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The Power of Ideas

It was toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and absturse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disuputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on reality. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrorte philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals understood the causes and probable consequences of this general indifference.

 

— The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1980)

 

 

 

Chapter 32

The power of ideas and the supreme role of ideas in human existence can be seen no more starkly than in the fact that people subscribe to them without any hesitation, wavering, or scruples.

Societies are the result of human action, human action the result of ideologies.

As the Czeslaw Milosz passage which I quote at the top of this chapter captures so perfectly, societies and any concrete order of social affairs are the direct outcome of ideas.

Ideas have consequences, whether for good or for ill.

The following is a real-life illustration — writ sickeningly large — of what can happen when the idea of individuality, individualism, and independent thinking are not regarded as primary but replaced instead with the ideology of egalitarianism by force:

When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they did so with the intention of obliterating its hierarchical political culture in order to reconstruct Cambodian society from ground zero as the world’s most egalitarian, and therefore revolutionary social order.

That passage comes from historian Karl Jackson, in a heartbreaking book, published by Princeton Press, called Cambodia 1975 – 1978. In this book, Jackson describes the Khmer Rouge (which was the name of the socialist-communist-Marxist party that took over Cambodia in the mid-1970’s) as “sectarians and radical egalitarians [who] saw the diversity and differences between people as the root of all evil.”

This, extrapolated and elaborated from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was the ideology. It was led by a cult-of-personality named Pol Pot, Western educated, who was also the architect of the Killing Fields – a seemingly incomprehensible genocide where Cambodian cities were systematically depopulated and the entire Cambodian population enslaved on collective farms with a horrifyingly draconian ideology-of-equality imposed upon all.

“Typically, the slightest dissent would be punished by the offender getting clubbed or starved to death, and so many Cambodians were dispatched by such methods (approximately 1.7 million between 1975 and 1979 according to one estimate) that fields filled with corpses became the macabre hallmark of the regime” (Ibid).

From the Journal of Asian Studies (1998):

“First, they tried to eliminate the use of linguistic registers that connoted kinship, age and other social differences. The word comrade, mitt, was suppose to replace titles, honorifics and even kin terms. Second, many non-verbal cues that connoted status, such as polite greeting forms and bending down before superiors, were also discouraged.”

A historian by the name of Jay Jordens writes that the “Khmer Rouge realized Buddhism was at the core of Khmer ideas of social hierarchy. Thus by abolishing religion and destroying all vestiges of Buddhism; monks, texts, images, rituals, and so on, they might destroy the moral underpinnings of the beliefs in ‘unequal souls'” (Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia, 1996).

And from the website Asia Pacific Curriculum:

By 1977, the distrust on the part of the leadership had reached paranoiac heights and the purges of suspected traitors increased. Even the ranks of the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves were purged, sending increasingly larger numbers of them and their families to prisons where they were tortured and then murdered. The most notorious of these prisons was S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison and torture centre run by Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. Out of an estimated 15,000 prisoners who were sent to S-21, only seven survived.

Prisoners housed there were photographed and tortured to produce confessions. When the interrogators were finished, the prisoners’ corpses were carried by truck to the “killing fields” outside of Phnom Penh. There are approximately 20,000 of these mass graves in various locations in the country.

The relatively short time that Pol Pot ruled — approximately four years — was a living nightmare. An estimated one-quarter of the Cambodian population was killed. I ask you to please pause for a moment and process that.

The Cambodian people who survived survived only on “a ladle of watery rice gruel a day.” They were forced into back-breaking labor most of their waking hours – separated from their families (families do not matter in the Communist ideology, if you don’t know, since all humans are comrades equally — loved equally, and it’s supposedly reciprocal — your parents the same as the parents of others whom you’ve never seen in your life and who did not raise you).

Pol Pot’s regime forced the Cambodian people to eat in spectacularly unsanitary cooperatives, treating them worse than the poorly treated farm animals. They lived under incessant terror of being reported for even minor acts “such as taking a coconut from a tree or allowing cattle to graze in the wrong field.”

And incalculable number of people died as a direct result of these filthy, terror-stricken conditions.

