Every so often our masters decide it's time
to take the Jack-O'-Lantern out of the
closet to scare the kiddies. David Ray
Griffin's
Osama Bin Laden: Dead
or Alive?,
which argues that Bin Laden's been DEAD
since late 2001, was published in May and so
a few weeks later, as if on schedule, we are
treated to another "Wizard of Oz"
perfor-mance, courtesy of the masters of
deceit, which the corporate news agencies
take at face value. Play close attention
to the men behind the curtain! They're lying
to us . . . again!
Anthony Flood
June 4, 2009
Answer Griffin if you can, or be silent (to
put it politely). If, however, you believe his case against The 9/11
Commission's
official conspiracy theory demonstrates the
need for a credible investigation, then join him in demanding
one.
Anthony Flood
April 20, 2009
This Site's “Existential Challenge”
“A
prime cause of our being deceived is . . . always our own desire to
be so deceived. . . . (A)ll of us constantly need to be asking
our-selves what it is which we want to be true, and whether our
de-sires so to believe are stronger than our de-sires to know the
truth, however uncon-genial to us that truth may be. It is
truly an existential challenge.”
Antony Flew, How to Think Straight:
An Introduction to Critical Reasoning, 1998, p. 10.
(Thanks to Dave Lull for the citation that I carelessly let wander
away from this quotation!)
“The
word of the great man is the wise healing word which all can
believe in.”
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State(1945).
You Cannot “Fix” the Economy, Mr. Obama.
Not in a hundred days.
Not in a thousand.
Although you haven’t directly claimed that you
can “fix”
the economy,* that’s what the news anchors are saying is at the
top of your to-do list. Such distortion is typical when they
have to interpret a complex story for an audience the average
mental age of which is about twelve.
But neither have you corrected this impression we have of your
intentions. Unless and until you do, then, I’m not being unfair
in reviewing the reasons why you cannot “fix” the economy
because, for all I know, you might agree with them.
To begin with the obvious, the economy is not a machine that
wears out and breaks down and so must be “fixed” or
“jump-started.” It’s not a car, truck, or train that will
collide with another or career off a cliff unless a skillful
driver grabs its steering wheel. The economy doesn’t have
moving parts that loosen and fall off and so need “rescuing.”
Neither is it a morbid organism that must routinely be “infused”
with fluids or “shocked” or otherwise “stimulated” back from the
brink of death. But such are the controlling metaphors of the
day.
The economy is not “fixable” because it’s not breakable, like a
machine, window, or bone. It is, rather, a complex social
network of human beings. We do not relate to each other
as machine parts (or organs) do to each other.
* When I wrote those words (before your inauguration) I could
not find the direct evidence that you would later pro-vide at your
second press conference
(March 25, 2009). There you said that “the most important thing
that I can do for charitable giving is to fix the economy;
to get banks lending again, to get businesses opening their
doors again, and to get people back to work again. Then I think
charities will do just fine.” You see, when a bus driver
donates $100 to a charity, to use your example, he’s allowed to
write off only 28% on his tax returns, whereas high rollers like
you may deduct 39% and “I don't think that's fair,” you said.
Right, Mr. President, it’s not. I have an idea: why not let the
bus driver join you in writing off 39%? How about 100%? The
notion that any degree of governmental lien on what we
produce can be anything other than unjust
is foreign not only to you, but also to the fawning
“journalists” still hallucinating on the ideological peyote you
sprayed at Grant Park last November 4th.
“Our
modern politicians know very well that great masses are
much more easily moved by the force of imagination than
by sheer physical force. . . . The politician becomes a
sort of fortuneteller. Prophecy is an essential
element in the new technique of rulership. The
most improbable or even impossible promises are made;
the millennium is predicted over and over again.”
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State(1945).
President Obama's
commitment to the Gospel According to Keynes, replete
with shameless invoking of The Sermon on the Mount, was
on display (again) in
his speech at Georgetown
University, April 14, 2009.
