SCIENCE VERSUS THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

THE MISSING DEBATE

NOVEMBER 16, 2010.  To the degree that physics, biology, and chemistry wish to assert that all human processes are physical processes, one major question remains: what is freedom?

There are a significant (perhaps overwhelming) number of hard scientists who claim that every human thought and action should be attributed to chemical changes or the motion of sub-atomic particles.

Therefore, what we normally think of as choices, decisions, alternative possibilities are illusions.  There are no true alternatives.

Human actions, no matter how they look, are always and nothing more than the irresistible effects generated by prior material causes.

If so, then what about the entire effort to form a Republic on these shores based on individual freedom?

But, you see, this debate never takes place.  Opponents don’t convene and state their basic cases.  They don’t engage in a philosophical argument in these terms.

They sidestep the crucial issues.

Is the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness a fragrant sentiment that actually has no meaning?  Is it just another deceptive slogan?

If you believe that all human thought and action is the predetermined result of involuntary physics, then yes, it is just another delusory bit of nonsense.

The Founders might just as well have fought the British for the right to bow before the king without removing one’s hat.

The Constitution might just as well have been written as a command to submit to Allah or a theocracy of the Roman Church.

If freedom is an illusion, what difference does it make?

As I’ve written before, the history of Western philosophy crashed on the rocks at the end of the 19^th century, because these questions were never seriously debated.

In the present technological age, the debate is more important than ever, because, increasingly, the means to alter brain processes are at our disposal.  If freedom means nothing, if it is a hoax, then the right to manipulate the brain without limit, for any purpose, is a given.  And if you don’t find a problem in that, you aren’t looking.

Scientists who are philosophical materialists are faced with this problem: if individual freedom is real, if choices are real, then those choices are NON-MATERIAL.

Choices proceed from something other than what can be found in the human body.

They proceed from something other than what can be found in chemicals or sub-atomic particles.

They proceed from the individual.

That was surely the essence of the documents on which the American Republic was founded.

One of the major political implications of philosophical materialism is the burying of the individual in the mass; and the mass is the group, the herd, the population, the collective.

The individual becomes a passé concept; a quaint, old-fashioned way of looking at the world.

In its place come the needs of the group.  And these needs can be measured and calculated and spun out on to charts, so that an overarching bureaucracy can distribute whatever items will best accommodate Everyone, according to some unchallengeable algorithm.

With the demise of the individual “as an object of concern,” wealth, property, ideas, and ambition can be ruled by Central Planners.

If you look around you, you will see that this is happening at an accelerated rate.

It may seem that the deep philosophical questions are of no importance to us, but that is not the case.  The failure to argue at that level leaves the playing field wide open to opportunistic encroachments on our natural rights as individuals.

Furthermore, it is clear that, were a real debate to take place, philosophical materialism could be dealt a severe blow—by an old Socratic strategy, called reduction ad absurdum, in which the implications of an argument are shown to lead to an untenable position.

For instance:

If all human action and thought are the result of involuntary chemical and physical changes, then we have no freedom to choose to act on what we hear, read, and understand.

Therefore, the very proposition that all human action is invariably dictated by, for example, brain chemistry is of no value.  Why bother to announce that, since knowledge of it would make no difference—since none of us can choose our responses to such an announcement?

And as for attempting to manipulate the brain in order to create “a better society,” why propose or defend that strategy, since the strategy is already being enacted on a purely deterministic basis, without free choice?

All those scientists seeking to find out more about the brain are doing what they do without the freedom to choose.  They are simply playing out the string in their laboratories, robots programmed for certain actions.

The concepts “better” and “worse” have no meaning at all, in any context. 

The very notion of considering alternatives in any sphere is meaningless, since we don’t have the ability to make choices. 

Since the beginning of time, if time ever began, a second-by-second inevitable course was set in motion for all species everywhere. 

If no choice in any realm is really possible, then how do we understand the meaning of “understanding?”  Isn’t understanding surrounded and illuminated by the notion of possibility, of various choices that can be made based on that understanding?  What is there to know or understand if freedom is a delusion? 

What I doing writing these words, and what are you doing reading them?  They mean nothing; they are nothing.  My action in writing, and yours in reading, are predetermined and unfree.   

Philosophical materialism leads us to this untenable position, this reduction to absurdity, and on these and other grounds, it should be rejected.

And instead, freedom should be reinstated to the place where it belongs.

As should its explication in the founding documents of the Republic.

And then we can discuss what the “non-material basis of freedom” might mean.

Everything in this article is for people who can think and reason.  Just because many people cannot engage in such activity doesn’t mean those of us who can should abandon the field to them.

If we do, they will act in accordance with materialistic considerations, whether they understand them or not.

Just as those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, those who don’t understand philosophy are doomed to act as if they do.

Freedom has philosophic context, and it burns brightest for those who know what that context is. 

On that basis, both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and drafted.  The founders were not men who merely acknowledged freedom and grunted in affirmation of it, as if it were a pork chop lying in the sand.   

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FOR EDUCATION

By Jon Rappoport

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

NOVEMBER 15, 2010.  I wrote this Declaration yesterday.  There is no mechanism as yet to accumulate signers and endorsers.  I thought of waiting until such a system did exist, but decided instead to post the Declaration now and send it out.  By your responses, I’ll gauge what to do next.

___________________________ 

A hundred fifty years ago, Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

The rules of discourse, science, and law all flowed from that source.  These rules could be bent, twisted, and used in devious ways—but then people would know that.  They would be able to point out where the arguer had gone wrong.

A common bond existed in schools of the day.  The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: LOGIC.

