Author: Sheila Marler
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Economic Inequality is Public Enemy Number 1
I entitled a previous article The Big Bang Swindle. I temporarily forgot something important about scientific theories: they are informed by philosophical ideas. All scientists work within the context of their own cultural understanding. A Spirkin explains the connection between philosophy, religion and science when he says that philosophy has always informed science, directly or indirectly, through ‘the whole system of culture’. So it doesn’t make sense to call the Big Bang theory ‘a swindle’.
However I am still concerned with the current direction of physics. I mentioned previously that Albert Einstein objected to Quantum physics, but it was his work that made the atom bomb possible. It seems strange to me that we don’t seem willing or able to discuss the beliefs and values that led to its development and to the bombing of Japan.
Philosophy and Science Science isn’t the problem. I would argue that the problem today is an economic system that allows a small number of people to set policy and control science. It destroys caution, it drowns out wisdom, and it uses science and politics as weapons.
Given enough time we can solve any problem. If extreme inequality threatens to rob us of time it must go. Economic inequality is public enemy number 1.
[1] A. Spirkin Philosophy and Science Marxists.org. Available Here
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The State is Your Daddy
It’s been my policy to ignore the Republicans. However, I feel I should say something about the government shutdown and the House tax bill. Since the Republicans control both houses of Congress I suspect that they actually want the shutdown to happen. Therefore, their threats represent a clear and present danger and must be stopped by force if necessary.
As for the tax bill, I think it can be addressed on the basis of principle. It is important to be aware that certain ancient principles are still being honored today. The law of bridewealth is acknowledged in the Bible in a perverse way–in the changing of it. This takes place in the third chapter of Genesis.
And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
…Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to they husband and he shall rule over thee. (Genesis 3: 13, 16)
I would argue that this story is justification for marriage without compensation. It suggests that marriage by default was always the norm, however there is evidence that the custom of bridewealth was practiced in the Old Testament. T.M. Lemos provides evidence of marriage gifts in the legal and narrative texts of the Bible, and in extrabiblical sources. Lemos also lists biblical references to marriage gifts other than bridewealth. Obviously, indebtedness to childbearing women is not admitted today but I believe it is acknowledged in the story of Adam and Eve. Please keep this in mind as we discuss the increase in the Child Tax Credit.
The House Republican tax bill would increase the maximum Child Tax Credit (CTC) from the current $1,000 to $1,600 per child. However it would exclude 10 million children whose parents work for low pay—about 1 in 7 of all U.S. children in working families, including thousands of children in every state. Another 12 million children in working families would receive less than the full $600-per-child increase in the credit (in most cases much less). Altogether, about 1 in 3 children in working families would either be excluded entirely or only partially benefit from the CTC increase. In almost every state, 25 percent of children in working families would be partially or completely excluded. In 12 states, at least 40 percent would be excluded. If you include cuts to or elimination of 1 million immigrant children in low-income families, the total number comes to 23 million children.
The credit is partially refundable. The refundable portion is limited to 15 percent of a family’s earnings over $3,000. So a single mother with two children and earnings of $10,000 is eligible for a CTC of $1,050 or $525 per child, rather than for the $2,000 ($1,000 per child) that a middle-income family with two children receives. The poorest children qualify for only a very small CTC or none at all.
On the other hand, families with six-figure incomes would be made newly eligible for the credit or receive the largest CTC increases. The CTC of a married couple with two children earning $200,000 would rise from zero today to $3,200 under the plan.
The Rubio-Lee proposal would help but it still falls short. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Senators Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennet, and other lawmakers have also introduced improvements. They would improve the CTC proposal in the House tax bill but they would not touch the biggest shortcomings in the plan: its heavy tilt toward the highest-income households and profitable corporations, and its impact in substantially increasing budget deficits and debt. (Emily Horton Child Tax Credit Increase Excludes Thousands of Children, Available: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/house-tax-bills-child-tax-credit-increase-excludes-thousands-of-children-in-low
Rising deficits in turn would lead to increased pressure to make deep budget cuts in areas such as health care, food assistance for struggling families, and education – cuts that would fall heavily on low- and middle-income families and render them net losers, even if the plan’s CTC provisions are strengthened.
“Overall, the House tax bill is heavily skewed toward high-income households and profitable corporations. When fully in effect, 38 percent of its benefits would go to the 0.3 percent of filers with annual incomes over $1 million…”
Of course not even the full amount of the CTC will defray the costs of raising a child in the middle class. The Republicans seem to be counting on our ignorance of the principles involved here. I conclude that the central obligation in the resistance should belong to the parents of girls. Since the government seems to be playing the part of a spouse or in-law, I would also advise young women to cooperate with their parents to assure proper compensation from the government. I think this type of organization is a matter of self-defense under this regime.