Vietnamese minority groups in particular were singled out for persecution and annihilation. So were the Cham Muslim minorities. Survivors report that urbanites suffered harder work and even greater suspicion than the peasantry. Virtually the entire population worked on farms, and do you know why? Because the ideology of egalitarianism decrees that all humans do everything the same. Thus, since the government couldn’t force people into instant expertise and the comparatively luxurious standards of urban living, the government went for the opposite: evacuating the cities overnight and forcing everyone, no matter their knowledge and training, into agriculture.

In terms of the sheer numbers of individual lives taken, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin killed far more people than Pol Pot, and yet he and his genocidal regime nevertheless stand out among them all — for being, in my opinion, the most horrific and evil-perfect-practitioners of their ideology, which regards individual human life as a non-existent phenomena, and therefore unimportant, people only worth anything to the extent that they help produce food “collectively.” Thus the Khmer Rouge slogans, written and posted where the Cambodian people could read them, contained a murderous contempt and disregard for individual human life:

“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss. Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”

The Khmer Rouge is among the most ghastly of proofs you will ever read about regarding the paramount role of ideas in human life.

For those who harangue and harass me and others like me for our defending individuality and individual rights, please read deeply about Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge — their annihilation of individual rights, individuality, and independent thinking — read what it led to in Cambodia.

 

As Vincent Cook expressed it so well:

Mass death is certainly no stranger to Communism. Even today a terrible famine stalks North Korea to remind us of the lethal nature of Marxism. However, Pol Pot has earned a special place in the history of Marxian Communism as his Khmer Rouge earned the special distinction of being the one Communist movement in history to actually attempt the full and consistent implementation of the ideals of Karl Marx.

Most Marxists would recoil at the suggestion that Pol Pot is the logical conclusion of their social philosophy, yet any honest assessment of Marx’s theory cannot conceal the fact that the radical egalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge is precisely what Marx predicted would be the ultimate culmination of all human history. It must be clearly kept in mind that industrial socialism, as it was known in the former Soviet Union and other mainstream Marxist states, is not the endpoint of Marx’s philosophy of history. In his view, the abolition of capitalist production relations is only the first stage of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

Marx anticipated that there would be a radical redistribution of wealth and a withering of the global socialist state (the “crude” stage of communism) followed by a fundamental transformation of human nature as all individual culture, personality, and economic uniqueness disappeared (the “higher” stage of communism). Marx looked forward to a time when individuals would be freed from an alleged alienation from their own humanity supposedly caused by the division of labor and money-based economic transactions. Individuality would be replaced by a new generic “species-being” [Marx’s term] personality, a personality that would specialize in nothing and be an expert at everything.

It is now a fact fairly well-known, even among socialists, that economic calculation under pure socialism is an impossibility. And yet compared with the idea that any country or economy could survive, let alone prosper, after government abolishes the division of labor — simultaneously crushing all individuality in the process — the calculation problem, as it’s known, seems downright minor even though it’s not: simply because this latter idea is sheer madness.

“Most Communist movements, faced with the utter infeasibility of industrial production under socialist central planning (let alone an abolition of the division of labor), chose to reconcile themselves with capitalism in various ways and to defer the Marxist ideal of higher Communism to a remote future that would conveniently never come. Some Communists, notably the Soviets and especially the Yugoslavs, practically admitted that the species-being ideal would never be realized and were willing to settle for varying degrees of centralized socialistic control mixed with elements of capitalism” (ibid).

Maoists, however, remained pure — at least for a time.

Thus the “Cultural Revolution” of China which vainly tried to transform human nature itself — individuals do not exist, these Maoists preached — that is, until its stupendous failure forced even the most radical of Maoists to step back and reevaluate. This failure-followed-by-reevaluation changed Maoism across Asia and the world — with one appalling exception: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot understood that industrialization and the cities which come about through the division of labor would have to be eliminated if the Khmer Rouge were to come anywhere close to an egalitarian society. This is why almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power (in April of 1975), they began evacuating Phnom Penh. They were, in a very real and literal sense, merely acting with the courage of their Communist convictions.

