Ray Harvey

A good reader (click on his name to read another interesting article) sent me a link to the following: Mighty Oil-Eating Microbes Help Clean Up The Gulf In response to which, I would also point out what too few people know: namely, that nature alone, apart from man, spills far more oil than all the [...]

As Johnny Caspar once said: “Running things — it ain’t all gravy.”

This important update comes to us from Ed Morrissey, over at Hot Air: It didn’t take long for federal judge Susan Bolton to zero in on the holes in the Obama administration’s argument in their lawsuit against Arizona and its new must-enforce policy on immigration violations. Bolton, a Democratic appointee, shot holes in the Department [...]

The following is Barack in 2008, campaigning hard against Hillary Clinton. Note how Barack comes out swinging against an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, stating (correctly) that Hillary would garnish workers’ wages and that Massachusetts’ individual mandate has left many residents “worse off.” Watch: Then, in the following video, he says (and I quote): [...]

This is what happens when you treat other people’s money as if it’s your own to do with what you please: London 2012 Olympics: Usain Bolt set to shun Britain over punitive tax rules Organisers of next month’s Aviva London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace had hoped to stage the first 100 metres head-to-head of [...]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt — or FDR, if you prefer — is, along with Abraham Lincoln, one of Barack Obama’s heroes, as Barack Obama is among the first to point out. Accordingly, Obama is pursuing a number of the same disastrous economic policies that Franklin Roosevelt pursued, which policies only served to keep the United States [...]

Socializing the United States has evidently not proved quite as popular as Barack and his minions at one time thought it would. Here’s the latest poll average:

Here’s some head-scratching calculus which I, for one, cannot fathom: NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world. Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al [...]

These photos, which someone just sent me, gleam with clarity and seem to me to represent America at her one-time best. Happy Fourth of July.

The dynamic Doctor Mariela Resendes (M.D.) is a private practitioner who spent her previous 5 years as the Managing Partner/CEO of the largest Radiology practice in the San Joaquin Valley of California, CMI Radiology Group. Just recently, she wrote an irrefutable and scathing essay on the coming healthcare disaster that Barack Obama and his clownish [...]

In the Concise Guide To Economics, author and economist Jim Cox correctly explains that the Multiplier is one of the major components of Keynesian policy. For those who still don’t know, Keynesian economics — named after the disastrously incorrect John Maynard Keynes — are what Barack Obama as well as George W. Bush (et al) [...]

It’s become very difficult now to keep up with the sheer multitude of lies told by Barack Obama and his clownish administration, but here’s a recent one that should give everybody pause: In order to protect the new national health care law from legal challenges, the Obama administration has been forced to argue that the [...]

The following questions were submitted to me some time ago by Mr. Maxwell Hoaglund, of Slagheap magazine, which unfortunately closed its doors before this penetrating Q & A appeared. I publish it here with Mr. Hoaglund’s full knowledge and permission. Q: Congratulations on the success of your novel More and More unto the Perfect Day. [...]

When you’re stuck in quicksand — or even a vat of thick oil for that matter — the first pointer in the survival manual is not to flail. President Obama hasn’t read that manual: The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue. “Some of [...]

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Today, June 4th, is the twenty-one year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China, when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students to bring about more freedom. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) [...]

UPDATE FROM ALLISON KAPLAN SOMMER Of course, the worldwide anti-Israel propaganda machine immediately began cranking out the standard stuff. Here, however, is some of what you won’t see from that same machine: Video taken by IDF [Israel Defense Force] naval boat shows the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships in the ‘Free [...]

The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony [...]

Around 630 AD, the Arab prophet Muhammad united the Arab people through the founding of a religion called Islam, which means “submission to God.” Muhammad forged these people into a fighting people the destiny of whom was to bring the rule of Islam to humankind. Within a hundred years, Muhammad and his disciples had conquered [...]

Gattaca is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is not new — it came out almost thirteen years ago, in 1997 — and it remains, I think, one of the most underrated movies ever. It was written and directed by the New Zealand born auteur Andrew Niccol, who has, before and after Gattaca, been [...]

David Horowitz: “I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. … For it or against it?” Jumanah Albahri: “For it.” Watch this chilling exchange, which just recently occurred at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD): [...]

