived.
Pomponazzi (1462-1525)

One of the ironies of the cold war, and one of the things Marina Oswald’s story tells us is that you could have taken 100,000 American fundamentalists, even at the height of Stalinism, dropped them in Russia, and they would have been happier there that than they ever were in the United States. I mean, what a dream for them: “Bad people were sent off to camps, and good people could walk the streets safely. Children were very law-abiding and honored their parents, and sex was very restricted.”
Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

The last Christian died on the Cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
Stephen Weinberg

Out yonder was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it. … The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and as alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
Albert Einstein

Theology: “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense.”
Scriptures: “so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them.”
Jesus must have “picked up a few ignorant blockish fisher fellows, whom he knew by his skill in physiognomy, had strong imaginations.”
Moses: “if ever there was such a man,” had, like Jesus, “learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus.”
Thomas Aikenhead, executed January 8, 1697 for heresy, at age 20.

”Jesus himself was a Jew speaking to Jews and not promoting much of a mythology – and – of course, his conversation about belief and doubt was not about Greek philosophical objections to faith. But his ideas and his image came to the real attention of the Roman Empire after he was long gone. He came to Rome in a story from the East, told in common Greek and already incorporating major tenets of religions that were familiar thought the empire. The ubiquitous image of Isis holding her divine son Horus was transformed into Mary and the infant Jesus.”
Jennifer Michale Hecht, Doubt: A History

Just prior to his death, Freud wrote a treatise called “Moses and Monotheism” in which he proposed that Moses was not a Jew and was actually an Egyptian aristocrat. Dr. Yahuda gets wind of this and screams at Freud, “The Myth! The myth is all! You take away that and you take away our faith!” Freud replies that the human mind is divinity enough. I agree with that idea, which is why I don’t like religion, politics or any kind of tribalism. I do think the mind is divinity enough, and that it’s much more incredible than any god, Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed you could concoct with the human mind.
John Malkovich

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that there are certain dogs I have known who will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
James Thurber

Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb.
Mel Brooks, Space Balls

The references to Mary in the Gospels are relatively few; John does not even mention her by name, A particular emphasis on her virginity first arose when a verse in Isaiah “Behold a virgin will conceive,” was interpreted as prophesying the birth of Christ and hence inspired or corroborated the Gospel accounts of the virgin birth. This interpretation, however, was drawn from the Septuagint (Greek) version, which had used the word “parthenos” to render the Hebrew for “almah” which was no more than a young girl, so the scriptural base of Mary’s virginity was shaky, especially as the Gospels specifically mention that Jesus had brothers and sisters …
Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind

The last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world was one by the Athenian philosopher Proclus in A.D. 475, nearly 1,100 years after the prediction of an eclipse by Thales in 585 B.C., which traditionally marks the beginning of Greek science. It would be over 1,000 years – with the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus in 1543 – before these studies began to move forward again.
Ibid

One of the great consolations of the monastic life is the assurance that we have that in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders your received, and if you can furnish a clean account in that respect, you are absolved entirely.. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account and charges it to the Superior … So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, “Oh holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

And since they condone capital punishment, I want them to stop bitching about Jesus getting nailed up.
Lenny Bruce

One is presuming (one is not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing with the Ten Commandments. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded (“in his own image,” yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying and adulterous species. Create them sick and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate that he exists only in the minds of his worshipers.
Christopher Hitchens

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H.L. Mencken

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.
Robert M. Pirsig

No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
George H. W. Bush to journalist Robert Sherman

To Pray: To ask that the laws of nature be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger (4BC-AD65)

The gods come and go; man remains.
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

Advertising’s Man of the Year, 2008

It should not pass without notice that Barack Obama has been named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year for 2008, beating out Apple and Nike. His was a dynamic campaign which promoted mass participation (many small donations) even as it was mostly funded by fat cats — over $34 million from from the finance sector alone. His twin logos, “Hope” and “Change” were blank slates on which devoted followers could write their own script. And they we did.

Clever. Very clever.

In the meantime, Obama has embarked on a course traveled by Clinton in the 1990’s – heavy dominance by financial insiders and war hawks. No change, little hope.