This was accepted. 

But now, this bond is gone.

The independence engendered by the disciplined study of logic is no longer a desired quality in students.  The classroom has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and one may even express grave doubts about the relevance of many of those facts.

A mind trained no farther than rote parroting—regardless of how neat and precise it may look—is a listless mind with no center.  It reaches out for vagaries and abrupt spectacular lies, hoping to find what it is missing.  But the search produces nothing of value, because to discover logic, one must learn the whole subject as a branch of knowledge, not as a flicker of common sense sparking here and there in the landscape.

A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines.  And in its decline, it accepts preposterous leaders and bizarre, self-sabotaging programs.  Ideologies that deny individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms, because they mirror a muddled people’s desire to confirm that failure is the inevitable fate of all of us.

Therefore…      

When in the course of human events, education becomes so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly:

Citizens have the right to rebuild that system so the greatest contribution to Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.

Logic, the key by which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally developed, must be unearthed.

That key, without which the American Republic could never have been founded, will be inserted into the lock of our society, so that a rejuvenation can eventually take place.

Logic and reasoning, the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—which has been forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every free civilization—will be restored.

We fully recognize that once a vital thing has been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or existence. 

To declare its importance makes no sense to “the crowd.”  They look bewildered and shake their heads.  They search their memories and find nothing.

They prefer to adhere to rumor, gossip, accusation, wild speculation, and fear mongering as the primary means of public discourse and assessment of truth.

These habits light their paths.  These reflexes give them some degree of pleasure.  These idols become their little gods.

To win out over such attachments and superstitions, we will have to pledge our efforts to the long term. 

But if our labors bring rewards, we can once again bring import to education, and to the founding of the Republic that cut a wide swathe through darkness.

A string of direct and distracting abuses has saddled our schools.  Among them:

Teachers believe they need to entertain children, in order to capture their attention;

School systems have substituted the need for public funds in the place of supplying a sound education;

Under the banner of political correctness, school texts have been sanitized to the point of sterility, in order to avoid the possibility of offending, to the slightest degree, any group;

Therefore, students rarely confront information in the form in which it is delivered, in a flood, every day, to people all over the world;

Students have, in this respect, been coddled;

Subjects, such as sex education, which belong in the family, have been delivered into the hands of schools and teachers;

Indeed, in certain respects, schools are asked to substitute and stand in for parents;

Masked as “learning opportunities,” various political agendas have been inserted in school curricula;

The basis on which the founding documents of the American Republic were debated and drafted—logical thought—has been eliminated from the curriculum as a serious discipline;

Therefore, students drift and grasp at superficially attractive ideas and fads of the moment;

In this respect, freedom has been reinterpreted to mean “mental incapacity and wandering thought”;

The vast contributions of the ancient Greek civilization, where logic as a crucial subject was born, have been minimized or summarized in sterile fashion;

The profound devotion to logic by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the father of the Constitution, has been forgotten altogether;

Logic, the connective tissue which binds together the progression of ideas in rational argument, has been kept away from students;

The result is the production of shallow minds that cannot see the architecture of reasoning;

Students, at sea, begin to invent wholly insufficient standards for accepting or rejecting various points of view and supposed authorities;

Students lose their true independence without ever having gained it;

The low level of overall literacy in our schools is matched only by the non-comprehension of rational thought;

In the presence of these and other deficiencies and abuses, students are pushed through, from grade to grade, graduation to graduation, as a bureaucratic function, regardless of their ability.

Therefore, in light of these intolerable circumstances, citizens of good intent declare that, in all ways possible, we will change this system.  We will urge, demand, and if necessary assume responsibility for, teaching children the missing key to education.

Logic; the capacity to reason, to think lucidly; to separate sense from chatter; to discover deception and avoid being influenced by it; to remain free and independent from the shifting opinions of “the herd”; to maintain personal liberty in the face of every spurious enticement to abandon it; to come to grips with those competitive sets of First Principles which will either lead to freedom or slavery; these are the stakes in our time.

This is the crossroad.

We choose the path that can bring us the fulfillment of a worthy goal.

We choose reason over vacuous mindlessness. 

We, who still know the power of the mind, and who understand how the founders harnessed that power to shape the great documents that yielded up, and still yield up, liberty, can bring, out of the dust of recent history, an education that truly trains the intellect.

Logic is the foundation of such an education.  

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.

NAKED FREEDOM

NOVEMBER 14, 2010.  First Principles are not popular.  They require coherent thought.  People would rather focus on an example, a case, a scandal, and wring the most sensational possible conclusions out of it—thereby removing its connection to any principle.

They would rather measure time by one piece of gossip after another.

The result of this mental deficit is a kind of permission to let the future leak in as it will, until it becomes a river that takes us wherever it leads.

But suppose we are able to marshal our resources and think about the basis of the Republic?

*                    *                    *     

The rise of science has swept all before it.  New inventions and technology have convinced the masses that science is synonymous with “workable,” “necessary,” and “governing.” 

Therefore, when a person makes a decision that is obviously and clearly unscientific, and therefore self-defeating, friends and family and co-workers and professionals urge him to reconsider and change direction.

This pressure can nearly have the effect of law, and, in fact, legislatures have passed laws that support science and forbid challenging it.

At this point, I could cite various examples of false and deceptive science—I have maintained an enterprise, over the last 30 years, in which I document such cases.  So I would have no trouble illustrating where and how science has been dressed up to look real, when it is actually hoax and fraud.

But here I don’t want to do that.  I want to make a simpler point.  It is framed by the question: how far does freedom extend?