The United States Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by an American socialist named Francis Julius Bellamy, who was also a Baptist minister, and whose cousin Edward Bellamy is the semi-famous author of two socialist utopian novels: Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897). Francis Bellamy was born in Rome, New York, May 18, 1855. [...]

A reader writes: Dear Mr. Harvey: What is the difference between communism, democratic socialism, and welfare statism? – Sincerely Confused Dear Sincerely Confused: First of all, Mr. Harvey is my dad. Please call me Ray. Communism is a species of the genus socialism; it is one of the many variations on that tired theme. Communism [...]

Sierra Club is the oldest environmental group in America. It was founded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir, whose stated goal was “to make the mountains glad.” In many ways, that puerile policy compendiates perfectly the essence of Sierra Club. Among other things, John Muir was an unapologetic racist, writing in 1894 [...]

The following article, quoted only in part, was written by Michelle Malkin, with whom I do not, for the record, always agree. (I believe in open borders, with thorough and proper background checks.) But she does raise an exceptionally important point here: In the aftermath of the botched Times Square terror attack over the weekend, [...]

Chief Seattle was an extraordinarily intelligent and charismatic man, a 19th century leader of Puget Sound Indian tribes. In 1884 he purportedly said, among other things, the following: The earth is our mother. What befalls the earth befalls all the sons and daughters of the earth…. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the [...]

More on the inherently statist nature of that pseudo-philosophy known as “environmentalism.” From journalist Patrick Richardson: In 2007, Sunflower Electric Power Corporation proposed a state-of-the-art coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kansas. This plant represented a $3.5 billion investment in one of the most rural areas of the country, $78 million in annual payroll during the [...]

The hard rock miner died last night, a beefy man, a strong man, with the soft-sad eyes of a thoughtful child. His name was Neil. He’d been a miner most of his life. He chewed Copenhagen and played guitar (he loved hard rock). In Vietnam he’d been awarded the Silver Star for an act of [...]

The United States is not a democracy and was never intended to be. Democracy means majority rule. The rights of each individual, however, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, are inalienable in the literal sense (i.e. cannot be transferred, revoked, or be made alien) and are thus never subject to vote [...]

He was one of the mellow, the soft-spoken, the tawny-haired — one who preferred to be alone. His name was Mark, a dishwasher at age 45. He was a drifter, a loner. He valued his freedom above all; dishwashing jobs he could always find. Our paths crossed and re-crossed at the Café Claire, where I [...]

This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, let us instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship. From Chapter 2 of Leave [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: Can you prove that humans possess the faculty of choice? – Waffling Dear Waffling: Yes, I can. And so can you. But first let me point something out: in the same way that you could not ever conceive dreaming if you’re never awake, so you can never conceive choice [...]

The definition of philosophy — judging, at least, from very nearly every philosophy dictionary on the planet — has confounded philosophers for many centuries, the concept being too large, it is sometimes said, to properly convey in a concise fashion. Yet, at the same time, in all branches of philosophy, minutia is cataloged to complete [...]

Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action). The following address was delivered before the University Club of New York, April 18, 1950, by Doctor Ludwig von Mises: How Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism The [...]

From NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski and Mark Murray U.S. military officials tell NBC News that the U.S. Army will court martial a lieutenant colonel who refuses to deploy to Afghanistan because he considers orders from President Obama to be “illegal.” Army doctor Lt. Col. Terry Lakin believes Obama does not meet the constitutional requirements to be [...]

This giant billboard was posted along I-70 in Lafayette County, Missouri. If you can’t quite make it out, it displays this message: “A Citizens Guide to Revolution of a corrupt government.” It then displays the following list of actions: 1. Starve the Beast. 2. Vote out incumbents. 3. If steps, 1 & 2 fail? Prepare [...]

Here’s an economic axiom which we’ve discussed here before, but which in this day and age is always worth repeating: If something is economically tenable, it never ever needs to be subsidized. The latest concretization of this fact comes from none other than the state-run Associated Press: After a year of crippling delays, President Barack [...]

Dr. Jack Cassell is a urologist in Florida. Just recently, he put the following notice on his Mount Dora practice: “If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.” Cassell told reporters that he wasn’t refusing care to patients; he wanted only to educate [...]

