912DC: Which New America, Which New World?

This memorable day, September 12, 2009 thousands and thousands of Americans - a coalition of grassroots, non-partisan movement of ordinary citizens - will be descending upon the capital of their nation, Washington D.C. They will be protesting against the covert sea-change revolution called "change" that is taking place in their country. Few outside the US may know it, but all is not well in the land since We the People was replaced with Hope&Change.

The conceptless label "change" probably originates in the relativist, progressivist philosophy of Pragmatism, but it certainly appears on the terminology index of Neuro Linguistic Programming (or Hypnosis 2.0). NLP is a rather hip, unscientific discipline used primarily in alternative therapies, the counselling industry and in the world of motivational training and coaching.

The Left embraced it as a great opportunity to manipulate others into conforming with their ethics program (the aim justifies the means!). Political correctness is but one branch of that school. Other applications of NLP are less obvious.


The all powerful Cass Sunstein, Obama's Regulatory Czar (since confirmed: 57-40) and author of NLP copybook "The Nudge", has hugely contributed to Obama's "voodoo" campaign (do go to the nudge blog for further ideas, suggestions and interactivity). The "hope&change" brand label may have been his baby, or the King of Astroturf's, David Axelrod. It is beside the point.

If "change" is to become a concept in lieu of a nominal label meaning "transition", it needs further specification: what is the status quo and what is the final goal; how is it reached and why is it desirable? Nobody offered specifics and nobody asked. An entire nation was seduced by a brand label presented by an elegant young black man with a smooth-working teleprompter.

America is no ordinary nation either but the sole country on the face of the earth based on a philosophy! Guess what "change" means for a nation that embodies individualism and personal autonomy? America may not be perfect in practice (who is?), but it is only based upon the best idea conceived by man since the Epiphany of the great Constantine?

Ayn Rand teaches us this about ethics: most choices in every day life play out in a spectrum of greys, but in times of moral stress clear choices become an imperative: good and evil become a zero sum game in which evil has nothing to contribute to the good and good has nothing to gain from evil: every compromise becomes a concession to and the negotiator an accomplice of evil. 

Increasingly Americans (and others as well) shall be facing the stark choice, not between the status quo or change, but more basically answer the question if their country is based on a philosophy that reflects human nature, or if they will follow into the footsteps of the Utopists that have gone before us, and whose legacies are filling the history books.

Much as opponents will spin and portray the protestors - often middle aged novices to bull horns and placards - as mobs of racist mercenaries of corporate interests, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear will recognize the fairness of their goals and merits. Accusations uttered by the opponents are already sounding shrill and are becoming ever giving subject of ridicule.
Few people understand the momentous nature of the brink on which humanity currently stands. But these Americans are the vanguard of a groundswell waking up to reality! Will individual rights and freedom prevail, or do we follow the enslavers who lure us with tales of victimhood and entitlement - ficticious injury to be redressed solely by a  increasingly fascististic state, a vicious alignment of corporatism in the service of total government?


Related:

- Today on The Lighthouse: ""A New America", the Movie"

Updating throughout:

- Twitcaps: live #912dc pics
- Covertress: "Photos (and vids) From 9/12 Tea Party in DC"
- YouTube: "912 DC by Frank Strategies"
- Fox News Livestream
- YouTube: "Demint "More Comfortable" At Tea Party Than Congress"
- YouTube: "Tea Partyers Drown Out CNN Reporter During Live Report"
- Fox News: "Sensus Bureau Severs Ties With ACORN"
- Politico: "A march today, but is it a movement?

Live Tweet Stream:



Post 912 Updates:

- Jeff Head.com: "912: America Awakes in 2009" (great pix: here's one)
- Conservative Feminist: "Up to 2 Million March on Washington DC to protest Spending and Policy – Largest Protest In DC History"
- Mail Online (UK): "Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama's spending in 'tea-party' demonstration"

Related sites:

- The 912 Project official site
- Glenn Beck's 912 Project
- The Tea Party Express Official Tour Blog
- American Liberty Alliance

Stop Blaming Capitalism!

