Reading Justice at the Thanksgiving Table

It could be my Jewish heritage, but I think that it is better to start a celebration with a reading than with a mere saying. I plan to read the following:

Let us read justice to the men and women whom we thank this evening. In the words of Ayn Rand: "Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. ... Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. ... Throughout centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road was new, the vision unborrowed. ... The creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered, and they paid. But they won." We celebrate their victories, and of our own.

The Prosecutors and the Astrologer

I have not had much time to post, but this is so outlandish that I'll just do with less sleep later.

The Associated Press reports,

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed worried that allowing people to sue prosecutors who fabricate evidence to win convictions might chill other prosecutions... The case in front of the high court involves two former Pottawattamie County, Iowa, prosecutors, Attorney Dave Richter and his assistant Joseph Hrvol. They are being sued by Curtis W. McGhee Jr., and Terry Harrington, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for the death of retired police officer John Schweer. The men were released from prison after 25 years.

Evidence showed the prosecutors had failed to share evidence that pointed to another man, Charles Gates, as a possible suspect in Schweer's slaying.

They later on denied that Gates was even a suspect, even though witnesses placed him near the scene of the crime and his name appeared in several police reports. He also was administered and failed a polygraph test and the prosecutors themselves even consulted an astrologer about their suspicions of Gates.

McGhee and Harrington filed lawsuits against the former prosecutors, saying as prosecutors Richter and Hrvol had them arrested without probable cause, coerced and coached witnesses, fabricated evidence against them and concealed evidence that could have cleared them.

Or, in short: All the evidence pointed to Charles Gates as the murderer. The prosecutors consulted an astrologer, who told them that CG was innocent. The prosecutors believed that what the astrologer told them was supernaturally true, trumping over any actual evidence. So they hid the real evidence, and used fabricated, fake "evidence" to deprive two innocent men of nearly the entire span of those innocent men's adult lives. But the two prosecutors have a fireproof defense from any criminal charge: they acted "in good faith," sincerely believing in Astrology and its truth. And now the victims of those two publicly employed swindlers may be deprived of even the right to sue those malefactors for civil justice - out of fear that holding future prosecutors accountable will hold them back from doing "their job" in judicial combat against future defendants.

And this is the payback of Kantian philosophy: reality is not knowable; the best that Justice can do is trial by combat, and in combat nothing counts except the result. Other countries, such as Switzerland, do have justice systems based on the Enlightenment notion of objective fact. We Americans have trial by combat, as was done in the Dark Ages, guided by supernatural forces, only hacking at each other with lawyers instead of halberds. And when the stars or the Gods have spoken, innocent men who have had the better part of their lives taken from them may have no recourse at all.

Life on the Edge of Implosion of Democracy

Back when I left Bell Labs, and decided to switch coasts to live with Yoon, I made a risky choice. Tenure-track jobs at universities where I would be able to teach advanced courses were few, and fewer within a comfortable commuting distance from Yoon's home. I took the job at Cal State LA with full knowledge of its moral and existential hazards. But damn it, I didn't expect the implosion of California Democracy to hit just 9 years after I took the job.

I'm posting this because the sudden silence from my end of the wire may have made some readers of this blog uncomfortable, and I don't want anyone to think that I have a problem beyond serious overwork. With a 12-unit per quarter teaching load, overwork was a given from the start. That would have been true even in classics, or in medieval history, where the content of courses in unlikely to change much from decade to decade. Teaching 12 units of advanced technical courses in Information Systems, with a 3-year technology half-life and 20% of everything in the typical course becoming obsolete each year, was always Serious Overwork. With research, and with enough hands-on experimentation with new technologies to keeps ahead of the graduate students (some of them already CIOs) in my evening classes, the better part of my waking hours were accounted for. And then, this year, came the (financial) crisis of California Democracy.

How does a busy urban school deal with a 16-million-dollar hole in its budget? First, it does not renew the contracts of part-time adjunct faculty. Simultaneously, there is a flow of incoming students whose 529s shrank enough that they can no longer afford private universities, or even the UC. The remaining faculty's advanced courses are cut, and we are assigned to teach the Business School's required Intro to IS and the like. Since there are fewer courses and fewer sections and more students, class sizes tripled, from an average of 12 to an average of 33. I spend most of my class time dealing with e-mailed questions from students; just reading and organizing and preparing to answer those questions, without which I can have no assurance that I'm doing a responsible job, takes three times as long as it used to.

Two of my three 4-unit courses this term (4 units because they cover the content of a 3-unit semester course in one academic quarter) are Intros. And there are NO adequate textbooks for Intros out there. So, following John Drake, I'm teaching my Intro sections with books that were never meant to be textbooks. I have nothing that otherwise would have come from the textbook's Instructor Site: no prepared homework assignments, no presentation PowerPoints, no test question pools (I had no idea how much time such conveniences saved.) And this on top of getting the Intro students (two-thirds of them coming from Pragmatist schools where they never had to do this before) to think in concepts instead of shopping lists.

My one remaining combined Senior-Graduate advanced technical course is up to the same numbers, because so many other courses were canceled. From 100% students who were taking a difficult technical course because they were burning with enthusiasm for its content, I'm down to 33%, the rest there because they had to take something; some of them signed up without the lower-division prerequisites. And the old textbook was 4 years old and obsolete; I switched to a brand new one for which I'm receiving the still-rough supporting materials by e-mail, sometimes in the morning before the evening's class.

The budget for graduate assistants and graders also is gone. I'm typing this as an otherwise-I-would-go-insane break from grading 100 midterm exams.

And we were just advised of an even larger hole next year. So I am lucky, in that I still have a job...

Is Christianity More Benign Than Islam?

We really need a site about Christianity to parallel Little Green Footballs. Just think what LGF would say if Moslems did what the Christian Churches have been documented doing ("Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches") by the LA Times - click the title for details.

In other news

Faf (Fafner?) of fafblog.blogspot.com seems a bit of a Libertarian flako, but this is brilliant:

".... In other news, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a man who set fire to a library and then promised to write a book about it."

(H.T.: Natailya Petrova on Facebook.)

Three Democides by False Morality: Part III, The Ban On Cloning

(This is the third part of a three-part article. Part I is here; Part II is here.)

The third democide by false morality differs from the Stalin and Carson democides in that, unlike its precursors, it was not a simple consequence of a false morality held my millions. Stalin headed a totalitarian regime whose main claim to popular legitimacy was enforcement of the traditional, originally Christian altruist false morality of Russia and Europe. Carson spawned a new, equally anti-human ideology and false morality that did not begin its toll of democide until after it had gained millions of adherents.

The third of the modern democides by false morality started out without a constituency and without anything resembling ideological conviction. It was - and is - mass murder of tens of millions of individuals, originating not from enforcement of false principles but from a false embrace of pseudo-principles, driven not by conviction, but by simple (and simple-minded) opportunism in the service of political power-seeking.

Dick Armey's world-wide de-facto prohibition against medical research into cloning-based organ replacement technology is not a case of political power in the service of false morality, but of false morality in the service of one politician's otherwise unprincipled pursuit of political power.

The first successful organ transplant, a kidney transplant between identical twins, was performed in 1954. It was successful because there is no immune rejection between genetically identical twins. Transplants between individuals who are not genetically identical always relied, and still rely, on chemical suppression of the recipient's immune system, leaving the patient at severe risk of premature death from diseases that someone with a healthy immune would have been protected against.