A reader writes: Dear Sir: Why do rabbits and eggs represent Easter, which also celebrates the resurrection of Christ? – Peter Dear Peter: Easter primarily represents the advent of springtime, just as Christ’s resurrection does. The Old-English word Eastre derives from an Anglo-Saxon Pagan goddess named Eostre, about whom very little is known. What we [...]

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air (Thomas Gray “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”). She works in a diner called the Desert Rose on the northwestern edge of Colorado, near the Utah border. The diner is small and undistinguished, clean and lit up in [...]

There are approximately twenty million myths about markets and market capitalism, one of the most common being this: Markets don’t work well (or are inefficient) when there are negative or positive “externalities.” Here’s how Tom Palmer, philosopher and economist, bunks that canard: The mere existence of an externality is no argument for having the state [...]

The trucker who lives next door is seldom home. He’s a long-haul trucker, he’s over-the-road. He earns good money and does not spend. Something of the ascetical about him. He’s forty. His hair is long. He wears jeans and combat boots. Sallow and haggard, his face is handsome nevertheless. His willowy wife does not ride [...]

My apologies to everyone who received a phony email from a phony Ray Harvey. That was not me. I’m not in England. I don’t need any money.

When portable radios first appeared in American stores, the average American worker had to labor 13 hours to buy one; today he or she toils for about 1 hour. In the 1920s it took 79 hours of work to buy a nice men’s suit; today it takes less than half that. At the beginning of [...]

The 2000-plus-page ObamaCare legislation would of course obliterate any remnants of free-market medicine that still exists in this country, and in so doing it would not lower the cost of medicine a bit, nor would it improve medical quality, nor would it ultimately insure more people, as the democrats themselves admit. The reason American medicine [...]

Political theory is the theory of government. It is a sub-branch of ethics, and economics, in turn, is a sub-branch of politics. Ethics — the science of human action — precedes politics because politics is the science of human action in societies, and societies are composed only of individuals. For this reason, the individual has [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray: What exactly is rack and pinion steering? Thanks, – Claude Bawls Dear Claude Bawls: The steering rack, as it’s known in the parlance of the trade, is a long iron bar, flat on one side, with thin serrations, known as “teeth,” which run the entire length of the steering rack. [...]

If you smell something fishy in this latest wave of methyl mercury talk, the reason is that there is something fishy in it — very fishy — and it stinks to high heaven. Please don’t be lured in. Here are the relevant facts: In this country, there hasn’t been a single scientifically documented case of [...]

The following is from Chapter 30 of Leave Us Alone — A Capitalist Credo: The Russian writer Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in what is now the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. At that time, Berdichev was still part of the Russian Empire. Vasily Grossman attended high school in Kiev and then the University of [...]

In 1943, a lady by the name of Rose Wilder Lane published a book called The Discovery of Freedom. It’s an absolutely original work of non-fiction, a salvo to human energy and the creative mind unshackled, and it influenced classic liberals and libertarians beyond number — and yet it has largely gone unacknowledged. From a [...]

Speaking of clams without shells, it was in the late 1980′s that McDonald’s was bullied by burgeoning environmental groups (who were concerned about “how many trees it takes to make paper“) into switching from paper packaging to Styrofoam containers, which McDonald’s soon came to call, apparently without irony, “clam shells.” Clam shells were not McDonald’s [...]

The following interview, which was brief but I think penetrating, was conducted January 27, in Aspen, Colorado, and appeared in the February issue of Cunning Stunts. The questions were put forth by the interviewer, Ms. Eileen Appleton, who has graciously allowed me to reprint it here: If he’s anything — and there does seem to [...]

In December of 1958, an American thinker named Leonard Read wrote a remarkable essay entitled “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read.” In this essay, Mr. Read walks us step-by-step through the entire process of how a single pencil is produced; I recapitulate it here because it is the only argument [...]

A reader writes: Dear RayHarvey: I have heard that a clam without a shell grows into a huge phallic-looking creature that would horrify and intimidate people who are not usually horrified or intimidated. Can you verify? If true, is this reaction indicative of an underlying psycho-sexual issue and is it in any way related to [...]

In February of 2007, the Los Angeles Times ran an article that said, among other things, the following: Since 1989, when organic-food activists raised a [bunked] nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: I’m one of these guys with a big belly and a small penis. I’m heterosexual, and I drive a truck for a living. I do not get a lot of exercise. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been pained by the size of my penis. I’m seriously [...]

