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Note To Readers

Both my websites have been glitchy the past several weeks, and then yesterday (or perhaps the night before) they both went down: offline completely.

I wasn’t aware of the problem for several hours, until a friend wrote and asked me if I knew The Journal Pulp was offline. I spent most of last night and all this morning trying to fix the problem. It wasn’t easy — primarily because I don’t know what I’m doing — but I believe I finally got her figured out. Nameservers, DNS records, hosting, change of servers, blah-blah-blah …

I thank you obsequiously for checking in with me, and please never doubt that I am eternally grateful for your readership and never take it for granted.

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Denmark, Sweden, & The Nordic Countries Are Not Socialist


Would you like to hear absolute, irrefutable proof of the overwhelming superiority of laissez faire?

Here it is:

Two-hundred years ago and since the dawn of humankind, the entire world was poor.

Now, less than ten percent of the world is poor.

Two-hundred years ago and since the dawn of humankind, the very wealthiest people in the world didn’t have access to the quality of food, drink, medicine, shelter, transportation, lumen hours, entertainment, and much more that the poorest people in the developed world now have access to.

That is the total testament to the absolute superiority and success of laissez-faire, which is a system of freedom protected by law.

Concerning collectivism, one of the most popular myths going today is that Nordic countries, like Denmark and Sweden, are shining examples of the success of Democratic Socialism.

This myth is used to bolster the hip-and-faddish quasi-coolness of what is in actuality an embarrassingly antiquated and shabby ideology — an ideology of catastrophic failure. When, therefore, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told Harvard business students, in no uncertain terms, that Denmark is not a socialist country, no one in North America really believed him.

Why did they not believe him?

Because they didn’t want to believe him. 

Too much is at stake — entire world-views and lives constructed upon foundations of smoke-and-mirrors which when exposed will crumble into nothingness.

Still, the facts remain:

“I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said. “Therefore I would like to make one thing clear: Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

He’s absolutely right.

The people who praise the Nordic countries for being socialist are not coincidentally the same sorts who praised Venezuela’s dictatorial regime — until it collapsed, that is.

I mean, of course, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and all the other usual suspects.

Here is what none of them know or wish to know:

The Nordic countries are in many ways the diametric opposite of socialist:

They are leaders in the economic freedom index and ease of doing business according to the World Bank.

In virtually all Nordic countries, private property — the crux of laissez-faire — is guaranteed by law, and the individual’s savings are fully private and free from government control.

Most Nordic countries, including Denmark and Sweden, have lower corporate tax-rates than the United States.

In Nordic countries, the government does not dictate or impose mandatory schooling but simply administers and promotes choice between private and state-run services.

The Nordic countries are leaders in private banking, which finances the vast majority of economic activity — which is to say, over eighty percent.

The Nordic countries have become leaders in attracting capital, guaranteeing legal security and private investment, and they are also leaders in the privatization of inefficient state-owned entities.

Quoting Norwegian economist Per Bylund:

While very little known, Sweden’s welfare state only “worked” through the early 1970s thanks to its deliberately preserving capitalist institutions and expanding its scope at a slower rate than the country’s overall economic growth.

This changed in the 1970s, which necessitated several devaluations of the currency in only a few years intended to “boost” exports, and then a somewhat lost decade in the 1980s.

The welfare state finally imploded under financial problems in what can best be categorized as an economic depression in the early 1990s. The social democratic government resigned, government lost control (to the extent it ever had any), and politicians from all parties got together to enforce strict budget discipline (no deficits) and consistently cut back on the state’s generous welfare benefits. At the same time, pseudo-market forces were reintroduced through Friedmanite voucher systems, private health care was no longer prohibited, and the national pharmacy monopoly was privatized.

Even Sweden’s railway traffic is now carried out largely by private companies.

Also, since 2006, Sweden has also seen relatively extensive tax cuts. Of course, these measures were necessitated by the great crisis in and around 1992 — the state does not limit its own power unless it absolutely has to.

(Link)

And quoting the equally excellent economist Daniel Lacalle:

[In the Nordic Countries,] the public sector does not dictate the growth pattern or the way in which the economy should be run: it is generated from the private sector, which finances more than 60 percent of research and development, and government applies private-sector best practices of efficiency and transparency in the management of public services. In addition, public officials do not have a life-long position.

Nordic countries have carried out successful privatizations of state sectors, from telecommunications to electricity generation and distribution. Even the postal service and many forests were privatized.

They have a labor market that is among the most flexible in the world.

In these countries, private education is encouraged through school vouchers, not forced state-run schools.

There is also the fact that it is virtually impossible to copy in the US a model used in countries with fewer inhabitants than New York, but the most important difference is that choice, freedom and private initiative are the cornerstone of Nordic nations, pillars of a society that none of the populists want to implement.

No, socialism is not the model of the Nordic countries. And the interventionists that use these countries as their “model” have a completely different system in mind: State control.

I recommend you read Scandinavian Unexceptionalism by Nima Sanandaji or “The Secret of their Success”in “The Economist.”

The success of the Nordic countries has been to take pro-market measures, privatize inefficient sectors and guarantee private property, wealth creation as well as legal and investment security.

There is nothing Socialist about the Nordic Nations…. Socialism is the political and economic theory which defends that the means of production, distribution, and financing should be owned or controlled by the state. Nordic countries are NOT socialist. They are capitalist societies with a welfare state, like most capitalist nations have, by the way. The US as well. And they are the first ones that understood what we all know: socialism never works.

(Link)

Learn this, Reader — learn it, understand it, and remember it — and you will know something that the rest of the world does not know.

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“Why Deny the Beautiful Coral Reefs Fringing Stone Island?” by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy

Doctor Jennifer Marohasy, for whom I once had the honor of writing an article, is a scientist I admire very much.