Is it an act of freedom for a patient to deny a life-saving treatment widely accepted as such, and acclaimed as the only possible choice open to him in his circumstances?

Or is it an act of suicidal ignorance?

And if it is the latter, how might that modify what freedom consists of?

Suppose, for instance, a doctor diagnoses this patient with cancer and tells him that his only chance for survival lies in accepting chemotherapy?

And suppose the patient refuses? 

Put aside, for the moment, the matter of whether chemotherapy would be effective.  Ignore what other therapy the patient might favor.

Consider this extreme situation solely in the light of whether the patient has the right and freedom to discard his doctor’s sober advice.

This is precisely a test case, because widespread acceptance of what good science consists of is being challenged by a patient who has no medical background or expertise.

Actually, we don’t know whether the patient is challenging the science; we only know that, from the point of view of experts, that is what his refusal amounts to.

The patient is simply saying no. 

Does he have that right?

Does he have the guaranteed freedom to make his choice, even if that choice leads to his death?

Should society have a higher right to countermand his decision?

In the future, we will see more and more test cases, and the tendency will be to rule out the patient’s liberty.

Therefore, we had better get it right now.

Freedom is freedom.  If you limit it on the basis of science, or magic, or religion, and if you limit it for one person, you are setting a precedent that can limit it for others. 

Try this example.  I am standing on my own property.  In my hands are blueprints I have made for my new house.  I am already building it myself, alone.  I am standing under the skeleton.

The city in which I live has a copy of the plans.  Employees in the building department have determined, scientifically, that this structure will not stand.  It will collapse. 

My house will be erected in the center of an acre of land.  If it falls, it will fall on me and no one else.

Sheriff’s deputies are standing on the edge of my lawn with weapons.  They are threatening to come in and arrest me, before I kill myself under the falling beams. 

Do they have the right to stop me?

Do I have the freedom to build my house exactly as I have planned?

We live in an age of official and unofficial meddling. Everyone believes he has the right to interfere in other people’s business, “for their own good.”

Such a belief has a twin—we must help everyone who needs it regardless of expense, regardless of where the money comes from, regardless of what the asserted need is.

Each belief re-enforces the other.

This is the society we are turning into.

Conversely, if we allow the patient to refuse chemotherapy, if we permit the builder of the crooked house to put up that structure, and if we are publicly willing to say we understand the consequences may be dire—and still, we are willing to forego interference, we are tacitly admitting that we don’t have to help everyone, everywhere, at any moment.   

If we stand up and limit the amount of help we are willing to give “to everyone, everywhere, at every moment,” if we are willing to assert that limit publicly and specifically, then we are closer to admitting that individuals have the right and freedom to risk injuring or even killing themselves.

This is a crossroad. 

Obviously, there is tremendous sentiment on the side of political correctness: we must interfere; we must intervene; we must save the misguided.

The same situation and issue is involved in the government’s foreign policy decisions.  Are we obligated to intervene in every foreign war or massacre?

Whether you view history and the future through the eyes of policy or conspiracy, the result falling out of the hopper is the same.

To the degree that we abandon first principles and the philosophy of freedom, and allow, instead, a case-by-case carving up of the tree of liberty, we will end up with a hollow root, and that which we once cherished will be gone, a faint remnant of a forgotten era.

Despite the sentiments of utopians and rainbow seekers and all-enveloping do-gooders and apocalyptic enthusiasts, freedom always did have consequences.  You can’t be for freedom and also insist on eliminating risk.  And in the test cases, where the popular belief is that an individual, following a horrific strategy, is going to cut his chances of survival, you have to stand back.  You have to learn that intervention is not the final answer, except if we want a society in which protection ultimately emanates from law backed up by the barrel of a government gun.

There are, and will be, increasing numbers of people who insist that protection must be the first principle of existence.  They will dress it up, they will flood the decks with quasi-religious swill, they will carry out the mandate with a grave smile of purity, they will cite science, they will issue messianic commands, they will turn themselves inside out to protect Everything. Under the flag of a new dawn, they will insist.

Their lives are not their own.  To imagine they are alive, they want yours.

Most readers will shrink away from my analysis.  They would prefer not to consider these extreme test cases because, while the prospect of allowing someone the freedom to harm or even kill himself might be privately acceptable, to publicly state it is policy is going too far.  Better to stay in the shadows.

However, consider this.  If five years from now, the number of patients who can legally refuse chemotherapy is reduced, because new regulations have been put in place, then ten years from now, the number of patients who can, say, refuse vaccines might be reduced.  And then, the number of patients who can refuse prescribed antidepressants might, in fifteen years, be reduced by similar regulations.

And then, on another front, the same basic concept that forbids a man from building a crooked house that might collapse on his own property is extended.  He can’t smoke in his house.  He can’t grow certain kinds of plants that might cause a random neighbor to suffer an allergic reaction.  He can’t raise his voice to his children.  He can’t own a bicycle unless he owns a helmet designed to government specifications.      

And then, 30 years from now, every patient under the national healthcare plan must accept all drugs prescribed by a government doctor.

And no property owner can protest a microwave scan of his house that automatically records and collates unpaid tickets, private debts, owed taxes, and memberships in groups of any kind.  He can’t drive his car out of his garage unless he is taking, on schedule, every drug his doctor has prescribed him.

Well, it’s good science.  For the greatest good of the greatest number, it’s all been figured out and expressed in regulations. 

When people don’t have the sufficient mental capacity to recognize or think cogently about First Principles, these are the consequences.            