Genetically compatible replacement organs can be grown artificially, in a decorticated fetus created by replacing the nucleus of a newly fertilized human egg with the nucleus of a somatic cell from the patient. Once the first mammal, a mouse, was cloned in 1986, the combination of somatic cell nuclear transfer with subsequent organ transplantation has been the obvious least-effort technology whose development would essentially end the threat of organ failure as a cause of death in the developed world. Fetal transplantation technology has been routinely used, since at least 2004, in replacement of small organs such as the retina of the eye. All that remains for the complete organ replacement technology to become practical, is experience with growing an actual decorticated fetus cloned from a prospective patient. There are no objective ethical or scientific obstacles to the development of this technology - only political ones.

The moral aspects of cloning have been sufficiently addressed in several articles by Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, especially his "Cloning is Moral," which specifically addressed the characterization of this technology as "growing human beings for spare body parts." To supplement the moral perspective, here is a rough estimate of the number of avoidable deaths that result from each year of delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technology:

In 2002 - the most recent year for which government statistics were available when I first wrote on this topic - 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths.

Given its obvious usefulness for saving millions of lives, the prospect of cloning-based organ replacement technology was something that Americans who understood its potential, including American Christians, generally favored, from the first mouse cloning of 1986 onward. Cloning is an important - and generally benevolent - part of the projected technological context of the future society envisioned by J. Neil Schulman, a recent convert to Christianity, in "The Rainbow Cadenza," his 1986 futuristic novel on the theme of Original Sin. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist is trying to have her mother, in stasis as a result of organ failure, revived by cloning. It is the protagonist's sister, Judge Vera, the most cruel and generally evil character in the book, who then voices the book's only objection to cloning: "I was supposed to cut out a baby's brain to bring her back?" Tellingly, the perversely anti-technology Judge Vera is a Wiccan. The book's Christians, the author's proxies, have no problem with restoring failed and amputated organs with cloning-based technology. Indeed, until Dick Armey's anti-cloning campaign in the late 1990s, no American would have associated opposition to cloning-based technologies with anyone other than the American Left's marginal anti-technology, anti-Western-Civilization fringe.

Dick Armey, an economics professor at North Texas State University, was elected to Congress in 1984, eventually becoming the leader of so-called "Economic Conservatives" in the Republican Party. In 1994 he collaborated with Newt Gingrich, the leader of the "Social Conservative" faction, in drafting the "Contract with America," which was credited with bringing about the Republican victory in that year's elections. In 1995 Gingrich became Speaker and Armey Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.

After the election, the Social Conservative faction expected the Republican majority in Congress to "deliver" on its key issues: immigration, abortion, and homosexuals. Until that time, Armey, himself a Bible Christian and a congregant of a Bible Church, had counted on, and had received, the support of Social Conservatives in his district. But that district also had many voters with friends and relatives among legal and illegal immigrants, and a university town with predictably libertarian attitudes on abortion and on the rights of Gays and Lesbians. Moreover, as an empirical social scientist of some competence, Armey understood that the three top issues of the Social Conservatives had no traction with the electorate. A genuine effort on those issues would cost him his seat, and could well lead to the loss of a Republican majority in Congress.

This left Armey in search of issues on which he could "deliver" to the Social Conservatives and the Religious right, without alienating his district's voters from his own candidacy, or the national electorate from the Republican party. Back in 1989, Armey thought that he had found one such issue in National Endowment for the Arts grants to Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, but the NEA backed down without a fight. In 1995 Armey was at a loss. And then came 1996, the year of Dolly the sheep.

Dolly was the first large mammal - not a mere mouse - cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer. The path to a cloned human fetus was clear. The anti-technology left, including some among Armey's university town constituents, were on fire. Interestingly, now that medical cloning had come closer to imminent reality, its compatibility with Christian morals started to be debated. A part of that debate was an editorial by one Gino Concetti in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, calling for a ban on human cloning: "A person has the right to be born in a human way and not in the laboratory." Concetti was a working journalist and an ordinary priest, not a philosopher or a theologian or a member of the Curia, and a newspaper editorial was far from an authoritative statement of Catholic Doctrine. But the Washington Post, noting the "semiofficial" reputation of the paper that Concetti's editorial appeared in, headlined a story in its February 27, 1997 edition "Vatican Calls For Ban on Human Cloning."

Dick Armey had his issue.

Contemporary Religious Right Protestants in America are mostly Pragmatist and anti-intellectual. When they need doctrine, they turn to the Catholic Church; the Religious Right's men on the Supreme Court are, to a man, Catholics. Concetti's editorial gave Armey a cause on which, through collaboration with the anti-technology Left in Congress and in both district and national electorates, he had a pragmatic chance to win ("deliver") on an issue that, he may have thought, the Religious Right would care about.

From his position as House Majority Leader, Armey led the formation of a formidable anti-cloning lobby. It was the first lasting political coalition between the theocratic "Right" of James Dobson and the anti-technology Left of Jeremy Rifkin, whose followers and allies came to dominate Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. By March 1997, political pressure from this unprecedented coalition led President Clinton to sign an executive order banning research on medical cloning in any institution receiving US federal funds, or any organization or enterprise working under contracts with the US government. Clinton's ban effectively terminated any possibility of cloning research at any formal institution, from colleges that enroll students with government-guaranteed education loans, to medical practices treating Medicaid or Medicare patients, to medical drug and technology companies with Medicare contracts. This effectively outflanked Armey, who was left to legislate a more formal legal ban against something that in practice could not take place in America any more.

Armey went ahead, and in January 1998 submitted to the House a permanent ban on cloning humans in the United States. Armey's bill was announced at a news conference with representatives of the Christian Coalition, Dobson's Family Research Council and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Jeremy Rifkin simultaneously announced a symmetrical anti-cloning initiative from the Left, at first informal but eventually, when Armey's initiative stalled, producing a statement signed by "64 of the nation's leading progressive policy leaders, academics and activists" in support of Armey's legislation. Under the Senate version of Armey's bill, introduced by Senator Bill Frist, a scientist convicted of human cloning would face up to 10 years in prison.

And then things began to fall apart for Armey. Congressional Democrats, seeing Armey's legislation as a blatant attempt to wrest credit for a cloning ban away from President Clinton, whose executive order had already produced an effective ban, did not go along. Armey, on the strength of Jeremy Rifkin's support, had counted on the support of Congressional "progressives." He didn't get it. And in the Senate, Senator McCain, who saw in biotechnology, including medical cloning, a hope for reversing the disabilities he had suffered from North Vietnamese torture, organized enough resistance to stop Frist's bill. And thus Armey's hope of "delivering" a legislative result to Dobson and the Theocratic Right, a hope for which he was willing to kill millions - some 3.8 million per year of delay in the development of medical cloning - came to naught.

Armey continued to re-introduce his legislation banning all human cloning after each congressional election. After 2001, when Jeremy Rifkin's Foundation on Economic Trends published a statement from 64 prominent anti-technology Leftists in support of Armey's legislation, anti-technology congressional leftists rallied to Armey's bill, which passed twice in the House of Representatives, only to be blocked by McCain's efforts in the Senate. Given the threat that such legislation could pass at any time, thus wiping out all previous investment in cloning-based technologies, private investment predictably stopped. Some work on cloning was included in State-level stem cell initiatives, but the State-level legislation authorizing these initiatives mandated that any cloned embryos be used only to extract stem cells, and in any case destroyed within 10 days, thus eliminating the possibility of developing organ-replacement procedures.

With the election of a Republican president in 2000, Armey's effort acquired a world-wide dimension. George W. Bush aligned his presidency with the theocratic wing of the Republican Party, and while the Constitution limited how far his theocratic agenda could be taken inside the country, as President he felt entitled to conduct the foreign policy of the United States pretty much as he pleased. The legislatures of countries striving to maintain friendly relations with the United States found themselves under pressure to enact their versions of Armey's bill domestically, and to join Bush's push for an international treaty to ban cloning worldwide, even while in the United States a formal ban of this kind was replaced with comprehensive funding restrictions, regulatory directives, and, to back it up and intimidate potential private investors, the threat of Armey's legislation.

