Oct
11
2011
From Hillaire Belloc’s “The Crisis of Civilization,” written in 1937:
“Capitalism works for profit, and men have called this in their haste and confusion the main evil of the capitalist system. It is not so. There is nothing immoral or exasperating to human feelings in profit as a motive for production, distribution, or exchange…. Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point: the evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit nor its dependence upon legally protected private property; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is of men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers in any community as to determine the tone of all that community” (140-141).
And men will gladly sell their political freedom for their economic survival. He will choose to be a slave if the benefits are appealing enough.
The problem is not inequality, as the Leftists think, it is the loss of economic freedom.
Belloc advocates a return to the guild system, which was a kind of a limited capitalism. He calls it “Distributism.” The main value is mass ownership. This is in contrast to socialism where the state owns everything. The central purpose of distributism is to subordinate economic interests to more important aspects of life, such as the spiritual and intellectual.
Oct
11
2011
Steve Jobs was bored. That’s why he created the devices that monopolize our attention – he was bored. Thinking back on his long, boring summers as a youth, Jobs said, “I’m a big believer in boredom … out of curiosity comes everything.”
Great practical advice for everyday life. But what does this say about the philosophy of modern technology?
Sep
11
2011
President Clinton is most famous for his lying and cheating and charm. Like most presidents, he did far more damage than we typically give him credit for.
Some takeaways from Libertarian writer James Bovard in his book “Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years” (2001)
- Clinton exploited and expanded the dictatorial potential of the US presidency.
- The power a politician acquires for government will survive long after his photo opportunities have faded.
- Faith in the coercive power of the best and brightest permeated Clinton administration policymaking.
- The lies that Clinton got away with were far more important than the ones on which he was caught.
- The better that people understand what Clinton did in office, the greater the nation’s chances for political recovery.
I will highlight the most important line: The lies that Clinton got away with were far more important than the ones on which he was caught.Yes, he is morally retarded. But remember, he aided al-Qaeda operations in the Balkans during the 1990s.
Aiding Al-Qaeda
James Jatras, a former political analyst at the US Senate, appeared before the UN War Crimes Tribunal in September 2004 as a defense witness in the trial of former Yugoslav president Milosevic. Jatras was a specialist on Eastern Europe, compiling five official reports on Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Jatras proclaimed that the foundations for the al-Qaeda terrorist network, headed by bin Laden, were laid in Bosnia and Kosovo. He testified that the US allowed Iran and Saudi Arabia to supply arms to Bosnia-Herzegovnia in the early 1990s.
Clinton’s Politically Correct “Muslim Favoritism”
General Charles Boyd, commander in chief of the US European Command from 1992 to 1995, accused Clinton of Muslim favoritism at the expense of the Serbs:
“Ethnic Cleansing evokes condemnation only when it is committed by Serbs, not against them.”
“The United States says that its objective is to end the war through a negotiated settlement, but in reality what it wants is to influence the outcome in favor of the Muslims…This duplicity, so crude and obvious to all in Europe, has weakened America’s moral authority to provide any kind of effective diplomatic leadership. Worse, because of this, the impact of U.S. action has been to prolong the conflict while bringing it no closer to resolution.”
Clinton’s great crime was promoting Islamic terrorist strongholds in Bosnia and Kosovo in 1995 and 1999.
Sep
6
2011
“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). – Jesus
The “Jot” is actually the 10th letter in the Hebrew alphabet, the “Yodh.” It is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The “tittle” is the little point on the upper edge of the yodh.
Every atom of Scripture is significant: the phrases, word-choice, grammatical forms. God instructed his prophets to verbalize Divine communications in a precise manner. “Every word of God is pure” (Proverbs 30:5).
Sep
2
2011
Thoreau made a poignant and astute statement when he turned inward to soliloquy about the invention of the telegraph and its degrading influence on the typographical American mind: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Thoreau was right about the telegraph, and its degrading effect on the American mind has been multiplied by television and the Internet. We live in a world of context-free, irrelevant information… and we’re sinking in it. Information has been degraded to a kind of commodity, the meaning of which doesn’t matter.
So, what does it matter?
When information was tied to a meaning, it was both local and actionable. All the information you dealt with before the telegraph had a direct purpose for your life; information meant action, knowledge meant power. Little wonder why our minds are so off-balance: we live lives as mere spectators, facing problems which we have no power to change.
Context, Please
Shut off the TV. Leave the internet as often as you possibly can. The Information Age is a trap. Get involved locally. Maintain a more immediate relationship with people, places and events. Go on a low-information diet and you will never go back to the muddy view of reality which you are currently watching. DEMAND that all information you encounter, even for a moment, has a direct relationship to your own life — that it offers you opportunities to act.
Aug
29
2011
Prophecy: Amos 8:9 predicted the sudden miraculous turning of mid-day into midnight. “It shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.”
Fulfillment: “Now from the sixth hour (noon) there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour (3 PM) (Matt. 27:45).
While at Christ’s birth, the dark night was turned into brightness, now at His death, the brightest time of day fell into darkness. As if God’s Creation went into symbolic mourning for Jesus.
Three Hours of Darkness at the Cross
Aug
16
2011
Read this description of Brownshirt recruits; “audacity was their dogma … the destruction of all social connections had made them rootless. With many, going berserk was overcompensation for their measureless weakness, their camaraderie a product of their fear of being alone’.
The ignorant young in Britain feel they have no stake in society and riot because their greatest fear is being all alone. They are bovine Brownshirts whose creed is “Finish off with a BANG.”
Aug
15
2011
From Orwell’s 1984:
“The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual….Alone – free – the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal…”
Statism is a sort of salvation for hopeless people who are willing to harm and control other people to “escape” their own mortality. Statism is a disease. We are all actually going to die, of course. The idea that we won’t die is the big lie of statism.
Aug
4
2011
For me, the WHOLE problem of politics is that it consists of grossly inadequate people telling others how to behave. My bottom line for politics — and for ethics — is to concentrate on improving yourself alone. There would be no room for the authoritarianism of modern-day socialism if this rule was followed.
If your ambition is to “save” the world for the righteous cause of liberty, the only legitimate way to do so is to improve yourself and then let others copy you. The Spanish Saint San Pedro of Alcantara was correct: “The trouble is that no one wants to correct himself and everyone meddles at correcting others: thus everything stays the same.”
Read the wise words of liberty advocate Leonard Read:
Assume that I have a magic ring; I need only put it on my finger to make every citizen’s position a carbon copy of my free-market, private-property, limited-government views. No cost in time or money. All of my ideas greeted by everyone with “You are absolutely right!” No deviation but only agreement! Would I put on this ring with its power automatically to cast all others in my ideological image? Most emphatically, I would not! To do so would put an end to all growth in others, and in me – an affront to my premise as well as to Creation’s scheme of perpetual hatching.
Our job is not to fool other people into behaving just as badly and on as erroneous of principles as ourselves. Our job is to improve our sorry selves so as to develop true light to help others see. Leonard Read: “In a word, our task is to increase our own candlepower. Is this not what our earthly existence is for?”
How To Advance Liberty: Leonard E. Read
Jul
30
2011
What is modernity? Why is the whole world insane?
Eric Voegelin said that modernity is a Gnostic revolt against the fundamental structure of reality.
He defines Gnosticism as the belief that humans can transform the nature of reality through secret knowledge and social action.