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

ANOTHER OPEN LETTER TO HOME SCHOOLS by Jon Rappoport

NOVEMBER 13, 2010.  Imagine this.  The key subject that turns a mediocre education into a brilliant one has been eliminated from most schools of any kind.

It’s true, and that subject is logic.

James Madison, thought of by many as the father of the Constitution, studied logic intensely at the College of New Jersey.  In fact, we have 122 pages of Madison’s own handwritten notes from the course.  The course followed the pattern laid down in a famous 17^th-century book, Logic or the Art of Thinking.

As a college student, Thomas Jefferson studied philosophy and logic under Professor William Small, at William and Mary.  Small had come to the college from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he, in turn, had studied under William Duncan, a renowned logician and author of Elements of Logick.  Indeed, Jefferson later remarked Professor Small went a long way toward shaping his life.

In both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we can see that the development of the content is achieved by a brilliant logical progression of ideas.

The philosopher whose work contributed most to the founding documents of the American Republic, John Locke, once wrote, “Logic is the anatomy of thought.”

To most students and teachers alike, these are buried secrets.  And for good reason.  The public school system of the United States has gradually eliminated this branch of knowledge, logic, from its curriculum.

Why?  Because the modern shapers of American education decided that the independent ability to reason was not a useful goal.  It’s that simple.

When you stop and consider it, creating strong and independent minds runs counter to the “flow” of education.  Instead, courses are meant to imprint data on student minds.  Period.

If students were taught the secret of logic, they would eventually be able to establish a position apart from peer pressure, apart from the Collective, apart from “the herd of sheep.”

They would be able to question, analyze, and dissect information with a skill that surpasses mere grumbling and adolescent dissatisfaction.

They would, in fact, fulfill, on an individual level, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.       

Teachers are meant to prepare students to go out into the world armed with the very best tools of thinking and reasoning.  Teachers are meant to train students so they have strong independent minds.

Let me point out that there is a difference between encouraging students to rebel and have grossly inflated opinions based on nothing—and showing them how to think and reason with power.

In the former case, you are turning out pretentious people who are walking on thin ice.  In the latter case, you are imbuing students with superior skills that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives.

Were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison no better than rebellious teenagers out to cause trouble?  Or were they mature men who saw through the manipulations of tyranny?

In society today, we are faced with a flood of information wherever we turn.  There are three general goals implied by all this information: one, maintain things as they are, maintain the status quo; two, search for the conspiracy behind events; and three, buy into grandiose solutions to our problems.

A student who is well ground in logic does not unthinkingly fall into any of these urgings.  Instead, he examines what he is reading, hearing, or watching.  He takes apart information and judges it on its own merits, on a case by case basis.  He finds the logical flaws and gaps in it.  He can assess the value of any argument and come to a rational decision about it.

Having and using this skill is one of the primary aims of a proper education.  Without a serious study of logic, this aim goes begging.  The student drifts on a sea of random, disconnected ideas and opinions.  Eventually, as an adult, to keep himself from living in a state of confusion, he grabs on to some authority and allies himself with it.  There is no predicting what that authority will be. 

Is this the future we want for our students?

Or should we teach them how to reason, how to apply logic, how to have the kind of power the founders applied to their circumstances, in order to create, on these shores, an independent and free society?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE MONEY CRUNCH

NOVEMBER 11, 2010.  This article is about where we may be fifty years from now.  Maybe you don’t care.  Maybe for you tomorrow is the only issue.  So be it.  That’s fine.

But I’m predicting something extraordinary will happen to…oh, let’s call it DEBT: A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL. 

The word debt will undergo a revolution…    

These days—and for a long time now—you really aren’t a modern government unless you spend more than you have. 

Debt-based governments, in fact, follow a strategy that is defined by some economists as: inevitable; good; healthy.

Healthy, that is, until the chickens come home to roost. 

Even when the White House and state capitols are crammed with chickens, squawking, pecking, wandering the hallways, you can find experts comparing government debt to overall private-sector production and shrugging with practiced indifference.

That shrug seems to form the core of their PhD credentials.

“No problem.  We can handle it.”

In California, the inability to pass a debt-laden state budget was the trigger that caused the recall of Governor Gray Davis.  Arnold the Weightlifter, displaying an optimism worthy of a superhero, entered the scene—but he, too, failed to lift the debt from the state.  Now, the bald ascetic, Jerry Brown, is the new messiah.  Yet on the campaign trail, Brown asserted the state university system could gift free tuition to every youngster in California, legally or illegally residing here.

In California, Illinois, Washington DC, Greece, France, Italy, England, and numerous other places, governments are facing the same problem.  They spent more than they had, in order to deliver goodies to people who “needed them, deserved them, demanded them.”  And some of the recipients were their own public employees.

Still, the sentiment for gift giving is strong:

“People everywhere must be helped.  No one should be left behind.  Ever.  Who cares how the spending is arranged?  We don’t give a damn.  Figure it out.  This is what government is for.  Change the definition of debt.  Erase it off the books.  Print more money.  Invent money.  Invent the invention of money.  Don’t bother us with the details.  Just get it done.”

And people argue whether these governments are socialistic.  It’s rather amazing.

Governments have an answer to all this.  They’ll control the means of production and distribution of goods and services.  Not on the scale we see now—on a far larger scale.

Governments will calculate their slice of the money pie from this ownership bonanza, and they’ll take that slice.  It will be big enough to make the case that the debt burden governments carry is reasonable, because they are profiting from owning, well, almost everything.

That’s the direction.  That’s the plan.  When you think about it, it always was.  Freedom and the free market were always seen (by the experts and grand thieves) as a momentary blip on the radar screen.  An aberration.

