“Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.”

--Dylan Thomas

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

                                                        --Winston Churchill

“I should have known better,” is the most typical guilty self-admonition indicative of buyers’ remorse. It is one of the most pervasively dominant political emotions in the country today, barely sixteen months into Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency. To paraphrase Churchill: never have so many been deceived so much by so few. Unfortunately, for the few who were not so deceived, an “I told you so” counter-admonition does not afford a respite from the prospect of pain and suffering in the horizon.

Saddled by the inertial burden of a Bush Derangement Syndrome which was engendered by war fatigue, and so maliciously and successfully perpetrated by the treasonous halls of punditocracy, the mainstream media, and the rest of the “blame America first crowd,” the nation proved vulnerable to the most ostentatious campaign rhetoric, which buoyed the thinnest resume a candidate ever had supporting the most liberal voting record in the Senate, all the way into the Oval Office. Fact checking fell by the wayside. The country became both a willing victim and a co-conspirator to her own self-deception.

The maverick brand that John McCain nurtured throughout his career allowed the so-called main stream media to effectively leverage the 2008 nominating process.  This resulted in the anointment of John McCain as the Republican standard bearer.  The Republican brand had been hijacked by the RINOs (Republican in name only) wing of the Party. The elitist country club Republicans lorded it over the conservative base. Not even the engaging charm of Sarah Palin who was far more conservative than MacCain has been for at least 16 years, and had a far stronger executive resume than Obama ever had, could resuscitate the faltering Republican campaign to save the day.

That Barack Hussein Obama ascended into the Oval Office is symptomatic of the political dyslexia that the country has sunk into, thanks in part to sustained assault on American educational institutions perpetrated by the so-called “Progressives,” that goes as far back as the turn of the last century, and the philosophical ideas of John Dewey, purportedly “. . . the most eloquent and arguably most influential figure in educational Progressivism” (emphasis added):

 “. . . Progressive ideas . . . rejected traditional classroom practice in favor of individualized instruction that let children learn at their own pace. . . . believed that all children had a right to be happy and live natural and full lives, and they yoked the needs of the individual to those of the community.”

 “. . . the public school's shift toward an overtly custodial function [w]as both anti-American, anti-intellectual, and, ironically, antidemocratic. . . . the perceived penchant for feel-good classroom instruction, and the . . . anti-intellectualism of adjustment pedagogy . . . marginalized the place of traditional core subjects. . . .”

In short, they converted the school system’s mandate to instruct into baby-sitting chores. Or in the succinctly astute formulation ofGeorge Will earlier this year,

“The dependency agenda is progressive education for children of all ages, meaning all ages treated as children.”

The dynamics of that takeover had been most recently lucidly and meticulously documented by Chuck Roger. Writing in the American Thinker, he chronicled the trajectory of migration of the progressives ideology from its origins as cultural Marxism at the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research to Columbia University and beyond. Among the luminaries prominently involved, most notable was Herbert Marcuse, who grafted cultural Marxism onto  John Dewey’s progressivist pedagogical philosophy and spawned

“A list of ideological progeny [that] reads like a "Who's Who" of collectivist ideologues: Pentagon bomberWilliam Ayers, anti-homework and anti-competition preacher Alfie Kohn, America-hater Noam Chomsky, communistVan Jones, and progressive Bible-thumper George Lakoff, to name a few. Education, social studies, and literature curricula burst with gibberish on social, environmental, and climate justice as well as multiculturalism, diversity, moral relativism, and moral equivalence -- all derived in some way from cultural Marxism.”

The immediate and explicit mission was to deconstruct American society by:

“. . . eliminating social decorum and glorifying perverse behavior in order to destroy the Western middle class and collapse society from within. Translated into today's terminology, the plan prescribed the commandeering of news and entertainment media, religious and financial institutions, organized labor, health care, and education.”

The celebration of decadenceand the sanctification of victimhood and dependency are two sides of the same currency coin which I dubbed as National Dyslexia. Not just in the context of literacy in particular, but in the context of perception in general, i.e., the difficulty if not outright failure to recognize and synthesize visual, spatial, and auditory relationships into a coherent gestalt, reliable and replicable perceptual representation of the outside world.

The first institutional manifestation of this phenomenon came about when MTV first became acceptable in the national polity as a legitimate entertainment venue. It subsequently proved a most convenient vehicle for the evolution of pop-culture, and the morass of mindless entertainment genres such as “reality shows,” etc.  MTV was first introduced in the national scene as a series of musical scores accompanied by video images which the music was supposed to represent rather than invoke.

Traditionally, it used to be that a musical score invokes images in the imagination of the listener, commensurate with how sublime the music is and how sensitive is the soul of the listener. When you furnish the images along with the music, you are presuming that either a) the soul of the listener is too barren to be expected to produce any images; or b) that the music is too impotent to ignite any sparks of inspiration in the soul of the listener.

Thus, while the school system, especially the union-dominated public schools continued to churn out functionally illiterate graduates, in the staggering order of 36% of total output in some localities , the entertainment industry conspired to commercially nurture a mindless citizenry, happily unaware of its cultural illiteracy.  What with instant gratification as the most dominant operational impetus in this age of light speed modern technology, moral illiteracy if not moral imbecility is bound to follow as surely as day follows night.

It is precisely in this context that the election of President Obama fits ever so snugly into the progressivist template for a takeover of the country. The recent passage of ObamaCare into law with its concomitant federal takeover of the student loan program sort of sealed the deal for the federalization of education. Where John Dewey and Herbert Marcuse fell short, Obama is apparently now poised to succeed in one of the most crucial financial aspects of the takeover:

“. . . to convert education into a new ‘right’ that is to be funded with American tax dollars and new bureaucracies.”

“. . . Obama was very open before the election about his plan to fundamentally change American society. The goal is to convert our nation into a European social democracy instead of a free market system with individual freedom.”

That this country has been so dearly loved even by people who were treated so ignobly by it is an eloquent testament to its inherent goodness. Despite some misguided policies such as the criminal internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry while some of their family members were deployed to the European theater in WWII, the paradigm of freedom and liberty that has been its main bastion afforded the unfortunately maltreated citizens the opportunity to transcend the immediately given set of adverse circumstances. 

But when Obama is finished dismantling the private sector, that proven venerable citadel of individual initiative, by downsizing and buying out and co-opting whatever is left to make every man, woman and child the ward of the state, there would be no more individuals left to spearhead and accomplish the most urgently needed transcendence. Only a blob semblance of wretched humanity will be left to wallow in a quagmire of putrid amalgam of malaise and discontent.

Digging out of the quagmire of malaise into the sunshine of liberty requires sufficient extra free energy to inspire the soul. Absent such inspiration, the slouching out should prove to be toilsome, indeed. When your soul belongs to Cesar in its entirety you can only render onto Cesar the entirety of your being. We are better advised to embark on the process of taking back the country before the utopian Obamism has accomplished its mission.  As I attempted to emphasize earlier elsewhere:

“We are at a crossroads when political decorum disregards well established protocols of intellectual inquiry in order to pursue and forcibly implement political agenda as demanded by ideology of the Progressives genre. The will of the governed is completely and unabashedly ignored by the ruling elites so obsessively blinded by their determination to control and lord it over the political landscape.”

“The battle over the acceptance of paradigms encapsulates the crisis of our time. On the one hand, there is the Repugnant Obama Paradigm with designs to fundamentally subvert the ideals which undergird the founding of the Republic. On the other hand, the Conservative Paradigm’s ‘super’ majority of the populace, some undoubtedly having voted for Barack Obama, remain faithful to the Founding Principles as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, are determined to prevent any such egregious transformation.”

“The electoral process remains to be our most potent weapon against the usurpers of power throughout the political landscape. Until that opportunity to throw out in the midterm elections the acolytes to the Obama Regime in Congress are upon us, judicial challenges may prove as potent vehicles both for stalling the devastating effects of ObamaCare and for formulating a viable alternative to Obama’s designs to downsize, to oblivion, this last best hope of man on earth. “

  Preface

Every intellectual endeavor is a work-in-progress, to the extent that the intellect continues to function. This stems from the intricate feedback mechanism inherent to the organic circuitry of the mind. This truism applies with absolute certainty to this opus.

While I consider the piece in its first stage of completion, because of the scope of the subject, I intend to revisit it for occasional revisions. I therefore enjoin the more proactive segments of the reading public to volunteer some comments, good, bad, helpful, harmful, or otherwise indifferent.  

I have absolute faith in my doubts, and I believe in the inherent perfectibility of the imperfect. Every aspect of my feedback circuitry most definitely falls in that genre. It is an integral part of my farm boy upbringing to constantly endeavor to assimilate any feedback, to enhance my chances at survival.

It probably serves to emphasize that every part of the work is “in progress,” including even this “Preface.” That is to say, subject to modifications depending on the author’s whims and maybe incidental sparks of inspiration and/or additional materials that may come to my attention, and be deemed relevant.

It is in this spirit that I beg your indulgence and enjoin you to occasionally check for updated versions of the article.

Live long and prosper and enjoy the ride, for to paraphrase Omar Khayyam(c.1038-1123), and be internet adaptive,

LXXI
The Clicking Keyboard writes; and, having writ,
Clicks on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

With a song in my heart: regards & carpe diem,

Constancio S. Asumen. Jr.

Table of Contents

Preface

Table of Contents

I. Prolegomenon: Preliminary Escapades

I.1 Personal Dimension

I.2 Professional and Political Conjectures

II. Fundamental Considerations

II.1 Elements of Knowledge

II.2 Three Types of Knowledge

II.2.1 Recursive or Operational Knowledge

II.2.2 Descriptive or Attributional Knowledge

II.2.3 Discursive or Propositional Knowledge

III. The Architecture of Inquiry

III.1 Philosophical Inquiry

III.2 Scientific Inquiry

IV. Practical Implications

IV.1 On Antrophogenic Global Warming

IV.2 On Darwinian Theory of Evolution

V. Concluding Observations

VI. Bibliography: Itemizing Primary Sources

VII. Suggested Keywords

I. Prolegomenon: Preliminary Escapades

“. . . as soon as we think that we correctly perceive something, we are spontaneously convinced that it is true. . . . if . . . it is impossible for us ever to have any reason for doubting what we are convinced of, then there are no further questions for us to ask: we have everything that we could reasonably want. . . .”

-- Rene Descartes, (as quoted by L. Newman)

I propose to start with the purely subjective observation that for anything that I consciously decide to do, there is an associated purpose and a concomitant motive which propel me to do it. If this sounds pompous and outlandish, being in the subjective realm, I can nevertheless claim it to be indisputably true.

I.1 Personal Dimension

For reasons I hope will very shortly become self-evident, by way of an introduction I deem it appropriate to reproduce in its entirety, grammar mistakes included, my email to Joan Swirsky which was composed and sent Tuesday, 2-Mar-2010 (9:26am EST, emphasis added):

Joan,

I missed you.  You are one of the unique rare souls generous enough to indulge my whimsy.  I pray all is well with you, and I mean every aspect of your being.

My February was consumed in a medical sabbatical.  I spent the first half being aware that something was not right with my body but could not quite figure out what.  I landed in the ER on the 15^th with a TIA.  I got discharged on the 18^th with Cobalt-Chromium stents on all four of my cardiac-arterial grafts.  I’m back at my computer to recuperate.  I submitted my latest article to Frank yesterday.  Frank said it’s queued for tomorrow’s posting.  I suspect something might be amiss when you did not reply.

Today I embark on an ambitious project which I labeled “Inquiry into the Nature (and Understanding) of Knowledge.”  It is provoked by my umbrage at the Oval Office spearheading the marketing and funding of Global Warming initiatives despite the fraudulent nature of the knowledge behind the GW narrative.

This about covers everything.  Here’s hoping I hear from you real soon.

Live long and prosper,

Stan

With a song in my heart: regards & carpe diem,

Constancio S. Asumen. Jr.

Being connected  makes all the difference!

Admittedly, this may fall into what I elsewhere dubbed, albeit in a different context, “The Fallacy of Exhibitionism.” I consider Joan to be my spiritual Rabbi and inspiration in the realm of authoring. She has been very generous and critically forthright with her opinions. How we got connected is a narrative that deserves, nay, demands to be told. It is instructive of the nature of communication in the age of the internet. It can be revealing of the internet’s pitfalls and immeasurable benefits.

The quasi-saga started on the night of Sunday, 25-Oct-2009. Coming home from work, I heard on the radio a replay of an interview with then candidate Obama pompously deploring the U.S. Constitution as a proscriptive constraint on governance rather than a prescriptive sanction for governance.  This was rudely and inadvertently cut off when I parked on the driveway.  I promptly proceeded to Google-search for the text string “Obama, U.S. Constitution.”

The first item in the hits list returned by my search propelled me to send the following email:

Dear Ms. Swirsky,

I stumbled onto your column when I googled for the keywords “Obama, US Constitution”.

You are exactly the kind of columnist/journalist/author we need more of in the U.S.  I regret that I did not stumble onto your work sooner.

If you have some kind of a mailing list for your articles, kindly include my email address in it.

I thank you very much.

With a song in my heart: regards & carpe diem,

Constancio S. Asumen. Jr.

Being connected  makes all the difference!

Since then the volume of our correspondence through four hours ago (9:52 am EST) tallied 36 in my inbox and 63 in the sent folder. In range of subject matter and wealth of substance, this is rivaled only by my correspondence with a graduate school colleague, through the Spring of 1973, who wrote me last on 1-Feb-2010. She is the only acquaintance from my college days who keeps me posted albeit on a less than regular basis.

