On this day...

On this day, we must honor those who have died for our country. On this day, we must honor those who fought and lived, often with lifelong ailments of both mind and body. And how best to honor them? Do the parades and flag-waving actually mean anything anymore? What are we waving the flag for? Who are we saluting? For what are we fighting?

The answer for Americans has been and can only ever be one thing...FREEDOM.

But are we still fighting for it? Or is it something we passively accept? Do we still feel the weighty responsibility of the blood that has been spilled to defend the right to rule one's own life? Or have we surrendered it for the sake of the silken promise of serenity? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government continues to allow torture? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government takes control of businesses? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when we rush to surrender our property and our choice to selected officials? Have we truly forgotten the horrors of the Berlin Wall, the Killing Fields, the Third Reich, the purges and concentration camps, the barbed wire and minefields, the executions and assassinations (public and private)?

Have the young people of today never learned of the horrors that chained whole continents to a destiny of fear and oppression? Have they never learned that these chains were all forged from promises made of an easier life, promises of the right to dispose of the blessings granted others as your own, promises that the blood of today will be the prosperity of the future? But that prosperity never came...only the blood. And true prosperity vanished as a whisper on the wind chasing the fleeting phantasms of its butchered progenitors.

Have you ever wondered why it is that every single country which has tried to earnestly enact the idea of wealth redistribution has had to keep its citizens within its borders at the point of a gun? Have you ever wondered what freedoms you would have left in the world you desire?

If you still remember these things, or if you see the error of fighting for freedom and then turning it over to a populist mob, then perhaps you can honor those who died fighting for the American dream. The American dream? Isn't that supposed to be a house, a white picket fence, 2.3 kids, 1.4 cars and a dog? No. The American dream is anything you want it to be. Therein lies its power. Therein lies its majesty and mystery. If the things you would fight for are nothing more than material objects than you are a fool, destined to find yourself in a gutter lying next to all the other petty criminals and thieves.

But if you would fight for freedom, for the true legacy of the right to decide for yourself, of the right not to support the fallacies and contradictions of your neighbors if you so choose, of the right to make up your own mind and the freedom to act on that choice-if you would fight for these things, then you are truly honoring the brave men and women who lost everything that they had just for the chance, for the shimmering sliver of a dream that freedom could be a reality.

So please, rather than making empty token gestures of patriotism today, go out and protest. Howl, scream, demand, argue, rant and petition for your freedom. Talk about it with your friends, lovers, spouses, co-workers, everybody you can. Post, comment, blog, YouTube it, Facebook it, Twitter it. Today is a day for honoring freedom. Even if it is just at arm's length, go and honor freedom today and the people who died for it.

I leave you with one of the great historical speeches that many of you may have never even heard of before.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MDFX-dNtsM

In Mourning for America

Do the math:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-budget7-2009may07,0,4310621.story

A 3.55 trillion dollar budget....17 billion dollars in budget cuts...a deficit of 1.2 trillion dollars...

Now, seriously....any investor....any one sitting at home doing their finances, would they seriously think that these numbers are acceptable? When you're in debt, do you spend more hoping that you'll magically bring in increased revenues somewhere down the line? Do you buy 2 new cars, a GM and a Chrysler with the hope that if you give them some money, they may give you a job, or a raise? Does it make any sense to increase debt beyond our ability to pay it back? If you're in business, do you expand your company's operations when sales are down? If you're managing a household, do you go on a luxurious vacation, when the creditors are knocking at the door?

No, of course not. Anyone who did that would be at least grossly irresponsible, and possibly insane. Does it justify it any more to demand that our children and our children's children, that generations, yes, generations of our descendants will have to pay for these excesses? Doesn't that make it all the more evil, to assign debt to those who have no say in the matter, to burden them with an obligation to feed our folly? Is it satisfying to mark our children with the mark of Obama's breed of original sin?

This madness seems to know no bounds. I do not see a bright future for America until a significant libertarian presence is felt in Congress and the White House. As such, I've darkened the background of my page to reflect the feeling that America has entered a dark age of decline. Hopefully the grassroots efforts of advocates of liberty across the nation will one-day be enough to lift this blinding curtain of self-righteousness and end the orgy of self-immolation which is the American politic.

Just think of it, and does it make any sense:

$1,200,000,000,000 deficit
- $17,000,000,000 budget cuts
=$1,183,000,000,000 remaining deficit

....Just what kind of difference is Obama making?

Happy 4th of July!

As we come upon yet another celebration of America's political and philosophical independence, I'd like to offer this video commentary made by Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute. In it he pays eloquent tribute to the spirit that made America a colossus astride the world and recognizes the philosophical as well as political nature of the revolution itself.

Enjoy:)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWv5VZWlwRQ

Altruism: Servility and Humanity as Sacrificial Animals

Thank you, Ron Fournier.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for what could not be a more vivid portrait of altruism in America and exactly what is wrong with it.
In case you didn't see his commentary on the nobility of sacrifice as an American tradition, here's the link so you can see for yourselves.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24366817/

What disgusts me about this the most are the assumptions that he makes about good and evil and what is noble or ignoble. He places selflessness as an ethical ideal, sacrifice as its expression, and a state of servitude as the blessed pinnacle of human endeavor.