This is the real meaning of the term “market correction.”

The mind of government, such as it is, thinks about banks and corporations and financial markets and says: “Well, we sort of own them and they sort of own us, and now we just need to cement those relationships and make them more inclusive.  The alternative is we all go down with the ship.” 

When government envisions the day it stands at the prow of the ship, it believes dangerous debt will be a thing of the past, because how can there be debt when the government owns everything and shapes the very meaning and story of money?  Who can then stand outside the structure and say there is a dangerous imbalance between what is profit and what is loss?

This is the game saver for governments.  It’s the final answer when every other strategy has failed utterly.

Government can envision this end game because, of course, the answer has to be delivered globally. 

No longer would there be a USSR crashing on the rocks and falling into a sea of red ink.  That was the old system, in which one nation could win against another, one economy could be more powerful than another, and debts had to be paid off to creditors.

No, in the new universe, all this goes away.  That’s the dream.

Enormous failure leads to complete triumph.

“We can spend and owe our way into oblivion, and that is a good idea, because after that there will have to be a reckoning that goes beyond reckoning—we will forge a different system where, by definition, such crises can never happen again.”

When you examine various experts’ mind-boggling acceptance of unpayable debt, you can, in fact, see this redefinition process has been going on for quite some time.

It’s a lead-in to a new kind of civilization.  To call it socialism is to underestimate it.  It’s a hybrid.  Corporations, governments, banks, markets—they are blended together…and at the top, there is a group of financial wizards whose job it is to constantly depict and redefine what money and debt and credit ARE, so that crisis is, a priori, eliminated.

Of course, the obfuscation will be fantastic.  It will look like science fiction.  But so do other sectors of society.  So what? 

The flow and roll-down from the top of the pyramid, however, will, in a real sense, make everybody into a functionary. 

Freedom in the marketplace will not only be severely constricted; people will have to adjust their actions and thoughts to align with the latest fabrications broadcast from the summit. 

It will resemble, this whole structure, the Medieval Roman Church, where cosmology and its detailed implications were adjusted from moment to moment, to rule out invasive realities and discoveries, where the nature of history was recast, like wet plaster, to resemble Church mythology and doctrine, where the proliferation of that doctrine rumbled like armies and smashed flat the objections of logic.

This is the vision, puerile and absurd as it sounds, that backs up every lunatic act of massive government debtors of today.  This is the future they see, dimly, or clearly.  This is their anchor.

If you want a modern comparison, I point you to the so-called science and modeling of global warming.  The airy mathematical castles built on other castles suck up selected historical observational data and resurrect them as evidence of alarming trends.  There is nothing in these models that has a mandatory relationship to the physical world.  When one castle is seen to be a fairy tale, three more are thrown up quickly to engender confidence.

If the vision of the future I’m sketching here comes to pass, the word debt will, a hundred years from now, be as incomprehensible and insignificant as a proposed piece of planetary debris floating around a sun a billion light years from Earth.

And some form of global altruism will be referenced to explain why this venal concept—debt—had to be scrubbed from human affairs and the human mind.

And you can take that to the bank.

Or:

We could preserve freedom.

“Debt?  Oh yes.  THAT.  At one time, people with criminal motives suggested that ledgers should be kept expressing what was gained and what was owed.  Those people were vicious proponents of a system they called the free market.  Finally, we reduced them to ashes.  We bludgeoned them out of existence.  Debt was a fictional piece of propaganda designed to promote inequality.  It was a dagger hanging over the heads of our people.  It was a tool of hate, before the Great Change.  Now, properly, there is only need and fulfillment of need…”   

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of a unique course for homes schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE REBIRTH OF EDUCATION

By Jon Rappoport

NOVEMBER 11, 2010.  Literacy is the foundation of education, but if the student can’t think and reason about what he reads, if he can’t ask intelligent questions about what he reads, then he is at sea like a cork bobbing on the waves.

Let’s suppose you wanted to create a high-functioning android.  What would you do?

You would endow this creature with the ability to absorb information and remember it faultlessly.  He would be a remarkable rote learner.

He would never question what he reads.  To guarantee this, you would omit teaching him logic.

Then he would go through life like a sponge, soaking up data and reciting it.

Is this what we want from young minds?

Well, in some societies, the answer is a resounding yes.  Of course, those societies are managed from the top down.  The leaders demand obedience.

In America, things are different.  At least for now.  We still possess sufficient freedom to want more from students.  We want to somehow imbue students with the capacity for independent thought.

However, this goal is not achieved by waving a magic wand.  Neither is it achieved by simply reminding young people that they are free.

Let us return, for a moment, to the birthplace of liberty, ancient Greece.  Two and a half thousand years ago, something unprecedented happened in the city of Athens.  From out of the darkness of prior civilizations, a new concept was set into motion.

The INDIVIDUAL was free.  He could choose.  He could think about vital issues of the day and make decisions.

A teacher named Socrates began to teach students.  He engaged in a practice that was brand new: dialogue.  Conversation aimed at understanding, at a deep level, ideas like Justice and the Good. 

It wasn’t enough to read about such ideas or memorize second-hand conclusions.

Dialogue, as Socrates used it, contained LOGIC.

He would show that certain ideas inevitably led to absurd conclusions.  He would show that certain trains of correct reasoning led to insights. 

This was thinking at a whole new level.

It caught on.  In fact, it formed the basis for the pursuit called science.  It formed the basis for the institution called law.  And finally, in the late 18^th century, men on this soil created a Republic that operated by and through law.