Joan and I seemed to have been yapping away in barely three months (February ’10 being a hiatus) as if we have known each other forever. She has that uncanny effect of bringing out in me what she dubbed “a wealth of memories screaming to be told.” What I find piquantly remarkable is the near-certainty that she would not recognize me from a hole in the wall if by a confluence of circumstances, we bumped into each other wherever people bump into each other these days.

{Any one of the following locations could be my favored venue for such a pleasant accident: the Intermission cocktail lounge at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, ditto the Carnegie Hall, the 18^th Green grandstands at Augusta National during the Masters, or St. Andrews Old and Ancient during the British Open, ditto the Pebble Beach Golf and Country Club during the U.S. Open. I don’t have the vaguest idea what genre of venues Joan may happen into, and there is no point speculating about them. There is no such thing as speculative knowledge.}

Joan, having posted her facial likeness on her website, I most definitely have a slight advantage as far as such a scenario goes. I would not bet the mortgage on it, though. Years of trying to stay under the radar somehow rendered my facial recognition skills somewhat jaded.

Herein lies the relevance of this quasi-saga to the project at hand: should such a fortuitous event come to pass, the only things we may know about each other are those which are true of who each one of us is. What we may not know about each other is for the time being essentially unknowable. To know that you don’t know does not constitute any kind of knowledge, as it does not make you know what you don’t know. At best, it may only make you want to know what you don’t know.

I.2 Professional and Political Conjectures

As I write, I will never know the content of the conversation that might ensue from such an encounter. Yet I’m certain I would find it, to paraphrase Spock, one of my all time favorite movie characters, fascinating to eavesdrop on. For reasons I cannot explain, and I hope she would not take offense at, I confess that contemplating on the above scenario in part inspired me to embark upon this project.

Finally, it behooves to touch on the political angle to my motivation. For this I invoke Patrick J. Buchanan’s conclusions, quoting H.L. Mencken, to a recent column on “Global Warming” and “Theory of Evolution” with the following indictment of the powers that be, especially the purveyors of information:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Both Darwinian Theory and moderate-period global temperature fluctuations were topics covered by An Introduction to Historical Geology, a course I used to teach to college juniors. Professional decorum compels me to think that an inquiry into the nature of knowledge with due diligence may help, in however minor way, exterminate those hideous hobgoblins, from the national polity. 

I am acutely aware that ideologues in the corridors of power, e.g., the Oval Office, both houses of Congress, the ‘main stream media,’ etc., have their designs to the contrary. Precisely for this same reason, it is essential that a wider and larger segment of the national polity be made aware that the paradigm these hoaxters are committed to perpetrate on the nation is abominable to a more enlightened populace. This article is my attempt at a modest contribution to such an urgently needed enlightenment. 

II.  Fundamental Considerations

Let me stipulate as a primary axiom that the ultimate purpose of human knowledge is the perpetuation of the human species. This is one of three equally fundamental axioms I adhere to as the basis of this inquiry. What you know does not count for much of anything if you end up being extinct, as did the dinosaurs of geologic antiquity.

It is necessary to postulate further, as a starting point, that the physics of the universe mandates that everything exists in space and time. Moreover, there are two intertwining and interacting realms of existence, namely the material and the conceptual. As a corollary, both space and time being themselves concepts, the material realm is necessarily subsumed by the conceptual realm. This is the main basis for ‘mind over matter’ to be axiomatic.

If idea is primary, how do you initiate an idea? Or the other side of the same question, how do you prevent ideas from being formed in your mind? How, when, and where did my knowledge of anything begin? I assert, contend and maintain that it began with my Will to know.

At the instant of conception, i.e., when the sperm unites with the ovum, the human soul is endowed by Divine Providence with the Will as the “essence of the soul,” or the “Divine spark of life.” This is another one of my three axioms. 

To put it another way: It is beyond the need of a proof that I have a soul. I just know that I have one. Since I cannot locate in time or space when and where I started having a soul, the moment of conception is as good a beginning as any. Better yet, it is the only beginning I can conceivably point to with more than just a significant degree of certainty. I am absolutely sure of it.

The immediate necessary consequence to my second axiom is that any instance of indecision is the most grievous sin you can ever commit. A forfeiture of your Will, is a betrayal of your soul, and an affront to Divine Providence.

II.1 Elements of Knowledge

"To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all of its life... Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters." ­­--Churchman (1971, p. 10)

[as quoted by Dr. Yogesh Malhotra, BRINT Institute,]

Nothing exists in isolation.  This is the third (not in order of importance but in order of reference) of the three axioms alluded to earlier. That is, existence, in and of itself presupposes a relationship. Knowledge may be construed as the state or condition of comprehension of this relationship, rather than just of the existent, by a process of knowing. 

For any notion of knowledge to be valid and viable, the process of knowing requires at least three necessary elements: first, the existence of the one that knows, aka, the knower, the sentient observer or subject; second that which needs to be known, aka the object of knowledge needs to be addressable by the subject; third the attribute of translatability of the knowledge thus established has to be verifiable.

This architecture is congruent with what seems to be ubiquitous in the literature, such as that laid out by Jonathan Dolhenty as follows (emphasis omitted):

“There are three elements which enter into knowledge:

·         (1) the knowing subject,

·         (2) the known object, and

·         (3) the mental act of knowing, which is called cognition.

. . .

“The object of knowledge is anything and everything that is, or becomes, or can be, known by man. The objects of man's knowledge are himself, conscious states of his self, and also realities other than himself. Every act of knowledge must be knowledge of something and refer to some object.”

I differ with Dolhenty in two significant ways. The entity of my object of knowledge is focused on the relationships concomitant to the existent’s existence rather than the existent itself. Second, the element of translatability as a condition to the establishment of knowledge is a requirement I claim to be my own contribution, although it arguably appears to somehow follow from expositions on “justified true belief” (M. Steup) analysis of knowledge, more so than from Bertrand Russell’s (1926) definition of knowledge. 

I further stipulate that when it comes to sentient being, I mean human beings. When it comes to thinking, and kindred activities, I am unapologetically anthropocentric. I cannot care less what the hen ‘thinks’ or ‘feels’ about it when I consume a soft boiled egg. My concern is primarily with human knowledge.

II.2 Three Types of Knowledge

For pedagogical purposes, I recognize and propose to deal with three basic species or types of knowledge , to wit: discursive or propositional, descriptive or attributional, and recursive or operational. This is not to claim that the list is exhaustive. It is merely to concede that the limits of my understanding recognize these three types to be relevant to the mission of prevailing over the processes and phenomena, encountered in both nature and society, that the mind needs to muster to control, and hence both beneficially and beneficiently, utilize its environment.

I acknowledge a somewhat radical departure from the classical formulation of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, namely:

knowledge of the first kind is based on sense experience and imagination;

knowledge of the second kind is based on reason or understanding;

knowledge of the third kind, which "proceeds [directly] from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things."

In my scheme of things, imagination does not formally belong in the realm of knowledge. While imagination may encourage and hasten the acquisition or augmentation of knowledge, it cannot be construed as an integral part of knowledge, per se. Likewise, his third kind of knowledge rather belongs in the rubric of Divine enlightenment or revelation, more in the genre of inspiration.

{Parenthetically, I deem it useful to emphasize in passing, that the fanatical acolytes of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in politics and academia, notably including President Obama and his cohorts, and some friends of mine who I otherwise respect, are the classic victims of the trap laid out by Spinoza. 

{Wittingly or unwittingly, they exploit the inherently ambiguous and overlapping boundary between knowledge and imagination to promote the sinister AGW agenda with the view of enhancing the benefits they may derive therefrom.  For Obama and other politicians it is economic and political leverage to justify taxation. For the academic types it is the continued funding of research or teaching projects, in progress or being proposed.}

Let us examine each one of these types, with the view of enabling us to vary the approach of dealing with each type to better equip our endeavors with the tools to properly and adequately promote our ability to deploy it to serve the mission of knowledge as noted above, namely, the perpetuation of the human species.

II.2.1 Recursive or Operational Knowledge

Of the three species, the third, namely operational knowledge is the simplest kind to prove and establish. I therefore find it expedient to deal with it first. This is exemplified by “how to do things,” kind of knowledge, where the proverbial “the proof is in the pudding” mantra is particularly applicable. 

The know-how used is valid if and only if the process yields the intended and expected results. As with every type of knowledge, the degree of difficulty of the proof is proportional to the degree of complexity of the object.

Thus, for instance, how to prepare a soft-boiled egg depends on what market grade of eggs you are using and who is the intended consumer of the dish. I prefer ‘barely comfortably peelable’ while Jack Lemmon’s Felix Unger prefers ‘spoonable.’ For a Rhode Island White Leghorn medium grade sized egg, Felix’s optimally requires three-and-a-quarter minutes in boiling water; mine is best done in four-and-a-half minutes. 

On the other hand, how to package explosives for remote detonation would require a more intricate construction and commensurate attention to detail. Obviously, in comparison, building the superconducting super collider particle accelerator entails an almost immeasurable degree of complexity.

II.2.2 Descriptive or Attributional Knowledge

Any attempt or effort to codify the attributes of an existent such that it acquires enough coherence to be communicated to another subject or knower, falls in the rubric of establishing attributional knowledge. This type encompasses descriptions of places, people, events, phenomena and imminently knowable objects, etc. These include both tangible (matters, events and places) and intangible objects such as the narrative of a dream episode.

The declarative statement, “my daughter is blonde and she has blue eyes” represents a good example of this type of knowledge. Made to a predominantly Scandinavian or Eastern European audience, it most probably may elicit a shrug of the shoulders or a “big deal!” in response. But made to an Oriental or Asian audience, as happens to be my ethnicity, it might elicit a “how did you manage to do that?” dismissive disbelief kind of response.

In either case, colors of the hair and the eyes being standard features of a person’s likeness traditionally employed for personal identification chores, the audience need not delve into the intricacies of light wave mechanics or the physics of refraction of light to confirm or deny the truth or falsity of the statement. The use of commonplace metrics would suffice to prove the verity of the statement.

The point being, that the ease or difficulty with which knowledge can be established primarily depends on the credulity or gullibility of the recipient public or audience, and the complexity of the knowledge being proved and probed into. Thus the statement “the earth is round,” to be conclusively proved, needed the circumnavigation of the globe to take hold over the proclivities of the “flat earth society.” By contrast, the statement “the sky is blue” needs only the ability of the audience to look up and the vagaries of the weather to get confirmed, or otherwise nullified.

A dream episode is a more cumbersome phenomenon to deal with. That dreams do occur has been chronicled since biblical antiquity. By a dream episode I refer to the sequence of events, scenes and interactions that unfolds while the subject is in a state of sleep which can be recalled in a coherent gestalt after waking up. The subject is involved either as an active participant to the event scenario or as a passive outside spectator. 

Regardless, the narrative of the episode falls under descriptive knowledge. This stems from the dictum of Descartes’ that knowledge emanates from the thinking subjective self. Both the interpretation of the dream and the cause that triggers the episode falls in the rubric of propositional knowledge, as they involve looking into the intricacies of physical activities of the brain and the dynamics of mental functionalities.

II.2.3 Discursive or Propositional Knowledge

This is by far the most complex of the three types of knowledge. As already noted above, the realm of dreams, their analysis and interpretation, appropriately belongs to this type of knowledge.  The realm of poetry, wherever and whenever it crosses the threshold of pure imagination, and becomes knowledge, most definitely falls in this category.

The case of poetry is uniquely instructive. It helps to be cognizant of the following meticulous and astute formulation by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822),

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; . . . the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. . . . Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all otherthoughts,. . . Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, . . .”

At such juncture poetry crosses the threshold of pure imagination into the realm of knowledge, translatable and susceptible of being understood and embraced by another subject, with the requisite sublime faculties, other than the creator of the poetry in question.

By way of an Illustration, I propose to use a first-hand experience which pertains to what I dubbed the Schumann-Spinoza Sonnets. This nomenclature stems from the historical fact that the first four sonnets in the series were written during a period, circa Sep-1980, when for an extended while, I was engrossed on Spinoza’s Ethics, while the Complete Symphonies of Robert Schumann would be serially playing full blast in the background.

I was struggling with a particular passage in Spinoza’s Ethics when like a clap of thunder a passage of Schumann’s “Spring” Symphony seemed to have completely submerged the universe. At that specific instant, I knew I completely understood what Spinoza meant and I had to take a break to capture the moment.

I proceeded to take my Saturday afternoon constitutional which consisted of a leisurely jog to the hilltop of nearby Fort Tryon Park, practically next door to my dwelling. To my complete surprise, a neighborhood art exhibition was in progress. A painting, labeled “The Storm,” in one of the booths caught my attention and I ended up staring at it for well over an hour until the artist, Jacqui, accosted me to inquire if something was wrong.

I politely begged my apologies for my utter consternation and went home and minted all four sonnets on my portable Olivetti in one setting. I went back to the park the next day and handed a copy of the sonnets to Jacqui. I never know what she did with them. I have not seen nor heard from her since.

It really never mattered whether or not she had read them. In my excitement, I took a copy of the sonnets to work the following Monday and showed them to a colleague who politely expressed his appreciation. But it is important to me that I know how they were written, including the sequence of events that preceded it. The experience was quite exquisitely exhilarating. Although I get only occasional comments on them, the very existence of the sonnets has become part of my personal knowledge.

Obviously, propositional knowledge as a type, encompasses a plethora of all sorts of scientific endeavors, notably mathematics and the natural sciences. It is in this area that a vigorously rigorous feedback mechanism is essential to thoroughly utilize previously proved other branches of knowledge to further enhance a particular branch of knowledge under consideration. 

Thus, mathematics is deployed to lend both elegance and rigor to formulations in physics, and vice versa. Biophysics had emerged into existence via a judicious and simultaneous eclectic deployment of mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, and other kindred disciplines. Similarly, geology utilizes the basics of biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics, etc.