“The worst that can be said of Pol Pot was that he was sincere,” Vincent Cook also wrote, and he’s right:

“The Cambodian people were in fact freed of the ‘alienation’ of a division of labor and individual personality, and were reduced to a perfectly uniform egalitarian existence on the collective farms. If the cruel reality of the Khmer Rouge slave state didn’t quite come up to the extravagant eschatological expectations of Marxist true believers, the fault lies exclusively with those who think of the Marxist pattern of historical development and its egalitarian outcome as a desirable state of affairs. It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot-type passion for equality remains as a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead.”

There should be no forgetting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge — no matter how much time passes — no whitewashing them, no cultural amnesia concerning them, nor any diminishment or rationalization of their utter evil, especially not by academic elites and ideologically bankrupt intellectuals explicitly calling for Communism and telling us, as a “reminder,” that “Communism is good.” These people and their mindset need to be ideologically exposed and defeated — routed — on the battleground of ideas, because the truth is that when the facts are made clear and the philosophies presented in full, without any equivocation, circumlocution, jargon, or obfuscation, they don’t even have an argument, and so they don’t stand a chance. Nobody has a right to the life or labor of another human being.

The Cambodian Killing Fields should stand eternally as horrific and twisted reminder of the philosophy of egalitarianism, and the human race should never forget that any minister of force preaching the egalitarian doctrine-of-envy is the direct descendent and ideological disciple of Pol Pot.

 

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Christopher Columbus, Howard Zinn, and A People’s History of The United States

This is excerpted from Chapter 25 of my forthcoming.

Chapter 25

Howard Zinn, who was not a historian, is the author of a cultic classic called A People’s History of the United States, which is a tour-de-force of historical misinformation, sloppy scholarship, and outright prevarications. This perhaps partially explains why on the subject of history and the role of the historian Howard Zinn once wrote:

“History is not about understanding the past [but about] changing the future.”

I know of no serious historian who would agree with that statement, which strikes me now as a pretty good definition of propaganda.

Given that Howard Zinn was not, by any reasonable standard imaginable, an actual historian, it is more than a little paradoxical, then, that this same Howard Zinn authored a book entitled A People’s History of the United States, which is now a staple in American colleges and high-schools and junior-high-schools all across the country, and for which reason I’m including a mention of it here, in this book: because prevarications and misinformation on this level, influencing countless young minds, must be countered relentlessly, forcefully, intellectually, factually.

It is, for example, a poorly known fact that Howard Zinn – who grew fabulously wealthy in the United States he hated: rich and famous here because people willingly and voluntarily paid him money in exchange for his book of misinformation (a process I fully support, incidentally, caveat emptor), loading him up with the dollar bills he claimed to hate, via the laissez-faire system he explicitly antipathized (Howard Zinn was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of the United States [CPUSA], though never, to my knowledge, allowed his money to in any way be expropriated and redistributed, as the CPUSA dictates would have it), who, indeed, never left the America he hated so much, dying here, an old man, famous and venerable, in 2010 – was a vocal defender of the Stalin-era Soviet Union and also the Mao Zedong-era China:

“China,” wrote Howard Zinn, in A People’s History, “was in the hands of a revolutionary movement, the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control” — this in praise of Chairman Mao, the murderer, who has the blood of approximately 100 million on his hands. (Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, who also propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khemer Rouge, called Mao’s China “a just society,” and, perhaps anticipating the locavore fad we’re now enjoying, also described Mao’s blood-red China as “a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level.”)

I want to at this point remind all readers and respectfully ask readers never to forget that Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were, in terms of sheer numbers of people killed, two of the most murderous tyrants in world history.

It is a poorly known fact, as well, that Howard Zinn was a huge supporter of the homophobic dictator Fidel Castro who, wrote Howard Zinn, “set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants.” Zinn unfortunately neglects to even mention, let alone elaborate upon, Castro’s decades and decades of systematic repression, the forced international isolation, the horrific poverty created and fostered by him, the grinding oppression, and of course the mass executions of regime opponents, intellectuals, journalists, and homosexuals.

Why does Howard Zinn neglect to mention all of that?

To ask the question is, I believe, to answer it.

