May
20
2013
The concept of America’s “national interest” is one of the main arguments warfare-state politicians use to justify sending American troops all over the world at such an enormous cost. But what is America’s true national interest? Perhaps America is spending a lot of money on a plan that does not actually pursue national interest. George Lundberg, a prominent sociologist who served as the 33rd president of the American Sociological Society, wondered if the American foreign policy he was seeing in the 1940s and early 1950s was in the country’s true national interest. Lundberg wrote an essay in 1953 called “American Foreign Policy in the Light of National Interest at the Mid-Century” to voice his concerns. He found that America had gone from a foreign policy of strategic non-interventionism to one dominated by a powerful executive who disregards the pubic and uses propaganda to increase his own powers.
The United States has a long history of non-intervention. Lundberg describes this long-standing policy as “continentalism.” The idea was that America would develop its own civilization on its own terms, independent of foreign opinions and influences. Lundberg explains: “Concretely, the policy meant non-intervention in the controversies and wars of Europe and Asia and resistance to the intrusion of European and Asiatic power systems and imperial ambitions into the Western Hemisphere (Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Barnes, p 576).” This did not necessarily mean the U.S. would never intervene in any conflict, but it would never do so without regard to national interest. President Washington advocated for the strength of the U.S. military to ensure it could “choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall council (ibid.).” The potency of this strategic non-interventionism was that it enabled delayed response, what Lundberg calls “the capacity to take into consideration aspects of the environment relatively remote in time and space (p 580).”
By the middle of the 20th century, American foreign policy was dominated by a stupendously powerful executive, supported by a bipartisan foreign policy consensus resembling one-party rule. Lundberg argues that the U.S. government multiplied its powers by disregarding public opinion and using propaganda to gain fraudulent support for those powers. He cites the examples of the World Wars, both of which had very little support from the American public. Wilson won his re-election campaign in 1916 on the slogan of “He kept us out of war.” Roosevelt publicly proclaimed to be against American intervention in World War II to keep up with public sentiment (p 612). But it was also a fraud; he was secretly planning intervention at the same time as his public statements against it.
The result of this power-grab by the U.S. government during the World Wars was an unprecedented tax burden to fund intervention and what Lundberg calls “the Fuhrer knows best” principle of foreign policy. The U.S. executive was asking Americans to embrace the Fuhrer principle with regard to itself at the very time that it was supposedly fighting this principle abroad. Lundberg described the unprecedented tax burden of the Truman Administration: “The administrations of all Presidents from George Washington through Franklin D. Roosevelt, including two World Wars, the Civil War, the War of 1812, collected $248,000,000,000 of taxes. President Truman’s administration in a few years has levied $12,000,000,000 more, the fantastic total of $260,000,000,000 (p 598-599).” Perhaps this is what the politicians mean by “national interest.”
Reference: American Foreign Policy in the Light of National Interest at the Mid-Century by George A. Lundberg, pp. 555-626 in “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace” (1953) by Harry Elmer Barnes
May
11
2013
Money, sex and freedom – but without any of the corresponding responsibility. This is the childlike fantasy of manhood so heavily promoted modern American society. But how many modern people have fallen for the fantasy?
Is this the picture of the modern American male?
In her 2006 article Men Growing Up to be Boys, Lakshmi Chaudry looked at the evolution in America from the benevolent patriarch of the 50s, dubbed “The Family Man,” to the adult teenager who spends his time “sneaking off to hang out with the boys, eying the hot chick over his wife’s shoulder, or buying cool new toys.” Chaudry argued that this new mythical image of masculinity is a corporate executives dream customer: “a man-boy who is more likely to remain faithful to their product than to his wife.”
There is a modern myth about the hopeless boy-man that will never grow up and thus has no capacity for pair-bonding and parenting – what Chaudry calls the “the basic processes that form the foundation of all societies.” And, of course, this new self-obsessed metrosexual man cannot be trusted with even the simplest of domestic tasks.
And yet, how much of this is just pure feminist fantasy? If this is the truth about the modern American man – and it certainly is the image pushed by popular culture in movies and such – then our civilization is screwed.
But perhaps this nothing more than a faux argument designed by apologists for the State to showcase men as unnecessary creatures in a Welfare-State that hires women to transport its fatherless children around to its schools, medical clinics and grocery stores – the Almighty Daddy who makes men look like losers because they don’t have the ability to provide (tax and exploit others) for the children.
While it is true that these male mooks are rampant among the young in American society – these man-boys who will never take responsibility for their actions and especially won’t provide for their offspring – the average American male of today seems to value traditional responsibilities: to hell with pop culture, rank consumerism and feminism. The Families and Work Institute, for instance, found that the percentage of college-educated men who were obsessed with their careers and wanted to move into jobs with more responsibility fell from 68% to 52% from 1992 to 2002. Combine that with the Radcliffe Public Policy Center Report from 2000 which said 70% of men in their 20s and 30s were willing to sacrifice career promotions and more money to get a more family-oriented work schedule. The culture-creators can try all they want to make all men into man-boy mooks, but they might never be able to penetrate the pair-bonding propensities innate in the human male.