III. The Architecture of Inquiry

The pursuit of truth through disquisition may arguably be traced back to the historical person of Socrates (469-399), BC. He is credited with the formulation that virtue is knowledge and knowledge is virtue, and that

“. . . truth needs to be pursued by modifying one's position through questioning and conflict with opposing ideas. . . .”

In short, he is the best known pioneer of intellectual inquiry. The dialectical method which was later developed into a framework of philosophical thought by the Hegelians from Hegel himself, to Karl Marx and the modern day materialists may be construed as the intellectual brainchild of Socrates.

The [Socratic] method includes the following components:

• interrogating a range of questions regarding a pivotal issue
• providing answers to these questions
• defending certain points of view

·         the ideal method to achieve triumph is that if the opponent asserts something opposite to his own statement, then this is an evidence that the enquirer is correct

Christopher Phillips, writing in Socrates Café for the Society of Philosophical Inquiry, delineates the disquisitional methodology of Socratis as follows:

What distinguishes the Socratic method from mere nonsystematic inquiry is the sustained attempt to explore the ramifications of certain opinions and then offer compelling objections and alternatives. This scrupulous and exhaustive form of inquiry in many ways resembles the scientific method. But unlike Socratic inquiry, scientific inquiry would often lead us to believe that whatever is not measurable cannot be investigated. This "belief" fails to address such paramount human concerns as sorrow and joy and suffering and love.

A typical college syllabus on the subject of Inquiry is described by K. P. Mohanan to contain something like,

“. . . equipping students with the ability to:

·         understand various modes of inquiry and apply them to a range of issues and ideas;

·         examine ways in which knowledge is constructed;

·         critically evaluate arguments and opinions;

·         engage in academic writing and research; and

·         effectively articulate and defend their views orally.“

III.1 Philosophical Inquiry

For pedagogical purposes I prefer to refer to the exquisite expositions by James F. Courtney, David T. Croasdell, and David B. Paradice, all of Texas A&M University (CC&P@TA&MU), on “Inquiring Organizations.” They managed to elegantly recast

“. . . the theories of knowledge of philosophers Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel and Singer ‘in the language and design of inquiring systems,’ providing ‘a description of how learning can be designed, and how the design can be justified.’ Reflections on creating knowledge are shaped and interpreted in the context of designing inquiring systems.”

Having been brought up in the philosophical ambiance of the Yin and Yang that permeates Oriental culture, the theories of knowledge associated with Kant and Hegel readily resonates with my mental and emotional proclivities. For this reason I choose to further focus my attention on the heuristics associated with the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel as shown in the table below (modified from CC&P@TA&MU):

As the authors of “Inquiring Organizations” meticulously noted,

“The models of inquiry, being systems, have inputs, processes, and outputs. The output of an inquiring system is "true" knowledge, or at least knowledge that is believed not to be false. One of the most distinctive features of inquiring systems design is the inclusion of elaborate mechanisms for "guaranteeing" that only "valid" knowledge is produced. . . .”

It can hardly be overemphasized that the validated output of the inquiry is further utilized as a feedback input for further iterations of the inquiry process, with commensurate adjustments on the models or dialectical constructs, as deemed appropriate by the subject. It is this feedback mechanism which when properly nurtured to flourish, guarantees the subsequent growth, progress, and aggrandizement of knowledge.

This feedback loop neglected, would ensure the reign of lethargy and ignorance, which almost for certain leads on to decadence and societal dyslexia. For as Shakespeare once deliciously put it,

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. . . .

III.2  Scientific Inquiry

“. . . No methods exist to guarantee truth. Nonetheless, science, as it has developed over the centuries, has improved its methods. As the philosopher of science Dudley Shapere (1984) puts it: we learn how to learn as we learn.”    

      -- Lindley Darden, Ph.D.

Protecting and upholding the integrity of the method has always been the hallmark of scientific inquiry. The historical record is replete with instances of scientists correcting their conclusions or re-examining their assumptions to accommodate experimental results or empirical observations.

Fidelity to the protocols of inquiry is a requisite aptitude for any investigator of scientific phenomena. Thus, Lord Kelvin could ill afford to suppress Ernst Rutherford’s discovery of radioactivity in order to maintain his assumptions on the sources of heat energy available to the earth in calculating its age.

He had to abandon the 20 to 400 million years range estimated age of the earth he obtained based on purely thermodynamic assumptions. These days the accepted age of the earth based on radioactive dating is in the neighborhood “of 4.54 billion years with an uncertainty of less than 1 percent.”

Selective reporting of empirical observations and/or experimental results in order to support the initial assumptions has never been an accepted practice in scientific inquiry. Any such attempt would categorically undermine the inquiry process itself and render all associated results and observations unworthy of being taken seriously, let alone hasten to advance the initial hypotheses.

The preponderance of quantifiable variables involved in most fields of scientific inquiry renders the process easier to handle. This stems from the rigors that mathematical formalism can potentially be brought to bear on the undertaking. On the other hand, excessive quantification courts the danger of losing the context of the initial hypothesis. The investigator needs to be always vigilant to keep the balance. Otherwise the inquiry can succumb to the danger of missing the forest because of the trees.

The Cartesian methodology probably represents the intersection of philosophical and scientific inquiry. In the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason (1637) Descartes demonstrated that much of his work was concerned with the provision of a secure foundation for the advancement of human knowledge through the natural sciences. He supposed that

 “The progress and certainty of mathematical knowledge . . . provide an emulable model for a similarly productive philosophical method, characterized by four simple rules:

1.   Accept as true only what is indubitable.

2.   Divide every question into manageable parts.

3.   Begin with the simplest issues and ascend to the more complex.

4.   Review frequently enough to retain the whole argument at once.”

Anybody engaged in scientific inquiry can scarcely do wrong by adhering to these simple rules of engagement.

IV.  Practical Implications

The recent discovery of shrimp-like creatures and jellyfish frolicking six hundred feet beneath a massive sheet of ice in the Antarctic engender momentous implications. At the very least, it should entail a rethinking of the assumptions brought to bear on the interpretation of fossil marine animal life respecting local and regional ambient temperatures.

On the other hand, enthusiasts and acolytes of AGW may take the opportunity to leverage the discovery and represent it as one more incontrovertible evidence that AGW is for real and here to stay. No one amongst the researchers who made the discovery expected to find organisms higher than microbes because of the frigid ambient conditions. 

The AGW advocates would be bold enough to assert that precisely because of global warming that these organisms managed to be where they never were expected, given the prohibitive conditions respecting both sunlight and temperature. A largely uninformed public would take the mainstream media balderdash as gospel. 

So like a political campaign, the matter is reduced to sensational journalism. Whoever is able to generate the most effective spin garners the leverage on public opinion, agents of influence, and policy formulations and implementation. What crystallizes as knowledge is a far cry from the product of Descartes’ “four simple rules of engagement” in scientific inquiry.

We are at a crossroads when political decorum disregards well established protocols of intellectual inquiry in order to pursue and forcibly implement political agenda as demanded by ideology of the Progressives genre. The will of the governed is completely and unabashedly ignored by the ruling elite so obsessively blinded by their determination to control and lord it over the political landscape.

IV.1  On Antrophogenic Global Warming

Prominent in the litany of woes for the AGW narrative is Edward Towne’s observation that

“. . . the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ is written first, by policymakers no less, and then the rest of the report is doctored and manipulated by a handful of "lead authors" to fit the summary’s agenda.”

His concluding admonition should be posted on every family dining room, and/or wherever human beings ordinarily congregate such as community centers, game arcades, beer parlors, places of worship, etc.:

“A lot of the responsibility for how this [AGW] is handled rests on you and me.  If someone tells you that the world is going to end in 100 years time because of the gases that come out your mouth and backside, you should have the intellectual fortitude to critically question that claim, and not treat like heretics those who do.”

The concerted effort to imagine and fabricate information to retrofit into the template which buttressed the Policymakers’ agenda was an egregious subversion of every principle and protocol of scientific inquiry. As I emphasized earlier elsewhere,

“It is a breach of protocol . . . that would have warranted sending the offenders to the stakes, if not for the fact that doing so would be a serious sacrilege to the noble memory of Giordano Bruno.”

Or, to invoke a less personal source, as The Washington Times pointedly editorialized more recently (emphasis added),

“The simplistic and increasingly discredited theory of carbon-based, man-caused global warming needs to be discarded, and the scientists who sought to squelch skeptics and artificially inflate their own reputations must be disciplined.”

The arguments I presented in that earlier work bear repeating with even stronger emphasis, as they have increased in relevance and urgency after the White House had persisted to be a part of the vanguard of the AGW crusade:

“Anthropogenic Global Warming, as postulated by the Kyoto Protocol is not even a scientific theory. It is only an unprovable hypothesis. The notion of "Greenhouse Effect" postulated in the context of the entire planet earth is, at best, an extrapolation of boundary value conditions, not otherwise warranted by experimental constraints.

“It is the process of experimentation that elevates an hypothesis into a theory, i.e., when replicable results supportive of the hypothesis are obtained, repeatedly. No such experimentation has been deployed in support of Anthropogenic Global Warming. A computer simulation is not an experiment. It is nothing but an exercise in modeling reality. Its validity depends largely on the set of assumptions that govern the set of process relationships stipulated in the model. It does not prove anything, by any stretch of the imagination.”

Another feature of the AGW movement which cannot be over-emphasized is its association with the paradigm of Command and Control Economics which reigns supreme in communist regimes. Once again, it behooves to recall somewhat extensively the nexus I indicated earlier elsewhere,

“The seminal beginning of the present-day AGW is traceable with unmistakable certainty to the Stockholm Declaration of 1972. Said document, reads, in part:

“Principle 5: The non-renewable resources of the earth must be employed in such a way as to guard against the danger of their future exhaustion and to ensure that benefits from such employment are shared by all mankind.

  “Principle 14: Rational planning constitutes an essential tool for reconciling any conflict between the needs of development and the need to protect and improve the environment. “

“In other words, a Command and Control Economy needs to be established to guarantee the equality of outcome for all peoples. The resources of the planet must be leveraged by a Global Government and deployed with precision to achieve that goal. What better tool to galvanize the support of the entire planet than a common danger with the tragic existential implications of Armageddon. Hence AGW as recently celebrated in Copenhagen came into being.”

The traditional notions of “valid knowledge” as established by the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel have been summarily abandoned by the intellectual brainthrust of AGW as represented by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Consequently, any self-respecting intellect should summarily dismiss any and all pronouncements coming out of that disgraced body. 

Thus when the POTUS brazenly claimed in this year’s State of the Union Address of an "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change," he was counting on what he perceived as the ignorance of the American peoplewhich elevated him to the Oval Office. Or, to be more charitable, he was reciting meaningless talking points platitudes with the assurance that a rubber stamp Congress can push through every whimsical scheme he embraces.

On President Obama's radical plan for the environment, in his book (which deserves to be in the required reading list for middle schoolers) “Red Hot Lies,” Christopher Horner warns that

“. . . global warming is the latest and greatest excuse for Obama's socialist agenda—which includes energy controls, economic interventions, and the explosion of the nanny state.

“When it comes to ‘saving the planet’ (read: controlling your life), liberal pundits and politicians will do anything to keep you under their Green thumb.”

The point is, there is money to be made by jumping onto the Global Warming bandwagon, provided you are on the taking side of the financial equation. Politicians and pundits of all shades and flavors conveniently embrace the Global Warming dogma not only as a matter of intellectual indolence, but more so as a matter of economic advantage.

Patrik Jonsson, staff writer of the Christian Science Monitor more explicitly noted,

“. . . Obama has set the scene for expanding the reach of climate-change imperatives – and science – into the lives of everyday Americans.

“He has made a ‘green economy’ a hallmark of the $787 billion stimulus package . . . He has prioritized the cap-and-trade bill and put into effect new auto mileage standards. And the Environmental Protection Agency has for the first time characterized carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, as a pollutant that it can control.”

Purveyors of political and economic policies who give a penny’s worth to the IPCC’s agenda, starting with Barack Hussein Obama himself should more properly be run out of town by sundown. We desperately need a new sheriff in town who is ready, willing, and able to preserve, protect, and defend the American way of life starting with the most cherished value of human knowledge.

 IV.2  On Darwinian Theory of Evolution

The theory of evolution as propounded by Charles Darwin in “The Origin of Species” (1859) should be more properly looked at as the hypothesis on evolution. Despite strong evidence of random mutation taking place in geologic history as inferred from the fossil records, no matter how ubiquitously voluminous, there has never been a documented instance that proved incontrovertibly, of new species emerging from an entirely different species just on the basis of environmentally leveraged random mutation.

The search for the so-called “Missing Link” which was deemed to prove once and for all that the human species are all descended from the apes, has largely been abandoned. Not because the need for a “link” to prove the “theory” has been rendered moot, by a preponderance of supportive evidence but because of the putative inertia of failure. 

No sooner than the announcement of the fossil found purported to be the “missing link” was celebrated with great fanfare, that contrary evidence was unveiled to debunk it. The purveyors of information were so eager to present what they construe as evidence of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution that wittingly or unwittingly, they were willing to disregard the traditional rigors of scientific inquiry.

Darwin’s theory of evolution got assimilated into the realm of knowledge on the strength of journalism, not of scientific inquiry. This came about on the heels of the secularist tide that swept European thought in the 19th century. This intellectual ferment has been chronicled succinctly by Keith Thomson of the American Scientist, especially as pertains to Darwin and Malthus.

As The New York Times put it barely four years ago,

“. . . contemporary Europe is the closest thing to a godless civilization the world has ever known. Does this place it in the vanguard of world history? That is what many Europeans think, which is why they have been caught off guard by the challenge of radical Islam even in their own back yard. They find it hard to believe that people can still take God seriously . . .”