The primary task of advertising is to bamboozle consumers, overwhelming their senses with useless and often prurient information, luring them into making irrational choices. Advertising stands capitalism on its head, negating the notion of informed choice. Obama’s choice by Ad Age is more than informative. It’s illustrative of business dominance of society. The heavy-handed thuggery of the Bush Administration had driven 75% of the population to cry out for change. Democratic leadership noted this public sentiment, and gave them what business wanted them to have – an advertising icon.

But no change. That is not allowed.

When Philosophy Dead-Ends

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a few exchanges with people on the right side of our health insurance debate, lively and informative to be sure. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I know the general direction we need to go. And it’s not where we are headed – Barack Obama and Max Baucus will take us down the path of corporate subsidy, hoping, as the old saying goes, that a few sparrows get fed via the cow’s intestinal path.

We’ve been round and round, so I’ll jump to my own conclusion – there should be a mixture of mostly public and some private, and the wealthy, who have the least to lose, should be able to buy whatever care they can afford. But a basic level of care should be available to everyone, paid by the tax system, so that those who cannot afford care get it. There ought to be diminishing co-pays. The French have a nice system, making people who can afford it pay up front, to be reimbursed later. That seems to deal effectively with the moral hazard.

That’s where I’m at. I await the Democratic-inspired boondoggle about to be visited on us. I and my fellow travelers will be blamed for whatever evil comes of it. Let me say in advance – the Democrats are as much beholden to the medical and insurance lobbies as the Republicans, and will not solve our problems without payment of a huge royalty to them. It will be no different than Baucus’s Medicare D, wherein a huge subsidy was thrown at the pharmaceuticals so that some might trickle down to ordinary people.

In the meantime, I encountered two lost souls of the right, two people up against a brick wall. Their philosophy had dead-ended them.

From “Max Bucks”, at Missoulaplis, in a thread containing 127 comments:

I am someone without health insurance. I pay cash for all my medical services. I am not a “free rider.”

From “Lt. Ripley” at mt.pundit, in a much shorter thread:

Yes, the specter of death and destruction looms over all of us… but it’s called LIFE. When you get into a car, you face the possibility that you may die. Life has risks. You cannot remove them all, nor do I understand why you would want to. Your health is part of that risk.

And I do completely understand. You do not know me. My ideals and principles are formed because I have experience and knowledge of it. What would I do if I faced a life threatening disease, and the prospect of huge bills? Well, either I do not accept treatment and die… or I do what I can to pay the bills that my treatment requires. Either way, it’s up to ME.

At some point, we all die, Mark. You can mitigate that somewhat by good preventative care (which I practice) and by looking ahead…. by mentally and financially (if you can) preparing for whatever life throws at you.

If we all paid for what we used, and paid for it directly to doctors, hospitals, etc, then we would be facing lower costs and better care. If we all faced those costs OURSELVES, you would see people educating themselves and using more preventative care. Whenever I am sick, or one of my children, I don’t first head to the ER or even the doctor. I research what it is, watch symptoms and decide if there are things I can do myself. If I need to, THEN I head to the doctor. If he/she suggests a certain treatment or course of action, I find out what that entails, what risks may occur if we don’t do it, and find out costs and difficulty.

Both of these gentlemen are driven by the “rugged individualist” model, and assume that either via savings or loans or family charity that they will survive any medical emergency that comes along. But they are free riders. Ripley takes it even one step further – he says that he would end his own life if he could not afford treatment. So too, I suppose, would any heroic character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,, that damned demonic novel that has inspired this type of thinking.

Anyway, neither Max nor Ripley understand the nature of health care. At the coffee shop I frequent is a bowl to collect offerings for a young man in Billings who was beaten senseless in a bar fight. His surgeries and reconstructions cost over $2 million. This, for a man who can probably barely afford his truck. You might say he brought it on himself, but what if it were cancer, or something only Dr. House could remedy with last second heroics? The point is, it’s beyond our control.

And that’s the bottom line – health care emergencies hover over us like the Angel of Death. Any one of us can be afflicted, and every year a small percentage of us are. This year there will be 500,000 bankruptcies in the U.S. due to medical costs. That specter haunts us all. We’re all vulnerable.