The reader is invited to refer to a lengthy scholarly article by Thomas Banchoff for a detailed study of the great theocratic power grab for a global ban on medical cloning. In brief, there was no consensus among the various Christian and Islamic sects about the morality of cloning; Jewish religious authorities were unanimously, even among the most Orthodox, supportive of cloning, declaring it to be no less than a religious obligation when done to save a fully developed human life (while also mandating early decortication of fetuses cloned for medical applications, "ensuring that the embryos used in this research are not brought to a point which constitutes human-hood.")

Countries with tax-supported, politically influential Catholic and Evangelical churches (such as Costa Rica and Germany) were, as would be expected, among the first to ban all human cloning in their national legislation, and to advocate a global ban through a UN-sponsored international treaty. Such countries, however, represented only a small fraction of the population of the world, and they would not have stepped forward to urge such a global treaty without the initiative of a trio of unusual allies: The United States (actually the administration of President George W. Bush,) the Vatican, and Saudi Arabia.

For the Vatican cloning was always a minor issue, minuscule in comparison with abortion, or with equal marriage for same-sex couples. But was also, as it was for Dick Armey, an issue with which they hoped to score deliverables. If a global treaty to ban cloning were successful, it would also establish a global precedent for an international regime based on religious rules rather than purported concern for the national interests of participating countries. Such a precedent would open the door to global bans on other supposedly "immoral" human action; abortion or equal marriage could then be next.

As for Saudi Arabia, its advocacy for a cloning ban was expected to be particularly effective in the Islamic world, as Saudi Arabia was both the site of Islam's two most holy pilgrimage destinations, and the model of strict enforcement of Islamic religious law. Saudi Arabia was an absolute monarchy, its royal family having close business, political and personal ties with President Bush, and more-or-less completely dependent on the United States commercially, politically and militarily. Kuwait, politically and militarily dependent on the United States for defense against Iraq, joined Saudi Arabia on Bush's side.

The Bush administration deployed every instrument of pressure it could to create an anti-cloning majority at the UN. That majority was largely composed of small countries that depended for their existence on military, political or economic support of the United States. This majority also included those Islamic countries that depended on Saudi Arabia or Kuwait for cheap oil and handouts. It also included Israel. Israelis, whether religious or secular, held (and still hold) an unusually positive view of science, technology, and especially of medical technologies, such as cloning, that promise to be useful in the defense of human life. In medical research and invention Israel was already a world leader, on par with the United States and Switzerland. But Israel's political leaders were (and still are) in the grasp of an expensive national-collectivist ideology that made them abjectly dependent on American appropriations, which could only originate in the US House of Representatives, which was firmly under the control of Dick Armey. And so Israel passed domestic anti-cloning legislation, and joined the US-Vatican-Saudi-led anti-cloning side at the United Nations.

On the opposite side was an equally ad hoc alliance of independent countries with secular majorities or secular constitutions, such as Great Britain, Turkey, and South Korea; the more secular countries of Europe; and countries determined to spite President Bush: China, Russia, and of course Iran. It was the ultimate inversion of sense: United States and Israel on the side of theocratic mass murder; Iran on the side of technology and of the freedom of science.

Ultimately, the world was saved from the prospect of a global ban on cloning by the fact that even the most abject of diplomats is not without some concern for the continuation of his own life. And so the ban was changed into a non-binding resolution that called on member states "to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life." They agreed to disagree, of course, on the exact meaning of "inasmuch" in that declaration. But the chilling effects of Bush's and Armey's efforts on investment in cloning technologies continues, and so do the regulatory barriers that stand in the way of research on medical cloning in the United States, and legislated barriers abroad.

As of 2009, medical research into cloning-based organ-replacement technologies has been at a standstill since 1998. With 3.8 million avoidable deaths for every year of delay in the development of these technologies, the death toll to date is close to 42 million, rivaling the number of victims of Rachel Carson, and close to the number murdered by Stalin and Hitler together. And what good did this exercise in mass murder do for Dick Armey?

James Dobson, who sponsored the press conference that announced Armey's legislation to the world, wanted a visible triumph of Faith. With both a legislative ban in the United States having no hope of becoming law, and a global anti-cloning treaty demoted to a non-binding declaration, a mere chilling effect was not the triumph of Faith that Dobson wanted, even if it was still killing 3.8 million people a year. And with only peripheral action in Congress on Dobson's big issues - on abortion and on equal marriage for Gays - the public perception of Dobson having enough Washington pull to be worth paying off was vanishing. As Armey was to write later, "As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to 'deliver' for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so."

Offended or not, Armey practically conceded that Dobson had the power to "take Armey's job back" by resigning from Congress in 2002. Having sat on the fence between Republican Theocrats and Republican Pragmatists through his tenure in Congress, in retirement Armey began to identify explicitly with the Pragmatists. The name of Armey's political organization, "FreedomWorks," is an explicit riff on the Pragmatist anti-principle, "whatever works." Armed with the anti-principle of having no principles of his own, Armey has been known to talk about "separation of Church and State" as though he had not been theocracy's standard bearer when he advocated his cloning ban, and murdered some 40 million people by the threat of this ban, only a few years before.

A Personal Postscript

As recently as 1997, I had a reasonable hope of living long enough for cloning-based organ-replacement technology to become available - and then of going on tolive practically forever. After 11 years of delay, and the prospect of more delay to come, that hope is no longer reasonable. Like the millions of Ukrainians who lost their lives because Stalin's false morality prohibited trade in food, and like the millions of Africans who lost their lives because Rachel Carson's false morality prohibited spraying mosquito swamps with DDT, I am one of millions who are losing our lives because Dick Armey's false morality barred the imminent development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies.

Of course Dick Armey, like Joe Stalin and Rachel Carson, didn't do it alone. Dick Armey's unique contribution was to yoke together an unprecedented (and unlikely) coalition of anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-technology activists spanning the spectrum from James Dobson to Jeremy Rifkin. Armey eventually lost the support of some of his former collaborators, but he is still in the coalition business. Armey's new coalition - the Tea Party movement, sponsored and organized by Armey's FreedomWorks - embraces everyone who despises the Obama program. It is of course preposterous to think that Objectivists, who oppose ObamaCare because it would enslave the providers of health care, and Theocrats, who oppose it because insurance companies that provide coverage for abortion would not be excluded from selling policies under the proposed Federal mandate, have something (or anything) in common. Dick Armey is counting on his new coalition to take him to the White House in 2012. The good news is that by 2012 Armey will be older than any first-time presidential candidate in history. And by then, he may well be dead of organ failure. Or, more accurately, of suicide by false morality - and by lack of principle.

The Opposite of Science

If you have a strong (and preferably empty) stomach, click on the title (above.)

Lord May, the president of the British Science Association, said religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past and it may be needed again.

Speaking on the eve of the association’s annual conference, the committed atheist said he was worried the world was on a “calamitous trajectory” brought on by its failure to co-ordinate measures against global warming.

He said that no country was prepared to take the lead and a “punisher” was needed to make sure the rules of co-operation were not broken.

The former Government chief scientific advisor said in the past that was God and it might be time again for religion to fill the gap.