Consistent with Thomas Kuhn’s formulation of shifting paradigms that usher in scientific revolutions, peer reviewed scientific literature became weighted towards the adoption of Darwinian Theory as a legitimate challenge to the religious doctrine on the origins of life. Most crucial to this dominance is in the production of science textbooks in every level of the educational system.

In effect Darwinian Theory became a self-fulfilling prophecy (as obtains in theories on social prejudice) whose trajectory into dominance is analogous to Allen MacNeill’s, alleles:

“If the environmental change persisted, new alleles might arise, but they would begin with a ‘norm of reaction’ that would produce significantly larger mean beak sizes, along with a normal distribution with significantly larger beaks at the upper tail of the distribution.

“In other words, the existing alleles for such a trait would bias subsequent mutations in the ‘direction’ of larger beaks, simply because the pool of potential new alleles would already start out biased in that direction. Therefore, the mutations and developmental changes that were available from one generation to the next would be biased in the direction of whatever phenotypic trait resulted in the highest reproductive success.”

James Lennox suggested in summary that Darwinian Theory “can be set out as a series of causal elements that, working together, will produce the needed transformations” (emphasis added): 

1. 1.   Species are comprised of individuals that vary ever so slightly from each other with respect to their many traits.

2.   Species have a tendency to increase in size over generations at an exponential rate.

3.   This tendency, given limited resources, disease, predation, and so on, creates a constant condition of struggle for survival among the members of a species.

4.   Some individuals will have variations that give them a slight advantage in this struggle, variations that allow more efficient or better access to resources, greater resistance to disease, greater success at avoiding predation, and so on.

5.   These individuals will tend to survive better and leave more offspring.

6. Offspring tend to inherit the variations of their parents.
7. Therefore favorable variations will tend to be passed on more frequently than others, a tendency Darwin labeled ‘Natural Selection’.
8. Over time, especially in a slowly changing environment, this process will cause the character of species to change.
9. Given a long enough period of time, the descendant populations of an ancestor species will differ enough to be classified as different species, a process capable of indefinite iteration. There are, in addition, forces that encourage divergence among descendant populations, and the elimination of intermediate varieties.

I included the list in its entirety to illuminate two significant points about the doctrine. First, items (8) and (9) provide the escape clause that renders any need for tangible proof of the theory as untenable, therefore unnecessary. The duration of human history is simply negligible compared to the span of geologic time.  Furthermore, item (9) guarantees that the “missing link” can stay undiscovered and would not in any way affect the validity of the theory. If it is supposed to be eliminated then it can forever remain “missing.”

Secondly, items (2) and (3) confirm the well-documented Malthusian pedigree of Darwinism. As Darwin himself suggested in his autobiography (1876), Malthus was the spark of inspiration for his Theory on Natural Selection (emphasis added):

 “. . . I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population. . . . it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work.”

Finally, it is important to emphasize that the strong tendency to cannibalize the private sector respecting wealth creation, as evinced by most of the policy formulations of Barack Hussein Obama is simply another mutation of this Malthusian-Darwinian cognitive dissonance. President Obama being a self-professed Christian, I concede him his professed faith. I only dare suggest in passing that judging by his policies alone, he appears to be most likely a Progressives Secularist unless there is such a thing as Christianity of the godless variety.

V.  Concluding Observations

“All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. . . . a crisis may end with the emergence of a new candidate for paradigm and with the ensuing battle over its acceptance.” (Kuhn, 1962)

The battle over the acceptance of paradigms encapsulates the crisis of our time. On the one hand, there is the Repugnant Obama Paradigm with designs to fundamentally subvert the ideals which undergird the founding of the Republic. On the other hand, the Conservative Paradigm’s ‘super’ majority of the populace, some undoubtedly having voted for Barack Obama, remain faithful to the Founding Principles as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, are determined to prevent any such transformation.

With the leviathan of the Federal government at its disposal, the battle is definitely stacked in favor of the transformationists . The jury is still out on who will eventually prevail. The underhanded way in which ObamaCare was passed through both houses of Congress does not bode well for the Republic.

This unfolding of events is consistent with my earlier observation that President Obama is the Zen Master of “the nexus of political subterfuge so effectively employed by both Lenin and Stalin against their rivals to pull off the Bolshevik revolution.” That poll after poll indicates a sizeable majority of the populace are opposed to his socialistic agenda provides a glimmer of hope that there are still institutional safeguards that may be brought to bear in lending impetus to this opposition.

Numerous reports of legal challenges to the legitimacy of the recently passed Health Care bill are indeed encouraging. This glimmer of optimism has to be taken with more than just the proverbial grain of salt, however, especially that Obama is well schooled in the art of packing the courts, pioneered by his professed model for governance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The electoral process remains to be our most potent weapon against the usurpers of power throughout the political landscape. Until that opportunity to throw out in the midterm elections the acolytes to the Obama Regime in Congress comes, judicial challenges remain a potent vehicle both for stalling the devastating effects of ObamaCare and for formulating a viable alternative to Obama’s designs to downsize, to oblivion, this last best hope of man on earth.  

VI. Bibliography: Itemizing Primary Sources

Item numbers denote the section<dot>sequence (of appearance) of the sourcing item indicated within the section.

Preface:

http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html

http://www.fleurdelis.com/rubaiyat.htm

I.0 Prolegomenon

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/

I.1 Personal Dimension

       http://www.joanswirsky.com/

http://townhall.com/columnists/Column2.aspx?UrlTitle=rethinking_political_virtue&ns=MonaCharen&dt=02/19/2010&page=full&comments=true&submitted=true

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5974

I.2 Professional and Political Conjectures

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Star_Trek_IV:_The_Voyage_Home

http://townhall.com/columnists/PatBuchanan/2010/03/02/hoax_of_the_century?page=full&comments=true

II.1 Elements of Knowledge

       http://km.brint.com/km.htm

       http://www.brint.com/ym.html

       http://www.brint.org/

       http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5108/

       http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/e/epistemology.htm

       http://www.futureperspective.com/know.htm

       http://www.radicalacademy.com/epistoa.htm

       http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#JTB

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/russell

II.2 Three Types of Knowledge

http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/phil104/spinoza4.html

II.2.1 Recursive or Operational Knowledge

       http://www.clarion-call.org/yeshua/pudding/proof.htm

       http://www.freebase.com/view/en/felix_unger

       http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4884506.html

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/ssc-and-future.html

II.2.2 Descriptive or Attributional Knowledge

       http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

II.2.3 Discursive or Propositional Knowledge

       http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/shelley-poetry.html

       http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/

       http://acelilacs.webs.com/schumanspinozasonnets.htm

http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.3,_Op.97_(Schumann,_Robert)

http://www.music-with-ease.com/schumann-symphony-1-b-flat.html

III. The Architecture of Inquiry

       http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/SOCRATES.HTM

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/socrates-philosophy-and-socratic-method.html

mailto:socratescafe@gmail.com?subject=I_have_a_qestion!

III.1 Philosophical Inquiry

       http://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/fisindex.htm#jc

       http://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/fisindex.htm#dc

       http://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/fisindex.htm#dp

       http://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/inqorg.htm

http://phiyakushi.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/the-philosophy-behind-macrobiotics-understanding-yin-and-yang/

http://www.ist-world.org/ProjectDetails.aspx?ProjectId=e87c34e7583c4d32a6a11c9a9907999c

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/05/dialectic.htm

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6820084/claims.html

http://www.bauer.uh.edu/parks/fis/inqorg.htm

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/full.html

III.2 Scientific Inquiry

       http://hist-analytic.org/Baumrin.htm

       http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Kelvin.html

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1908/rutherford-bio.html

       http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/LDarden/sciinq/

       http://earthsci.org/fossils/geotime/radate/radate.html

       http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

       http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/59

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/text/descart/des-meth.htm

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4b.htm#disc

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/i9.htm#indub

IV.0 Practical Implications

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100315/ap_on_sc/us_sci_antarctica_sea_life

http://www.nolanchart.com/article7402.html

IV.1 On Antrophogenic Global Warming

       http://www.nolanchart.com/article805.html

http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2009/11272009.htm

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/john_kessler/giordano_bruno.html

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/02/osama-and-obama-on-global-warming/

http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2009/11272009.htm

http://blog.heritage.org/2010/01/27/obama-is-no-kennedy-redefines-nasas-mission-as-global-warming/

http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/2009/03/japanese-scientists-rejecting-global.html

http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2010/01042010.htm

http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=97&ArticleID=1503&l=en

http://www.prisonplanet.com/monckton-secretive-copenhagen-treaty-creates-larcenous-global-govern

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/02/osama-and-obama-on-global-warming/

http://books.google.com/books?id=1W6dMudInpkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Red+Hot+Lies&source=bl&ots=-54efVI4_o&sig=TuI1EXcHel0zBftlVrLMeq9u5Fk&hl=en&ei=QBKvS424LcKblgf0uaGQAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CDQQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=&f=false

IV.2 On Darwinian Theory of Evolution

       http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/origin/chapter6.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/05/19/2009-05-19_missing_link_found_fossil_of_47_millionyearold_primate_sheds_light_on_.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100302131719.htm

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/1798-darwin-and-malthus

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/arts/31iht-idlede1.html

http://www.motivation-tools.com/workplace/social_prejudice.htm

http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2006/06/random-mutation-and-natural-selection.html

http://www.pitt.edu/~jglennox/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/#PhiProDarDar

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html

V.0 Concluding Observations

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Thomas-Kuhn.htm

http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2009/11112009.htm

http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2010/03032010.htm

http://www.thehopeforamerica.com/play.php?id=3416

http://hoosierpundit.blogspot.com/2010/03/zoeller-readies-legal-challenge-to.html

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=119783

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20100228_Obama_should_expand_court.html

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0799fdrcourt.htm

VII. Suggested Keywords

Not even George Washington, who first held the office, had a clean slate to work with. He had pre-existing conditions to dispose of to start governing. This was common knowledge long before the POTUS started his campaign. So what is the point of constantly reminding the populace that he inherited pre-existing conditions? He just wants to show the nation how little regard, let alone respect, Obama has for what the people know about their own country.

The abrasive arrogance as constantly showcased by President Obama—most recently at his Healthcare Summit—is a typical characteristic trait of a hardcore ideologue determined to impose his vision of how the country should be regardless of the means with which he accomplishes it. You cannot fault the President for being so consummately and thoroughly absorbed by his well rehearsed chutzpah. He is simply consumed by the greatness of his own transformational messianic powers as he preens himself pedantic of his teleprompter-spiced eloquence.

Recall that he ascended to the Oval Office on the strength of snake oil salesmanship. He told the nation he was the change they were waiting for and a majority of them bought his hot air, hook, line and sinker. He enjoined the nation, on Inauguration Day, to help him fundamentally remake America and at least 68% of America gave him a standing ovation.

Why then should President Obama, now that the leviathan of the Federal government is at his disposal, bother to listen to the hoi polloi on any subject, whatsoever? So doing would be a gross exercise in criminal imbecility, tantamount to an abrogation of leadership responsibility. It is therefore self-evident that when President Obama bristled  during the Healthcare Summit that (emphasis mine)

“. . . any time that a question is phrased as, “Does Washington know better,” I think we’re kind of tipping the scales a little bit there since we all know that everybody is angry at Washington . . .”

he wanted to convey that “Washington” means “George W. Bush,” the pre-existing condition he inherited.

Obama’s Political DNA

President Obama’s “snubbing allies like Britain, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic” was not an attempt to placate America’s perceived traditional adversaries such as Putin’s Russia and the hardliner communists in China. Rather, consistent with the apologetics  blitzkrieg  unleashed  earlier by BHO starting with his groveling to the Arabs, in particular and the Muslim world in general, as obscenely exhibited in Cairo, it was merely showing his true political colors.

Ditto his simultaneous askance at Israel and embrace of the Palestinians’ perennial claim to victimhood:

“ . . . The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. … It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Nurtured for the better part of two decades in the Right Rev. Wright’s Black Liberation theology, Obama fundamentally hates, and is contrite of the West in general, and embarrassed and disdainful of the glorious and proud achievements of American power and exceptionalism, in particular.

That he ended up in the Oval Office is symptomatic of the political dyslexia that the country has sunk into, thanks to sustained assault on American educational institutions perpetrated by the so-called “Progressives.” Obama’s history of academic sojourn at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago and the documented embrace of Saul Alinsky as his mentor is an incontrovertible evidence of his Progressives pedigree.

The “Obama the intellectual” brand has been peddled persistently if casually in the literature. During his stint at the Harvard Law Review where, as Bradford Berenson would have it (emphasis added),

“. . . the environment . . . then was political in a borderline unhealthy way. It was quite intense.

 “... Interestingly, race was at the forefront of the agenda. There were intense debates over affirmative action that sometimes got expressed through fights over tenure . . .”

Obama himself subtly but unequivocally, proclaimed his bona fides as an activist, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment, thus:

''But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance . . .''

In the realm of politics, Obama the intellectual gives room for Obama the activist. Factor in the influence of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and we got ourselves a radical ideologue activist in the Oval Office looking after our welfare (“according to our needs,”) to the best he can deliver “according to his ability.”

In Defense of Intellectuals

In a column not too long ago, Thomas Sowell deplored the seeming lack of accountability that’s brought to bear on intellectuals for the ideas they espouse:

“If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences. But intellectuals who generate ideas do not have to pay the consequences.”