Maybe this will lead to a society in which Paul Ryan and his ilk cannot seduce women into having more children for a few pennies, and fill the coffers of the rich while denying those same women the entitlements they’ve paid for.
See also: Emily Hales, Can government incentives reverse falling birth rates? Deseret news, June 27, 2014. Available: https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865605862/Governments-use-incentives-to-counter-falling-fertility-rates.html
Buttonwood, Political power follows economic power, The Economist, Feb 3, 2016. Available: https://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2016/02/economics-and-democracy
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Mega-Church and New World Order
This is the beginning of my effort to provide additional links pertaining to my articles. I haven’t done this previously because I’ve assumed they would already be available to my readers. Relevant articles and videos seem to appear in my news feed and I sort of figured they would be available to my readers as well. Now that I’ve said this I realize how ridiculous it sounds, but there it is. The following videos support the previous article concerning religious confusion.
This next one is extremely long, so you might want to watch it in smaller pieces. I’ll have more to say about the general situation in the next post.
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The Low Standard: Pseudo-Intellectualism in Neo-conservative Thought
In the book, When Empire Meets Nationalism,[1]the authors expressed their hope for a ‘intellectual alternative’ to the neo-conservative worldview. The problem with this expression, in my opinion, is not its basic sentiment but its wording. It implies that the neoconservative worldview is intellectual. Whatever else might be said about neoconservative pronouncements, they are most definitely not intellectual. A case in point can be found in the introduction of the book, which tells of a political controversy that arose in 2005 surrounding George Lucas’s comments about his Episode III of Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith.
The director declared he had developed his saga in reference to the Vietnam War and felt there was a disturbing parallel between this event and the invasion of Iraq. By comparing the ‘philosophy’ behind his work to the current political situation, he was stating that ‘most bad people think they are good people, they are doing it for the right reasons and, as if to underline the polemical aspect of his declaration, he added to the parallel between the American political context and the leitmotiv of his Episode III that ‘In terms of evil, one of the original concepts was how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship’, in other words, how a prosperous Republic, albeit in a crisis, becomes a moralistic and militarist dictatorship. A process which some, on the political left, would use to define George W. Bush’s policy-making.
Naturally, right-wing American groups felt themselves personally attacked by Lucas’s comments. One group, the pro-republican group, the Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood, (PABAAH), called for a US boycott of Lucas’s latest film. What did surprise the authors however, was the fact that conservatives and neoconservatives did not reject the right-wing position outright. Or at least they did not echo the PABAAH’s call for a boycott. The neoconservatives agreed with Lucas in principle, arguing that he ‘was simply mistaken in his definition of Good and Evil. Anakin Skywalker, who becomes Darth Vader, chose, according to them, the good side, the Empire’.
I would explain Americans’ failure to develop an intellectual alternative to neo-conservatism in this way: one assumes the neocons are either making a sick joke, or that they are completely mad. Given this understanding common decency dictates one of two things: a cynical guffaw, or a discrete silence. (Note that an intellectual answer is not on the list of possible responses.) This leads me to suspect method in the neo-conservative madness.
It is difficult to recognize the implicit challenge in their tactics because their remarks are more like a slap in the face than political discourse. However, since I agree that it’s important to confront this particular comment in a coherent way I’ll answer it, in kind.
With the Darth Vader comment the neo-conservatives made a mockery of everyone and everything, including neo-conservatism itself. The first thing to be understood is that this was a defensive maneuver in response to George Lucas’s criticism of neoconservative policies. In this light, it’s important to assert that not even the neoconservatives could believe that switching the roles of villain and hero in another writer’s work is a respectable course of action. Then why would they take this course of action? I would answer that with another question: what else could they say? The best they could hope for was to divert attention from Lucas’s criticism. And they no doubt also considered it a bonus that they were able to show contempt for the conventions of civil society. Outrageousness is their way of attacking collective confidence and corrupting political rhetoric. What else would you expect from a bunch of Gnostics?
[1] Didier Chaudet, Florent Parmentier and Benoît Pélopidas, When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia. Ashgate Publishing, Burlington, VT, 2009
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Do Neo Conservatives Understand Christmas?
The Neo Conservatives have used fundamentalist Christians to increase their popularity. This was necessary because without American Christians they would have had no political base in the United States. In my opinion, it is a problem that the neocons are not Christians. It is a bigger problem that they are Gnostics.