Max and Ripley have dead-ended. Their philosophy took them as far as it could, and left them high and dry. They are now faced with an ugly truth: We depend on one another, we help one another. Private charity is one means, and government is another. Each has its place. In Bob Cratchit’s world, there wasn’t enough private charity to go around, so only a few got help. In the modern world industrialized countries have used government to achieve widespread health care, and have done so effectively.

In the United States we’ve got one foot in Cratchit’s world, one in Tommy Douglas’s. (He’s the founder of Canada’s Medicare, and was voted the greatest Canadian in a 2004 CBC-sponsored poll up there.) We are leaning Tommy’s way, but there’s still too much resistance for an effective remedy to take hold.

Obama has won, Baucus has proposed reforms. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better. It’s time for cowboy foreplay: Brace yourself, honey.

The Best and Brightest Take the Helm

The Obama Administration has begun to take shape, I am reminded of the haughty arrogance of Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, two of the intellectual powerhouses that led us into Vietnam. McNamara has to a large degree repented for his sins. So too has Bundy, to the extent he was able.

I’m thinking of Vietnam, of course – a catastrophe given us by Kennedy’s Whiz Kids, David Halberstam’s “Best and Brightest“, the leaders of academia and industry whom JFK recruited to give his administration a spit-shine unlike any before.

As I watch Obama assemble his team, I’m looking for parallels to Camelot, and I don’t have to look far. The haughtiness of high intellect is there, the star power, the ability to make grand mistakes in a grand way.

And the playing field is also there – Afghanistan. I don’t know what we are fighting about over there – the origins of 9/11? Maybe so, maybe not. But I do suspect that if we were to pull out now, just leave it be, we’d be far better off. The place is a desolate wilderness whose most meaningful contribution to improvement of the human condition is the annual poppy seed crop.

Afghanistan is some sort of power vacuum – a place that will be occupied by others if we don’t. It is strategically situated between Pakistan and Iran – I suppose that matters. But I wonder what the worst would be – what if the Taliban took over? Will the people suffer? Of course. But the U.S. is not concerned with the suffering of ordinary people, aptly demonstrated in Iraq. There is something more at stake here. I wonder if, as in Vietnam, our leaders have given exaggerated importance to the place as egos slowly displace strategy.

Where Alexander failed, where the Russians failed, we will succeed. We are the exceptions.

Succeed in what? Devastation of an already impoverished citizenry? A massive display of industrial firepower on an agrarian countryside? Sounding familiar? What is there to prove?

Obama, during his campaign, had to appear hawkish to avoid the perception of a weak-kneed conflict-adverse liberal. Iraq was unpopular, Afghanistan supposedly the “good war”. So he staked his phallus on it – that’s where he chose to be a man. My fear is that he will follow through, fearing a legacy of retreat.

That’s the Vietnam mindset.

We can only hope that calmer, lesser minds prevail – that the Obama Administration is also stocked with people of vision and humility who know enough not to spend our youth in an unwinnable quagmire.

No Good Can Come of This

2008 is on the way out, and 2009 will be devoted to condescending commentary on Obama’s inexorable rightward drift and the left’s begrudging acceptance of it – this before they internalize it and begin to actively enable him. It is, after all, good to be king.

Two things need to be resolved before we exit 2008 – health care, and globalization. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on these subjects, to no resolution. But I see a common thread in both now, this after reading Zadie Smith’s essay in the New Yorker, Dead Man Laughing. I realized that her father’s wisdom was a truism – “no good can come of this.”

Start with globalization – one of my favorite TV shows is on the Science Channel – it’s called “How It’s Made”. In it, they show us the complicated and fascinating manufacturing processes behind products like hockey sticks and curling stones and charcoal briquettes. What I began to notice after a few episodes was that 1) the workers were usually Anglo men and women, and 2) the products were more often Canadian. I began to suspect that they still make things up north.