Johann Bessler was born in Zittau, Germany, in 1680. He died in 1745. His claim to fame is that, in the 1712, he built a remarkable machine — called the Bessler Wheel — which he said was a machine of self-perpetuated motion; by 1717, “he’d convinced thousands of people, from the ordinary to the most [...]

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it. Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. That’s all it means. Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that [...]

There’s an old joke lumberjacks still love to tell: “Why did the train stop?” Answer: “To let the lumberjack off.” This quip was coined around the same time that a famous study was conducted. It was a study that measured the caloric intake of lumberjacks, whose appetites are about as notorious as the size of [...]

Reality is existence, and existence is everything. Every theory of everything must start there. There’s existence, and there’s essence. These two things are separate but not separable. In the language of Thomas Aquinas, esse (or essence) is identity: To be, in other words, is to be something. The conclusion is inescapable because (as Aristotle noted) [...]

There is no such thing as nuclear waste — and that’s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy. A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste. Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility, in an interview he gave with William Tucker, author of an excellent book called Terrestrial [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: Is Charles Bukowski a great artist? – Billy Badass Dear Billy Badass: No, he’s not. Bukowski is too sloppy to be a great artist. He lacks vision. He lacks depth and he lacks focus. Reading him, one is reminded of Truman Capote’s criticism of On the Road: “That’s not [...]

The following is excerpted from Chapter 10 of my book Leave Us Alone: A Capitalist Credo: Environmentalism, with its attendant army of politicos all armed to the teeth with environmental laws, is, let us make no mistake, the highroad to hell. Before going all the way green, I urge you to take a longer look [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that? – Slo Readuh Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more. It’s impossible to overstate Shakespeare’s genius. Forget that his plots were largely borrowed; forget that he never created a major character who didn’t have significant flaws. None of that [...]

What is now termed modern medicine actually began in the early 1920s when science — in particular, germ theory — culminated to a point that sickness and disease were at last being treated reliably. It was then that doctors and hospitals got much better at the business of saving lives. This more highly developed service [...]

WD-40 is a uniquely American invention, created in 1953 by three technicians at the San Diego Rocket Chemical Company. The name WD-40 derives from a project the goal of which was to find a water displacement compound. It took them 40 tries. WD-40 stands for Water Displacement #40. Initially, the main purpose of WD-40 was [...]

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, and who on February 12th turned 201-years-old, was a devoted and life-long white supremacist — and remained so up until the day he died. Nor did he waver in his staunch advocacy of colonization — which is the deportation of black people from the United States. [...]

There’s never been a famine in the United States, and one thing alone is responsible for this: private property rights. Capitalistic societies are the wealthiest societies in the history of the world, and it is the absence of fully protected property that creates poverty. As the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto puts it in his [...]

The population of the entire world could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space about the size of Jacksonville, Florida. Ninety-seven percent of the earth’s land surface is empty. If you allotted to each person 1,250 square feet (which is quite a bit), all the people in the world would fit into the state of Texas. According [...]

In the beginning, and for several decades afterward, slavery was not primarily a governmental institution, neither in Europe, nor the United States. Initially, the enslavement of Africans was almost all done privately. There were, to be sure, a handful of governmental charters, but in the early days, the preponderating number of slaves were traded by [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray: I’ve always been told it’s better to be shot at and missed than shit at and hit. While getting shit on obviously does suck, getting shot at means someone doesn’t like you enough to want to shoot at you in the first place. So is it really better? Scatman Dear [...]

The translators of the earliest English bibles were monks immersed in Latin. This is important to remember since they were translating directly from Greek, and agape, the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, meaning “To esteem highly.” Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey! You are a true friend to the workingman, such as me. Your book Leave Us Alone should be required reading in our schools. Don’t you get sick and tired of capitalism being everyone’s escape goat, like I do? The halls of congress are crowded with representatives of the “X” [...]

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography. In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were [...]

The following is Chapter 21 of Leave Us Alone: Before the Great Depression of the 1930’s and 1940’s, there were a number of depressions and recessions in this country, two of the most notable being the Panic of 1819 and the depression of 1837. In every instance prior to the Great Depression, the government policy [...]

The two essential claims of the environmentalists, which I take for granted are already well known to everyone, are (1) that continued economic progress is impossible, because of the impending exhaustion of natural resources (it is from this notion that the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” comes), and (2) that continued economic progress, indeed, much of [...]