Today Gnosticism justifies itself through Quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is called science, but it had metaphysical pretensions from the beginning. That’s why Albert Einstein rejected it. He believed in a God that does not play dice with the universe.
From an article on transnational interpretation.org:
Now let’s look at the history of the development of quantum mechanics, which was thoroughly saturated with discussions of consciousness and the mind. First, celebrated mathematical genius and quantum theory pioneer John von Neumann stated in 1955 that ‘N. Bohr, Naturwiss. 17 (1929)…was the first to point out that the dual description…necessitated by the formalism of the quantum mechanical description of nature is fully justified by the physical nature of things [and] that it may be connected with the principle of psychophysical parallelism.’
The ‘psycho-physical parallelism’ is a purely metaphysical doctrine saying that a physical process in the body is accompanied by a subjective psychological experience in the mind without any causal connection between them. Does this sound ‘New Age-y’ to you? It does to me. Yet Von Neumann not only reports Bohr’s use of this term but explicitly invokes it in his account of ‘measurement’ in quantum theory. [To quote von Neumann]
“…we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer. In the former, we can follow up all the physical processes…arbitrarily precisely. In the latter this is meaningless…that this boundary can be pushed arbitrarily deeply into the interior of the body of the observer is the content of the principle of the psycho-physical parallelism.”
Von Neumann goes on to refer to the ‘ego’ of the observer as that which experiences a single outcome of the measurement, even though the physical system is described only by a set of outcomes. Connecting the two is the mysterious ‘collapse’, for which Von Neumann gives a formal representation but which he explicitly says lies outside any physically describable system. [1]
Another problem with quantum physics is the lack of consensus as to what kind of social and economic reality is compatible with the quantum universe. Despite of this lack of consensus quantum mechanics has had real consequences in the world. This would probably explain the Bush administration’s lack of a plan for Iraq, even though they were clearly determined from the beginning to destroy it. Condoleezza
Rice stated as much in a 2006 press conference. When asked how she intended to restore peace to Iraq, she said:
“I think it would be a mistake. What we’re seeing here, in a sense is the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East not going back to the old one.”[2]
According to Eric Voegelin, the Gnostic system is its own logic. That’s why it can’t allow logical questions. System building is not philosophy. It is based on the desire to dominate being. True philosophy on the other hand is based on the love of being.
In answer to a similar question to that asked of Rice,
George Bushan aide to George W. Bush demonstrated that he is a system builder:“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
You might wondering what can be done? After all, quantum mechanics describes the way the universe works, doesn’t it? No, not really. A different physics has always been a possibility. The only real question would be how far back we need to go. In the meantime it is relevant to recall the view of man proposed by William Shakespeare compared to that proposed by Job. This implies two different views of God. The Gnostics gave us the idea of the Superman–just one episode in their struggle to remake mankind. Today they claim to be improving the process of evolution with artificial intelligence. Considering the effects they have had in the world so far, it shouldn’t be surprising that they represent a direct challenge to the Christian religion. Contrary to their pretensions to godliness, Christianity tells us that God became human. And rather than demonstrate his fearsome power He experienced the harsh realities of mortal existence.
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed…And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:1, 3-7)
[1] Where did the ‘Wrong’ idea of quantum theory implying consciousness come from? Quantum physicists Transactionalinterpretation.org. Oct 2, 2015
[2] Thierry Meyssan The Neo Conservatives and the Policies of Constructive Chaos Voltairenet.org, 27 July 2006
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Movement for a People’s Party
Last week Nick Braña announced the next stage in his effort–the Draft Bernie movement has become the ‘Movement for a People’s Party’. In a recent interview on the Jimmy Dore Show, Braña explained that although progressives have the numbers, they are ‘too atomized’ to be successful at the polls. He hopes to remedy that situation by enabling collaborative efforts toward independent politics. The new movement’s priority is coalition building, or a pooling of resources rather than a merging of various groups, however the end goal remains the same–the creation of a new party.
Previously the Draft Bernie effort looked like a catch-22. How do you recruit people without a platform, and what good is a platform if you don’t have the organizational structure to implement it? Furthermore, unless the new party could really challenge the Democratic Party it would have to compete for Democratic votes–somewhat like the Green Party in the 2016 election—which is not exactly an inspiring prospect for people who hoped to blow the Democratic Party out of the water. Today all that remains is the conviction that the two-party system has to go–and a new strategy. Considering that the Draft Bernie team is not alone in their vision for a third-party, that should be enough.