Republicans Surrender

After everything that Republicans and Democrats agreed on before the last presidential election, there was only one real issue in President Obama's proposal to extend government control of health care financing in the United States, from nearly total to fully totalitarian: whether the transfer (at gunpoint) of the money used to pay for the care of those who did not obtain insurance before they got sick, will be done openly through the tax system, or covertly, by forcing health insurance companies (1) to "insure" those with pre-existing conditions, and (2) to tax their other customers for the cost. Once the alleged opponents of Obama's plan agree to hide the tax for "universal health care" in premiums paid for genuine health insurance, we know that they are scumbags peddling their alleged principles for pull, and that for them, any remaining "opposition" is just a matter of haggling over price.

And now, the official Republican response to Obama's proposal: "Here are four areas -- four important areas where we can agree, right now: One, all individuals should have access to coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. ..."

John David Lewis, in an article about Obama's plan in The Objective Standard (published the day after, but presumably written long before) put it like this: "If the Republicans compromise, (then) they will have once again capitulated to their opponents, abandoned liberty, and ruined the opportunity to redirect this nation toward its founding moral principle: individual rights, protected under a constitution in a free republic."

As of the previous evening this is no longer an "If..." The Republican Party has capitulated, much as I figured it would, but far more explicitly ("important areas where we can agree, right now") than I thought. After this, those former advocates of freedom who are still willing to pretend otherwise, and participate in "Tea Parties" and other Republican-sponsored events, can read what they are collaborating with - in black-on-white electronic ink. It remains to be seen how many will act the role of self-blinded stooges, of "useful idiots" playing mirror-image to "single payer" advocates at Obama rallies, even after having been explicitly told, by the Republicans themselves, what they are bearding for.

(retrieved original) PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students

The original totalitarian version of the Department of Education guidance for President Obama's planned speech to primary school students has been systematically replaced - in every readily found repository on the Web, and of course on the Department of Education site linked to my previous blog post - with a new version in which the more totalitarian parts have been bowdlerized out of the text. Finally, an occasion to show that I can actually do what I teach: I located an html copy of the original in the Google indexer cache and copied it to my archive. The title, above, of THIS blog posting will take you to a true copy of the original - just in case you are one of the millions who have been left to wonder what the big fuss was about.

Of course, not only have the traces of the original official guidance document disappeared from the scene of the crime, but El Presidente now plans to deliver (a revised version, no doubt, of) his education speech on Monday before the start of school, for advance parental approval. To whomever is tempted to find out what Our Dear Leader originally planned to say to the kids, I remind you that breaking into the recycle folder of the President's computer is a Federal Felony. So please don't. I'm certain that The Onion will publish a reasonable facsimile.

Johnny Can't Think

Leonard Peikoff's 1984 Ford Hall Forum lecture "Why Johnny Can't Think" was considered, by every non-Objectivist I ever discussed it with, an extreme exaggeration. Fast-forward to 2009.

The New York Times favors Obama's proposal for making government-managed health care mandatory for everyone, so it can hardly be accused of being uncharitable in describing a rally of supporters. Here is a not untypical excerpt (the rest is much the same, but I'm keeping the quote to a length permitted by fair use:)

Danielle Butler, for example, a graphic designer from Phoenix, said she received an e-mail message from Organizing for America inviting her to attend the rally, and came there to support the president even though health insurance has never been a big issue for her.

“I volunteered at his campaign and just really want to stand behind Obama’s initiatives,” said Ms. Butler, 29. “I support the changes that he wants to bring to our country,” she added. Ms. Butler said that when the rally was over, she felt charged up, but had not learned much new about health care.

Individual motives for attending were also diverse. At a rally at North High School in Denver that drew about 1,500 people, Martha Sullivan was struggling, and failing, to attach a sign that read “Single Payer,” to a chain-link fence in the parking lot. Ms. Sullivan said she was motivated by faith — the United Church of Christ where she worships has urged its members to support health care for all.

“I think people who have Christian beliefs should stand up and say, ‘This is what Jesus would have wanted,’ ” said Ms. Sullivan, 59.

Other people were stoked by personal causes that seemed in some cases only peripheral to a broader societal debate.

“I’m out here if it will help one more kid get medication,” said Johari Ade-Green, 58, of Denver, who was holding a sign with a picture of her grandson, Zumante Lucero, who died in July at age 9 from complications of asthma. Her grandson had insurance under Medicaid and Social Security, she said, but through a mix-up was denied medication.

The article reads like a museum of epistemic pathologies. The last instance is especially telling. The woman's grandson was killed by government health care - and she thinks that she will "help" other kids by making it mandatory for all Americans. Ayn Rand's diagnosis of this kind of pseudo-cognition - "Poison as food, poison as antidote" - was never more directly observable.

PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama's Address to Students

Click the title for official instructions from the US Department of Education. Those parallels are getting more parallel every day....

Update: The document at the link above, on the official US Department of Education site, has been replaced with new version, with the totalitarian parts bowdlerized out of it. For the original version, please see my new blog posting, farther above.

"Don't you ever question my reality!" (Part 2)

Hope you didn't miss Part 1, posted August 21 (the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion.) The theater continues:

Lauren Stratford said of the decision to become a holocaust survivor without having actually suffered the holocaust, “I think only the individual can decide if he/she is a survivor.” .... Nobody shows a hint of doubt when a speaker by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stands before us (in 2009) to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Ain't America No More

Once upon a time, the ordinary people of America framed their Constitution on a principled, if still incomplete, understanding of individual rights.

Welcome to 2009.

Last month, a Harvard University professor was arrested for "disturbing the peace" with public criticism of a government official. Conservatives on the Web cheered for the arresting officer. The idea, that under the First Amendment it is unconstitutional to arrest a person, just because that person's public speech, criticizing a government official, irritates a police officer, never crossed the Conservatives' alleged minds.

Now, a month later, another police officer threatened to arrest - but did not actually arrest, making the incident somewhat less outrageous - another critic whose take on a government official irritated the police officer. And now, everyone who was on the side of the arresting officer in the Gates-Crowley case is outraged, outraged, that a demonstrator can be threatened by a police officer with arrest, merely for public criticism that outrages the officer.

Unfortunately, as the police officer in the linked video says, this "ain't America no more." The America where people - never mind police officers - had principles in their brains, rather than merely on their tongues and then only when pragmatically convenient, has been deliquescing for half a century now. After decades of "education" by the Comprachicos running the schools, ordinary Americans - the full range from Socialists to Conservatives - are no longer capable of inducing a principle, even when the concretes from which to induce the principle are staring them in the face. In the form of high-profile news stories.

Ominous Parallels, anyone?

"Don't you ever question my reality!"

Click on the title (above) for the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion. It is a reporter's account of a real event. I'd be rolling on the floor (laughing) if I'd only vacuumed my floor first....

Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press

An open letter from Cary Nelson, AAUP President, about Yale University Press' decision that "eliminated all visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s new book The Cartoons That Shook the World." Nelson writes,

"We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press...

Click on the title, above, to see the letter.

Insider Tips as Currency for Political Extortion

I would not trade on an exchange that allows insider trading: I have no wish to sell a stock that's known (to the buyer but not to me) to be about to go up; or to buy one that is known, to the seller but not to me, to be about to go down. It turns out that I've been a chump: the US Congress legislated its members, and their cronies in the Executive branch, out of all provisions, legal and contractual, against insider trading.

Many of our federal legislators and officials supplement their already juicy salaries and benefits by extorting bribes. But there is the technicality that bribes in cash or equivalent are illegal, and a provision exempting legislators from laws against getting paid off in cash wouldn't fly with the voters. So instead, they gave themselves a loophole: they legislated that the insider trading laws that apply to businessmen, and other non-members of the aristocracy of pull, do NOT apply to members of Congress, congressional staffers, and appointed officials of the executive branch. Thus, members of the US Congress have made themselves legally free to extort at will, provided the payoffs are not in cash or stock or other valuables, but rather in the form of insider information that the Congresscritters, etc., can use to steal value (legally - they made it so) directly from the retirement funds and other investments of the rest of us.