In the opening of his bestselling book A People’s History, Howard Zinn begins with this description of Christopher Columbus:

“So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians…. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.”

Here is how Hans Koning described Christopher Columbus, in a book titled Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, which appeared the year before Howard Zinn’s book was published:

“The population were Arawak Indians … a people who had developed agriculture (corn, yams, cassava), who could spin and weave, but had no iron, no horses, no beasts of burden…. Their society seems to have been based on village communes where most property was jointly held…. Some of these people wore little gold ornaments in their ears and noses.”

Neither Koning’s book nor Zinn’s book cite any sources, which is unheard of for a work of history which purports to contain authentic scholarship, and neither men were, I repeat, actual historians.

Here, however, is the main thing I wish to point out now.

Among the most famous passages in all of Howard Zinn’s literature is the opening paragraph of A People’s History, wherein readers are treated to a loose transcription of Christopher Columbus’s log (or diary). Zinn’s transcription, which is again following the lead of Hans Koning’s description in the book that appeared just the year before Zinn’s, introduces passages with leading sentences and then, in an appalling display of academic dishonesty, omits full sentences — at which point proceeding to quote completely out of context and striking out all passages from Columbus’s log that controvert his pre-formulated genocidal narrative.

Christopher Columbus, whatever you think you know of him, wasn’t, for the record, guilty of genocide.

In his log entry for October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote:

“I warned my men to take nothing from the people without giving something in exchange.”

Both Howard Zinn and Hans Koning completely omitted this passage.

But the worst is still to come.

In the same paragraph of A People’s History — the opening paragraph — Howard Zinn, purporting to transcribe Columbus’s log, writes the following. I’m quoting Howard Zinn precisely – and by that I mean I’m including Zinn’s crucial use of ellipses:

“They have no iron. Their spears are made out of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

That is, I say again, an exact quote from Chapter 1, paragraph 1, of A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. This passage has been cited countless times over the years and decades, and it’s not a stretch to say that this Howard Zinn passage has had and continues to have real societal ramifications.

It is a total deception and fraud.

Please look now at what Howard Zinn omitted, without any mention of omitting it, and look what he replaced with ellipses. I quote from Christopher Columbus’s log:

“I saw some who bore marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to them to ask how this came about, and they indicated to me that people came from other islands, which are near, and wished to capture them, and they defended themselves. And I believed and still believe that they come here from the mainland to take them for slaves.”

This translation comes from a well-known scholar named Robert Henderson Fuson – perhaps the most widely used translation of Columbus’s logs – who explains this passage further:

“The cultural unity of the Taino” (a more specific name of the tribe which Zinn calls the Arawaks [something like “Native American Indians” verus “Apache Indians”]) “greatly impressed Columbus. Those who see Columbus as the founder of slavery in the New World are grossly in error. This thought occured to Samuel Eliot Morison (among many others), who misinterpreted a statement made by Columbus on the first day in America, when he said ‘They (the Indians) ought to be good servants.’ In fact, Columbus offered this observation in explanation of an earlier comment he had made [in his logs], theorizing that the people from the mainland came to the islands to capture these Indians as slaves because they were so docile and obliging.”

The boldface emphasis is mine.

Zinn’s use of ellipses between the sentences “They would make fine servants” and “With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want” is in actuality Zinn’s linking together two sentences which are not even in the same paragraph.

As a matter of fact, they’re not even in the same entry date in Christopher Columbus’s log. They’re two days apart.

The truth is that Christopher Columbus, who was a devout Catholic at a time when Spain was under Muslim siege – the Muslims had long-ago conquered the Iberian Penisula, and 1492 was the very year that the crucial battle of Granada occurred – the truth, I repeat, is that Christopher Columbus, who was no saint or angel, but a soldier, sailor, and missionary, was driven to save Christianity. He therefore made it his mission to counter Muslim conquest and to, in turn, spread Christianity in order to combat Muslim rule.

Christopher Columbus was a man motivated, like all missionaries, by his drive to convert people to his faith. Which is why Christopher Columbus also wrote in his log, about these same natives – and this is something else you find nowhere mentioned in any of Howard Zinn’s literature:

“I want the natives to develop a friendsly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.”