“Cogito ergo sum” [I think therefore I am] is probably the most potent, popular and famous of all the formulations in Rene Descartes’(1596–1650) Meditations on First Philosophy. I myself consider it the most basic of all ideas ever formulated.  Descartes himself considered it as the “first item of knowledge.” It certainly is one of my favorites.  But ideas are, ipso facto, inconsequential, to the extent that they remain just ideas. It is the translation of the ideas into sensuous, human praxis that produces results: useful, harmful, or otherwise indifferent.

To illustrate the point: Karl Marx did not harm a single soul, with the possible exception of some other researchers at the British Museum who might have been inconvenienced by his protracted presence in the place. It took a Lenin, a Stalin, a Mao, a Castro, a Che Guevarra, etc. to give the Marxian ideas their full measure of blood, tears, lives and misery. 

Karl Marx himself famously observed with more than a terse lament in Theses On Feuerbach, that

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Dr. Sowell was kind enough to reply to my email as follows,

 “But Marx and others specifically put forth their ideas as a spur to action, just as narcotics producers manufacture drugs to be used.” 

Indeed, all of Marx’s polemics were designed to incite action. But the analogy with narcotics manufacturer is rather tendentiously over-simplified. The narcotics manufacturer’s primary motivation is to generate revenue, if not profit. Whereas, propounding ideas into a coherent gestalt can very well be an intellectual’s ultimate goal in and of itself.

Thus, it took the activism and programmatic organizing skills of Vladimir Lenin to effect the change that made the difference. With his brilliant and timely pamphleteering, notably in “What Is to be Done” and “The April Theses,” he galvanized the discontent of the Russian populace against the lethargic obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy. This effectively gave him the leverage to transform the relations of production to his advantage. As a result, it enabled his regime to control the rules of engagements amongst the various class segments of Russian society.

Once Lenin was gone it required the amoral ruthless political opportunism of Joseph Stalin to consolidate the political leverage established by Lenin, via an unmitigated repression of the opposition, actual or suspected. Categorical ruthlessness was necessary because the rules of engagements were devoid of the will and consent of the individual citizens, so engaged.

It behooves to emphasize at this juncture that as long as the battle is joined in the realm of ideas, the Founding Principles as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are sufficiently strong and reliable to withstand the challenge of the “command and control” variety.

The deployment of a regime of czars, with 26 czardoms at last count, and counting, “. . . is an unprecedented power grab centralizing authority in the White House, outside congressional oversight and in violation of the Constitution.” Moreover, as chronicled by online-wsj.com (emphasis added),

“. . . Barack Obama won his first election in 1996 by throwing all of his opponents off the ballot on technicalities.

“By clearing out the incumbent and the others in his first Democratic primary . . . [he] is embarrassed enough by what he did that he misrepresents it in the prologue of his political memoir. . . ."

This clearly demonstrates that Obama is, to put it mildly and charitably, no stranger to the nexus of political subterfuge so effectively employed by both Lenin and Stalin against their rivals to pull off the Bolshevik revolution. With such a home grown radical activist ideologue in the Oval Office there is no substitute for constant and astute vigilance, to preserve and defend the hallmarks of American Exceptionalism we so nobly cherish.

For you, the valiant heirs of Prometheus,

Of Liebnitz, Kepler, and Copernicus,

We mourn our lose but celebrate the cause

That cost the ultimate measure of your

Devotion, proclaimed in blazing glory,

And sealed your rendezvous with Destiny.

In votive gratitude, our homage pledge

To keep your torch aflame and let endure

Ages of unbegot posterity.

So every fragment that your ship had strewn

Would our ambitions amply leverage

And claim your vintage courage as our own:

     All wholesome sacrifice to Liberty

  “In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? . . .  But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. . . .” --Randy Barnett (emphasis added)

“. . . the putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum [dead head] began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances. . . .“

The seventy-minute pedantic spectacle, punctuated by more than 100 partisan standing ovations, and several lamely disguised derisive sniggering of some in the crowd, should dispel any iota of a doubt that the POTUS is a certifiable agent of the patently destructive hubris of communist ideology. Only an ideologue, categorically convinced of the superiority and righteousness of his cause, can be so unabashedly angry that his agenda has been decisively, if temporarily, thwarted by the will of the people.

The self-proclaimed transformational President proceeded to transform a traditional ritual of governance in the hallowed halls of Congress into a locker-room peep talk on his expectations of how the nation ought to behave and think, and how his party and the opposition should conduct themselves in order to live up to his standards of decorum and accomplishments. He admonished the nation for not appreciating his unique genius in governance. He rebuked Congress for excessive partisanship. He falsely vilified the Supreme Court Justices for doing their duty with a majority finding to declare McCain-Feingold unconstitutional, because there is “no basis for allowing the government to limit corporate independent expenditures.”

Admittedly, we had a preview of this elitist mean spirited streak of Obama’s during the campaign when he derided the rural folks of Pennsylvania as people who would “. . . cling to guns or religion or antipathy . . . as a way to explain their frustrations." At that time I just mentally noted that the remark was eerily reminiscent of Marx and Engels’ blatant characterization of the lumpenproletariat as the social class composed  of “beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. . . .”

Both the atmospherics and rhetoric at the State of the Union ritual merely confirmed the bona fides of Barack Hussein Obama as a hardcore ideologue and rendered it unwise for this country to seek a compromise with any of his policies. Fortunately there are encouraging indications of his bungling incompetence lending a glimmer of hope that America may yet prevail. Unfortunately, retrenchment is one of the principal instinctive reflexes, integral to the arsenal of survival strategies for a hardcore ideologue “sympathetic toward the general aims of Marxian socialism.”  The contempt for “we the people” which he amply exhibited and articulated during the campaign and validated at the State of the Union can propel him to let his ideology determine the vector of his policies regardless of the consequences to the nation. 

Bereft of Effectiveness, Replete with Excuses

To keep matters in perspective, it behooves to revisit a few items in the catalogue of scenarios of policy formulation and execution to count some of the most recent ways.

First: Outsourcing writing of the Health Care bill to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The adults who occupied the Oval Office before President Obama, used to draft legislations and present them to Congress for deliberation. This President on the other hand let loose the bureaucratic and clerical fury of congressional staffers to wreck havoc on what he deems his flagship legislation. That was why he could not articulate on the substance of the bill in any coherent fashion or graphic details and resorted to reciting platitudes every time he held a press conference on the subject.

Second:Outsourcing handling of terrorist culprits to nobody in particular. That was how nobody could answer the question of who authorized Mirandizing drawers Umar. That was how DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano pronounced the verdict of all systems peachy at her first press conference on the incident. That was why the futile if pathetic finger pointing of who did not notify the not-yet-constituted High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was a spectacle on national TV at Congressional Hearings because nobody knew that nobody bothered to constitute what was supposed to be an all-important instrument of protecting the country, or who was supposed to do the constituting. The lawyerly formalism of dubbing drawers Umar an “alleged suspect” is sickening. The powers that be might as well call him a hero and make the charade consummate!

Third: Attributing most if not all the pitfalls of his administration as the legacy from the previous administration and proceeding to appoint Pres. George W. Bush as the co-leader to “coordinate efforts to involve more Americans in the recovery and rebuilding effort that's needed in Haiti.” By so doing, he telegraphed to the world these three alternatives as each equally likely to be true:

1. Haitian relief is not that important so it does not matter much if the relief effort succeeds or fails;

2. the pervasively blame-worthy President Bush can really be counted on to deliver when the chips are down;

3. President Obama himself does not really know what he is talking about or doing, for that matter, he is just learning on the job.

2. He was acutely aware that the Truck is practically the folk symbol of American manhood, therefore it is the POTUS’ sworn duty to deride it. Otherwise, the country runs the risk of unleashing the unbridled American competence on the universe thereby undermining all the good will this nation had earned resultant to all the serial apologizing to the world in the first few weeks of his administration that the President had most painstakingly and tirelessly undertaken for America’s competence and historical generosity.

I can go on for a few more but I don’t have the intestinal fortitude for it. Besides, an exhaustive list would be logistically prohibitive for our immediate purpose. The bottom line is, we sent a spoilt brat to do a man’s job and we have been rewarded commensurately for our foolishness.

Cognitive Dissonance or Ideological Delirium

The great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously observed, "we only see what we know."  Accordingly, in this White House nobody hears anything except ideas which tend to promote the Oval Office agenda, which is the takeover and control of every aspect of every citizen's life.

That this is problematic for the future of the country is not recognized by the mindset of a Community Organizer, aka, a neighborhood agitator, or rabble-rouser.  In order to thrive and flourish, a Community Organizer requires a significant amount of dysfunction in the domain, which viewed from the Oval Office translates into the entire national polity.

Once a Community Organizer, always a Community Organizer: the world is viewed always from the prism of structural and/or operational dysfunction in the community. The danger at this juncture is much greater and potentially more devastating because the principal dysfunction is in the Oval Office.

It is the hallmark of humankind that at various critical stages, it was able to synthesize and systematize its interaction with nature such that it increasingly augmented its realm of ‘natural resources’ in order to improve its chances of enhancing its existential well being, and therefore promote the prolongation if not the perpetuation of the human species. The invention of mining and metallurgy, famously attributed to Georg Bauer (1494-1555), better known by the Latin version of his name Georgius Agricola, represented such a critical stage as it solidified the transition from the Stone Age to the Age of Metals which afforded society superior tools than theretofore known.

Augmenting the realm of natural resources was the operative paradigm. Crucial to the success of this project was the recognition of extant forces in nature such as wind and water currents and harnessing them to societal advantage. Thus from the sailboat to the windmills and the watermills, man had deployed his inventive inklings to enhance his power over nature. Even more critical to the advancement of this project is the discovery of latent forces in nature and galvanizing them for societal use.

Exemplary of this achievement was William Gilbert’s discovery of electricity and magnetism in the Elizabethan Age, circa 1600. In combination with the invention of first the Steam Engine, and then the internal combustion engine, electro-mechanical technology ushered in the industrial revolution which seemingly made the human mind’s dominance over the vagaries of nature complete.

Moreover, further discoveries into the structure of matter revealed that the mind’s conquest of nature appeared limitless into both the microscopic and the telescopic dimensions. Ever larger and more powerful particle accelerators were commissioned to solidify our mastery of the subatomic architecture of matter, an understanding which had ushered in the nuclear age.  Deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope and jet propulsion technology brought in the exploration and attempted colonization of outer space, even beyond our own galaxy, with budgetary projections purportedly cheaper than democratizing one Middle Eastern country.

From early primitive agriculture to extra-terrestrial colonization the overriding compelling narrative is that of progressive dominance and leverage by the human mind over the forces and processes of nature. That is exactly one of the most important attributes that defines human beings as human and distinct from and superior to any other creature on earth. 

From gathering resources to harnessing extant forces, to galvanizing latent energy, to creating new processes, there is a definitive progression of increasing dominance and leverage.  The deal is, we dominate or we are vanquished. There is simply no in-between, where everybody is happy and no one is offended or hurt, polar bears and lung darters, included. With apologies to Alexis de Tocqueville, this is precisely the essence of American Exceptionalism as I understand, embrace, and celebrate it.

Obviously, the late Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, whose 1798 Easy on Population, on Charles Darwin’s own admission, purportedly inspired the formulation of the latter’s hypotheses on Natural Selection and Theory of Evolution, would disagree and disapprove of my viewpoint. But in the people-versus-environment controversy, I am most definitely on the side of population. I like people more than I like most of the others of God’s creations. I share Mark Steyn’s concerns that we are in an ominous trajectory to lose the demographic wars (emphasis mine):

“. . . Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. . . . Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%. ”

Even more ominous is that “The Limits to Growth” crowd in both the Club of Rome and the Sierra Club—proudly self-proclaimed to be “America's oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization”-- have infested our academic institutions and influenced the mindset of more than a generation of would-be policy makers. This is the same crowd that brought us the church of environmentalism and the recent circus of watermelon Marxists  (green in the outside, red in the inside) in Copenhagen.

From the Van Jones abortive appointment as “Green Jobs” czar to Anita Dunn’s rants on the moral merits of Mao Tse Tung as a political philosopher, there is ample evidence that Obama himself represents a typical specimen of this mindset. His Columbia/Harvard pedigree is consistent with the characteristically Alinskian Rezko/Ayers/Wright associations in Chicago. His attempts to railroad through Congress the legislation of ObamaCare, under cover of closed-door negotiations is Obama’s version of the “full court press” in basketball which happens to be one of his favorite sports.

When he warned during the campaign that his administration’s energy policy could be “bankrupting coal-fired power plants . . . because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted,” we ought to have taken him seriously. This is eerily consistent with the promise of “jointly mobilizing 100 billion dollar/year fund transfer” made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Copenhangen.  Schooled for the better part of twenty years in the Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church on black Liberation Theology, the idea of an American superpower is an anathema to Obama’s mentality.

The Bankruptcy of Green Technology

“The term "Green Technology" has been adopted over the last 5 years to identify a group of industries and industrial applications which exploit the commercial value of technologies that benefit the environment; particularly as it impacts the human condition. . . .”

Without a doubt, as broad a description as this, is bound to encompass a plethora of industrial endeavors with a wealth of challenges and opportunities for creative achievement in one form or another. As a field of industry it should promise to be a profit-making proposition. But as a vehicle for national policy, it is inherently intellectually bankrupt. It behooves to note the primacy of the environment over the ‘human condition’ in this nutshell of a definition. It has all the primitive trappings of lifeboat economics with the noxious and regressive ideology of scarcity.

Granted that the technology would be so successful that we are able to synthesize chlorophyll and clothe every man, woman and child with it to enable them to photosynthetically capture solar energy and transform it into some beneficial form, the fact still remains: it shall have only accomplished the successful, if financially lucrative, harvest of existing energy. Whereas if the focus of the nation’s creative mentation is directed at the replication of the processes that produce the energy of the sun, i.e., controlled thermonuclear fusion, then we shall have achieved a proactive and progressive energy policy, worthy of a great nation.