The link comes, ironically, from an organization dedicated to radical expansion of government power - and thus, of government-as-an-extortion-racket in general - a position its members justify, in part, by a naive belief that everything would be all right if only such loopholes were closed. Their opponents, on the other hand, insist that there is nothing morally wrong in insider trading - even when insider information is being used as the currency in which bribes are extorted from American business by our political rulers. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain..."

Yes, there should be a legitimate market in organs for transplantation

Click on the title, above, for a comment in the New York Times "Freakonomics" column by Stephen J. Dubner:

Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, was accused of enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000. Mr. Dwek pretended to be soliciting a kidney on behalf of someone and Mr. Rosenbaum said that he had been in business of buying organs for years, according to the complaint.

Remember this story the next time someone brings up the need for a legitimate, regulated market for human organs, as we’ve discussed here many times in the past. Many people’s objection to such a market is that poor people would suffer because a) they won’t be able to afford to buy organs; and b) they may be coerced into selling them. But with the current black market, poor people are already being excluded from getting organs (because there’s a scarcity of donated organs) and being lured into selling them - although in this case, it appears that a middleman got to pocket $150,000 while the “donors” got only $10,000.

And please, fellow Objectivists, hold back on knee-jerk reactions to "regulated." I doubt that in this context it means anything beyond objectively necessary requirements for fully informed consent, and safeguards against fraud.

Free Speech and "Disorderly Conduct"

I'm amazed at the paucity of principled comment about the recent (and unfortunate) arrest of African-American literateur (and Harvard professor) Gates, by Cambridge police officer Crawley, on charges of "disorderly conduct." Gates' "disorderly conduct" is described, on the charge sheet, as "loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" - the "public place" being the porch of Gates' home, and the "behavior" being loud verbal criticism, probably inaccurate, of a police officer.

Before the essentials, though, I need to say why I tend to think that Gates' criticism of the police officer as a "racist" was inaccurate. I once knew a Jewish gentleman from a country in Central Europe that back in the 1930s practiced its own kind of "Jim Crow" against Jews; anyone who so much as "looked Jewish" was excluded from the "better" places of commerce in that country well into the 1980s. Like many American immigrants from Central Europe, my friend favored shorts in the summer. And, looking for a good place to eat lunch, was often stopped at the door, and told that shorts were not considered acceptable attire in the restaurant that had caught his fancy. On those occasions he was certain that he had been stopped at the door because he "looked Jewish" - even though the same restaurant would welcome him with a smile in winter, when he wore slacks.

When dealing with people who had faced racism in the past, a competent police officer will take the context and effects of their experience into account. Gates, unfortunately, permitted his experience - his first faculty job was in a part of America where racism was common and assumed - to bias his judgment. He probably owes Officer Crowley an apology for inaccurate criticism - or would owe Officer Crowley an apology if Officer Crowley had not taken Gates' error as cause for arrest.

Of course there are, even by the most stringent standard of individual rights, contexts in which loud speech can be objectively criminal. But, outside the context of fraud, or of violations of intellectual property, any legitimate regulation of non-governmental speech must be strictly content-neutral. In a free society, there is only a small set of contexts in which non-governmental speech can be a cause for arrest:

1. The speaker uses a private platform belonging to someone else without the owner's consent. Gates spoke from the porch of his own home, so this is not relevant here.

2. The expression interferes with the process of justice. Gates was not in a courtroom during a trial, and in any case a policeman is not a judge. A policeman is a specialized emergency worker, trained to keep a cool head even in contingencies far more disturbing than loud and inaccurate verbal criticism from an unarmed and otherwise innocuous citizen. So this is not the case here either.

3. The expression invades the property of others and interferes with their other rights. For example, shouting loudly at night, when the noise would disturb the sleep of one's neighbors, might be criminal. But it was daytime, and no one (other than the arresting officer) was irritated by the noise. So again, no cause for arrest.

4. The delivery of a credible threat. Not the case here, and not even alleged.

5. The proverbial "shouting fire:" speech that, in context, can cause a crowd to panic and stampede; or perhaps the incitement of an unruly crowd to a lynching or a riot. But there was no crowd; the handful of non-police onlookers at the scene were outnumbered by uniformed police.

So what was it, about Gates' conduct, that could possibly have crossed the line into "disorderly," meaning "criminal," action? Objectively, nothing. Subjectively, the arresting officer may have perceived Gates' speech as repulsive and insulting. But this is hardly enough reason for a professional public servant, sworn to defend the rights of the people, including the free speech rights of Professor Gates, to arrest Professor Gates for nothing beyond loud and insulting verbal criticism of a government employee, even when that criticism was publicly delivered, on Professor Gates' porch, in that employee's face.

One mark of a Police State, is that one may not speak ill of a police officer without risking arrest. Where is the First Amendment when we need it?

Economics as it can be and ought to be

What would Economics be like without the grossly false, yet somehow widely accepted, belief in the automatic and universal rationality of economic actors? MIT finance professor Andrew W. Lo, and Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson, are making progress in that direction. The title above this blog post is a link to a Niall Ferguson lecture about the complicated relationships between the application of genetic algorithms - "evolution" - in biology and in economics. Ferguson induces his concepts from the facts of reality that he studies as a business historian. Finally, an economist with an epistemology that an Objectivist can applaud. Having once read Ayn Rand's marginalia comments about how lousy the epistemology of Ludwig von Mises had been, economics was the last place where I'd have expected scientific work - with a sound, inductive, contextual epistemology - to emerge.

Conservatives criticize official for opposing reproductive choice. Yes. Really.

The conservative blogosphere has exploded with condemnation of a federal official for expressing opposition to reproductive rights. Yes, you did not accidentally inhale: the same people who would forcibly stop a woman from aborting an unwanted pregnancy, and force her to give birth against her will - including thousands of officials who once held jobs in the Bush administration on the strength of this position - are now a-blather because 32 years ago a Dr. John Holdren, now director of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, better known as the "science czar" (barf) expressed support for a Chinese-style "one child policy" with "population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion."

Consider my experience, with what those two variants of opposition to reproductive choice mean in practice. Back in the 1980s, my then-wife and I wanted a child - but we were faced with a significant risk of genetic defects. The prospective results of having a genetically defective child were so catastrophic that for many years we did not dare to take this risk, and nearly resigned ourselves to never having a child. And then amniocentesis for genetic testing became available, together with safe and legal second-semester abortion, eliminating the risk: now we would be able to try again if our first fetus happened to be defective. Fortunately our first fetus turned out to be OK, and eventually became a healthy child. Thanks to the availability of safe and legal abortion we became parents. Without the availability of abortion we would have continued to face an unacceptable risk, and we would have been forced to remain childless.

And then consider the position of the Conservatives. They, under the previous administration, happily endorsed the appointment of officials whose anti-abortion position, if enacted into law, would have forced me to remain childless. But now they turn all hysterical at the appointment of their fellow scumbag whose policy, while despicable, would have been less devastating to my happiness, than their own policy would have been.

Oh well. One more fact in evidence that the bulk Conservative is cognitively crippled, unable to think conceptually about either life, or morality, or politics. But then, they do not even pretend that what they have, instead of ideas, is the result of anything beyond intuition, "common sense," and supernatural revelation. Their usual opponents, on the other hand, are beset by delusions of cognitive adequacy. Creepy and loathsome, the slime on both sides of the sewer.

Three Democides by False Morality - Part II, The Ban on DDT

(This part follows Three Democides by False Morality - Part I, Holodomor.)