Howard Zinn’s famous passage is outrageously deceptive in its selective quoting, and Howard Zinn, who has influenced so many millions of young minds, is arrantly guilty of context-dropping and academic fraud – omissions which are crafted precisely to convince all readers that Christopher Columbus had no care or concern for the physical or mental well-being of the natives but was only driven by “a frenzy for gold,” as Zinn says, which then led Columbus to enslave the natives for profit – when, that is, he wasn’t hunting them down with dogs, since they could not supply him with vast treasures of gold, from mines which existed only Columbus’s imagination.

Howard Zinn writes:

“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

In response to which, the anthropologist Carol Delaney, also translator of Columbus’s logs, writes this:

“Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.”

In reference to Columbus’s October 12, 1492, entry, Carol Delany writes this:

“In my first reading of the diary I could not understand why he seemed so driven to find gold. But this understanding changes when one realizes that finding the gold was necessary not only to repay the people who had invested in the voyage (and to induce them to finance another), [but was also] essential if he was ever to finance another Crusade. Today, we might disapprove of that motive, but at the time [when the Moors were taking over, with extreme force and violence, much of Europe] it was felt to be a worthwhile and Christian duty.”

Carol Delany says this as well:

“Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect. Most of the time when injustices occurred, Columbus wasn’t even there. There were terrible diseases that got communicated to the natives, but he can’t be blamed for that.”

The natives also gave back plenty of diseases to the Europeans.

It is also a fact that Christopher Columbus never owned a slave.

It is a fact that Christopher Columbus adopted an indigenous child and made this child his son, and Howard Zinn does not mention this.

It is a fact that Christopher Columbus did not commit genocide.

I’m no zealous admirer of Christopher Columbus, nor am I his defender. That is not my primary point here. I believe in accuracy and historical truth, of which Howard Zinn and his detestable book make a mockery, and that — historical truth and historical accuracy — is what I seek to defend.

The fact is that Howard Zinn’s gurus Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh have far more blood on their hands than Christopher Columbus ever did, and I will leave you with a quote from an excellent historian named Oscar Handlin, of Havard University, who’s meticulous in his research and mind-spinningly well-read, and who in 1980 reviewed Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States, before Zinn’s book developed its cultic and slavish following:

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.

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The Great Electrifier: Nuclear Energy & the Myth of Nuclear Waste



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 Energy:

Pierre Guelfe: When the depleted fuel rods are removed, the reactors are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U235 content of this is very low … U235 is the fissionable isotope. But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It’s called ‘Mixed Oxide Fuel’(MOX). We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we’re pure plutonium, and we scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don’t leave any waste.

William Tucker: I’ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure: The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?

Pierre Guelfe: That’s right. You have four plutonium isotopes: Pu239, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242. Of the four, only Pu239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can’t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor (source).

And yet on the basis of some colossal misinformation, the United States now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.

The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is “not to reprocess” a perfectly reusable by-product — and all for absolutely no good reason.

That, as I discuss in Chapter 12 of my book, is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada: to store a nuclear “waste” that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.

Nuclear “waste,” incidentally, is also used for medical isotopes. In fact, over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we’re not allowed to use any of our own.

This is not only profligate.

It’s a kind of lunacy.



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Valedictorian Speech That Will Change Your Life: To the Graduating Class of 2017

Young women and men of the graduating class of 2017:



You are the magic.

You are the one.

You are the magic and the fun.

You are meant to be happy.

You are meant to enjoy your life, before it’s done.

So please, for goodness sake, have fun.

You are a tightly packed pod of living potential. Didn’t you know? You’re waiting to EXPLODE. Your will to believe this about yourself is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

Now, then, at last, your real education begins.

Now, at last, comes the process of learning that, one hopes, never ends.

You unfortunately have before you a great many things to unlearn — many things of great concern:

There are dogmas, both secular and non, green, blue, and red, that you will have to shed: false ideas, both secular and non, that school has inculcated into your head.

And yet, and yet …

You possess a powerful weapon — the greatest one in your entire arsenal — and that is your brain.