Dave Budge perhaps had the final word on the situation in a comment under my post “A Markist Dialectic“:

Ask any random economist, even Keyesians, and 95% of them will tell you that we’re better off with trade where we employ our resources to our most efficient production. What we’re experiencing now is the pain of globalization. But it won’t last forever and we’ll redeploy our excess labor in useful ways over time. That is, unless we stifle innovation with protectionist policies.

This is the right’s answer to the pain and dislocation of a trade policy dominated by the needs of capital. Accept it, internalize it, enable it. You can’t fight it. But far from Zadie’s proscription that no good can come of this, Dave is chipper and optimistic. Something good will happen.

What, exactly? Something. We’ll find some use for our labor. We make good movies. Perhaps we can all be actors. We make hamburger by the COSCO boatload. Perhaps we can all make burgers for one another. Maybe we can all become counselors, or join the military and attack yet new and innocent foreign places. Something good will happen.

In the meantime, we are shutting down industry, good-paying jobs are disappearing for ordinary people, and poverty is edging ever-upward into what we once called our middle class. But something good will come of it. We’re letting markets work, after all, and we don’t question the wisdom of markets.

Which brings me to health care. Again, Dave Budge, this time at Gregg Smith’s active and lively Electric City Weblog:

Prior to HIPAA Montana had hundreds of companies that wrote health insurance. Upon the act being put in force the number of companies writing health insurance fell to less than 10 (There are only 2 in Idaho and only 1 in Washingston.) HIPAA limited pre-existing conditions limitations to 12 months and accordingly many insurance companies left the individual insurance business in favor of selling group plans.

So, prior to 1997 your wife wasn’t uninsurable even with cancer. HIPAA is likely the most damaging piece of health care legislation ever written. It screwed those who need individual coverage by limiting competition, increasing premiums, and re-enforcing the employer based health care model.

And again, later:

There’s no point in talking to you about health insurance because A) you think health care is a right (at some arbitrary level of care) and B) you’re unwilling to see that it’s been the government that has created this bollixed system with all of its intervention. For every fix government enacts two or more problems are created.

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a 1996 law that made it more difficult for insurance companies to deny coverage to people because of pre-existing conditions. It didn’t outlaw the practice, by any means. It merely said that if workers switch policies due to job change, that they could not be denied coverage due to a preexisting condition on a new policy if they maintained coverage and did not go for long periods uninsured.

Prior to that time, insurers would either refuse to cover someone with a preexisting condition, or exclude that condition from coverage while covering other ailments. That’s an industry fix, and a good one in Dave’s mind – don’t cover the one thing the person most likely needs coverage for. Under-insure them.

Ted Kennedy was behind HIPAA, and he looked at the market-driven system and thought to himself “no good can come of this”. What the hell is the point of insurance that doesn’t cover illnesses? He fixed it, and, as Dave notes, insurers fled the market. The game was up. Dave sees this and a failing on the part of government. The industry was only doing what comes naturally: Seeking profit, avoiding risk.

…you think health care is a right.

At last he, flustered with me and all of the bollixing of government, said what was true. We have it now on screen for all to see. Dave thinks that people who cannot afford coverage should not have coverage. That, dear friends, is our philosophical bottom line. I say where the market fails, fix things. He says that the market doesn’t fail. If a market outcome is bad, it’s destiny. Accept it. Internalize it. Enable it.

Oh, we’ll do it his way. Obama is drifting inexorably right. The left will begrudgingly accept it, internalize it, and then enable it. There’ll be no heath care fix, no middle class tax cut, no end to Iraq, no protections for workers displaced by globalization. We’ve elected a secret member of the DLC. No good can come of this.

It’s a Wonderful Life

How’s this for a business plan:

I’m a credit card company. Market research shows me that a sizable number of people use credit cards as a convenience and pay off their balances monthly. I make money that way – I charge merchants a fee for each purchase. Merchants are OK with it, as people tend to spend more money when they use credit cards versus cash.

But it’s not enough. I want more. There’s a market niche out there that I need to exploit -kids. I will have my marketing department get hold of the names of all kids graduating from high school each year, and I bombard them with offers. Parents might object, but the kids are 18, legal adults, so screw the parents.