Nick often cites a recent Gallop poll revealing that 61% of Americans are fed up with the existing parties. Then there’s the recent AFL-CIO conference, where a third-party was a hot topic of conversation. In other words, this is something people want. The Draft Bernie movement started out as a daring wager that Bernie would leave the Democratic Party. Little did they know, giving up would not be an option. People’s Party, it’s time to get serious.(forapeoplesparty.org)
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Neoconservatives Against the World
We knew that this election was a contest between two deep state factions, but the most interesting thing in my opinion is the fact that both Trump and Clinton represent neoconservative influences.
It was Bill Clinton who allowed the left-wing neocons to take control of the Democratic Party.[1] (Page 36, Location 465) He did so because he needed their support for his first presidential campaign. This would explain the DNC’s treatment of Bernie Sanders in 2016. Bernie’s Democratic Socialism is more threatening to left-wing neocons than the right will ever be. However the neocon influence on the left tends to stay under the radar. It usually takes the form of neoconservative candidates posing as progressives, including John Kerry, Howard Dean, and John Edwards. Those ‘in the know’ hoped that the imperialist-democratic ideal was on its way out with the election of Barack Obama. Little did they know…
It goes without saying that the right-wing religious leaders who supported Donald Trump are also neocons, although everyone seems to chalk up their bizarre statements to religious extremism. The Christian Right has been considered a natural ally of the neocons since the time of Irving Kristol. The neocons shared the Christian Right’s aversion to the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s. They rejected the Democratic Party when President Carter proved to be too open-minded and respectful of people’s different lifestyles, and they were disappointed again at Reagan’s moderate stance on family and cultural issues. From that time the Christian Right has supported the most radical groups and it has violently opposed the Democrats, particularly the Clinton administration, which it considered too timid in foreign affairs.
This alliance has been courted by both the Christians and the neocons. Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition from 1989 to 1997, had neocon sympathies, putting him somewhere between a sometimes anti-Semitic protestant fundamentalist and the pro-Israeli group in Washington. On the neocon side, PNAC sought to create links with key Christian groups such as William Bennett’s Empower America, and neocons like Kristol or Eliott Abrams showed their support by sharing extreme Christian positions on abortion and Aids. This alliance was boosted after September 11 when Christian Right think tanks, lobbies, and affiliated preachers adopted the neoconservative vision of Islam, Islamic terrorism and the ‘War on Terrorism’.
Many Americans are not aware of how often the Christian Right has swayed presidential decisions. George Bush was threatened with their sanctions when he condemned Israel’s assassination attempt on Hamas leader Rantissi in June of 2003. As a result of their threats Bush’s reaction to the successful assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Rantissi in 2004 took on an entirely different character: he sided with Sharon. (When Empire Meets Nationalism, Page 35, Location 447)
Thus, starting from a deep-rooted anti-communism, the neoconservatives have gradually developed their analyses, which go far beyond the strict mould of their supporters to irrigate the whole political scene. During all their historical trajectory, there has always been a desire for American supremacy and a wariness of the rest of the world which can only lead them towards a re-legitimization of the Empire as a key to world order. (When Empire Meets Nationalism, Page 38, Location 489)
Given this discouraging state of affairs, it’s important to identify a pointed and coherent resistance. The position of Pope Francis in this struggle is probably best illustrated by the identity of his Catholic critics. As described in Todd Scribner’s book, A Partisan Church: American Catholicism and the rise of Neoconservative Catholics,[2] Francis’s critics are Catholic neocons. This is probably the faction represented by Paul Ryan when he stated that Francis should not be involved in politics. Bernie Sanders on the other hand, has been sympathetic to Francis’s approach.
Orthodox criticism of the Catholic Church represents political rivalry of another sort. The Orthodox Church is not a disinterested religious voice. It vies with Alexander Dugin for influence over Vladimir Putin.
Dugin’s neo-eurasianism represents a line of thought similar to neoconservative thought. His influence on both Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon reveals the true dilemma of our time.
[1] Didier Chaudet, Florent Parmentier, Benoit Pélopidas, When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia. Ashgate Publishing Limited, Surrey, England and Burlington VT, 2009. (All page numbers and locations correspond to the Kindle edition.)
[2] As reviewed by Patrick Garry, Neoconservative Catholicism in America. First Things, December 2, 2015
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Humanity at the Crossroads
I just read the New York Times article about the baby homes in Ireland. Patriarchal ‘morality’ creates a throwaway culture. It turns love to hatred, beauty to ugliness, and human kindness to cruelty. If we really want to make things better we have to let it go. [1]
[1] Ireland wanted to forget but the dead don’t always stay buried New York Times, 10/28/2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland-babies-children.html)