Think for yourself.

Your thoughts are things, and as such your thoughts are something you can train.

Cultivate thought. Cultivate your living potential. Cultivate your mind. Seek — and if you seek, you will, I promise, find.

I say again: Cultivate deliberate thought.

It is the most precious thing you’ve got.

Human excellence is a thing you develop — as talent is largely developed and learned:

Neither are inborn but earned.

The real secret of discipline is the insight that your values and habits are what you choose them to be.

Did you hear that?

Did you hear me?

Embrace human progress. Embrace technology, whether nano or nuclear, super-elastic, or the prosthetic limbs and artificial hearts and other organs that come from plastic.

Technology has gotten us to this point. Only technology can get us beyond.

The ingenuity of the human mind is limitless. Your mind is your magic wand.

And for enjoying the fruits of your labor and for enjoying the pleasure of technology, you owe no one — and I mean no one — any apology. None whatsoever.

Progress is good. Retrogression is not. Therefore I say: progress forever. For having fun, you owe no apology whatsoever.

Rejoice, oh, you beautiful young human beings, rejoice in your youth — revel in your time — and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, and walk in the way of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes. But know that there will come a time, as there comes a time for every one of us, when the beauty and power of your youth fades, and you’re left with one thing: it is the most important thing, the most powerful thing you can find:

Your mind.

Your vision of who and what you want to be is among the most very valuable of assets you have. Cultivate, therefore, that vision.

That is your mission. Come at it like a head on collision.

You will no doubt have already been told — and you will, I’m afraid, be told many times more — that genius cannot be taught or learned, that greatness comes from some rarified source: a precious DNA strand.

But I’m hear to say that the diametric opposite is true:

Greatness comes from within — it comes from within you — just as true originality comes from within you too.

Genius in fact can only come from within. It’s in what you think, but also, as important, in what you do.

Yes, you are simultaneously the source and the receiving force.

Because it’s not how talented or how smart you are.

It’s how deep down your desire goes, how high you’re willing to push, how far.

This is why ambition and persistence are the greatest predictors of success.

For this reason you and you alone are … what? Yes:

You are the magic.

You are the one.

You are the magic and the fun.

Your life is like a precious toy. It is meant to be something you enjoy.

Your passions are primarily willed: you mustn’t ever think of passions as something you either have, or not. If you’re interested in something — even if it’s at first only a moderate interest — and if you then pursue that interest, your passion for that thing develops as your understanding of it deepens.

The more time you spend with something, the more your feelings for it grow.

The more your feelings for it grow, the more about that thing you come to know.

Jobs are healthy. Work is good. Work is good for the soul. Nothing more than work is fundamentally necessary for the production of abundance and the good things that make your life pleasurable. Be happy in your work.

Don’t not be cruel. Don’t not be a jerk.

And remember: you are the magic. You are the one.

Your life is meant to be fun.

Your life is your values.

Your values are the things you most enjoy.

The secret key to the lock of life is nothing more — or less — than developing a durable purpose around which to arrange all the other things in your life, and against which all other things you measure and weigh.

This is also what I’ve come to say. This is what I wish to convey:

A central purpose is the unifying factor that molds together the human clay and integrates all the other factors in your life, year-to-year, month-to-month, day-to-day. So that to be in control of your own life, you must build this fundamental purpose, and, once built, you must not let it go.

But why is this so?

Because purpose forms the base and at the same time creates a kind of pyramid, the stones of which are your other desires, arranged in order of importance, which spares you any number of internal clashes and strife.

This great pyramid is your life.

The central purpose that forms its base allows you to enjoy your existence more abundantly, and on the widest conceivable scale.

Young women and men of the graduating class of 2017: the circuit of the seasons is to bud, to blossom, and to die, and no matter what any one you may become, or why — no matter how good or bad or ugly or beautiful or cruel — in the spring of life, you’ve all envisioned a beautiful and brilliant and dazzling future that sits waiting for you — and I’ve come to tell you that that vision, young women and men, is the correct vision:

It is accurate and incontrovertibly true — as true in 2017 as in any culture or era or time or season.