If there is a single idea at the foundation of all contemporary collectivisms, it is that the individual human is merely an organ or a cell of some supra-individual social superorganism. Collectivisms differ as to the identity of this alleged superorganism - family, clan, tribe, state, nation, religion, race, even all of humanity - but they all agree that the only "moral" action for an individual, is action that benefits the designated social "superorganism," even if it harms or kills individual humans, often including the individual for whom that action is alleged to be "moral."

Just as the root of altruism in Western cultures is the Christian doctrine of "Imitatio Dei," applied to Jesus' total self-sacrifice for the sake of sinners, so too the core doctrine of modern collectivisms - the notion that human individuals are mere organs or cells of the body of a collective superorganism - derives from Christian doctrine. It comes from Saint Augustine, who wrote (in Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, 21[8]) "We have become Christ. For, if he is the Head, we, the members; he and we together are the whole organism." It is on the basis of this doctrine that the Church justifies the extermination of heretics, as no less moral than the amputation of a gangrenous limb for the salvation of the "whole body of the Church." And even as some still healthy flesh may need to be cut off in such amputations, so the faithful Christian must not hesitate to sacrifice, in a crusade against heresy, some lives of the possibly innocent: "Kill them all - God will know his own." This conception of the collective "body of the faithful" as a superorganism was later copied by Islam, and by every collectivist ideology since. In every collectivist "morality," the individual is no more than dispensable flesh (or sacrificial meat) to the collective Superorganism.

Until Rachel Carson and the advent of Environmentalism, appeals to the collective as a "superorganism" always included in that superorganism the biological relatives, and especially the children and grandchildren, of the human individuals comprising the collective in question. Because one's progeny are a genuine value to the individual, this allowed the false morality, of sacrifice to the collective, to be cast as a matter not so much of consent to one's own self-destruction, as one of working for the life and happiness of one's children and grandchildren. The children, and the future, were the central theme in the propaganda of the collectivisms of old. Invariably the "members," or "cells" of the corresponding "superorganisms" were themselves individual human persons. It is this aspect of traditional collectivisms that was transcended by the first American to perpetrate a world-scale democide of her own.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and science writer fascinated by the unfolding scientific understanding of the complex web of interrelationships among the many organisms in natural ecosystems. Her fascination with the emerging understanding of biological ecosystems led her into a Platonic reification of the global ecosystem as the ultimate social Superorganism, one that included not only the humans, but every organism on Earth, and their environments as well. This made her particularly aghast at the use of chemical pesticides with the potential to eliminate entire non-human species, such as the insect vectors of malaria parasites and other deadly microorganisms, to save the lives of humans. In Carson's view, this amounted to one kind of cell harming the Superorganism for its own benefit - the equivalent of a global cancer.

Carson set out her view of the global ecosystem as a Superorganism, of which the individual human was at most a disposable cell, in her best-selling book "Silent Spring." The title "Silent Spring" is a masterpiece of bait-and-switch propaganda. It is sane and good for people to enjoy birdsong, and to value a healthy and abundant natural environment for human life. But in the course of the book Carson gradually shifts the viewpoint, so that by its end an intellectually careless reader has been persuaded that the global ecosystem constitutes a Superorganism with an intrinsic moral value far greater than that of individual humans, or indeed of the entire species of Homo Sapiens. Once this viewpoint is assimilated, it becomes a "moral crime" to view the global biosphere as merely a value for human existence, a value that can be technologically improved, by human action, for human benefit. The reader is persuaded, instead, to view the global ecosystem as a single living Superorganism - and that morality consists of subordinating not only one's interests as an individual human, but even the persistence of the human species, to this Superorganism's welfare. Rachel Carson's book gave rise to a new kind of Collectivism, and to a new false morality of unequaled virulence.

Malaria, a disease caused by mosquito-borne parasites, was on the verge of eradication in 1948, the year Swiss chemist Paul Mueller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods." "Silent Spring" was a best-seller that spawned a mass movement whose first target was the use of DDT against malaria-carrying mosquito populations. The new "ecological" collectivism first grew in the United States, and within 10 years became influential enough to push through a federal ban on spraying DDT (in 1972,) and by 1985 also on manufacturing DDT, even for export. Because malaria was most widespread in countries that lacked the industrial infrastructure to manufacture DDT, the spraying of mosquito populations stopped, and deaths from malaria surged back to between 1 and 3 million per year - between 24 and 72 million to date.

In 2001, demand from countries where malaria was widespread led to a slight relaxation of the anti-DDT regime. In the Stockholm Convention of that year, the use of DDT was authorized - but only for applications that did not threaten the "integrity of the global ecosystem." This means that DDT is only available for indoor use, which can only protect those who live and work in houses with solid walls. The latter include the politicians and diplomats who negotiated the Stockholm Convention. People who live or work outside those walls continue to die.

Three Democides by False Morality continues: Part III, The Ban On Cloning

Death by Conservatism

" .... The Strongin-Goldbergs, in turn, had nine unsuccessful invitro attempts, and finally had to use marrow from an imperfectly matched unrelated donor to treat their son Henry, who was running out of time. He died of graft vs. host disease at the age of seven. .... One of the reasons that the Strongin-Goldberg family lost Henry was because research on PGD was stalled for a year and a half in the middle of their attempts to use it — stalled by government officials who called it stem cell research, and who feared a slippery slope, and designer babies, and parents who use their children for spare parts. Had this family not lost those 18 months of research time, their real life story might have had a different ending."

Read the whole story (click on the title, above.) Everyone dies, sooner or later, but how much sooner depends on whether the politicians in power are on the side of Man, the animal that lives by his mind - or on the side of faith, of ghosts, and of living and dying in fear of their stupid and arbitrary God. And, depending on which medical technology your life will eventually depend on, consider how many months or years of research time they already took away from your life.

Sunk With The Tea

(No, I'm still posting the "three Democides" series - but I am not allocating a great deal of my time to blogging this year, and I decided to give temporary precedence to a current, real-time topic.)

The decision of some Objectivists to support, and to participate in, the "Tea Party Movement" has come to exactly the end that Ayn Rand predicted for such efforts. As Robert LeChevalier writes in the OActivists mailing list,

Evidence is growing that many Tea Parties around the country are being subverted by those who neither share our values or the values on which this country is founded, and that they are paying lip service to them while manipulating the Tea Parties to dilute their effect (Democratic hacks, Libertarian dupes, Republican opportunists, or even very likely the police, by the way), or simply using them as a cash cow for any end you can imagine.

Or, as one organizer of a "Tea Party" wrote to another OActivist,

I'm sure you're aware the focus of the Tea Parties is limited government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. Individual rights certainly doesn't contradict any of those key points but I don't feel it fits ....

One of those slogans (none is specific or well-defined enough to call it a goal) is "fiscal responsibility." "Fiscal responsibility" is also the main slogan of ongoing proposals and campaigns, in several US states (and also at the federal level) to raise taxes (yes, I know that "fiscal responsibility" may also mean "cut spending," but Christian Republicans are not about to give up on the Christian principle that "we all have a responsibility to help the less fortunate.") And the claim that a campaign to raise taxes "does not contradict individual rights" could only be made by someone who has no idea of what rights are.

Those who advocate collaboration with the "Tea Party" movement sometimes cite Ayn Rand's one narrow exception to her caution against "unprincipled alliances:" "The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree." But in its original context (The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 7 January 3, 1972, "What Can One Do?") what Ayn Rand wrote was:

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." ... It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies... The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree.