Editor’s Note: this is Part 2 of a two-part debate. Read Part 1 here. Part 2 — The Debate Rages On: We Are Not In Climate Crisis Dr. Gray’s rebuttal to Dr. Trenberth: Kevin Trenberth has given the standard response that human-induced global warming advocates always give to their critics. He cites the large number [...]

The following, which took place before ClimateGate, is a written debate between Dr. Kevin Trenberth — head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder — and Dr. William Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. This debate originally appeared in the Fort Collins Forum and [...]

Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922. He died January 27, 2010. Zinn taught Political Science at Boston University from 1964 until 1988; he was an American historian, of sorts, a self-proclaimed Marxist who, by his own admission, did not believe in objective history: I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of [...]

From the moment oil first made it into the mainstream, peak oil and the imminent depletion of fossil fuels have been vehemently predicted. A by-no-means exhaustive list of those predictions might run something like this: “I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has [...]

Under President George W. Bush, who was the Herbert Hoover of his day, appropriated government programs grew from $298 billion to $613 billion. Under President George W. Bush, Social Security spending went from $406 billion to $662 billion. Under President George W. Bush, Medicare spending went from $216 billion to $425 billion. Under under President [...]

A reader writes: Dear Harvey Ray: Is there proof of God? Can science prove that God doesn’t exist? Signed, Hopelessly Devoted Dear Hopelessly Devoted: No, science cannot. In fact, nothing can. Yet we can be certain that God doesn’t exist — by virtue of the very nature of proof. The meaning of proof precludes proving [...]

Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group. The word capitalism was coined by Karl Marx, in the 1850′s. Marx used it to denounce private ownership of the means of production and the autonomous workings of the free market. Capitalism [...]

Read Part 1 of this article here. Take an empty beer bottle. We can either throw that glass bottle away or recycle it. Assume for a moment that we all want what’s best for the planet. Assume, therefore, that we want to use as few resources as possible. Should we recycle our beer bottle, then? [...]

Few arguments are more dangerous than the ones that “feel” right but can’t be justified (Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981). Paradoxically, recycled trash is exactly what you get 99 times out of 100 when the sacred subject of recycling comes up. Recycling is the process whereby rubbish is converted into reusable materials. [...]

The most obvious place to begin any real discussion of water is in pointing out that right now on planet earth, water in its potable form is about the most abundant resource there is. No one even passingly acquainted with the subject seriously disputes this. In the words of water specialist Fredrik Segerfeldt: “Water is [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray: I recently read a synopsis of a book about the question of animal rights, and I’m curious to know your take. Do animals possess rights? If so, where do these rights reside? Thanks, Pig Bodine Dear Pig Bodine: Rights are a formal codification of human freedom. Rights, as Herbert Spencer [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: I’m a fellow who exercises regularly. As a result, I often find myself the victim of a multitude of aches and pains, including these peculiar shooting pains in my balls. Without a doubt, though, the pain that plagues me most are side aches. What ARE these things? Doubled Over [...]

Politically, global warming and climate change have little if anything to do with climate science, and the fact that this subject has become such an overwhelming political issue is a fine testament to how poorly the world understands the legitimate functions of government, and why those functions are legitimate. Indeed, it turns out that the [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: Who’s the better filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch? P. Durango Dear P. Durango: Are you kidding me? But there’s no comparison. As a filmmaker, David Lynch possesses innumerable shortcomings, foremost of which is the fact that he’s an obscurantist extraordinaire — and this is no small thing. The [...]

A reader writes: Dear Sir: You are reported to have said that there is no order or disorder in the universe apart from what man himself puts there — this in spite of your well-known preoccupation with a fluid and congruent universe. Can you tell us how you reconcile this, with regard in particular to [...]

The difference between the cynic and the skeptic is the difference between epistemology and ethics. It is the difference between brain and body. Skepticism is an epistemological word. Cynicism is ethical. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality. The Greek word skopein [...]

Environmentalism has so thoroughly permeated world culture that the saving-the-planet rhetoric is accepted even by those who don’t really regard themselves as dyed-in-the-skein environmentalists. It is taught as holy writ in public schools, and it’s espoused by poets, priests, and politicians alike. This monstrous ideology would, given the first opportunity, destroy humankind, a fact of [...]