The Obama administration’s focus on green technology as the principal component of his policy geared to attain energy independence is yet another flank in the systematic assault on capitalism in America with a view of downsizing it to fit the template of European socialism. Or in George F. Will’s compelling formulation (emphasis mine),

“ . . . Tens of billions of dollars are being dispensed, as by the U.S. Energy Department, which has suddenly become, in effect, a huge venture capital operation, speculating in green technologies. . . . propelling the gigantic and fabulously lucrative industry of combating global warming. . . .

“Copenhagen isthe culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world's climate by breaking the world's — especially America's — population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. . . .”

It would be a huge mistake to attribute this policy making to mere bungling incompetence, as Victor Davis Hanson seems to imply by dubbing it “An Energy Humpty-Dumpty View of the World.” It is far more egregious than just “methologizing” that in a “fantasyland of a con artist like Van Jones, millions of windmills and solar panels will free us from energy costs and cool the planet.” It would be more accurate to see it as a well-calculated effort to undermine one of the most basic ideals on which this country was founded: mastery of nature with the blessings of Divine Providence.

Even the few non-believers who may be so inclined to challenge it, have to ensure they are commensurately protected, armed, or fortified before daring so, else it would only be a fatal exercise in futility. Furthermore, they would not be challenging the substance of the proposition per se, but the mission implicitly sanctioned by the battle cry as popularly and traditionally perpetrated and prescribed for by Jihad.

Many a war veteran (especially of WWII and Vietnam) have been wondering why in the good old days Muslims, Sheikhs and Infidels were comfortable sharing bunkers, trenches and fox holes with one another to fight a common enemy such as the North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong guerrillas, Italian fascists, Japanese militarists, and the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany.

The blessings of a common adversary propelled the instinct for survival to compel adherents of Islam to forge various alliances, with the infidels both during World War II and the Cold War (also referred to in some quarters as World War III). Such alliances, however, being proscribed by Islam as a matter of doctrine, was necessarily both inconvenient and transient. Marriages of convenience never last beyond the next bifurcation in political strategy.

“Qur'an:9:5 "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war."

“Qur'an:9:112 "The Believers fight in Allah's cause; they slay and are slain, kill and are killed." . . .”

Just as not all Catholics subscribe to the ritual of confession as an effective and exclusive means of atonement for ones sins, not all Muslims subscribe to the ritual of jihad, until he runs amok and starts killing infidels, to the familiar refrain of "Allahu Akbar." Incidentally, the English word amok, is the Malayan language (e.g., Tagalog a.k.a. Pilipino, Bahasa Indonesia, etc.) word for Jihadist. Juramentado is the Bisaya equivalent of the term. It is derived from Spanish and literally means one who disavowed all worldly pursuits and pledged his life and soul exclusively to killing infidels.

It might be over stretching the reliance on hope over experience to credit Liberal ideology to have invented Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) as an overriding planetary danger so once again doctrinal differences can be considered minor and pushed to the back burner for safer periods of planetary bliss when the polar bears are no longer in danger of being washed away and off to oblivion.

Alas Global Warming has become a religion adopted and actively promoted by various national governments or government supported academic institutions, including most ominously the attempt to establish a Global Government. So the moral categorical question of the era is: can Global Warming protect and save us from the murder and mayhem that come with the battle cry "Allahu Akbar"? 

To answer this question it behooves to examine both the evolution of the Global Warming movement and the dynamics of political marriages of convenience in the historical record, and their attendant consequences, intended or otherwise.

The Stalin-Hitler Non- Aggression Pact of 1939, signed in August with a secret agenda to divide Europe into “spheres of influence” consigned to Germany or the USSR was one classic illustration of such marriage of convenience. Both sides knew at the outset that the pact would be abrogated either unilaterally by one party, or by mutual consent of both parties to the treaty, once other political expediency demanded such an eventuality.

Thus when one month later the Germans invaded Poland, and Russia took over the Baltic countries, the world accepted it as a logical consequence, as a matter of course, as day follows night. Likewise, when on 22-Jun-1941, Hitler deployed Operation Barbarossa in full implementation phase in an attempt to sweep the Russian Front like a storm, most astute political observers chalked it up to Cole Porter’s “just one of those things,” the none too bizarre falling out of a political marriage of convenience.

Joseph Stalin’s Yalta Conference with both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in February 1945 was of a similar ilk. It pulled to an inconvenient, uncomfortable embrace, otherwise mortal adversaries. It was George Patton's genius to have recognized that Stalinism and Americanism were irreconcilable visions of reality and acknowledged and warned of the danger of the alliance even in the heat of crucial maneuvers in the battlefronts of World War II.

Ironically, the Yalta Conference spawned the United Nations which ultimately begot the Church of AGW, with its arsenal of politically fabricated ‘scientific’ gospels. Without denigrating the UN’s initial role as a useful vehicle for mediation in the Cold War, when the super powers treated geopolitical strategic calculations as a chess game played on a global scale, its subsequent degeneration into a den of graft and corruption, as exemplified by the Oil for Food Programme shenanigans, is yet another teachable instance of the falling out of a political marriage of convenience.

The entire history of the Berlin Wall is one of the most appropriate metaphors for the role of the United Nations as a mediator in the Cold War. Under the aegis of the UN, the Wall rose and deplored by John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With the consternation of the UN the Wall fell on the instigation of Ronald Wilson Regan. The commemoration of its fall was dismissed by Barack Hussein Obama as of no significance. 

But most noteworthy of all, the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered the disintegration of the USSR. This resulted in a host of communist ideologues amongst the liberal intelligentsia of the West to flock into the United Nations and its satellite institutions. This crystallized the takeover of the environmental movement by communist ideologues of all shades and flavors of radical persuasions.

The seminal beginning of the present-day AGW is traceable with unmistakable certainty to the Stockholm Declaration of 1972.  Said document, reads, in part:

“Principle 5: The non-renewable resources of the earth must be employed in such a way as to guard against the danger of their future exhaustion and to ensure that benefits from such employment are shared by all mankind.

. . .

“Principle 14: Rational planning constitutes an essential tool for reconciling any conflict between the needs of development and the need to protect and improve the environment. “

In other words, a Command and Control Economy needs to be established to guarantee the equality of outcome for all peoples. The resources of the planet must be leveraged by a Global Government and deployed with precision to achieve that goal. What better tool to galvanize the support of the entire planet than a common danger with the tragic existential implications of Armageddon. Hence AGW as recently celebrated in Copenhagen came into being.

But as a counterforce to Islamic Jihadists, Global Warming as a religion was a non-starter, or an abject failure, at best.

Firstly, as Samuel P. Huntington aptly pointed out (emphasis mine),

“. . .The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. . . .”

Furthermore, as I indicated earlier elsewhere (emphasis added),

“. . . The fact that geographically and historically Islamic cultures have been associated with repressive governments is no accident of history. It is rooted on the proscription of the notion of Free Will from the tenets of Islam that makes its adherents exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to fear and repression.”

Moreover, the notion of compassion is, by all indications, alien to and contra-indicated by the tenets of Islamic Jihad. By definition, the Islamic Jihadist is, ipso facto, not interested in collaborating with infidels, much less in cohabiting the planet with anybody but adherents to Islam.

Similarly, most if not all acolytes of Global Warming are not really interested in saving the planet but in the control of our purses and lives. That they make profit in the bargain, is rather incidental.

Thus it came to pass that the exorbitant expenditures of sorely needed government resources to pay homage to the oracles of Global Warming in Copenhagen is just another instance of the ruling elite disregarding the sentiments of the governed. But it has always been my contention, since I started becoming aware of politics, that without any exception, any nation always deserve the leadership that happens unto them, regardless of the process (or errors) they come by it.

                Often the truth we sadly miss

           As we see only what we know.

           Nor each occasion could reveal

           The gravity of what we feel,

           On things we dare and dare not do.

           Yet, though in vain, let me express

           One simple thought, one sincere wish

           That may with love and peaceful bliss

           Replete you find the Holidays!

          And may the seasons thereafter

          Be seasoned with mirth and laughter.

          The rare occasioned somber sky

          May not but serve to amplify

          The happiness of days gone by,

          And glories of unyielding prime,

          And promises of days that lie

          Uncharted in the blue abyss

          And daunting vagaries of Time!

          May each grief find sweet redress;

          Alien to fears, much less to tears,

          May triumphs and exploits increase

          All through the fast succeeding years!

 The sentiments maybe recycled but they are no less wholeheartedly felt

from me and my family (all three generations of us)

 Coram, NY, Yultide '09

__________________________________________________

<c> 1994 Constancio S. Asumen, Jr.

          Original, New York, NY

          Christmas Eve '82

 Last Revised:

          Port Washington, NY

          Christmas Eve '92

____________________________________________________

 LVII
Ah, but my Computations, People say,
Reduced the Year to better reckoning?--Nay
'Twas only striking from the Calendar
Unborn To-morrow, and dead Yesterday.

          -- Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

 

 To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,    

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride       

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.  

Then the most prevalent speculation in the media was: “where could he be going at 2:30am”? To which, the near-billion dollar valuation of the Woods estate notwithstanding, my retort was: “he was probably trying to be at the head of the line of black weekend (pun not intended) shoppers at the nearby mall.” This is not entirely preposterous considering that Tiger Woods has been rather notable for his go-getter demeanor.

However the proverbially Clintonian “Bimbo Eruptions” promptly kicked in. The saga unfolded far beyond the traditionally tolerable envelope of tabloid titillations to become unquestionably tantamount to moral turpitudes of the grossest order. Traditionally, golf and moral turpitude would not fit harmoniously in the same sentence. But then again, in the age of Obama, adherence to tradition has increasingly and alarmingly become rather taboo. 

If the point needs illustration, until the ascendancy of BHO into the Oval Office, apologizing for America was never a part of Presidential rules of engagement, either domestically or, least of all, abroad. Neither was selective financial “bailout” of the private sector on the premise that some organizations are “too big to fail;” after which some of them did fail anyway (cf, e.g., Chrysler with Fiat as the sequel). It has to be noted parenthetically that the Oslo acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was the rare and most welcome exception.

This is by no means to claim that Obama invented the “reset button.” On the contrary, as Andrew Fogg, the Golf Hypnotist, has sufficiently documented, it has been a valuable widget in the arsenal of most great champion golfers. In politics, it has been a valuable tool since Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise. Or in the original formulation of John Milton, the classic “reset button” was sanctioned by the Devil himself:

To Tiger’s laudable credit, he elected to own up to the shenanigans and vowed to make amends when he announced his decision to take “an indefinite break” [from golf] to repair his marriage. We can only wish him well. It is indeed heartening that he seems to have the support and encouragement of his fellow professional golfers. By contrast, the POTUS does not seem to lose any opportunity to disown the pitfalls of his administration and blame his predecessor. The POTUS also enjoys the support of most of his fellow liberal Democrats in Congress and in the beholden corridors of punditland. Is this just a simple case of badge of honor among thieves and thugs in the latter; and of looking after your source of revenue in the former?

On the ledger of accountability, at least EldrickTigerWoods has proved the better man than Barack Hussein Obama. As I have pointed out in an earlier blog post, on the ledger of race and racial identity, Eldrick Tiger was way ahead of Barack Hussein. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. The next time we elect a president, we should make certain that the fellow (or lady) is an accomplished golfer. We shall then at least would be more likely to have a president who owns up to the administration’s mistakes and shortcomings rather than commission a search for a scapegoat.

I delved into the subject of accountability earlier elsewhere, albeit perhaps in a slightly different context, but nonetheless relevant:

(XVIII)              [4]

            To put the fault on my ill-attitude

 So-called, yourself you find acquit from blame

            Yet blameless be, what worth a fortitude? --

            Mischief breeds malice, should itself disclaim!

            Were conscience from all blemish fully free

            Its force of judgment should all times prevail,

            And so prevailing, would perforce decree

            Exclude such things bedeemed as boding ill

            From all affairs you deign to undertake;

            So undertaken, merits are your own

            To cherish; else, for ills amends to make.

            Laurels anon, save such as Laurels won:

               Self-absolution but redeem in pain

               The sinner -- not the sinning, nor the sin!

It can hardly be overemphasized, that the opportunity to redeem oneself with another chance is an integral part of the American Dream. As long as we do not forget the transgression, the transgressor can be forgiven. In the specific case of Tiger, I contend that the ultimate judge and jury should be Elin and her children. I would hasten to add that barring being absolved by these judge and jury, Tiger’s place in the hallowed pantheons of golfing history has been irreparably diminished and damaged and his quest to surpass Jack Nicklaus’ records has practically ended with the escalade affair.

Should that eventuality come to pass, his records should be adorned with a multitude of asterisks. And for all Tiger’s greatness in golfing skills and demeanor, he shall have been reduced to a mere footnote to the accomplishments of great and near-greats: people who by a confluence of both designed and fortuitous circumstances have somehow managed to get the better angels of their natures reign supreme over the baser devils of their decadence.

Some Corollary Angles

Mary Grabar, writing in Pajamas Media, had painstakingly deplored the appearance of giving a pass to Tiger’s co-conspirators in sin:

. . . Some black media commentators have criticized Woods for excluding black women.

Woods’ mistresses and flings, ranging from cocktail waitresses to porn stars, are being made into minor celebrities. They share attention with the prostitute, Ashley Dupre, who brought down Governor Eliot Spitzer.

But rarely are these women the objects of opprobrium. When one TV commentator called these women “bimbos,” he was shot down by the host for his lack of respect. . . .