Far from having "a single goal," the organizers of "Tea Parties" seldom list fewer than three or four. And even fewer of these are either specific or well-defined (the ambiguity of appeals to "fiscal responsibility" is just the last case-in-point.) The "Tea Party" movement is - in all respects - the paradigmatic embodiment of "we've got to do something." This means, you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. If only Ayn Rand were alive today to say, "I told you so."

Three Democides by False Morality - Part I, Holodomor

The function of objective morality is to enlarge the quality and the span of human life. The result of false morality, and of its enforcement by law, is death. Prior to the last century, this death was meted out primarily to individuals who were believed, whether falsely or accurately, to have broken the many laws that enforced the false moralities of their age. The last century, beginning in the 1930s, added democide - mass death of millions, many of them visibly innocent of any individual breach of the proclaimed moral law - to false moralities' toll.

The author of the first democide by enforcement of a false morality was Joseph Stalin. Marx, Engels, and most of their Russian followers were consistent materialists, and had no use for the concept or the language of "morality." Stalin, who became the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, largely on the strength of his genuine proletarian origins was not, as far as anyone knows, either a systematic materialist or an Atheist. Stalin had been educated for priesthood in the Orthodox Christian Church, and there is controversy about whether or not he was duly ordained as an Orthodox priest. Two successive Patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church vouched for Stalin as an Orthodox Christian believer in good standing with the Church - and while their endorsement may have been made under duress, Stalin's understanding that he needed this endorsement was a radical turn away from the explicitly materialist stance of his predecessors. Stalin frequently appealed to "God's Will," both in his official speeches and in his everyday conversation. More than any other dictator in history, Stalin engineered popular assent to his power by appeal to (a false) "morality." It helped that Stalin's "Socialist Morality" was largely identical to the traditional Altruist "morality" of Orthodox Christianity.

Stalin was the first tyrant to use, possibly without any overt understanding, the fact that it was possible to eliminate humans by the million with relatively little direct use of gallows, gas chambers, or firing squads. It was enough to make it impossible for men to use their minds to support and extend their lives. The human is the animal that lives by its mind, and dies when denied its use.

By 1930 Stalin had achieved nearly complete totalitarian control of every aspect of life in the Soviet Union, including its economy. The only significant exception was agriculture. For a thousand years, what was now the Western quarter of the Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine, was the "Breadbasket of Europe," growing much of the Old Continent's harvest of wheat. Its productive, prosperous independent farmers (in Ukrainian "kulaks") were the Soviet Union's last men outside the economic power of the State. It was against them that Stalin deployed the first exercise of enforced "morality" as a means of democide.

Stalin drew on two religious notions. The first, whose roots go back to the pre-history of religion, is that food is not created by human agriculture, but is a holy gift of God or Gods, to be treated as sacred, and consumed only as part of a religious ritual. The second, peculiar to Christianity and going back to the New Testament episode of Jesus driving the money changers out of the Temple, is the notion that it is immoral, and sacrilegious, to trade, for selfish commercial profit, in the stuff of sacred religious ritual. Stalin's fusion of these notions was that food, the sacred stuff of life, belonged to all people, and for individuals to trade it for selfish profit was contrary to Socialist Morality. Therefore commercial trade in food was banned. Farms were systematically searched for grain that had not been turned over to the Soviet State. Farmers convicted of trading or hoarding grain were shot. The resulting famine, the Holodomor, killed between 7 and 15 million people, including 5 to 10 million Ukrainians. The Holodomor was also remarkable for the lack of any resistance. Because they were being murdered in the name of a "morality" that they also shared, Stalin's first democide enjoyed a unanimous sanction, and even a kind of endorsement, from its victims.

Next Part: Three Democides by False Morality - Part II, The Ban on DDT.

GHF Climate-Disasters Report: Worse Than Fiction - A Lie

Roger Pielke writes: "A new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum ... is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. ... The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie." (click on header above for the rest)

Exactly Why Late-Term Abortion IS Pro-Human-Life

The facts of reality that make the freedom to abort one's pregnancy, up to the moment of birth, a pre-requisite for living a life appropriate to Homo Sapiens (click on header.)

The Ayn Rand Center still needs quality control

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is the first Objectivist political action organization in history, and a learning curve is to be expected. Ayn Rand distinguished collaboration with those who share the same basic premises - which is to the advantage of the more consistent, in this case, to the advantage of the Objectivist - from collaboration with those whose basic premises are different, in which case collaboration advantages the more evil and irrational, who benefit from the sanction that collaboration gives them. Enlightenment-based Classical Liberals (Reason Magazine contributors such as Radley Balko, Virginia Postrel and Cathy Young, for example) are good potential allies. Supernaturalist Conservatives and populist/localist Libertarians, on the other hand, hold delusional premises - and giving them ideological credibility (and tainting our own) by collaborating with them can only be counterproductive. While individual Objectivists may well collaborate productively with non-Objectivist organizations on specific projects without appearing to endorse their ideologies, the Ayn Rand Center effectively lends Ayn Rand's name to organizations with whom it is seen to collaborate. But the task of distinguishing between those two categories of potential allies is hampered by America's current Pragmatist culture, which discourages even ideological organizations from openly stating their principles. Checking out the websites of potential allies, and identifying the premises underlying their political positions, is an essential component of ideological quality control - and an indispensable precondition of long-term political effectiveness.

I noticed that the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is listed as a "Co-Sponsor" of the 09.12.09 Protest at the Capitol. Reading the list of sponsors, Ayn Rand's name is the only one that the average American will immediately recognize. The logo of the "Protest at the Capitol" shows, with the US Capitol in the background, three red fists, in the style of the old anti-draft Left Libertarian protests that some Objectivists joined back in the 1960s, prompting Ayn Rand to caution them, in the essay I cite in my April 5th blog post (below) against the hazards of unprincipled alliances. The impulse is understandable: slavery, whether by old means of conscription, or of the new threats of higher taxes, "national service," hyperinflation and so on, is despicable enough that even the most rational individualists will feel the impulse to look for allies. But emotions are not a guide to action. Alliances with nuts and cranks transfer the credibility of rational men to men who do not deserve to be made credible. Who are the other sponsors of this event?

The primary "National Sponsor" and main organizer of this event is, as can be told from the red fist logo, a Left Libertarian organization, one called "FreedomWorks Foundation." (When I wrote this blog entry I didn't know that FreedomWorks is a front for Dick Armey. See my comment #6, below.) Their idea of "Freedom" includes the "freedom" to make "free" permanent copies of rented DVDs to one's hard drive - regardless of copyright. Back before the present plague of Pragmatism, even Conservatives, much less Objectivists, would have had qualms at associating with such an outfit. But under the cover of Pragmatism, with its the rejection of principles qua principles, the Left Libertarian position (with its disregard of individualist principles - such as the principle that a creator rightly owns the product of his creative action - for the sake of some "larger" social or political "freedom") has a certain appeal to the sufficiently Pragmatist Conservative. After all, media producers, directors, entertainers and songwriters are big financial contributors to the "Left." If they can be deprived of a part of their income, the campaign coffers of the "Left" will be that much lighter. And about the principle of the creator's right to the product of his mind - "Principle? What's a 'Principle'? You talk like an Elitist Intellectual! The Enemy!" Yet if this principle is discarded, a protest against taxation is left without a moral foundation - and its participants can only look like objectors, not against taxation per se, but only against some specific ends to which they are being taxed.

So much for the organizers. What about the ARC's fellow co-sponsors? They come in two varieties. Some identify as "Conservatives." For example, here is the mission statement from the FAQ of a double co-sponsor, GrassFire, which also lists its ResistNet affiliate as a separate co-sponsor: Grassfire.org’s leadership team holds a strong and unwavering commitment to conservative, pro-family and pro-faith values. And those are the lesser evil.