She is among other things an independent thinker down to her very core, which makes her by definition a true scientist — by which I mean: one who follows the evidence wherever it leads no matter the political opposition, the hysteria, the prevailing dogmas, the vitriol, the blowback.

She’s an Australian who, along with Doctor John Abbot (formerly of Central Queensland University), did much study of and work upon issues concerning the Great Barrier Reef.

In 2002, she began documenting her “concerns,” as she puts it, “with the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) ‘Save the Reef Campaign’ including their perverse influence of this campaign on public policy in a long review entitled ‘WWF Says Jump, Governments Ask How High” and a short piece for the IPA Review in March 2003 entitled, ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation.’”

From her website:

“My initial interest in global warming was driven by a desire to better understand water issues, and in particular the likely affect of increasing levels of carbon dioxide on Australian rainfall.”

The following is a recent and important article she wrote for her website. I encourage you to read it in full — because it is an eye-popping, jaw-dropping illustration of what science (climate science especially, but not exclusively) has come to today:

Why Deny the Beautiful Coral Reefs Fringing Stone Island?

by Jennifer Marohasy

We live in an era when it is politically incorrect to say the Great Barrier Reef is doing fine, except if it’s in a tourist brochure. The issue has nothing to do with the actual state of corals, but something else altogether.

Given that the Great Barrier Reef is one ecosystem comprising nearly 3000 individual reefs stretching for 2000 kilometres, damaged areas can always be found somewhere. And a coral reef that is mature and spectacular today may be smashed by a cyclone tomorrow – although neither the intensity nor frequency of cyclones is increasing at the Great Barrier Reef, despite climate change. Another reason that coral dies is because of sea-level fall that can leave some corals at some inshore reefs above water on the lowest tides. These can be exceptionally low tides during El Niño events that occur regularly along the east coast of Australia. 

A study published by Reef Check Australia, undertaken between 2001 to 2014 – where citizen scientists followed an agreed methodology at 77 sites on 22 reefs encompassing some of the Great Barrier Reef’s most popular dive sites – concluded that 43 sites showed no net change in hard coral cover, 23 sites showed an increase by more than 10 per cent (10–41 per cent, net change), and 17 sites showed a decrease by more than 10 per cent (10–63 per cent, net change). 

Studies like this, which suggest there is no crisis but that there can be change, are mostly ignored by the mainstream media. However, if you mention such information and criticise university academics at the same time, you risk being attacked in the mainstream media. Or in academic Dr Peter Ridd’s case, you could be sacked by your university. 

After a career of 30 years working as an academic at James Cook University, Dr Ridd was sacked essentially for repeatedly stating that there is no ecological crisis at the Great Barrier Reef, but rather there is a crisis in the quality of scientific research undertaken and reported by our universities. It all began when he sent photographs to News Ltd journalist Peter Michael showing healthy corals at Bramston Reef, near Stone Island, off Bowen in north Queensland. 

More recently, I personally have been ‘savaged’ – and in the process incorrectly labelled right wing and incorrectly accused of being in the pay of Gina Rinehart – by Graham Readfearn in an article published in The Guardian. This was because I supported Dr Ridd by showing in some detail a healthy coral reef fringing the north-facing bay at Stone Island in my first film, Beige Reef. 

According to the nonsense article by Mr Readfearn, quoting academic Dr Tara Clark, I should not draw conclusions about the state of corals at Stone Island from just the 25 or so hectares (250,000 square metres) of near 100 per cent healthy hard coral cover filmed at Beige Reef on 27 August 2019. Beige Reef fringes the north-facing bay at Stone Island. 

This is hypocritical – to say the least – given Dr Clark has a paper published by Nature claiming the coral reefs at Stone Island are mostly all dead. She based this conclusion on just two 20-metre long transects that avoided the live section of healthy corals seaward of the reef crest. 

I will refer to this reef as Pink Plate Reef – given the pink plate corals that I saw there when I went snorkelling on 25 August 2019.

Dr Clark – the senior author on the research report, which also includes eight other mostly high-profile scientists – is quoted in The Guardian claiming I have misrepresented her Great Barrier Reef study. In particular, she states, 

“We never claimed that there were no Acropora corals present in 2012.”

Yet this is really the only conclusion that can be drawn from the information presented in her report, which states in different sections the following: 

“Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.

“At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.

“For Stone Island, the limited evidence of coral growth since the early 19th Century suggests that recovery is severely lagging.

“… by 1994 the reef was covered in a mixture of coral rubble and algae with no living Acropora and very few massive coral colonies present …”

Clark and colleagues recorded the corals along two transects, which they explain included a section of the reef now stranded above the mean low spring sea level. The sections they studied are some metres away from healthy corals – Porites and Acropora species, including pink plate corals that I snorkelled over on 25 August 2019.

Please read the full article here.

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The 4th of July & the True Meaning of Human Freedom and Independence

Ama-gi: Sumerian symbol which many believe to be the first written expression of liberty: circa 3000 BC.

Independence is autonomy. It is the freedom to govern yourself and to rely upon your own independent judgment.

Independence is the freedom to express your own individuality.

But what, finally, is freedom?

Freedom, in its most fundamental form, has only one meaning: it is the omission of force.

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

It simply means that you are left alone.

It means that every individual, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, possesses the absolute right to her own life — and only her own life.

The thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Freedom is one of those things that virtually everyone believes in — that is, until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. And then almost no one believes in it.

The difficult thing for many people to accept about freedom is that it doesn’t actually guarantee much of anything.

It doesn’t guarantee success or happiness, or shelter, or a certain income, or food, or healthcare, or a “level playing field” or a level training field, or anything else that must ultimately derive from the production or labor of others.

Freedom means only that you are free to pursue these things and that if you achieve them, they are yours unalienably, which in turns means: they cannot be taken, transferred, revoked, or made alien.