And the only real rebel is the dog who tirelessly sniffs out reason.



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Whiskey Wisdom: How to be the Smartest Person in the Bar

(The following is excerpted from Whiskey Wisdom: A Bartender’s Guide to Living Ravenously)


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You can spot her from a mile away, the smartest person in the bar — or, if not quite from a mile away, nonetheless from very far.

She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as smart.

Still, her brain is carefully crafted — self-crafted and stylized — like a work of art.

Her eyes are alert and bright and lively. They twinkle.

She’s relaxed and polite, with a well-modulated voice that speaks to you in the appropriate tone.

Her smile glows like expensive stone.

You do not quickly forget that smile.

She walks purposefully, and yet not aggressively, or with an overbearing style.

She has a sense of humor.

You can see that she knows there’s a kind of dignity in loneliness. She doesn’t go out of the way to seek friends or groups or any kind of crowd.

In general she prefers quiet to loud.

She gives and receives compliments gracefully, can be strong and assertive, quick to stick up for herself, but she can also speak of her shortcomings and accomplishments with an equal ease which you envy.

When communication or clarification is called for, she’s never dismissive or inexplicably silent — never, of course, in any way aggressive or violent.

What’s her trick?

What’s the secret?

The secret is this:

First, develop a total disregard for where you think your abilities end.

You must aim beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

Do things you think you’re not able to do.

Nothing is impossible, in this regard. The will to believe is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want.

The discipline to follow through is next. It is also the most difficult.

Why?

Why most difficult?

Because it requires hour-after-hour, day-after-day practice.

It requires diligence.

Second — unless you’re in a technical discipline like medicine or mechanical engineering — drop out of college immediately.

College stunts the mind.

It’s a breeding ground of mindlessness and unoriginality, and an exercise in non-thought. It’s a snake-infested swamp of dogma — and, like all dogma, it will corrupt you and scar your soul irreparably.

College is conformity.

The cost of conformity is colossal.

Individuality, on the other hand, is a prerequisite of genius.

Genius is the cultivation of your living potential.

The deeper your cultivation, the deeper your genius.

Cultivate, therefore, a purpose around which you can construct your life.

Passion is largely willed: the more you do something, the deeper your understanding of it grows, so that after time your passion for that thing develops and spreads like a gorgeous soft surge of water-ripples.

Third, whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might.

What, after all, does it mean to be smart?

It means to self-stylize your brain, like a work of art.

It means to be intelligent — like you.

Intelligence is your mental capacity to deal with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.

That’s why it never mattered to you when you were voted least likely to succeed — why it never fazed you when they called you a misfit, a malcontent, alienate, disaffiliate, deviant, recalcitrant. And it’s why your natural-born predilections and proclivities and predispositions are and always have been irrelevant: because intelligence is an acquired skill.

It must be developed by each person’s own desire and activated by each person’s will.

It must be habituated and automated by each person’s own mind.

Which is why it’s quite rare and beautiful, and rather difficult to find.

This, incidentally, is true for both children and adults: the cultivation of intelligence requires effort — or, to put the same point in a slightly different way: thinking is an act of choice.

Thought requires work.

Whereas to be stoopid is relatively simple: all you have to do, in essence, is do nothing. If you do nothing, stoopid will naturally occur.

Being smart, however, requires a different sort of action.

It’s not passive.

On the contrary, thinking is an entirely active process the undertaking of which is, when you think about it, massive.

She’s intelligent, yes, but in a highly unorthodox way, they say, hard to pinpoint why: bookish but not book-smart, introspective, certainly, and everything she does — yes, everything — she does with all her heart.


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Wodka!

This article first appeared, in slightly altered form, in the Coloradoan newspaper.

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The Polish call it wodka.

The Russians call it vodka.

The word itself comes from the slavic voda — meaning “little water” — and, like water, vodka is colorless, odorless, and often enjoyed ice-cold.

Distilled from fermented potatoes, or fermented grains (like rye or wheat), or sometimes even grapes, vodka is a deceptively simple spirit that consists primarily of ethanol and water.

Here’s a little known fact about vodka:

Grain vodka because it’s distilled from grain is actually whiskey.