Law—not decree, not force, not a monarch’s assumption of divine right to rule, not the shifting bobbing changing will of the majority.

The basis of American law was embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, two documents that were debated and drafted by men who very well understood the branch of learning called logic.  They were devoted to it.

In fact, logic was the connective tissue that held these documents together and made them operable.

Now, all these years later, the study of logic has been systemically removed from most school curricula.

In other words, the essence of what made the Republic possible has been taken away from the population.

Think about the effect of that action.

It’s as if sailors and navigators, going to sea in ships their ancestors built, no longer knew how to read the stars or use instruments to guide them to distant ports.

No deep appreciation of the Declaration or the Constitution is possible in the absence of logic.  These documents become vague mirrors of sentiments expressed centuries ago, in another world, by men whose brilliance is forgotten.

And if you are an ambitious person with an agenda that involves trampling freedom and burying it, if you are seeking to replace this form of government with another one that destroys what was built here, you will also replace logic with spurious and attractive-sounding ideas—so you can move the mob.  So you can revert to control rather than freedom.

And who is going to stop you?  The young, with their half-baked educations, who can’t follow a train of thought past the first station?  School teachers, who never learned logic when they were young? 

It’s fine to talk about “the struggle” and the need to “defend liberty.”  But if you abandon the world of ideas to those who want to undermine the Republic, the battle is lost.

The world of ideas is not some ivory tower of meaningless chatter.  It is vital.  It is alive.  It is the bloodstream of the Republic.

When Tom Paine penned Common Sense in 1776, it sold an astonishing 500,000 copies in that first year.  The eloquent prose and the logic of it literally forced the Declaration to be written. 

Such living ideas need to be articulated at length in order to take on their true meaning.  But the ideas standing alone collapse.  They need the connective tissue of logic to form a coherent whole.  Then, the power appears out of the fog.

To paraphrase the old conundrum about the tree falling in the forest, if a logical argument is made and no one can understand it, is it logic?  Is it real?

At least in pragmatic terms, we have the answer, and we can see it if we look around us.  Minds lacking real education falter, retreat, glaze over, and reach for the latest homily, the latest slogan, the latest prescription for our ills. 

Minds revert to older nostrums, which can be summarized under one label: COLLECTIVISIM.  The vague philosophy that asserts the group has all rights and the individual has none.

This is where we are heading.  This is where we have been heading for some time.  On that shore, decorated with empty promises, more and more people believe “everybody will be given everything they need.”

Of course, collectivism is always a mass puppet show, in which the leaders who hold the strings solidify their tyranny behind the curtain.

Portraying themselves as saviors, they promote a false dream.  They spin fantasies.  They issue sugar-coated directives.  They offer empty generalities.  They claim they are for the Good.  They skip and chisel their way from A to B to F to Z to R effortlessly, as if they are champions of valid deduction.

Minds that cannot distinguish deceptive idealism from correct reasoning buy the Fool’s Gold.  And then, in the absence of logic, freedom disappears.

No one remembers what it was.  No one cares.

Freedom was just another fairy tale in an old book.  Now we have a new fairy tale.  It is shinier.  It is more modern.  It is simpler.

Is this what you want?

If your answer is no, the first profound order of business is the reinstatement of logic, as a branch of learning, as an extensive discipline, as a set of fine tools for minds, in education.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Jon has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He has published articles on politics, medical science, and health in newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe, including LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, and Stern.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE INDIVIDUAL

VERSUS “THE INDIVIDUAL OF LICENSE”

NOVEMBER 9, 2010.  In Why Is It Called Freedom, I described the free individual, and the corruption that occurs when the license to act “as if free” is substituted on a grand scale.

I want to expand on those ideas.

THE IDEAL CALLED THE FREE INDIVIDUAL—THE FULFILLMENT OF THE UNDERLYING VISION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

The free individual is driven by his own choices.  He envisions his highest objectives and acts, with power and energy and will, to bring them about, in the world. 

The free individual is intensely creative.  He isn’t a follower.  He breaks new ground.  He doesn’t cater to the collective.  He doesn’t compromise to satisfy the wishes of the group. 

As a matter of course, what he invents does spill over and benefit others.  But he isn’t tethered and bound and lashed to the group.

The free individual rejects the notion that he is limited by his past. 

He doesn’t navigate his life by the “needs of others.”

He rejects the premise that humanity is one “melted-down” Whole that must be served.

The free individual recognizes that the Collective accumulates its catalogue of “needs” based on the desire to obtain something for nothing—and he pays no attention to this campaign.

Likewise, the free individual is aware that certain leaders, who have attained their position through clever strategies, manipulate the needs of the Collective to advance their own position.  He does not serve these leaders.

The free individual doesn’t engage in actions whose purpose is to limit the freedom of others.

Unlike the free individual, the individual of license interprets freedom to mean he has broad latitude to trample on others, to lie, cheat, connive, and steal, in order to achieve his ends.

To outward appearances, he is carrying out a program based on freedom, but he is not.  Inevitably, his actions involve repressing the liberty of others.

He calls his actions “part of the free market.”

In this way, over time, freedom of commerce accumulates more degradation.

The man of license doesn’t see beyond the end of his nose.  He is operating on the basis of how he envisions freedom.  To him, freedom IS license.  There is no distinction.  Freedom becomes his permission to roam the landscape and extract profit from “targets of opportunity.”

He rationalizes his actions away on the basis that “humanity can’t attain to anything better.”

In truth, he spends a certain amount of time convincing himself that this rationalization is accurate.  This is the extent of his “philosophy.”

In a nation where there is a preponderance of people of license, the society declines, and its memory of what freedom is deteriorates.