“The legitimate functions of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Here, he’s speaking of — and against — the initiation of force.

Around the same time Thomas Jefferson was writing those words, another erudite fellow, a German named Wilhelm von Humboldt, independently came to the exact same conclusion:

“Any state interference into private affairs, where there is no reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned” (The Limits of State Action, 1791).

That — the absence of violence, the omission of force — is finally what Independence Day is all about.

Happy 4th of July.

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Modern-Day Socialism and the 30-year Anniversary of Tiananmen Square

This recent tweet captures the half-assed distinction Marx tried to make between so-called bourgeois property and personal property:

On the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — when the totalitarian socialist government of China quashed, with extreme force, a political uprising by the people of China who rebelled at last against the obliteration of their freedom — I sincerely hope that the dire error of the illustration above is both obvious and horrifying.

If, however, it’s not obvious or horrifying, this is perhaps a testament to the steady erosion and the subsequent non-understanding of the concept of rights — which, in turn, is the result of the ideology and the ideas which have for decades reigned supreme in academia and across western culture.

The fatal error in the illustration above is this:

A complete non-understanding of — or, worse, deliberately ignoring — the supreme importance of the amount of money (i.e. capital) that it takes to start and run a large business, including but not limited to all the equipment required; and even more important than that: the role of ideas and the knowledge and learning that goes into starting and maintaining a business.

James Jerome Hill, Thomas Edison, John Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Ray Crock, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of others could be appropriately cited here — and they should be: because they represent the principle precisely: they and all others like them, who have brought the entire world incalculable amounts in incalculable ways, are the total argument to the illustration above. Moreover, any employee of any business is free to raise her or his own capital and invest her or his own time and learning into a business of her or his own, and the division of labor and the specialization which creates the machines that the business-owner buys with the capital she’s raised is perfectly legitimate, and it is good.

But I suggest we make it more personal:

Let us say your mother, who was born into poverty, the second oldest in a family of ten, and who then worked very hard all her life, beginning as a young teenager, in restaurants and kitchens around southwestern Colorado — let us say that one day this mother of yours, after 53 years of working and learning her trade, of perfecting her pie-crusts and cinnamon rolls and donuts and biscuits and all the other recipes she learned and developed and invented, finally went for it: She mortgaged the home she did not yet fully own, and she raised other money, and she at last, at age 54, opened her own restaurant.

She thereafter worked tirelessly to make this restaurant succeed — and it did: People voluntarily and happily came into her establishment and paid their money to eat her pies and cinnamon rolls and donuts and biscuits and soups and everything else she’d learn to make and create, and which she daily worked so hard in producing anew. In turn, your mother, because her business was earning money, could afford to hire people — people who voluntarily agreed to work for her in exchange for a wage, and whom she taught the things she’d learned over the course of her life. And more than that: these employees liked your mother — they liked working for her, because she was fair, and they learned from her as she learned from them, and the money was good for everyone. The contractual relationship was mutually beneficial: because she hired them and they voluntarily agreed upon the wage she offered, and because the restaurant, which (let us never forget) was her idea and upon which she took all the financial risk and started up, and, armed with knowledge she’d accumulated and developed over four decades of her life, she worked tirelessly to build — knowledge and skill people willingly paid for — she succeeded.

Now imagine someone suddenly comes along and tells your mother that the employees who voluntarily agreed to work for her, and who do so by contractual arrangement, and who invested no capital in starting up this restaurant or buying any of the expensive equipment, and who can leave at any time — they by right have equal ownership in your mother’s business, merely by virtue of the fact that she hired them.

That is the horrifying error in the illustration above.

The exact same principle applies to any business, no matter the specific industry.

If you think that I’m in any way being hyperbolic, you’re perhaps forgetting your history lessons.

It’s called expropriation. It is a horrible injustice — and it’s flatly, unequivocally wrong.

It’s what everyone from Lenin, to Mao, to Castro, to Pol Pot, to Che, to Occupy Wall-Street, to many others, believe:

Egalitarianism by force.

Note the phrase “by force.” Under a system of freedom, anyone is allowed to create a business which is non-hierarchical and entirely employee-owned. Under the opposite system, however, the opposite thing is not true.

It is a very great irony indeed that socialism — which through the media-mob and especially the social-media-mob — has, in the last two decades especially, developed a reputation as being hip and trendy and young and even new and cool: a glittering new idea, this 21st century socialism. The irony is that it’s just the opposite, and the grim joke is on all the true-believers: because the ideas which underpin all socialist theory are embarrassingly outdated, antiquated, and old as hell. They’re also proven failures, mathematically doomed.

Not only are these ideas out-of-date, in fact: they’re out-of-touch — out-of-touch with even the most rudimentary economic laws — and it is a frightening thing when the leaders of the free world, behind whom the people have lined up in lockstep, do not have any inkling of these rudimentary laws (such as knowing that America absorbs and subsidizes much of the world’s socialized pharmaceuticals).

You have the natural-born right to grow wealthy, so long as you do not infringe upon the rights of others: your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you need any more convincing, please watch the following debate — it’s genuinely fascinating — in which the young, hip socialist (founder of Jacobin Magazine) is soundly defeated by a so-so defender of private-property and free-exchange. I urge you to take particular note of the young socialist’s absolute refusal to answer the question: if people voluntarily want to work for someone who starts up a business, and if these same people voluntarily agree to that business-owner’s offered wage, should they be free to do so? Should such business transactions be legal and allowed?

And the reason the hip socialist does not answer this question is that he doesn’t believe this business structure and this sort of voluntary transaction should be allowed — because he, like so many others, has bought into the dismally old and failed ideology of egalitarianism-by-force.