It is, to be sure, underaged and heavily filtered whiskey, but it’s whiskey, nevertheless. One of the chief differences is that vodka is usually filtered through charcoal, whereas whiskey is usually filtered through wood.

Both the Polish and the Russians lay claim to the invention of vodka.

To the Polish people in particular, this subject is significant and contentious — a question of national pride — and on this subject, the historical record is unclear. Certain sources do say the first distillation of vodka took place in what is now a part of Russia, in the 9th century, but there are other historians, just as venerable, who date it in 8th century Poland.

Neither of these prototypical vodkas, however, were anything like the vodka we know and love today — nor, incidentally, were they particularly strong, weighing in at a preposterous 30 proof. Like gin, most of these early vodkas were medicinal rather than recreational. Today, we know better.

Prior to the 1940’s, vodka was virtually unknown in the United States.

The vodka martini — also known as the Kangaroo Cocktail or the Vodkatini — isn’t generally accepted by so-called purists (i.e. snobs and classicists with whom I stridently disagree) as a true martini, but in fact the vodka martini has a more legitimate claim to this title than most people realize. That, though, is another story for another time.

One thing is certain:

In Casino Royale, when James Bond ordered his now famous Vesper cocktail, he did much to popularize the vodka martini.

Here’s how the passage appears in Ian Fleming’s famous novel, published in 1953:

“A dry martini,” Bond said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

Got it.





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Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail: Sazeracs & Manhattans

A reader writes:

In your last video (which I enjoyed somewhat) you said the Old-Fashioned isn’t the oldest cocktail on written record, and you are correct. The Sazerac is. When will you do a vid featuring that one, bud?

Here you go, bud — though, for the record, it’s not actually known if the Sazerac is the “oldest cocktail” on written record. Everyone says it is, but history is mute on the matter.





Thanks for watching.



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Putting the Cock Back in Cocktail (Part 4): Whiskey

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Whiskey — or whisky, if you prefer — is a distilled spirit that’s usually made from corn, rye, barley, wheat, or, very often, a cross combination of some or all those.

Whiskey is almost always aged in wooden casks which almost always consist of charred white oak.

The word “whiskey” is an anglicized version of the Gaelic uisce beatha (in Scottish Gaelic: uisge beatha) which means “living water,” or “water of life.”

Irish whiskey, Scottish whiskey (i.e. scotch), Canadian whiskey, and American whiskey (i.e. bourbon) are by far the most popular whiskeys in the world. But these days virtually every country produces some sort of whiskey.

In bartending, whiskey is the new vodka. It has never been more popular.

So I made the following:








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More And More Unto The Perfect Day: A Good Review At Chanticleer



L Wilson Hunt, of Chanticleer Book Reviews, recently wrote a flattering and insightful piece on my novel More and More unto the Perfect Day.

That review reads, in part:

Bizarre things are beginning to happen to Joel Gasteneau. A strange illness has left him feeling weak and haunted by vivid dreams, and he feels that he is being followed. Exhausted and fearful, he decides to abandon his life as a pensive drifter and focus on a long-neglected project: To find a durable proof for the existence of God.

This pursuit will run Joel through a gauntlet of self-discovery, one that will challenge the very limits of his mental and physical endurance.

In a solid telling of a complex story of mystery and intrigue, author Ray Harvey assumes the role of master illusionist. Clues abound, but can Joel trust them? What is he really experiencing? Viral fever flashbacks? The eruption of long-buried memories? Reality? More questions than answers emerge as the reader is drawn into another world, where mysticism and philosophy tangle and clash across a stunningly-rendered, often other-worldly landscape.

The novel is stocked with well-developed, fascinating entities. Joel’s father, Neil, a brilliant and deeply ascetic man, has a weakness for violence and his own definition for the word “blood.” Has he killed in the past? And, if so, will he again, and soon? Another entity is a stranger that Joel encounters called Tom, a sort of human/alien hybrid, who seems to know too much about Joel’s past. Along with these characters are oddly-shaped, silver clouds that seem to be keeping a watchful eye on Joel’s whereabouts.


Click over and read the rest.