Philosophy is an inescapable fact of human life because humans, as John Milton said, spend the better part of their lives inside their own minds. Humans, in other words, think to survive, and life, therefore, is not primarily physical. It’s psychological. Philosophy is indispensable because the fundamentals of thought are entirely philosophical. Any attempt to [...]

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1919 and abolished in 1945. It came into full power under Adolph Hitler in 1933, and proceeded at that time to slaughter a spectacular number of people in a relatively short span of years. Socialists today are of course universally agreed that Nazism was many things, [...]

Epistemology is the science of knowledge. The word derives from the Greek episteme, which means knowledge. Epistemology proper didn’t actually begin until Rene Descartes (1596-1650); but the stuff of epistemology — logic, reason, deduction, induction, et cetera — has been with us since the Ancient Greeks. Epistemology is an extraordinarily complicated discipline that starts with [...]

He is not nor was he ever regarded as a saint by the Catholic Church, and the St. before his name refers to his putative homeland. No one knows where the enigmatic Comte de Saint Germain came from, and no one knows for sure where he went. He vanished into time without any trace. The [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: Could there be time travelers from the future among us and if so, does that mean a time machine has already been invented? Dear Anonymous: Your question is a fascinating one. Actually, it reminds me of a similar query people used to put to me all the time: “Do [...]

It’s high time we dispel once and for all the absurd myth that Ronald Reagan was somehow for deregulation. Statistically speaking, the size of bureaucracy, in terms of sheer civilian manpower, increased dramatically under Reagan, so that by the time he was finished, there were well over 200,000 more government workers than in 1980, when [...]

It insults the sophisticate like a sacrilege, to the outlander as alien as unwritten dialect, and both are correct to call it capitalistic. Miniature marketplace of candy smells and gum, plantless and plastic, an assault upon all things organic, not postmodern but modern, a modern mercantile, with its gleaming tile floors and lurid lights that [...]

In 1993, senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. The outcome: Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What happened next, however, is the real crime: According to the British charity Oxfam, many of these children were forced into prostitution. Thanks to Senator Harkin — who lives in the complete luxury [...]

A reader writes: Dear Ray Harvey: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky? I ask because, like everyone else in academia, I think he’s about the smartest man in the world. Best, D Dear D: Which Noam Chomsky are you referring to? The one who openly supports Hezbollah? Or do you mean the one with [...]

Ethics is the study of moral philosophy. Morality is the science of human action. First comes metaphysics, then epistemology, and then ethics. Those are the big three of philosophy. Of them, ethics is arguably the most complicated. Metaphysics and epistemology have a direct and immediate bearing on our most fundamental ethical questions: namely, is there [...]

There is, among rightwingers predominantly, though not exclusively, a rather persistent misconception that the United States is at its roots a religious nation. This is demonstrably false, and rather easy to verify, as we shall see in a moment, but first let us note that the subject is significant (and becoming more so) not because [...]

Dr. Yuri N. Maltsev is an economist who teaches at Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin. Prior to that, for many years, he was an economist for Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reform team. In 1989, he defected to the United States of America. Dr. Maltsev is now among the most articulate living defenders of laissez-faire capitalism. Just recently, [...]

Three major branches grow upon the ancient tree of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. From these three branches spring two secondary and one tertiary. The two secondary limbs are politics, a sub-branch of ethics, and aesthetics (also known as art), a sub-branch of epistemology. One limb alone grows from the sub-branch of politics, and that [...]

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” Said Oscar Wilde. Esthetics — or aesthetics, if you prefer — is the philosophy of art. It is a sub-branch of epistemology. Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, spawns esthetics like Superman spawns sequels. Esthetics is classified as a sub-branch of epistemology because art is a by-product of [...]

Postmodernism, in all its vicious variations, is a term devoid of any real content, and for this reason dictionaries and philosophy dictionaries offer very little help in defining it. And yet postmodernism has today become almost universally embraced as the dominant philosophy of science — which is the primary reason that science crumbles before our [...]

In May of 1606, the first American settlers arrived in Jamestown. The Virginia Tidewater Region, where these original 104 set up their colony, was a breathtakingly fertile chunk of land. So it was that these first American settlers found more resources than they could at first believe: oceans teeming with seafood, woodlands alive with birds, [...]