- Yaron Brook's Call to Action - March 2009 (Part 1 of 2)


- Yaron Brook's Call to Action - March 2009 (Part 2 of 2)


- Yaron Brook on Sacrifice


- Yaron Brook on Glenn Beck


More video material of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Two Quotes on Capitalism

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated. (...) Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors, and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state. (...) “The time for enlightenment has come. (...)

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, 2009

- Caption: "Look to the West", by Nathan Struttman (Quent Cordair Fine Art, Napa) -

If one wishes to advocate a free society - that is, capitalism - one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights , one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. (...) Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. (...) It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin. A collective tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country's wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency - so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated "rights" that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these "printing-press rights" negate authentic rights.

Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights" from "The Virtue of Selfishness", reprinted in"Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal"

- Caption: Cover design of "The Virtue of Selfishness", by Nick Gaetano (Quent Cordair Fine Art, Napa) -

Obama is NOT the Most Liberal Liberal to Have Run for Office

On the late day the news was suppressed that a major Obama speech writer has broken rank, rummaging through an rather amusing PUMA blog - Hillbuzz - the winning meme hit consciousness level: Obama is not at all "the most liberal Democrat that’s run for president in as long as anyone can remember" ...

... Obama is NOT a liberal at all!

In "The Hidden Sinisterisms of the O Campaign" we introduced Global Labor, a unionist blogger who is perturbed by the Obama 'authoritarian' influence on education. He asserts that Obama's eduction adviser, Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond - like Ayers - is persuaded of the justice of the 'educational debt', reparations due to black citizens as 'historically oppressed." This theme is classical Marxist dialectic, pointing to the Marx assertion that Capitalism breeds happy peoples because it exports oppression to the Third World (never mind that African Americans are well, Americans).

If Obama doesn't share the Marxist beliefs with his former Chicago Annenberg Challenge board colleague Ayers, then why does he have (or has had) Mike Klonsky serving on the campaign blogs, answering matters pertaining to education and 'social justice', as Global Labor alleges? Both Klonsky and Ayers emerged from the SDS: whereas Ayers started his Weather Underground mob, Klonsky - via the October League - founded the US Communist Party (Marxist-Leninst) (CP (ML)), which was officially sanctioned by the Chinese regime.

The confusion in the political landscape could not be more profound. A leading Dutch magazine came up the other day with "Dutch liberals might become disappointed in Obama, because he is not as liberal as they think he is". That would be because - in order to win American Presidential elections - candidates have to 1. pretend to respect the 2nd Amendment (right to carry arms); 2. support the death penalty; and 3. pretend to be a Christian of sorts. The case is however altogether different.

No, Barack Obama is no liberal, and certainly not The Most Liberal Ever. He's an old fashioned, authoritarian, top down, commie nomenklatura. It's John McCain who's the real liberal, as some would have it ...

Every so often in this blog we make an effort to explain what is wrong with the current entrenched alignment of political parties, and that the American notion of liberals and liberalism is flawed. The last time we made such an attempt was in "Credit Crunch Critical for Survival of Capitalism." The American uptake of liberalism is actually Socialism light, which is directly opposed Libertarianism.

Confused? Luckily we now have the availability of the online Ayn Rand Lexicon in which the matter is explained better than we could ever aspire to. Consider:

"For many decades, the leftists have been propagating the false dichotomy that the choice confronting the world is only: communism or fascism—a dictatorship of the left or of an alleged right—with the possibility of a free society, of capitalism, dismissed and obliterated, as if it had never existed.