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Quiddity

This certainly beats most of the other stuff I’ve had sent to me lately. Thank you TRD! And thank you Merrriam-Webster for using my sentence.

“Quiddity” — Word of the Day, September 6th, 2018.

That article, incidentally, which discusses the difference between mezcal and tequila, was part of a monthly series I once wrote for the Coloradoan newspaper.

If you don’t want to deal with their fireworks display of pop-up advertisements, you may read it here on my website.

I always thought that along with the heartbreaking beauty of distilled spirits, it was one of my better efforts, which I know isn’t saying much.

Nevertheless.



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Oxford Professor: “Control Them for the Good of Everyone”

Danny Dorling

The BBC, which is owned by the British government, recently hosted a talk from Oxford Professor Danny Dorling — a quintessentially elitist talk, but even worse than that: one which shows how completely out-of-touch with reality (economic reality, in particular) so many of these intellectuals are. Please note also that further on in the lecture (you can watch the video here) what Professor Danny Dorling classifies as “rich” includes even poor people in the United States. Why?

Because poor people in the USA, as Eric Worrall explains it, “are rich by global standards — and so pretty much everyone in the USA is part of the target group the professor believes needs to be ‘controlled.'”

Here’s one of the most astonishing parts of the professor’s talk — which is nothing more (or less) than the latest repackaging of Marxism:

I’m Danny Dorling, I’m professor of Geography at University of Oxford, and in my very humble opinion one of the worst things about high economic inequality is it damages the environment.

High economic inequality is extremely damaging to the environment, because the greedy do not know how to control themselves.

Thomas Piketty, who is a brilliant economist from Paris, has done incredible detailed work recently, looking at the consumption and pollution patterns of the richest one percent, and he has shown that the richest one percent disproportionately contribute to greenhouse gasses and to carbon pollution which are damaging our planet.

This is because they buy so many things they do not need, because money is not an issue for them.

It’s because they have so many homes that they travel between, is because when they travel they don’t travel in a sustainable way. At the extreme they’re flying in private jets; there isn’t a better way to heat up the planet and damage our environment than to fly in a private jet and they need to learn the importance of this.

Because climate change is the biggest threat that we’re facing, and we’re partly facing it because we’re allowing the greedy people to carry on being greedy, and we’re not controlling them for the good of everyone.

[Boldface mine]

Please reread that last paragraph — especially if you think I exaggerate the dangerousness and the full-blown Neo-Marxist egalitarian roots that are an inherent part of the environmentalist philosophy.

Note also that Thomas Picketty’s postmodern and explicitly Marxist book has been thoroughly — and I’m mean thoroughly — rebutted and debunked.

I want to point out also here that even if the world were to implement all of the proposed measures (proposed by Professor Dorling and all the others) to reduce carbon emissions — which measures, incidentally, almost never include carbon-free nuclear energy — it would not only NOT have any significant effect on global temperatures (“Don’t Tell Anyone, But We Just had Two Consecutive Years of Record-Breaking Global Cooling): it would devastate world economies to such an extent that even wealthy countries wouldn’t have the wealth by means of which we deal with societal issues.

If low-impact is the ideal, I have a question for Professor Dorling and anyone else who thinks similarly: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea?

The correct answer, of course, is North Korea, which has a much lower impact upon the environment — by far, in fact — and which exists in grinding poverty, misery, repression, authoritarian control, death.

If low-impact is the ideal, none of the world’s great cities would ever have been built or allowed: from New York City to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Tokyo, Chicago, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Los Angles, and everything in between — gone.

As environmental guru Maurice Strong said, at Earth Summit:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Reader, at the very, very minimum, please understand this: without industrialization, the division-of-labor and the transmission of knowledge are instantly obliterated, and that means, among innumerable other things, all the benefits of the division-of-labor and the transmission of knowledge — from phones, computers, tablets, modern medicine, planes, trains, automobiles, running water, reliable clean water, heat and air-conditioning, supermarkets, highways, radios and movies and televisions, buildings, bridges, electricity, as all other forms of energy, and a billion other things besides — are all gone. Because industrialization which singlehandedly created the division-of-labor which facilitates the transmission of knowledge is alone responsible for this.

So please let me quote environmental guru Maurice Strong again:

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

In other news, Seattle’s Brazen Tax Grab Ignores Unintended Economic Consequences and California Set to Become First State to Require Solar Panels on All New Houses

Please remember: if it has to be subsidized, it’s not sustainable.

The solution is to get all subsidies out of all energy — as with everything else — and simply leave people alone. Let supply be determined by consumer demand.

“California is set to become the first state to require solar panels on all newly built single-family houses,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Not only will consumers have no choice in the matter, but neither will voters. “The state’s Energy Commission is scheduled to vote Wednesday on the rules, which are expected to pass and take effect in 2020,” the Times explains. “The regulations, which would also apply to new multifamily buildings of three stories or fewer, don’t need the approval of the Legislature.”

The Commission estimates the average cost of a new single-family home will increase by $9,500 but that utility bills will decline by roughly twice as much over the period of a 30-year mortgage. Why not let consumers decide whether the projected future savings justify the immediate up-front costs? Because here people can do whatever they want, as long as it’s mandatory.

California Already Has a Housing and Poverty Problem

Median home values in California have been climbing since 1940, now approach $500,000, and are more than twice the median value nationwide, according to economist Issi Romen of BuildZoom. When factoring in the cost of living, California has the nation’s highest effective poverty rate. Skyrocketing housing costs are chiefly responsible, contends Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-leaning California Budget Policy Center.

“Every year, the state falls roughly 100,000 units short of what it needs to keep up with housing demand,” Patrick Sisson writes in Curbed.com. Sisson cites a 2016 McKinsey Global Institute study, which found that California real estate prices are rising three times faster than household incomes and that more than half the state’s households cannot afford the cost of housing.