The idealization of freedom was distorted into license and a slanted understanding of the free market.

Although the Republic had broken away from the oppressions of Europe, there was no way it could automatically endow its citizens with an incorruptible nature. 

Except through education.  But such education would have had to delve further than a literal understanding of the founding documents of the nation.  Thomas Paine once remarked that a constitution is an explication of underlying principle.  And this is the case.

The explanation, envisioning, and unearthing of the free individual as an ideal is a legitimate and necessary purpose of education. 

How do you teach a student a higher concept than he is accustomed to imagining?  This is the challenge, and of course the teacher must be ready for such an undertaking.

It is not rote learning.  It isn’t the casual transmission of superficial ideas. 

In America, the ideal of the free individual has taken a back seat to the philosophy that large numbers of people have needs, and those needs must be satisfied through government-enforced initiatives.

The circle is closed when enough students—having never learned what the free individual really is—perceive themselves in the default position of being needy.  Then they readily accept the substitute philosophy.

People of license feed off the populations of people of need.

Reinstating the idea of the free individual is the highest of priorities.

Attempting to curtail, by enforcement of law, all the instances of crimes committed by people of license is futile—because there is no higher ideal to attain to.  That ideal has been scrubbed from the culture. 

I’m not so naïve that I believe every single human being can or will become a truly free individual in a given period of time.  But if the ideal were omnipresent in the society, at the very least there would be enough reflections of it to view, so that some semblance of a standard could sustain us. 

As things stand now, young people have very few references. 

The Republic has become smaller in its insight and imagination, and this condition is not curable by law.

However, each one of us has enough freedom to build, in our own minds, the vision of the free individual.  What springs from that is unpredictable, and good. 

It turns out that the most profound meaning of freedom never dies.  It can be shuttled off to a remote spot in the psyche, but it continues to have fire.

No one can hand off the responsibility to resuscitate the ideal of the free individual to another.  That is simply an act of surrender.

Freedom continues to ring its bell.  This is what drives the most morbid people of license to the brink of despair.  Every time they believe they have forced away the vestiges of the free individual, something happens.  Something reminds them that their control is faltering.  Their venal philosophy, which they forward under cover of darkness, has been exposed.

As a side effect, people who could help resuscitate the ideal of the free individual sit back and take heart, thinking that other people will always be there to provide hope. 

Ah yes.  The people of license, the people of need, and the people of hope.    

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PARADISE ON A BUN TO GO

EXTRA MAYO

SLICE OF AMNESIA

NOVEMBER 8, 2010.  The idea of One Final Consciousness, in which every individual should participate, has swept through the world. It has become as firmly rooted in the culture as the burger.

In the film Avatar, the Na’vi species even have a “cord and a plug,” so they can enter the bio-consciousness of their forest.  Directly.

This fad began in the 1960s, when Eastern spiritual thought was simplified, twisted, and imported to the West.

If the notion of the free individual, as framed in the basic documents of the American Republic, was already on the wane, it took its biggest hit as this Eastern hodge-podge mish-mash enveloped pop culture.

There were supporting premises, promoted by Western spiritual teachers: the difference between ego and self is negligible; ego is destructive; ego is an effort to falsely separate away from larger consciousness; self is an illusion; with enlightenment, a person surrenders the illusion and gloriously joins the homogenized cosmos.

Environmentalists took on these premises for their own use.  Ego-separation fenced humans off from Nature and led to the destruction of the natural world and its “web of life.”

James Lovelock, the formulator of the Gaia Hypothesis—all life on Earth is one bio-collective organism—wrote:

“This new interrelationship of Gaia with man is by no means fully established; we are not yet a truly collective species, corralled and tamed as an integral part of the biosphere…”

One of his disciples, Al Gore, offered this, in Earth in the Balance:

“This we know: the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.”

I’m pointing out the underlying philosophical idea here: the distinct and unique individual is an illusion.

The extent to which this premise and its derivative branches have taken hold is illustrated by the widely held generalization that “man is destroyer.”

That summary of the human being is so popular it is, in many circles, considered as final as, well, the science of manmade global warming. 

Whatever is left of the ideal of the free individual is being phased out, as quickly as “higher collective beings,” such as Al Gore, Maurice Strong, Mikhail Gorbachev, et al, can accomplish it, on behalf of Gaia.

Of course, as leaders of humankind-as-melted-down-butter, these men are permitted to retain their status as powerful individuals, because they are benighted, blessed with a holy mission that requires jets, large estates, personal fortunes, and teams of assistants.  These leaders suffer, for a little while, the pain of pretending they are separated egos, so that the rest of us may give up that ghost and merge into the Oneness of the All.

In case there was any doubt about why the study of the founding of the American Republic has become, in, most places, an arcane enterprise, we have the answer.

The idea of the free individual (even though it has been inexorably propagandized as universal licentiousness, crime, greed, and destruction) is still a threat.

New Education informs us that self, ego, nature, biology, and freedom are now sub-categories of an overriding material and spiritual collective, and the individual must be permitted to fall deeper and deeper into a slumber which precludes him from remembering himself.

That’s the future, as it’s being sketched in by glorious, meek, submissive, holy, altruistic, prophetic, money-making billionaires, in their castles.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for home schoolers and adults.  For inquiries, qjrconsulting@gmail.com

AN EMAIL EXCHANGE WITH DR. JUDITH CURRY

THE PROLIFERATON OF MODELS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE

NOVEMBER 5, 2010.  You don’t go to a spot in Tennessee, drill down into the ground, extract a core sample, analyze it and publish a graph that reports the evolution of the planet’s temperature for the last 1000 years.