Intellectual Therapy for Those Who
Believe
“Free Market
Capitalism Caused the Meltdown” and “We Need More Government
Regulation, Even Nationalization and Outright Socialism”
Peter Schiff, Austrian Scholars Conference, March 13, 2009
Wisdom from Ernst Cassirer Germane to Assessing a Messianic Presidency Informed by
Keynesian Lunacy
“If we look at the
present state of our cultural life we feel at once that there is a
deep chasm between two different fields. When it comes to political
action man seems to follow rules quite different from those
recognized in all his mere theoretical activities. No one
would think of solving a problem of natural science or a technical
problem by the methods that are recommended and put into action in
the solution of political questions. In the first case we
never aim to use anything but rational methods. Rational
thought holds its ground here and seems constantly to enlarge its
field. Scientific knowledge and technical mastery of nature
daily win new and unprecedented victories. But in man's
practical and social life the defeat of rational thought seems to be
complete and irrevocable. In this domain modern man is
supposed to forget everything he has learned in the
development of his intellectual life. He is admonished to go
back to the first rudimentary stages of human culture. Here
rational and scientific thought openly confess their breakdown; they
surrender to their most dangerous enemy.
“In order to find the
explanation of this phenomenon that at first sight seems to derange
all our thoughts and defy all our logical standards we must begin
with the beginning. Nobody can hope to understand the origin,
the character, and influence of our modern political myths without
first answering a preliminary question. What must know what
myth is before we can explain how it works.”
Ernst Cassirer,
The Myth of the State,
Yale University Press, 1946,
3-4.
This posthumously published book is not the more popularly styled
1944 essay that Cassirer wrote for Fortune magazine, which
one may read here.
“Where did you get
that idea?” Whereas once
I could reply only by citing
hard-to-find articles, now I can usually provide them. On this
non-commercial site I share the scholar-ship that has indebted me
and essays of mine that try
to pay that debt forward. My chief intel-lectual creditors occupy
my
Gallery of Heroes.
I hope you'll visit the pages I've devoted to them.
And please feel free to send questions,
comments, and criticism
here.
Anthony Flood
Love Your Enemies . . .
As Enemies
Now is the time for all good men to withdraw whatever mythical “consent
to be governed” they may have ever given to their “elected
representatives,”
Who acknowledge no limits to their power;
Who regard that “consent” as a blank check to
tax away our wealth
and debase the cur-rency in which is denominated what
wealth they permit us to keep;
Who forcibly prevent us from using precious metals as money and
mandate that we use instead notes issued by the banking cartel,
which alone may counterfeit with impunity;
Who use the pelf they call “revenue” to extend their control over
our peaceful enterprises and, gallingly, to do so in our name;
Who have ruined that good name to fund the
welfare and warfare state by borrow-ing, their promise to repay
secured solely by their future power to tax and counterfeit; and
Who scheme to conscript our children into imperial legions
to prosecute the government program called “the war on terror,”
putting them in kill-or-be-killed predicaments that
terrorize foreigners and seal the resolve of terrorists to repay us in kind.
Those who not only will not withdraw that “consent,” but willingly grant
it, who embrace rather than renounce the state and all its works, those
for whom “national greatness” is the sup-reme value to which all others
must be sacrificed, are not to be numbered among the “good men.”
Rather, some of them are the predatory state's morally complicit net
beneficiaries, who are in desperate need of moral conver-sion; the rest,
tragically, consist of some of the state's ignorant net victims, who are
in equally dire need of intellectual conversion.
Until the necessary conversions occur, however, good men must re-gard
them objectively as enemies.
Yes, we must love our enemies, but that presupposes acknowledg-ing that
we have enemies, knowing who they are, and not pretending that
they are friends.
Anthony Flood
March 26, 2009
About Links
This
is a perfect spot to list external links, isn't it? While
redesigning this page for its fifth anniversary, however, I
decided to retain the prevailing "no-links" policy. Passive
advertising for other sites clutters home pages. I do not seek such "placement" for this site
elsewhere; I offer none here. People find this site by searching for the thinkers and ideas
it honors, and
I expect this will continue.
Compiling
one of those unweighted (and seemingly interminable) lists is
easy, but the risk of misinterpretation outweighs the prospective satisfaction
of sending visitors to a site I think worth a look. If I can't tell you
why you should visit it, why should I merely list it? This site
does sport external links, but only in contexts that make it clear why
they're there.
If anyone
feels the need to straighten me out on this, I invite him or her to
write me.