Kelly Knutsen of the trade group California Solar & Storage Association assured the Times that the new mandate would produce “a significant increase in the solar market in California.” He said it would also send “a national message that … we are a leader in the clean energy economy.” Permit me to translate: what’s good for the solar industry is good for the country.

(Source)



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The Godless Constitution

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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 of any particular issue I or anyone else may have with religion in the capacity of religion, but rather because the true founding premise of this country cannot survive upon a religious base.

That founding premise is the principle of individual rights.

The United States, as we’ve noted before (and can never note enough), is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly upon individual rights.

It was the principle of individual rights — the sheer strength of it — that corrected the contradictions and the great injustices that were also once a part of the United States.

It was the principle of individual rights that successfully overthrew the barbaric institution of slavery:

It was the principle of individual rights that brought this country to civil war, and it was the principle of individual rights that won out.

Among many other things, individual rights mean that if you choose to worship a Christian God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship a Pagan God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship no God at all, you are free to do so.

In this country, you are free to do anything you wish, provided you do not infringe upon the equal rights of any other person.

Your rights stop where another’s begin. In this way, rights are compossible — i.e. they do not and cannot conflict.

Such is the nature of individual rights.

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

The reason rights cannot survive a religious grounding is that religion, by definition, is built upon faith, whereas rights are the exact opposite: they are demonstrably rooted in the human quiddity — namely, the faculty of volition, moral agency, and human individuation.

From a philosophical perspective, a religious defense of rights is absurdly unequipped to withstand the onslaught of secular attacks, as recent history has also proven, and indeed it is this as much as anything else that has eroded the principle of rights down to virtual non-existence:

The most prominent defenders of rights have sought to defend rights from a religious rather than philosophic premise, and rights have suffered immeasurably from it.

So much so, in fact, that the concept of individual rights is understood by only the slimmest minority of people, and that is why the subject of rights has all but vanished from political discourse today.

Religion must be separated from rights if rights are to survive.

It is a fact that neither the word “God” nor the word “Christ” appears anywhere in the United States Constitution. When asked why, Alexander Hamilton replied: “We forgot.”

The Jeffersonian “wall of separation” was actually originated by a Baptist minister named Roger Williams, who fought mightily to remove religion from government and vice-versa. Thomas Jefferson fully sanctioned this idea — all rightwing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding — when, in 1801, he wrote the following in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all of his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Please note the First Amendment echoes there. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

And Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust of the United States.”

Note also in Jefferson’s native state of Virginia, the 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which he and his friend James Madison helped draft, read, in part:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions of belief….”

John Adams: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” (Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli).

James Madison: “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise…. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution” (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments).

In a letter from 1819, James Madison wrote that “the number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state.”

In an undated essay, Madison also wrote the following: “Strongly guarded is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States.”

Benjamin Franklin: “My parents had given me betimes religious impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt Revelation itself” (p. 66 of Ben Franklin’s autobiography).

Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all” (The Age of Reason, p. 89).

Thomas Paine: “All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this think called revelation, or revealed religion…. What is it the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder…. Loving of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has beside no meaning. Those who preach the doctrine of loving their enemies are in general prosecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches” (The Age of Reason).

George Washington: “I oppose the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution…. [Every American should] worship according to the dictates of his own heart.”

In 1783, George Washington rejoiced that in this country “the light of truth and reason had triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition.”

John Adams: “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it’” (Letter to Charles Cushing, October 19, 1756).

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote: “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”

Also from John Adams: “The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity…. Thirteen governments [referring to the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without pretence [sic] of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”

Reverend Jedidiah Champion, closing his Sunday service with a prayer in 1797, said this: “O, Lord: wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President [Thomas Jefferson] a double portion of They grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”

Reverend Timothy Dwight, 1798, said: “Why should the religious support the philosophers, the atheists, like Thomas Jefferson?”

Reverend William Linn opposed Thomas Jefferson in print for “his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion …”

“And if,” continues the God-fearing Reverend, “this opposer of Christianity [were to become President it would] destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.”

New York clergyman, Dr. John Mason publicly referred to Thomas Jefferson as “a confirmed infidel and lacks so much as a decent respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

New England Palladium (a popular newspaper): “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous prostitute, under the title of Reason, will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to worship of the Most High.”

The Christian Federalist: “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected president, those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin — which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence — defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”

Thomas Jefferson was repeatedly called by clergymen “a howling atheist,” and even accused of “libel against Christ.”

Ask yourself: if he was devoutly religious, why was he slandered so? And why did he edit out all the miracles in his copy of the New Testament?

Thomas Jefferson: “An amendment was proposed by inserting the words ‘Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ but was rejected by a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination” (From Thomas Jefferson’s biography; please mark well those last words: “Infidel” meant “unbeliever,” which in turn meant “atheist”).

Thomas Jefferson: “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions…. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no harm for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (Notes on the State of Virginia).

Thomas Jefferson: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classes with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” (From the margins of Jefferson’s Bible).

Thomas Jefferson: “They [the clergy who denounced him] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (i.e. any faith forced upon us).

Thomas Jefferson: “I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity [has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man. Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter …”

Thomas Jefferson giving advice to his nephew: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than the blindfolded fear…. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue on the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Our rights have no dependence on religious opinions.”

Faith and force are the antithesis of reason and rights.

Rights do not depend upon religion or God or gods but just the opposite: rights are an inherent part of the human faculty of rationality.

Rights are how we survive on this earth, and they exist without any reference whatsoever to a religious ideology.

Until that principle is fully grasped, rights are every bit as endangered by conservatives as they are by liberals — and that’s saying a lot.

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Associated Press Lines A Pistol Up To Ted Cruz’s Brain

There are subtle subliminal messages, and then there are those that almost hit you right between the eyes.