There are measuring stations, on land, all over the globe—some stations far less reliable than others.  There are satellites overhead that have been recording radiance since 1978.  There are ocean measurements as well. There are tree cores that reveal information about temperature.

How all these records are interpreted and then coordinated is a matter of controversy.  Models are used.  These models are competitive with one another.  And they are strings of complex mathematical inferences which give more weight to certain data and less weight to other data.

After a year or so of sifting through scientific and (to me) arcane debate about the flaws in various models, I began to wonder whether all the models were so abstracted from plain observation that they were useless. 

On October 27, I emailed Dr. Judith Curry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Dr. Curry is a well-known climate researcher who, unlike many of her colleagues, has shown an interest in skeptics who reject the notion that manmade warming is a serious and imminent threat.

Here is that email:

veteran medical reporter query on climate science

InboxX

jon rappoport to curryja

show details 9:36 AM (3 hours ago)

Dr. Curry,

Jon Rappoport here.  I’ve worked as an investigative medical reporter for 30 years.

In uncovering various kinds of medical-research fraud, I’ve educated myself about how the use of sophisticated models can obscure and distort simple data and cover over the basic uncertainty of the research conclusions.

I’ve tried to apply the same understanding to debates about competing climate-science models. 

I fully realize that most scientists think models are absolutely necessary, and the proposal that important knowledge might be acquired without them appears ludicrous.

Nevertheless, I’ve tried to approach the warming question with an idiot’s eyes and, perhaps, a useful swipe or two of Occam’s Razor. 

So please remember—in the field of climate science, I AM a complete idiot.  I’m navigating by my own version of common sense, and I’m seeing problems with every step I take.  The only question is, are these problems less troublesome than those caused by building models that spawn other models?

Suppose, as regards land measurement of warming, we did the following:

Select the hundred most reliable land stations in the world—those that have a clear, continuous, daily record of temperature going back at least 75 years.

The environments around the stations haven’t changed so radically in 75 years that obvious warming factors were introduced (highways, factories, shopping malls, etc.).

The daily temp measurements, as far as we can tell, were carried out with integrity and accuracy.

We then perform one, and only one, slightly abstract arithmetical calculation: We take each day at each station, and average the temp measurements recorded at six in the morning, noon, and six in the evening—or as close as we can get to those times.

Now, for each of the 100 stations, we have a daily average temp.

We then graph that daily average for each station across those 75 years.

We then have 100 graphs in front of us.

For each graph, we do…nothing.  We just look at each graph.  We keep looking.  What are we seeing?  An obvious overall story of dramatic warming increase?  Decline?  Stability and sameness?  A mixed bag of uncertainty?

Then we draw a trend line for each graph. 

Then we ask, “How many degrees of warming for any given graph, across 75 years, would constitute a red flag?”

I would leave the answer to that question to you.

Let’s call the answer X.

Then we ask, “For how many of the 100 graphs do we see a trend of X or greater?”

Suppose the answer is 42. 

Well, is the geo-distribution of those stations clustered in one area?  Are the stations far apart?

What are the other 58 stations telling us?

In other words, we begin to construct a narrative.  A story told by what we see.  Others can examine our story and comment on it—without invoking complex models.

It seems to me this is a reasonable starting point.  And for those who want to jump off from it into the aether with their models, well, it should be apparent how valid or invalid their suppositions and reasoning are, right from the start. 

Does all this seem completely insane?

When I read comments on blogs in which people argue the flaws vs. merits of some extremely complex model, I get the uneasy sense they’re debating angels on the heads of pins—and they’ve wandered so far from what temperature is and means they’ve lost the thread. 

At the risk of losing you (if you’ve come this far), I can offer an analogy in the field of disease diagnosis and testing.  One can read papers in which the subtleties of antibody-test interpretation are argued: layers, bands, false-positives in non-risk populations, etc.  But one glaring fact, which is being ignored, stands out: Until 1985, the presence of antibodies specific to a particular germ was considered a good sign for the patient.  It meant his body had fought off and disposed of the invader.  Antibodies were certainly not a clue that the patient was ill or was going to get ill.  Then, without the slightest justification (except some clever circular reasoning), the whole business was turned on its head.  Antibodies were indicative of illness. 

I point this out to a number of well-known researchers, and they simply stare at me as if I’m mad.

So then I say, “You know, when you vaccinate a person, you’re producing antibodies.  And you’re saying the antibodies confer protection against illness.  But when those same antibodies are produced naturally, by the body, you say they’re a bad sign.”

Then they throw me out. 

Hope to hear from you.

Regards, Jon

Here is Dr. Curry’s brief reply.  I have deleted a sentence or two that contained private information Dr. Curry didn’t want published.    

Curry, Judith …10:29 AM (2 hours ago)

 Reply |Curry, Judith A to me

show details 10:29 AM (2 hours ago)

hi jon thanks for your message.  not at all insane, in fact a number of people are doing similar things…I will get to this general topic in december (at least according to my current plans).  Judy

I take Dr. Curry’s reply in a positive light.  Maybe there is another way. 

Skeptics have already shown the massive unreliability of many data that are widely accepted as useful.  So perhaps it’s time to say all the models are a sign of a bad habit; a useless and harmful addiction.

Throughout science, there are types of models that should never have been built in the first place.  They were interesting to the builders in the same way that advanced chess is interesting to those who can play at that level.  But by their very nature, they’re rubbish science.

They were doomed from the start to chart a flight path that was, a priori, in a universe vastly different from the observational data.  

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com