If Pigs Had Wings …

Adolf Godwin Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf, defined the “big lie” as one so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. It’s a propaganda technique, not terribly effective but often used. Sometimes one can spot a “big” lie by an overly specific account of something. For example, Karl Rove says that George W. Bush read 95 books in 2006, 51 in 2007, and 40 in 2008 (his total has declined – I can only assume he will slip in another 20 or so today).

It seems appropriate that it is Rove spinning this fanciful tale, as he is often referred to as “Bush’s Goebbels”. Rove is a professional liar and not a man to be trusted about anything, even the color of his eyes. He’s endured, for eight years now, the uppity criticism of Bush from the nation’s effete snobs – Bush is maligned as the C-student who is sheltered from bad news. He’s being replaced now by an intellectual, a man who thinks, writes, and above all, reads. Rove is a little testy.

There’s a reason – the critics, effete though they may be, are right. And eight years of the Bush Administration have yielded a major terrorist attack on the country, two unwinnable wars, unimaginable deficits, decrepit federal agencies unable to respond to disaster, and financial collapse. That’s only a partial list of major failures. Add an attack on the Constitution.

That’s the price of not reading.

I know Rove is lying – heck, most of us figured that out right away. But I’ll put up a little evidence. One, many have opined and offered anecdotal evidence that Bush is dyslexic. That doesn’t mean that he is not smart – only that reading is troublesome to him, so that he has to rely on other traits (such as an uncanny ability to read people, if not books) to gather data from around him and process it. Bush relies on staff to verbally summarize reports – due to trust issues, he only likes to hear one side. Hence, disaster.

Winston Churchill was dyslexic. It’s not necessarily debilitating. What undid Bush was not dyslexia, but rather isolation from competing viewpoints. But one thing it certainly means is that Bush did not read books.

Secondly, Bush has himself admitted that he does not read newspapers. As he told Brit Hume in 2003, he started his day by asking Andrew Card “what’s in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what’s moving. I rarely read the stories.”

A man who can’t bring himself to read a full newspaper account is unlikely to dive into the tomes that Rove credits him with reading – “David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” … U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”

I challenge anyone reading this to cite an instance in any of Bush’s extemporaneous, unscripted comments, in which he made a historical reference. Any.

Bush might have been an adequate president if he had actually read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”, as Rove claims he did.” He might not have surrounded himself with yes-persons. His administration is legend for being wrong with extreme clarity of vision, of the tunnel variety. Indeed, if George W. Bush could read a book, he could have spared us all a load of grief.

P.S. New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Bush Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read — the only title he could find was “The Fart Book.”

P.P.S. From one of Bush’s Yale classmates: it’s not the substance abuse in Bush’s past that’s disturbing, it’s the lack of substance … Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read the newspapers; he didn’t watch the news; he didn’t even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me.

Reality

Free enterprise is a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
Noam Chomsky

Capitalism will never fail because Socialism will always bail it out.
Nathra Nader (Ralph’s Dad, attributed by Ralph)

We do a lot of arguing here about various abstracts – see below. Dave Budge informed us in that thread that his philosophy, libertarianism, has not failed because it has never been tried.

I wanted to deal in something less abstract, something that is not only tried, but is always practiced in the real world, and not held out as some potentially beneficial abstract theory (if only we would come to our senses).

The quotes above are dead-on. Hard to dispute what is happening right before our eyes.

Disturbing …

Top-Term-Paper-Sites.com sells term papers to kids. The advertising is sensational. I never thought denial could be practiced so openly. Here’s what they say:

Don’t Compromise

Is it high time that you should have a place where you can find term papers that will help you in real?

Never underestimate the teacher. (They have some tricks up their sleeves)

Tools like anti-plagiarism sites & softwares nail your grades and essays.

Numerous anti-plagiarism softwares are readily available online.

These online softwares come in very handy for the teachers, which makes your job really difficult.(Emphasis added.)

Guarantee # 1: A completely new research/term paper – You won’t find it anywhere.

Guarantee # 2: Professionally written term papers by American research specialists.

Guarantee # 3: Your essay will be completed on time or its FREE.

Guarantee # 4: Customer support, e-mails & requests replied within 2-4 hours.

——

Do you notice how crappy the writing is? It cries out for [sic]’s. I suspect that English is the author’s second language. Even our kids’ term papers are being outsourced!

I did my share of bad writing in my school days, but I never stole anything. No doubt some plagiarizing was going on, but I never heard anyone openly rationalizing it.

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.