From the hyper-partisan Associated Press (AP) — which, incidentally, still masquerades as actual journalism — on June 21, 2015:

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The image is even more edifying when you compare it to other AP photo’s over the past few years:

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And then there are these, some (but not all) of which also come from the AP:

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Good old-fashioned objective journalism. Where’s Noam Chomsky when you need him?

To be fair, the AP did today qualify their choice of photos, saying (and I quote):

“The images were not intended to portray Sen. Cruz in a negative light.”





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Leonard Nimoy: He Lived Long and Prospered

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In 1975, when Leonard Nimoy was 45-years-old, he wrote a book titled, I Am Not Spock.

Some 20 years later, he wrote another book, a follow-up (of sorts), titled I Am Spock.

One finds oneself strangely heartened by Leonard Nimoy’s eventual acceptance of his iconic status — and the colossal shadow his most famous character cast.

What accounts for the sheer size of that shadow?

Answer: Spock represents eternal ideas, timeless themes, and that is why his character — and, for that matter, Star Trek — endures and will continue to endure.

However campy it may (or may not) now seem, Star Trek never ceased in its ultimate mission: to explore the question of what it means to be alive and human.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the original Star Trek series, was greatly influenced by The Twilight Zone, which came right before Star Trek, and indeed it was The Twilight Zone that popularized the use of science fiction as a vehicle for philosophical ideas.

From this standpoint, it was an ingenious method for probing the role of reason in human life.

That, I believe, largely accounts for Spock’s timeless appeal.

Leonard Nimoy was born March 26th, 1931, in the West End of Boston: Leonard Simon Nimoy, son of Max and Doris Nimoy — both Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, now part of present-day Ukraine — and he is exactly four days younger than his Star Trek co-star, William (“Common People“) Shatner.

He lived long, and he prospered.

Leonard Nimoy, RIP.





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Occupy Wall Street: Bullying Old Ladies, Lice Infestations, Defecating In Banks, Shutting Down Burger Kings — Yes, Barack, No Different From The Tea Party

It’s being called by some The Worst Media Double Standard in Recent History, and I couldn’t agree more. I’m referring of course to the mainstream media’s overwhelming support of the Occupy Wall Street movement vis-à-vis their utter vilification of the Tea Party, who paid for the permits (I know, because I was one who paid), who complied with the licensing laws, the littering laws, the pedestrian-traffic laws, the noise ordinance laws, and much much more — unlike these Occupy people protesting they know not what. So that when Barack Obama says that these people “are not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party” he as usual doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. It would be laughable if it weren’t so sickening.

Here’s the 99 percent you and I are supposedly a part of:

“Shut Down Burger King”:



Crapping quite literally in the entryway of a bank:



Pushing a 78-year-old (conservative) woman down the stairs:




Lice outbreaks in Portland:




Let us remember and never forget that this is the movement Obama and the democrats explicitly support.



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Does Exercise Really Promote Weight Loss?

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 their logs.

It turns out that the caloric intake of a lumberjack is, on average, about 5,000 calories per day.

By comparison, this same study measured the caloric intake of tailors. Tailors, it turns out, consume on average half that: 2,500 calories per day.

It was found in addition that those who change their occupation from light to heavy work, or vice-versa, develop corresponding changes in appetite.

All of which is by way of saying that physical activity makes you hungry. Not exactly news, and yet if it’s followed to its conclusion, the ramifications run deep.

The relationship between weight loss and exercise is a complex relationship, and no matter what anyone tells you, it is not well-understood.

Furthermore, despite prevailing wisdom, despite what you’ve been hammered with all your life, there’s not a shred of real evidence that suggests exercise promotes significant weight loss. As a matter of fact, at one time not so very long ago — up until 1962, to be precise — the medical prescription for obesity was bed rest.

An obesity and diabetes specialist named Russell Wilder, of the Mayo Clinic, lectured famously in 1932 on obesity. Among other things, Mr. Wilder told us that his “fat patients lost more weight with bed rest,” while “unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of weight loss” (Russell Wilder, 1932).

As Wilder and his colleagues reckoned it, “Light exercise burns an insignificant number of calories — amounts that are undone by comparatively effortless changes in diet.”

A University of Michigan researcher named Louis Newburgh calculated, in 1942, that the average man “expends only three calories climbing a flight of stairs. He will have to climb 20 flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread.”

Why then, ask some, don’t we simply skip the stairs and skip the bread? It’s a good question.

These physicians argued that the more taxing the physical activity, the more that the appetite increases. And study after study, beginning with those conducted on our previously mentioned lumberjacks and tailors, confirm this.

“Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal,” said Hugo Rony (not to be confused with Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat), in a 1940 textbook titled Obesity and Leanness. “Consistently high or low energy expenditures result in consistently high or low levels of appetite. Thus men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations.”

Mr. Rony here goes on to speak of our flapjack-eating lumberjacks, and ends, curiously enough, by asking the same question these men repeatedly asked him:

“Why did the train stop?”

Of course, the real question is not why the train did or didn’t stop, but why we’ve come to believe — and believe so overwhelmingly — the exact opposite of what was once the prevailing medical view?

Credit for that belongs to one Jean Mayer, initially of Harvard University, who then went on to become America’s most influential nutritionist.

As an authority on human-weight regulation, Mayer was among the very first of a new breed, a type that has since come to dominate the field. His predecessors — Wilder, Rony, Newburgh and others — had all been physicians who worked closely with obese and overweight patients. Mayer was not. His training was in physiological chemistry; he had obtained a doctorate at Yale with a dissertation on the interrelationship of vitamins A and C in rats. In the ensuing decades, he would publish hundreds of papers on different aspects of nutrition, including why we get fat, but he never had to reduce obese patients as part of his clinical obligation, and so his hypotheses were less fettered by anecdotal or real-life experience.