Enough of these kids sign up for cards (I’m bombarding college campuses too), and few of these kids know anything about compound interest. They are on tight budgets … they are young, and I know they are going to do some impulsive spending. I’m going to make it easy for them. Then I’m going to make their minimum monthly payments so low that it’s like a siren song – don’t pay me off… don’t pay me off… Kids will run up balances.

Here’s the hook. My interest rates are so high that most of the minimum payment I charge is interest, so the balances aren’t paid down. Pretty soon these kids will lave large balances, and will be making interest payments to me in the area of 22-29% per annum (usury laws are a thing of the past – I had something to do with that.)

It’s beautiful. I have staked a claim to a portion of these kids’ income now and for years to come. They’ll be working their low-pay jobs, and I’ll be siphoning off a good cut for myself. I’ll spend my idle time thinking up new ways to charge them more – excessive late payment fees, jacking up interest rates if they are late on a phone bill – any way to squeeze an extra buck out of them.

The flow of wealth is upward. I’ve staked a claim to the wealth produced by the lowest wage earners among us.

Congress is timid – I’ve bought most of them. But a few of the more recalcitrant ones might suggest laws that prohibit me from marketing to kids (and the elderly – my other lucrative market). They might even suggest usury laws. I’ll put a stop to that. Thanks be that there are only a few people in congress that I don’t intimidate.

Ah, human weaknesses to exploit. It’s what I do. I love it. Greed is good. It’s a wonderful life.

Education Note: Kids should not leave high school without having learned something about the dangers of credit cards and compound interest. It’s the least they can do for the kids.

Rahm’s List

Fox News reports that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been in touch with Governor Rod Blagojevich, and had presented him with a list of acceptable candidates to fill Obama’s senate seat.

Emanuel is widely credited with engineering the Democratic takeover of the House in the 2006 election. But closer examination tells a different story. John Walsh, writing in Counterpunch, tells of Emanuel’s efforts that year to infuse the House with new pro-war Democrats.

Long ago Rahm chose 22 key races, open or Republican seats, where Dems might win. By any reasonable criteria, all the candidates chosen by Rahm, save perhaps for one, were pro-war as is Emanuel himself. In two cases Rahm had to put in considerable dollars and effort in the primaries to drive out antiwar candidates. He drove out Cegelis in Illinois’s 6th CD, at the cost of one million dollars, in favor of Tammy (“Stay the course”) Duckworth who lost in the general election. In California’s 11th CD primary, Emanuel backed the prowar Steven Filson who lost to the antiwar candidate, Jerry McNerney, who went on to win in the general election.

It’s a sure bet that Emanuel’s list of acceptable senate candidates will be pro-war, and that Duckworth will be on it. (She is an Iraq vet who lost her legs over there, but still supports Bush’s war effort.) Hopefully she will be tarnished by being on the list, and will have to move on.

Looking at all 22 candidates hand-picked by Rahm, we find that 13 were defeated, and only 8 won! (One is still undecided.) [9 eventually won.]And remember that this was the year of the Democratic tsunami and that Rahm’s favorites were handsomely financed by the DCCC. Tammy Duckworth, for example, was infused with $3 million ­ and was backed in the primary by HRC, Barack Obama, John Kerry, etc. The Dems have picked up 28 seats so far, maybe more. So out of that 28, Rahm’s choices accounted for 8!

Since the Dems only needed 15 seats to win the House, Rahm’s efforts were completely unnecessary. Had the campaign rested on Rahm’s choices, there would have been only 8 or 9 new seats, and the Dems would have lost.

Emanuel will be the gatekeeper for Obama, and the arbiter of many positions of power over policy. Two things about him are evident: – he is rabidly pro-Israel (a dual citizen), and pro-Iraq war.

Progressives are in for many more unpleasant surprises as this caterpillar administration becomes a full butterfly.

Inappropriate

From the Guardian: Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez of Chile had some strong words for Madonna at a mass he said recently. Madonna was in Chile for a concert on December 10. Said the card,

“This woman comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner she provokes a crazy enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of lust, lustful thoughts, impure thoughts.”

Medina began his homily with lofty praise for General Augusto Pinochet.