 To this I had replied in the “comment” section (edited accordingly for the sake of clarity):

Forget about the women. As far as we know not one of them took a celibacy vow. Even if they did, they were only “pursuing their happiness” as in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, prescribed for and enshrined in The Declaration of Independence.

On the other hand, if memory serves from the vows I took, Tiger would have sworn to “forsake all others, etc. etc.” Besides, the cocktail waitress is only responsible for the drinks being served with the most titillating ambiance practicable. The golfer on the other hand, is responsible to the integrity and honesty with which the game of golf is traditionally perceived and appropriately associated.

Tiger’s escapades have just made golf compatible with moral turpitude, an association not traditionally heard or seen in the annals of the exalted game.

This is coming from someone who has won exactly one golf hackers’ tournament and a party to three marital vows (serially of course).

I regret not having pointed out that Ashley Dupre did not bring down Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer was taken down by the cumulative weight and inertia of his hypocrisy so characteristic of the typical liberal Deomcrat: publicly crusading to close down prostitution while cavorting as one of the prostitution industry’s most high profile patron.

It is very easy indeed, to get sidetracked by collateral considerations. That the feminist movement has irreparably damaged the essence of American womanhood, is to my mind beyond any debate. Nevertheless, some people, myself definitely excluded, call that progress. It has, at the same time effectively castrated the American males’ potency respecting societal and social graces. The death of chivalry as ushered in by the feminist movement has robbed American society of the more pleasant graces of social decorum and is a definite disservice to traditional civility.

Indulgence in the most prurient of our reflexes is as old as humankind itself and certainly predated Tiger Woods and his picadillos by ages if not eons. The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch at Madrid’s Museo del Prado is dated approximately circa 1500 A.D. In fact we need not document the Hedonistic rituals of antiquity to come to terms with the reality that we all came into being as results of the prurient indulgence of exactly one generation prior to our own.

When all is said and done, we all fit into the catalogue concocted by the brilliant wit of Omar Khayyam, in the ageless Rubaiyat:

LXVIII
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

LXIX
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

In an earlier article I inadvertently volunteered the information that “I am no longer a church-going Christian.” Before some family and friends would inquire on what exactly did I mean by the ‘confession’, or maybe just for my own edification, I deem it necessary to elaborate on that state of affairs to the best that my selective memory can muster.

Suffice to say, memory is, of necessity invariably selective. As an organism with instincts for self-preservation, we only retain what serves to reinforce the prolongation if not perpetuation of existential well-being. No conspiracy theory here. It is just how the cookie crumbles. No grandiose designs or sophisticated schemes on how life is supposed to unfold. For which a bit of background is in order.

I grew up in a small farming/fishing village of fewer than a hundred households, of mostly relatives with the exception of two or three families. Close family ties were so pervasive one had to reach out to the adjacent town to get married. In terms of societal and civic activity, it would compare most appropriately with the fictional village of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof, but for three qualifications that need to be stressed. It was a catholic community; it was a farming village by the sea; and it definitely was not fictional.

These first two attributes are more important than one would ordinarily suspect. Firstly, my father converted a sizable tract of homestead virgin forest into a coconut plantation by spear-fishing at night and using the night’s catch to hire help during the day to work the farm. This required proximity to the sea to be remotely practicable. Having grown up ‘by the sea’ has a definite indelible influence on my psyche, so much so that I have not lived more than an hour’s trip to the sea my entire life. To a boy, the sea always presented the promise of infinite possibilities. By contrast, farm work invariably gave me the feeling of being hopelessly and helplessly grounded, with no prospect of liberation from the clutches of the soil and the vagaries of the weather.

Secondly, the catholic aspect of it is important in the sense that mother was a devout catholic and father was a nominal practitioner. As a pre-school boy I would go to town with mother and father and I would end up spending the Sunday afternoon with father at the town cockpit. (Then, cockfighting was one of the most popular pastimes in the old country, and father was one of the acclaimed accomplished minder of fighting roosters in the town.)  Mother would invariably spend the Sunday afternoon in church.

Nevertheless, I grew up a devout catholic since around third grade, circa the time when I went through catechism leading to my first communion, up through sophomore high school. Being devout meant as early as a third grader, I was one of two boys in town who could lead the novena, and frequently did so in public without embarrassment or reservation, notwithstanding that the chore was traditionally assigned to girls. The other boy was my brother, two years and eight months older than me. The point is, I took religion rather seriously starting quite early on. Going to church was a weekly ritual until my high school sophomore year.

Around that time, they stopped conducting the catholic mass in Latin. The veil of mysticism was lifted off the mass as a ritual. When I started to understand what was said and done in church, I began to gradually realize that my main reason for being in church was to get close to Evangeline, the prettiest damsel and best dancer in campus, the girl I courted with the proverbial passion of first love. Somehow the realization made me extremely uncomfortable. Increasingly, the burden of inventing stories for the priest at confessional, so I could take the Sunday communion, became toilsome and intolerable. Sans provocation, my conscience started to kick in.

At the end of my sophomore year I was sent to represent my school at a national conference of students who were aspiring to pursue farming for a lifetime vocation. As a congratulatory gift, one of my maternal uncles, a practicing Seventh Day Adventist (SDA), gave me a bible. I spent a good chunk of my third year in high school reading that bible, which is one of the few books I have read cover to cover more than once. I may not be that much the wiser for the experience, but that was the first year of my not being a church-going Christian.

This was the first introspection phase of my religious meanderings. The days spent in the wilderness, so to speak. Or to borrow Omar Khayyam’s  brilliant formulation,

LXVI
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"

Having quit following her to church and miserably failing to learn the tango, or any dancing skills for that matter, I of course began to drift apart from Evangeline, the love of my life. But my love affair with the bible persisted through my final year of high school. It eventually led me back to church. During the first two and one-half years of college, I found myself a guest member of an SDA congregation right in the heart of the largest Muslim city in the country.

The congregation consisted exactly of four resident families, with two to six members to a family, and four to five students from my newly opened university, as guest members. The fifth member of our group went to church rather irregularly. The four of us, more often than not, walked the five to six kilometers separating the campus from the city, both ways every Saturday regardless of the weather.  There were times when we got an occasional break from the motor pool personnel and were able to hitch a ride, but they were too few and far between.

The congregation elder was a medical doctor and we held the worship services at the waiting room of his clinic. I was positive that he was not a pastor or an ordained minister because we never addressed him as such. Although I did not quite have a chance at a one-on-one dialogue with him, (I was only a taciturn college kid, he was the accomplished elder of the bunch) I held him in high regard and respect.

The congregation on the whole had a very congenial informal ambiance. The resident families took turns hosting us, the student guest members, for lunch each Saturday. I was content and comfortable with my new identity as an SDA congregant. I even managed to leverage my religious entitlement to have ROTC deferred for two semesters because a Saturday drill violated the SDA Sabbath protocol. Ditto with any special examinations, like the competency classification tests (which landed me into remedial English course) scheduled for a Saturday: we were allowed to take them some other time.

During this period, I however admit to cringing with consternation and resentment every time I heard somebody remarked that I was a person who could be trusted because I went to church every week. This was, to my mind, the cliché case of putting the cart before the horse. To date I hold the deep seated conviction that I went to church on a regular basis because I was a decent person, mainly due to my upbringing. To formulate it otherwise would be an affront to the honor and achievements of my parents, the most monumental of them I consider to be the success of their children.

I was blessed with loving and caring parents who inculcated into my consciousness an appreciation of the notion of the good, the beautiful and the true, along with the value of hard work and the mental habit to examine the merits of any proposition that needs to be acted upon or taken as gospel.

This is seriously important because my parents got married when they were in grammar school. Father was nineteen just on the verge of being promoted to seventh grade. Mother was sixteen, still in the sixth grade. Both of them were scions of farming/fishing families. Their moral and spiritual moorings essentially consisted of the goodness of their hearts and the desire to do what was right, tempered by the rigors of the elements associated with farming and fishing life.

It was against the backdrop of these introspections (my second over the last five years) that I was caught off guard by a sermon. The occasion was the Saturday following the second anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death. The congregation elder chose the life and death of the iconic celebrity as the subject of his sermon. His thesis was that no amount of glamour, glitter, wealth and fame can work to your benefit if you live a life of sin. The thesis as such was fine. But in the process of expounding on it, he proceeded to berate her judgment and vilify her character and probe into every conceivable aspect of her memory and legacy to prove his point.  In his passionate eloquence he managed to impute the most negative nuance to every facet of her life.

Somehow this violated every fabric of decency that was planted in my soul by my parents. It took every fiber of self-restraint for me not to walk out of the service right then and there. From my farm boy upbringing one just should not speak ill of the dead. I cannot remember being taught the specific reason for the proscription, but I hasten to guess: that it is because the dead is inherently incapable of defending itself. Or if you subscribe to the wisdom of Shakespeare’s formulation that

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;”

the evil deeds have ample chance to speak for themselves. Therefore it becomes incumbent upon common decency to highlight the good deeds, especially when they are buried with the carcass. Thus the practice of delivering a eulogy at a funeral is a protocol of decency.

What I even found more outrageous was the fact that no other person seemed to have found the sermon objectionable. It might of course be that everybody was just as taciturn and reserved as I was then. Be that as it may, that was the last time I attended a church service as a congregant. Since nobody asked me why I stopped going to church, I did not think I needed to come up with an explanation, till now.

The “fault,” at this juncture, is giving credibility to Al Gore. It was understandable that Bill Clinton would sell Al Gore as a presidential timber. When he was picked for Vice President, I chalked it up to Clinton’s attempt at getting a life insurance. With Al Gore in line for succession to the Oval Office, who was going to want to harm a President William Jefferson Clinton? The Democrats have such a perverted sense of reality.

The point is, after reading Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance,” it is one of the few “wonders of the world” that anybody could give Al Gore an iota of credibility. That book established Gore’s bona fides, beyond any shadow of a doubt, as a certifiable charlatan. But then again, not very many people may have read it. (Full disclosure: I got it from a $1-book stand and I read it commuting to/from work in the NYC subway.)

Some might deem it an exercise in futility to focus on Al Gore at this juncture in history. With the advent of the transformational, transcendent Obama, Gore himself is history. I wish it were quite that simple and harmless. Gore, being the self-proclaimed high priest of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) duly ordained by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, has successfully charmed the public into accepting his balderdash as gospel.

The same intellectual dysfunction and disconnect that were dismissive of “Earth in the Balance” have embraced the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and allowed it to creep into our educational system. It is analogous to making “Earth in the Balance” a required reading material for high school seniors as a pre-requisite for graduation. 

It is noteworthy that this same dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become the Ditherer-in-chief and make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.

It matters little that Al Gore is gallivanting around the globe with his huge ‘Carbon Footprint’ making millions of dollars in the process, peddling fictitious literature billed as gospel. What is most crucial is that the Obama regime with all the powers and resources of the Federal Government at its disposal is buying into and espousing the Al Gore agenda hook, line and sinker. Anybody who dares to sound a note of alarm or caution is vilified as naysayers intent on obstructing the President, or worse, as racist opposing the President’s agenda because he happens to be black.

It behooves to keep in mind that one of the premises of “An Inconvenient Truth” is the mantra that the science of Global Warming is a settled issue. That there is an overwhelming consensus within the scientific community does not make the belief a well established body of knowledge. Science is not a matter of faith and consensus. It is a matter of verifiable facts and phenomena that can be replicated repeatedly under carefully controlled constraints.

It used to be that scientific theory was established by a preponderance of verifiable evidence. Not anymore. In the age of Gore and Obama, science is established by a preponderance of repeated incantation, followed by a preponderance of favorable media coverage.

Consensus does not a science make. Carbon Footprint and Carbon Offset, are not scientific concepts. They are political constructs, concocted for propaganda, designed to politically and financially benefit their proponents. It has as much basis in reality as did mortgage-backed securities which obliterated the real estate market and the entire financial system needed a multi-billion dollar bailout.

Beneath the Veneer of Hypocritical Rhetoric

Anthropogenic Global Warming, as postulated by the Kyoto Protocol is not even a scientific theory. It is only an unprovable hypothesis. The notion of "Greenhouse Effect" postulated in the context of the entire planet earth is, at best, an extrapolation of boundary value conditions, not otherwise warranted by experimental constraints.

It is the process of experimentation that elevates an hypothesis into a theory, i.e., when replicable results supportive of the hypothesis are obtained, repeatedly. No such experimentation has been deployed in support of Anthropogenic Global Warming. A computer simulation is not an experiment. It is nothing but an exercise in modeling reality. Its validity depends largely on the set of assumptions that govern the set of process relationships stipulated in the model. It does not prove anything, by any stretch of the imagination.

At the time of this writing, there is a brewing scandal surrounding the apparent falsification of ‘scientific’ data by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglea in the UK, known to be the intellectual brain thrust for AGW.  It is a breach of protocol governing scientific inquiry that would have warranted sending the offenders to the stakes, if not for the fact that doing so would be a serious sacrilege to the noble memory of Giordano Bruno.

For the sake of pedagogical integrity, let us disregard the potential ramifications of such a scandal and confine ourselves to verifiable facts. Carbon dioxide accounts for 0.0314 vol % of the atmosphere and ranks fourth in the distribution after nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. This amount constitutes 1.5% of the total carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, the dissolved component accounting for 98.5% of the total.

People exhale carbon dioxide all their lives. Lower forms of being in the biosphere generously discharge it from the other end, an activity most notably attributed to cattle. Plants use it in photosynthesis. Coral reefs use it to produce more coral reefs, to eventually become limestone and marble, eons hence.

With all these multitude of phenomena in which carbon dioxide is involved, where is the research that isolates in a quantifiable format, the human contribution? The answer appropriately brings to mind a quatrain from Omar Khayyam:

 XLVII 

When You and I behind the Veil are past, 

Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last, 

Which of our Coming and Departure heeds 

As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast. 