As early as 1953, after just a few years of research on laboratory mice, Mayer began extolling the virtues of exercise for weight control. By 1959, the New York Times was crediting him with having “debunked the popular theories” that exercise played little role in weight control. Mayer knew the obese often eat no more than the lean and occasionally even less. This seemed to exclude gluttony as a cause of their weight gain, which meant that these fat people had to be less physically active. Otherwise, how could they take in more calories than they expend and so become fat?

Through the sixties, Mayer documented the relationship between inactivity and the overweight. He noted that fat high-school girls ate “several hundred calories less” than lean classmates. “The laws of thermodynamics were, however, not flouted by this finding,” he wrote, because the obese girls expended less energy than the lean. They were much less active; they spent four times as many hours watching television. Mayer also studied infants. “The striking phenomenon is that the fatter babies were quiet, placid babies that had moderate intake,” Mayer reported, “whereas the babies who had the highest intake tended to be very thin babies, cried a lot, moved a lot, and became very tense.” Thus, Mayer concluded, “some individuals are born very quiet, inactive, and placid and with moderate intake get fat, and some individuals from the very beginning are very active and do not get particularly fat even with high intakes” (Gary Taubes, “We Can’t Work it Out”).

Jean Mayer pioneered the exercise and weight-loss practices that many people today consider axiomatic.

Jean Mayer cited “sedentary living” as the “most important factor” in obesity, and, for that matter, all other adverse health conditions appertaining thereunto.

“Modern people,” said Mayer, “are inert compared with their ancestors [who were] constantly engaged in hard physical labor…. The development of obesity is to a large extent the result of the lack of foresight of a civilisation [sic] which spends billions annually on cars, but is unwilling to include a swimming pool and tennis courts in the plans of every school” (Jean Mayer, 1968).

At that time, many doctors and nutritionists disagreed with Mayer’s pronouncements; and even now, a number of very reputable scientists still do.

“It is a common observation that many obese persons are lazy, i.e. they show decreased impulse to muscle activity. This may be, in part, an effect that excess weight would have on the activity impulse of any normal person” (Rony, 1941).

But isn’t it equally possible that obesity and physical inactivity are symptoms of the same cause?

And isn’t it obvious that the more physically active we are, the hungrier we get?

Mayer’s voracious attack on hunger completely masked the logical inconsistencies his arguments contain.

He did at one point acknowledge that “exercise could make us hungrier,” but in the same breath added “It wasn’t necessarily the case.”

This was the crux of Mayer’s nutritional philosophy.

He alleged a gap in the relationship between appetite and physical activity.

“If,” said Mayer, “exercise is decreased below a certain point, food intake no longer decreases. In other words, walking 30 minutes a day may be equivalent to four slices of bread, but if you don’t walk the half-hour, you still want to eat the four slices.”

This is untrue. And it’s the fatal flaw in his theory. As the lumberjack-tailor study makes very clear, physical activity has a direct and significant bearing on appetite.

And yet from his faulty premise, Mayer, unaware that he was upending the existing worldview on weight loss, wattled forward.

He based this conclusion on two (and only two) of his own studies from the mid-Fifties. The first purported to demonstrate that laboratory rats exercised for a few hours every day will eat less than rats that don’t exercise at all. But this was never replicated. In more recent experiments, the more rats run the more rats eat; weight remains unchanged. And when rats are retired from these exercise programmes, [sic] they eat more than ever and gain weight with age more rapidly than rats that were allowed to remain sedentary. With hamsters and gerbils, exercise increases body weight and body-fat percentage. So exercising makes these particular rodents fatter, not leaner.

Mayer’s second study was an assessment of the diet, physical activity and weights of workers and merchants at a mill in West Bengal, India. This article is still commonly cited as perhaps the only existing evidence that physical activity and appetite do not necessarily go hand in hand. But it, too, has never been replicated, despite (or perhaps because of) a half-century of improvements in methods of assessing diet and energy expenditure in humans. It helped that Mayer promoted his pro-exercise message with a fervor akin to a moral crusade (Gary Taubes, “We Can’t Work it Out”).

In 1977, coinciding with Mayer’s crusade, the New York Times spoke of the “exercise explosion” that had come about because the conventional wisdom of the sixties that exercise was “bad for you” had been transformed into the “new conventional wisdom — that strenuous exercise is good for you.”

The Washington Post as well estimated that “100 million Americans were partaking in the new fitness revolution” — coincident with the start of the current obesity epidemic.

Still, no matter how many billions believe it, the evidence that exercise promotes weight loss has simply never been produced.

My favorite study of the effect of physical activity on weight loss was published in 1989 by a team of Danish researchers. Over the course of 18 months the Danes trained non-athletes to run a marathon. At the end of this training period, the 18 men in the study had lost an average of 5lb of body fat. As for the nine women subjects, the Danes reported, ‘no change in body composition was observed’. That same year, F Xavier Pi-Sunyer reviewed the studies on exercise and weight, and his conclusion was identical to that of the Finnish review’s 11 years later: ‘Decreases, increases, and no changes in body weight and body composition have been observed,’ Pi-Sunyer reported (Ibid).

Here’s the main thing to realize: the relationship between exercise and diet is a complicated relationship, but the chemistry behind weight loss is not complicated:

To lose weight, you must simply use more calories per day than you take in. That’s it.

All the hype and all the fad diets and all the panaceas in the world won’t change that. Exercise does burn calories (even if it’s not quite as many as people think), but it also dramatically increases appetite. Thus, as often as not, exercise tips the scales in the wrong direction.

That’s the fact, Jack.

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WD-40

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 to use it as a rust preventative solvent and degreaser to protect missile parts. The Convair Company bought it in bulk to protect their atlas missile parts.