The other co-sponsors ("Campaign For Liberty," "Young Americans for Liberty" - formerly "Students for Ron Paul." and so on) are "Ron Paul Libertarians" - anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-global-trade, "anti-militarist anti-Imperialists," believers that Iran would be harmless if Americans had not objected when "Iran wanted to control its own oil fields."

Nuts and cranks. And the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

On Crimes Motivated By Collectivisms, And Their Proper Punishment

The recent expansion of so-called "hate crime" legislation by the US Congress has drawn a storm of condemnation from Conservatives and Libertarians, occasionally echoed by other observers, including some who consider themselves Objectivists. Yet if one is to actually apply Ayn Rand's philosophy to the evaluation of such laws, one needs to strip away the false labels and intrinsicist arguments - and evaluate what is really being legislated independently of either.

"Hate crime" is a bad label, because hate is just as much a part of violence that falls outside the scope of this legislation, as of violence punished by longer prison terms under it. What the legislation actually concerns (and what, unfortunately, only Objectivists can accurately name) is crime motivated by collectivism: by animus, not against the specific individual whom the criminal assaults or kills, but against a collective classification to which the victim happens to belong. How should such motivation affect the punishment?

There are three distinct (albeit closely interwoven) reasons why crimes are punished, and need to be punished. The first is retribution: the criminal has inflicted an injustice on the victim, and justly deserves punishment. The second is retaliation: the prospect of punishment reduces, proactively, the incidence of crime. The third is prevention: the incarceration of the criminal prevents him from committing additional crimes while incarcerated - and, if provided and made use of, rehabilitation services may reduce the criminal's inclination to commit additional crimes after his eventual release.

How is each of these considerations affected when a crime is motivated by collectivism?

In an objective legal system, retribution is proportional to the product of two measurements: the harm done to the victim, and the irrationality of the criminal's action. If it were shown that no non-consensual harm was done to anyone, or that an accused person's action had been rational (for example, to save his own life in an emergency) then no criminal sanctions are objectively called for. To harm another individual not because of anything that individual has chosen or has done, but from bigotry about facts that were outside the victim's choice, such as where the victim was born, or her race, or her sexual orientation and so on - in other words, crime motivated by collectivism - is, outside of some barely imaginable emergency contexts, at the outer extreme of irrationality, and therefore at the outer extremity of injustice that deserves retribution.

Retaliation works indirectly, by enhancing, through the prospect of punishment, the disincentive against irrational (and therefore unjust) action. A greater irrationality - and collectivism is close to the acme of irrationality, exceeded only by such self-sacrifice as attempting to carry out a suicide bombing - needs to be met by the prospect of proportionally greater retaliation.

Similarly for prevention. Someone who strikes a cheating spouse or an abusive boss is acting out, however irrationally, against a specific individual's actions; such a person is not likely to endanger, after his release, anyone other than someone who would then choose to marry him or to hire him in spite of his criminal record. Once the requirements of retribution and retaliation have been met, such a person can be safely released. On the other hand, a collectivist who is out to bash or kill Mexicans or Jews or homosexuals or Blacks cannot be released, when there are many other potential victims against whom he bears the same anti-rational, collective animus, and whom his release would put in harm's way.

So by all means, let us call so-called "hate crimes" by their right name: crimes motivated by collectivism. And punish them accordingly.

Collaboration: Getting Ayn Rand 180-Degrees Wrong

The economic policies of the Obama administration are an increasingly evil continuation of the evil policies of the Bush years, and need to be opposed. Because of Obama's self-identification as a Liberal, most Christian Conservatives have switched sides, and now are (at least until they again have a Christianist in the White House) the main publicly visible source of opposition. It is predictably tempting for wannabe-Objectivists to collaborate with that opposition. But wait: did not Ayn Rand write something (back in 1964, re-published in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal") about "The Anatomy of Compromise?" Didn't it have something to do with being more consistent than the other side?

Here are some examples of what advocates of collaboration with Christian conservatives have been writing in recent weeks:

"In any competition between people with the same basic principles, the more consistent one wins."

"In opposite principles, the more consistent one wins – due to its consistency. Any collaboration serves to undermine the inconsistent collaborator."

"In any cooperation between two parties, the more consistent one wins."

All of which are the precise opposite of what Rand actually wrote: "In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins." In context, Ayn Rand wrote:

1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.
2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.
3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

And to put "the more evil or irrational one" into the context of collaboration with Christian Conservatives: all appeals to self-sacrifice in our civilization ultimately derive from the Christian doctrine of "Imitatio Dei," of imitating Jesus' ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, not for the sake of the good and the virtuous, but for the unearned salvation of sinners. Ayn Rand's shrugging Atlas is a vision of the exact opposite of Jesus bearing the Cross: it is the vision of the heroic Spirit - the heroic Mind - refusing to bear the burden of sacrifice. "Going Galt" means nothing if it does not mean refusing - totally and absolutely - to "imitate Christ."

So what is one to make of Randians who give favorable references and Web links to Christianists, to the likes of Michelle Malkin - in the context of "going Galt?" Stupidity? Opportunism? A symptom of minds destroyed, even among wannabe-Objectivists, through the pervasive indoctrination of children into Pragmatism by the Comprachicos who run American schools?

If you want to work against the culture of self-sacrifice, and for the Human's individual human right to pursue his own happiness on Earth, then, and especially in contexts where you find yourself on the same side of the barricade with people of mixed premises who on other issues advocate for evil, the advocate of individual rights must make sure that his own basic principles are clearly and openly defined. The alternative, of hiding principles in the name of collaboration, amounts in the long-term to philosophical and practical suicide. And to those who "cited" the exact opposite of what Ayn Rand wrote: if you venture to cite Ayn Rand, at least try first to grasp what she actually said.

Does this mean (thanks, to Al Brown, for asking in Comments) that Objectivists must refrain from any and all collaborations and alliances in our political activism? No, not at all. When a potential collaborator shares our basic basic principles, the most consistent among the allies - the Objectivist - has the most to win. It is only in collaboration with those, whose basic principles are different from ours, that Objectivists lose. In politics, those basic principles are:

1. Individual human rights, the necessary preconditions for being able to live a life appropriate to a human, are facts of reality, objectively knowable from the evidence of the human senses, and neither arbitrary nor supernatural.

2. These pre-conditions include non-interference by others with one's life, liberty, and the pursuit of one's own happiness on Earth.

3. The only proper function of government is to secure these rights - by bringing the legitimate use of force among individuals under the control of objective law.

To collaborate with someone who differs with any of these basic principles is unavoidably counterproductive. For example, consider someone who believes that rights are only granted to men by the deity of a supernatural religion, and are handed down by revelation in his religion's holy scriptures. Unavoidably, this man's support for my right to pursue my own happiness on Earth will end where the prohibitions of his religious scriptures begin. My collaboration will make him stronger, and thus eventually better able to limit and infringe my rights - better able to undermine my ability to live according to my own basic principles, and eventually my ability to live a life appropriate to my Self as a human being - or to live at all. What good would it do me to slow down the growth of taxes this year, if it strengthened, as my current "allies," those who would stop the development of the cloning-based medical technologies on which my life is likely to depend a decade from now?

It is rational for me, in the political context, to collaborate with people who are not Objectivists in other things - but only with those who agree with me on basic principles of politics. Collaboration with Classical Liberals, for example, is often productive: they share our basic principles, but we are more consistent than they are in the application of those principles - and therefore the collaboration is to our advantage. Collaboration with Christianists, on the other hand - with Michelle Malkin and the like - would be a means, not to the advancement of my life and happiness on Earth, but to their destruction.