The political origin of that notion is more shameful than the “moderates” would care publicly to admit. Mussolini came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Italy. Hitler came to power by claiming that that was the only choice confronting Germany. It is a matter of record that in the German election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis—with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism). That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s (...) >>>

(...) apparently somebody forgot to inform the West.
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"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
--Michelle Obama, the first lady of zero sum economics



- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise" -

Global Warming = Earth Lib

"The battle for the world is not a battle between two political ideals. It is a battle between two views of the nature of thought."
-- Leonard Peikoff
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Psychology deals with mental processes and behavior. Philosophy explains man's understanding of reality in terms of broad abstracts, based on three axioms: existence, consciousness and identity.

Axioms are self-evidences rooted in the perceptual awareness of the world around us. They have a built-in protection against attacks by reality dodgers who disagree: being the basis of all human knowledge, to disagree means relying on the very same axioms.

A child realizes that objects exist and learns to integrate sensations into percepts. This leads to the axiom of identity, which is necessary for human cognition. Entity and identity - differentiating one object from another - leads to the next discovery: the Law of Causality. In time a child absorbs and integrates all axioms.

Entities perform actions; it is what entities do. Walking is not possible apart from an entity with legs. An entity has certain attributes, while lacking others. A child shakes its rattle and hears a sound, whereas a pillow is mute. Every entity has a nature: specific, non-contradictory and limited. An entity must act in accordance with its nature.

On the basis of two points the adult validation of Causality consists in stating the relationship explicitly: the Law of Identity, and that action is an action of an entity: A = A. The alternative would be that an entity acts apart from its nature, or against it. Both are impossible: existence is identity. Apart from its nature a thing is nothing: a ball is not a ball if its nature is not that it is round.

Causality is a corollary of identity. A corollary is a self-evident implication of already established knowledge. The Law of Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action.

Vast numbers of men never get beyond axioms. A primitive tribesman - often even lacking an integrated consciousness - does not have the benefit of Aristotelian principles; he has no way of adhering to axiomatic consistencies. He ends up contradicting the self-evident, as is also the case in various mystical world views.

Of an entirely different order are men who have the benefits of advanced education, yet consciously reject axioms on political grounds, as is the case with Postmodernists - Leftist as well as Rightist subjectivists. A declared war on reality - deliberate and systematic self-contradiction - is the essence of their 'narrative.'

The philosophers of the past two centuries known as the anti-modernists, the Counter-Enlightenment movement or present Postmodernists reject the very idea of the self-evident as the base of knowledge and repudiate all three axioms, attacking them as 'arbitrary postulates,' 'linguistic conventions' or 'Western prejudice or (meta)narrative' (e.g. science).

Is it any wonder that the sequence of events get confused? The military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are placed prior to the tragic events on 9/11 is but one example of time-line problems with cause and effect, the Law of Causality?

A CNSNews article has identified other difficulties related to direct causes: "A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the “black hawk down” battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels."

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, betrayed his credentials by using another popular rhetorical trick from the Postmodernist cupboard, the false equation: (he) "equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

Either that, or a dialectical process from the Rousseau school of thought is taking place in the mind of the Representative, the liberation of planet Earth from the oppressions of the perceived 'white, male power structure' (another term for rational civilization).

More such stories have been compiled by M. Barbay in "Global Warming' Caused Regional Problem? (Since 1975)."

Here we see how a seemingly minute, deliberate, philosophical manipulation of the speculative, ideological variety - which separates the world of ideas (subjectivism) from the world of reality (objectivism) - can lead to major problems. But then, it was invented two centuries ago for that self-same purpose: the peddling of literally, 'non-sense.' The cause of crime is the law ... thought creates reality.

Another interpretation would be the manipulation of facts, or the 'Orwellian' rhetorical trick of changing definitions into their opposites resulting in oxymorons, for instance Hegel's "true freedom through the state."

Who remembers that modernity - the Enlightenment and its political offshoot liberalism, once stood for what is presently its opposite? Individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and rationality became collectivism, statism, socialism and anti-reason, the latter presently morphing into the ultimate expression and most frightening form of subjectivism: anti-humanism.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dystopia of Paradise" -