Ken East, one of the original founders, maintains to this very day that there is nothing in WD-40 that would hurt you if ingested.

Here are some other uses of WD-40:

1. Protects silver from tarnishing.

2. Removes road tar and grime from cars.

3. Cleans and lubricates guitar strings.

4. Gives floors that just-waxed sheen without making them slippery.

5. Keeps flies off cows.

6. Restores and cleans chalkboards.

7. Removes lipstick stains.

8. Loosens stubborn zippers.

9. Untangles jewelry chains.

10. Removes stains from stainless steel sinks.

11. Removes dirt and grime from the barbecue grill.

12. Keeps ceramic/terra cotta garden pots from oxidizing..

13. Removes tomato stains from clothing.

14. Keeps glass shower doors free of water spots.

15. Camouflages scratches in ceramic and marble floors..

16. Keeps scissors working smoothly.

17. Lubricates noisy door hinges on vehicles and doors in homes.

18. It removes black scuff marks from the kitchen floor. Use WD-40 for those nasty tar and scuff marks on flooring. It doesn’t seem to harm the finish and you won’t have to scrub nearly as hard to get them off. Just remember to open some windows if you have a lot of marks.

19. Bug guts will eat away the finish on your car if not removed quickly. Use WD-40.

20. Gives a children’s playground gym slide a shine for a super fast slide.

21. Lubricates gear shift and mower deck lever for ease of handling on riding mowers.

22. Rids kids rocking chairs and swings of squeaky noises.

23. Lubricates tracks in sticking home windows and makes them easier to open.

24. Spraying an umbrella stem makes it easier to open and close.

25. Restores and cleans padded leather dashboards in vehicles, as well as vinyl bumpers.

26. Restores and cleans roof racks on vehicles.

27. Lubricates and stops squeaks in electric fans.

28. Lubricates wheel sprockets on tricycles, wagons, and bicycles for easy handling.

29. Lubricates fan belts on washers and dryers and keeps them running smoothly.

30. Keeps rust from forming on saws and saw blades, and other tools.

31. Removes splattered grease on stove.

32. Keeps bathroom mirror from fogging.

33. Lubricates prosthetic limbs.

34. Keeps pigeons off the balcony (they hate the smell).

35. Removes all traces of duct tape.

36. Folks even spray it on their arms, hands, and knees to relieve arthritis pain.

37. Florida ‘s favorite use is: ‘cleans and removes love bugs from grills and bumpers.’

38. The favorite use in the state of New York , WD-40 protects the Statue of Liberty from the elements.

39. WD-40 attracts fish. Spray a little on live bait or lures and you will be catching the big one in no time. Also, it’s a lot cheaper than the chemical attractants that are made for just that purpose. Keep in mind though, using some chemical laced baits or lures for fishing are not allowed in some locations.

40. Use it for fire ant bites. It takes the sting away immediately and stops the itch.

41. WD-40 is great for removing crayon from walls. Spray on the mark and wipe with a clean rag.

42. Also, if you’ve discovered that your teenage daughter has washed and dried a tube of lipstick with a load of laundry, saturate the lipstick spots with WD-40 and rewash. Presto. The lipstick is gone.

43. If you sprayed WD-40 on the distributor cap, it would displace the moisture and allow the car to start.

As you can see, WD-40 makes a fine, fine lubricant, though it is not necessarily recommended you use it lube up a vagina, or whatever.

The basic ingredient in WD-40?

Fish oil.

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Howard Zinn: Freedom Versus Equality

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 history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching….

Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.

Howard Zinn is probably second only to Noam Chomsky in terms of the neo-Marxist influence he wields, and in light of Howard Zinn’s recent revivification, which began just prior to his death, the History Channel aired a program called The People Speak, which was a documentary written and produced by Matt Damon and based upon Howard Zinn’s propaganda publication A People’s History of the United States.

Quoting from his People’s History:

“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history, because it uses wealth to turn those in the 99 percent against one another” (A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn).

That is Howard Zinn’s philosophy in compendiated form: Ninety-nine out of one hundred of us are not actually free, even if we think we are, because income inequalities exist.

Howard Zinn never seriously asked why income inequalities exist in the first place — at least, not that I’ve ever seen — but the answer to that question is this: not everyone possesses the same degree of talent, skill, and most especially, ambition. (This point, incidentally, was dramatized persuasively in the late Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.”)

Inequality is inherent to freedom.

Humans left free naturally stratify, as several famous experiments have demonstrated. Why? Because of the reason just stated: humans possess varying degrees of talent, brains, and most of all, ambition.

Freedom, of course, does not guarantee wealth; it does not guarantee success. Freedom is one thing and one thing only: the absence of compulsion. It simply means that you are left alone. Freedom means no entitlements, no minimum guarantees, no help (or hindrance) at all, no public education, no free health care, no drinking laws, no illegalization of drugs, and so on.

Howard Zinn did not pretend to be an advocate of liberty. He, like all postmodernists and neo-Marxists, believed that “social equality” and “social justice” are more important than freedom, and, accordingly, individual rights (particularly the inalienable right to your own property — i.e. your money) can be lawfully expropriated by the government and redistributed.

To this day, Zinn’s A People’s History remains a staple among academics and other leftists — despite the fact that it is the only “academic” history book that doesn’t contain a single source citation, and despite the fact that it was refuted long ago, and devastatingly so, by the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin in the pages of the The American Scholar (49). Here’s an excerpt of that refutation:

It simply is not true that ‘what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.’ It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders (Dr. Oscar Handlin, The American Scholar, 49, 1980).

Ron Radosh has also very recently written an excellent article on Mr. Howard Zinn and Mr. Good Will Hunting.

Howard Zinn: 1922-2010