How horribly backward this all seems to me.

"Sacrifice," writes Fournier, "is a word that Americans like to associate with their heritage, their ideals and themselves." I don't. And I know quite a few other Americans who don't. What is it about sacrifice that makes it an ideal? Even if it has been in our heritage, it does not necessarily make it so. Rather it would seem better treated as a regret, a misfortune forced on us to deal with governments and movements of masses which demand our sacrifices and offer little in return. When sacrifices are forced upon people, when their property is stolen under the guise of social works, when their lives are chained and mandated by the asphyxiating legislation of special interests, then they are made sacrificial offerings on the altar of Society rather than choosing to make sacrifices. I fail to see what is noble in being made a victim. Victims of any form of brutality deserve the same respect as any other human being and some compassion or pity. But suffering is not a virtue in itself any more than sacrifice is.

"No Mother Teresas there" quips Fournier about Romney and Huckabee. Well, none here either. I recommend Christopher Hitchens' book The Missionary Position for a detailed presentation of exactly how "virtuous" she was. If we were to call virtuous those who would work unwaveringly towards foisting Catholic law on an entire nation of people as she did in Ireland we would be turning the very notion of virtue on its head so that tyranny most foul would become the goal of our aspirations and submission (or "service") to such tyranny would be the honorable role of the enlightened citizen.

But Fournier is just getting started. He moves on to berate our "materialistic" nature which as he puts it is "consumed by consuming, a materialistic culture that encourages people to pursue happiness via shopping sprees and save sacrifice for tithing on Sundays and distant do-gooders."

He lumps together ideas like it's a fire sale. Everything must go! First of all, materialism does not necessarily mean that one will think of shopping malls as Nirvana, or seek absolution on Ebay. According to Wikipedia, "The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism."

And here's the entry from Merriam-Webster online:

1 a: a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter
b: a doctrine that the only or the highest values or objectives lie in material well-being and in the furtherance of material progress
c: a doctrine that economic or social change is materially caused — compare historical materialism

2: a preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things

So, what we have here is a pathetically cloaked attempt to get us to swallow the idea that we should feel guilty for our material success, because what we should be doing, according to Fournier, is to be stressing over spiritual matters. This is an assumption to which any athiest should take offense.

But he cannot be satisfied with these offenses against reason, he has to rub salt in the wound.

He writes:
"But it would be a mistake to assume there is no stomach for sacrifice — or its sister virtue, service — in our society and in our politics. The desire to serve is part of human nature, and a particularly American virtue. History tells us that our selfless instincts flower in troubled times like these, and can be tapped by leaders looking for ways to motivate an anxious people."

He simply has to keep stressing his assumption that sacrifice is a virtue, as though saying it enough times would be sufficient proof. Of course he doesn't feel like he needs to justify this, as he is obviously writing for a spiritual audience, one that accepts the Judeo-Christian ethics at face value. Unfortunately far too many athiests do as well, a symptom of their misguided attraction to collectivist ideologies such as socialism and communism which share the same ethical base. Placing sacrifice and selflessness as virtues in the place of accomplishment and pride wreaks havoc on the moral compass of humanity, turning all our ideals against the mandates of the reality of our survival. It demands that we all become sinners and robs us of our self-esteem because of the impossibility of the demands on our conscience. Rather than feeling pride for what good we have done through the virtue of our work, we must feel shame for every empty mouth, and every shattered soul. Rather than feel the shining glory of purposeful action, we must become cynical and bitter at the impossibility of ever there being an action with purpose. THIS is what it means to place sacrifice, servility, and altruism as ideals. For a more detailed argument on the horrors of altruistic belief systems, I would refer the author to the works of Ayn Rand, most notably The Virtue of Selflessness.

I could go on. Fournier definitely does. I've written this much and only covered the first half page of his editorial. He fills up 2 full pages with this tripe. But I won't bother. The reason is that pulling the ideologies from his work is just that simple. He assumes that everyone feels the same way about these things, and so he makes absolutely no pretense about covering them up. It isn't enough that we simply do what we can, when we encounter misfortune in this world, we must give our whole lives to it to merit consideration in Fournier's analysis.

Dying in war counts as a worthwhile sacrifice in Fournier's analysis, but surprisingly in that he so readily takes on the mantle of a determiner of virtue, he cannot discriminate between the virtue of the abolitionists or the confederates, nor between the struggle for Manifest Destiny or the struggle against fascism and communism. Clearly all these endeavors are rendered equally virtuous in that the people who fought for them died. And there we have it at its heart. As long as you die for something, then you're virtuous. I would rather live and place life as the ultimate value. There are far too many Jihadists that would be rushing to agree with Fournier at this point.

As for me, I can't stomach to read through his raving scribbles for one second longer. So, go check it out for yourselves, and try to think about this one thing if nothing else--If it is virtuous to sacrifice the most you can to the most "deserving", what would utopia look like?

(And no cheating. We're talking about real sacrifice here. That means that you don't get equal or greater values in return.)