May
8
2013
Well-meaning Westerners have long supported their governments in sending foreign aid to poor countries, particularly those in Africa. What does Kenyan economist James Shikwati think about foreign aid to Africa? “For God’s sake, please just stop.” He told SPIEGEL that the good intentions of Western governments to eradicate poverty has been “damaging” his continent for the last 40 years. “Believe me,” he said, “Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.”
Unfortunately, poor Africans are not the only recipients of Western aid. Shikwati said, “If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.” He explains how the process of sending goods to Africa works: the UN World Food police take their cut of the action and then a large portion of the goods dump into the market at very low prices, causing local farmers hardship. “Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program.”
Africa has remained poor despite massive aid because it has incentivized African functionaries to avoid real market solutions – like initiating trade relations with neighbors. If Kenya were to trade with Uganda or Tanzania, “It would force us to improve our own infrastructure, while making national borders – drawn by the Europeans by the way – more permeable.” The most merciful policy the Western countries could have toward struggling Africans is to stop funding the UN World Food Program and stop the propaganda about the need to help a continent with plenty of oil, gold and diamonds.
Apr
2
2013
The Soviet Union was the first country to legalize on demand abortion in 1920. By 1934, there were 700,000 abortions performed in the Russian Autonomous Republic in the year. Iceland was the first country to legalize abortion for medical reasons in 1934. Women could abort their child within the first 28 weeks if they were in any kind of physical or even mental danger.
Colorado was the first U.S. state to partially legalize abortions in 1967; Hawaii and then New York allowed abortions in 1970. But Roe V. Wade ruled all state anti-abortion laws unconstitutional in 1973.
Abortion indicates a high time preference rate in the individual and widespread abortion in a society spells high TPR in that society. “Family planning” is actually done by those who have very high TPRs and do the least planning.
Mar
4
2013
Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), the only son of President Lincoln to survive into adulthood, spent his life trying in vain to separate himself from his father’s legacy. Robert was Secretary of War under President Garfield from 1881 to 1885 and the minister to Great Britain in 1889. His last career was lawyer and then president for the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago. Republicans tried hard to get “Lincoln’s son” to run for president several times – even as late as the 1912 election.
Robert resented living in the shadow of his father’s fame and heroification. “No one wanted me for secretary of war, they wanted Abraham Lincoln’s son. No one wanted me for minister to England, they wanted Abraham Lincoln’s son. No one wanted me for president of the Pullman Company, they wanted Abraham Lincoln’s son.”
He described a rather distant father: “During my childhood and early youth he was almost constantly away from home, attending courts or making political speeches. In 1859, when I was 16 … I went to New Hampshire to school and afterward to Harvard College, and he became president. Henceforth any great intimacy between us became impossible. I scarcely even had 10 minutes quiet talk with him during his presidency, on account of his constant devotion to business.”
Robert’s wife honored him by burying him at Arlington Cemetery, away from the family plot in Illinois where his father was buried. She wrote that Robert “was a personage, made his own history, independently (underlined 5 times) of his great father, and should have his own place ‘in the sun.’”
– A bit of trivia from the “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” file: Shortly before Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, John’s brother Edwin Booth saved Robert Lincoln in an accident on a train platform. Also, Robert witnessed the deaths of three presidents: his father, Garfield and McKinley.
Feb
22
2013
The standard Masoretic Hebrew text of the Bible places Abraham’s birth (Gen. 11:26) exactly 1,948 years after the Creation.
This is an intriguing parallel to the birth of Israel 1,948 after the birth of Christ.
Jan
22
2013
The Brits who hate gun ownership might possibly be parroting the lines of their racist parents or grandparents who supported their government’s subjugation of brown people in India. If the Indians had been allowed guns, they would have been too uppity for the British government. The gun control crowd, whether in Britain or elsewhere, only wants to take guns away from the subjects and never from the State. Of course, many in Britain do not hate Indians and want their guns back.
Gandhi said it best:
“Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.”
Jan
5
2013
The philosopher David Hume lamented the fact that so many women only read books that keep them in the dark — keep the truth of the world hidden away from them. The books he wanted them to read were far more “instructive than their ordinary books of amusement, and more entertaining than those serious compositions, which are usually to be found in their closets.” So what did the eminent Hume recommend for women? History.
History will teach women about human vanity. It will teach them: “That our sex, as well as theirs, are far from being such perfect creatures as they are apt to imagine, and that Love is not the only passion which governs the male world, but is often overcome by avarice, ambition, vanity, and a thousand other passions.”
David Hume; Of The Study Of History
Jan
3
2013
Murray Rothbard demonstrated Marx’s self-refuting nonsense in this dissection of the Marxian concept of “ideology.”
It is a well-known irony and another deep flaw in the Marxian system that, for all the Marxian exaltation of the proletariat and the “proletarian mind,” all leading Marxists, beginning with Marx and Engels, were emphatically bourgeois themselves. Marx was the son of a wealthy lawyer, his wife was a member of the Prussian nobility, and his brother-in-law Prussian minister of the interior. Friedrich Engels, his lifelong benefactor and collaborator, was the son of a wealthy manufacturer, and himself a manufacturer. Why were not their views and doctrines also determined by bourgeois class interests? What permitted their consciousness to rise above a system so powerful that it determines the views of everyone else?