Notwithstanding the bloated egos of most politicians and some 

punditocrats, our physical universe as pertains to the planet earth, 

is still heliocentric. Much of what is going on that affects the 

temperature mostly is influenced by solar activity, or lack thereof.

Temperature fluctuations are well documented in the historical geologic record. They are somewhat loosely correlated with solar magnetic storms or sun spots (emphasis mine):

“At over 1.4 million kilometers (869,919 miles) wide, the Sun contains 99.86 percent of the mass of the entire solar system: well over a million Earths could fit inside its bulk. The total energy radiated by the Sun averages 383 billion trillion kilowatts, the equivalent of the energy generated by 100 billion tons of TNT exploding each and every second.”

Not even all the messianic powers of Barack Hussein Obama, reinforced by all the major bloviators in Capitol Hill (think Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Chuck Schummer, etc.) has any prayer of reversing the influence of these staggering numbers.  So, where does the urgent call to action by the Global Warmists come from? Let’s take a look at another, rather longer, historical record (emphasis mine):

“Based on a combination of historical trends over the last several thousand years with the recent trends reasonably attributable to anthropogenic causes of temperature increase, it appears that some small additional increase might be reasonably possible (but not certain) by 2100, but most likely within a range < 0.4^OC, which would put it in the range of several warm periods in historical times that were particularly productive times.”

On a normal day in either winter or summer, when my HVAC system is engaged in the house, I suffer through a greater temperature variation going from the first floor couch to my computer room on the second floor. The answer is painfully obvious. The urgency is analogous to the avowed need to pass the stimulus bill of thousands of pages without being read, let alone analyzed by those who have to vote on it.

To propose to deploy inordinate resources for Global Warming is political folly worthy of celebration only in The United Nations. Let American taxpayers not have anything to do with it.

          Due faith and courage for your future course,

          Be best prepared to emulate with pride

          The brave defenders of your sacred shores.

          Allow not blunt your own awakening

          By rhetoric that politicians use

          To thwart your conscience into weakening

          The selfsame vehemence of vengeance's cause,

          The which would break the fetters of your soul

          And tear the mask of shameless tyranny.

          Default's the cross of falsehood bearing all

          Unreason for your seeming destiny

                   To drown, in surfeit, bliss of ignorance,

                   To crown, in glory, sweet irrelevance!!        

Having introduced this locution in an earlier article, I hasten to stake my claim as the one to have originated the phraseology. Thus, if and when it wiggles itself into an unheralded immortality in the hallowed pantheons of political discourse, there should be no mistaking on who first minted it.

Mistaken attribution may not lead to a distortion of history with momentous repercussions on the subsequent unfolding of events. But accuracy in reporting is important; otherwise injustice becomes an acceptable integral part to the praxis and history of scholarship. Becoming so would, ipso facto, defeat the very sine qua non of history.

For instance, the catchy "nattering nabobs of negativism" is often mistakenly attributed to Vice President Spiro Agnew just because he was the first on record to have uttered it in public. However, it was minted behind the scenes by then speechwriter William Safire, whose “On Language” column justified The New York Times being delivered to my doorsteps for several years.

The Agnew attribution may not have changed the course of history. I however deem it an injustice to Safire’s contribution to the national political discourse in particular, and to language scholarship in general.

I have come to the inevitable conclusion that President Obama’s ascendancy to the Oval Office was made possible mainly by a failure of the majority of the American electorate to recognize a multitude of patterns concerning Barack Hussein Obama, the individual, his modus operandi, and its cumulative impact to our national polity. These include, among others, his associations, his teleprompter enhanced eloquence, his penchant to obfuscate information obstinately, his flair for the dramatic and sensational, etc., in endless litany.

Granted, there were countless enablers along the way. But the genius of Obama lies in his gambit that taken as a litany, or a laundry list of seemingly harmless lapses of judgment, his modus operandi could not harm him politically. He was in effect counting on the statistical certitude that the majority of the electorate could not muster a gestalt perception of himself as a politician. Therefore Americans as the electorate are inherently incapable of knowing how harmful Obama is to America.

It is a certainty because the electorate as a collection of minds and individual conscience and consciousness, constitute a few drops of genius in a bucket of mediocrity. This is not to denigrate the intelligence of the American electorate. It is just to recognize the undeniable brutal reality that statistically, the nonchalant John and Jane Doe “cannot care less” amongst us do vastly outnumber the “you never can fool me” Einstein and Heisenberg amongst us.

To invoke the original far-reaching conclusive formulation of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in its entirety, "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and incompetencies, assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that all of the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen."

I deem it pointless to dwell again on the litany of sins. Aside from having peripherally dealt with it earlier elsewhere myself, the internet literature alone is replete with brilliant and incisive documentation. To single out the most notable few I recently found: Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly analyzed Obama’s lapses in judgment. Thomas Sowell pointed out with unmistakable emphasis how ruinous Obama’s czaring of America is to the country. Joan Swirsky pushed the envelope even further by delving into who could possibly be calling the shots.

The enablers demand revisiting because they, too, constitute a pattern. It requires getting to the forest without being distracted by the trees. The so-called main stream media, exemplified to notoriety by the “tingling legs” of Chris Matthews, being blatantly functioning as a de facto propaganda outlet for Obama does not need any journalistic sourcing. That the “hope and change” mantra took political traction, thanks to the acolyte media has become a common knowledge.

It is however usually under-appreciated that the Clinton Paradigm ushered in with facility the arrival of the Obama Paradigm. The ultimate political insider Richard Morris architected triangulation as an effective tactical maneuver to attain the strategy of political survival. This enabled the Clinton presidency to recalibrate its bearings, to survive Newt’s “Contract for America” revolution and introduce a new standard for Presidential behavior. The Clinton era effectively corroded the nation’s sensibilities.

After the nation have accepted the mantra that the Lewinsky Affair was about “only just sex,” “everybody does it,” “does not amount to impeachable behavior,” the crush and burn methodology of Rahm Emanuel became as benign to the nation as a cub scouts fire drill. On his inauguration speech, Obama enjoined the nation to help him remake America and more than half of the nation gave him a standing ovation.

Little did the applauders suspect that what he had in mind was to convert America to be the leading debtor nation after a long tradition of being a reliable creditor nation. Little did the nation suspect that what he had in mind was to downsize the private sector, the very dependable engine of wealth creation, in order that union and government bureaucracies, become the undisputed purveyor of the perverted “golden rule,” that he who has the gold makes the rules.

As a matter of pedagogical illustration let us take the recently passed House Bill which is popularly deemed the PelosiCare version of ObamaCare.  I had neither the latitude nor the forbearance to deal with the thousands of pages of the full text. Hence, I searched the CRS summary page for the text strings “establish” and “prohibit.” The search returned ten hits for “establish” and five hits for “prohibit.”

Without going into a tedious and toilsome cost-benefit analysis of the implications of the search result, it is safe to conclude that at the very least, when PelosiCare becomes the law of the land, we are guaranteed five more constraints to what can be done, without fear of violating the law. Whether they be czars, commissions, committees, or panels of sorts, there shall be ten more units of bureaucracy to function as instruments of governance.

Let me remind, in passing, all those who breathed a sigh of relief on the report that Sen. Lindsey Graham pronounced the Bill a DOA (dead on arrival) in the Senate, to take the relief with the proverbial grain of salt. The venerable Senator issued a similar verdict on the Sotomayor confirmation. She was then the nominee. She is now Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Would calling Senator Graham’s office for an explanation serve any purpose? I suspect it would be an exercise in futility.

Finally, recognizing a paradigm is one thing; being cognizant of its enduring legacy is quite another. I deem it proper and fitting to apply the modifier repugnant to emphasize the reality that every facet of the Obama agenda has the guaranteed effect of undermining the principles which serve as the foundation of Americanism, the vaunted last best hope of mankind on earth.

With Iran being in the crosshairs of international concerns and the preponderance of what I dub the Repugnant Obama Paradigm, which includes, inter alia, the recent groveling and pandering of this White House towards the Moslem world, I deem it essential to share the sentiments herein with as wide a public as I can possibly reach.  

I therefore solicit your indulgence and present the original piece in its entirety, neurotic trappings included.

{*******}

By now I gathered from your messages that you are pretty much disappointed with the websites I routinely visit and the tendencies I’m inclined to read and indulge my fancy at. I know that you know that you are not alone in that regard. Since quite a few of my messages were left unanswered, I don’t know where to begin. 

Let’s start with the question of moderate Moslems: where are they, what are they doing a propos of the Jihad that is unleashed at the West, what is the most likely influence they will have in the direction and outcome of conflict resolution.

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument that they exist. I submit to you that to the extent that they are silent on the issues, they render themselves irrelevant to the process, let alone to its outcome. The silent majority become de facto collaborators to the factions that drive the events that set the agenda.

I have to concede: my over all knowledge of Islam is limited to a one-semester course on the Cultural History of Islam in the Philippines. This is supplemented, perhaps by three semesters of working as a Research Assistant to a professor doing her doctoral desertion on the subject. I therefore would not presume to give an analysis of the various sects of and tendencies in Islam to probe into and prove or disprove were moderation lies.

Rather, I’d propose to speak from real life experience with our version of Islam in the Philippines. Admittedly, this experience is not as extensive as yours. Garnered between the ages of 18 and 29, I submit to you however, that it is equally instructive and diverse: as a student, an office worker, a manual laborer, and a faculty member in a prestigious university. I had classmates, professors and students who were Moslems.

I have shared working and lodging quarters with both the politically active and the completely apolitical. I had argued with them, fought with them, played with them, joked with them, negotiated with them, lobbied with them. At one point I even fancied romantically courting one of them. I had my life and limb threatened on more than one occasion resulting from differences in opinion on rules of procedures in Student Government elections.

The conclusion gleaned from this experience, as obtains in the Philippines, at least: there are no radical and moderate doctrines of Islam.  There are only varying degrees of adherence to the same doctrine. This distinction is by no means academic.

It is one thing to have an institutionalized deliberation of what the doctrine entails, teaches and promotes or prohibits, i.e., an institutionally conscious architecting of a belief structure and its societal and sociological implications. It is quite a different story to have individuals decide to adopt or discard certain parts of the doctrine as a matter of practical convenience.

The former is wont to produce religious/ideological enlightenment. The latter, more often than not, results in political and/or commercial opportunism and cultural relativism of the worst kind. In effect, the typical Moslem intellectual assumes a split identity: one when he is conscious of his adherence to Islam, (his “Islamhood” so to speak), and the other when he discards, wittingly or unwittingly, the religious affiliation and constraints.

To state it mildly and kindly, it is extremely difficult and problematic to make long-term programmatic political allies out of people with lukewarm convictions. They can reach out and deal with the outside world in a less than antagonistic manner only to the extent that they are able to transcend their identities as Moslems.

This translates into always having an ulterior motive in their dealings with the outside world, i.e., with the infidels such as you and me. Whatever alliance you made with them should be understood to be in the context of a specific set of circumstances. Any bonding that ensues from such alliance is non-transferable to the next set of conditions.  In other words, you cannot expect any form of loyalty from them because you cannot expect that they will shed off, even temporarily, their Islamic identities for your sake.

When you are in conflict with any one of them the notion of who is at fault is decided by the fact that you are not one of them. You should not expect that any one of them would voluntarily look after your interest and intercede on behalf of objective facts of the conflict. When an atrocity is committed on someone who is not one of them, nobody protests, and nobody bears witness for the victim so the perpetrator is tolerated.

Incidentally, I should mention that the university where I studied and later worked in was established for the express purpose of promoting integration between the Moslems and the rest of the nation. When five Iranian students were robbed, murdered and mutilated in a nearby town, it was the non-Moslem constituents of the university who demanded that the local and provincial (roughly comparable to State here in the U.S.) authorities at the very least condemned the atrocious deed. The rest remained silent. Presumably those Iranians were not Moslems. Or if they were, not the version of Islam preached and practiced in the locality. Of course nobody got arrested or answered for what happened.

 It is entirely possible, indeed, I think it is most likely that the Islam practiced amongst the Iranians and the one practiced in the Philippines are different. I am not going to venture into the difference between the Suni and the Shiite sects. That is completely beyond my domain.

I can say this for certain: of the different nationalities of Islamic cultural backgrounds I have been exposed to in Japan and here in the U.S., Filipinos (in general, and I in particular) seemed to have gotten along rather more easily with people from Iran and/or Turkey.  The fact that, by a confluence of circumstances, I got along well with Farid has very little influence in this observation. If anything, it probably is an indirect result, or at least an illustration of its verity.

Conversely, we seemed to experience more difficulty with people from Pakistan. In fact at the Chiba Foreign Students College, there was open enmity between the Pakistanis and the Filipinos. Granted, this might have been caused by specific incidents. So let us put this aspect of the issue aside and refocus on the treatise of the article, which triggered all this.

Maybe it is true that Iran has all the socio-political institutions conducive to the emergence of an Islamic moderate as a political force. Indeed, there were reports of Candle Light vigils on the streets of Tehran in reaction to 9/11 as compared with celebratory dancing on the streets in the rest of the Middle East. More recent reports of anti-Taliban demonstrations in Tehran also reinforce this encouraging tendency.

Unfortunately, however, political ferment of the sort that can reverse the tide of ideology takes at least a generation to take hold. The terrorist network is actively waging a war on Western civilization now, ironically using some of the tools only Western civilization could conceivably produce.

Are we then to wait around for another generation of enlightened intellectuals to decide whether or not it is a war worth fighting and another generation to actually fight this war? Or shall we deny that there is a war being fought!   The events of 9/11 changed a lot of things. The principle of self-preservation was not one of them.

When somebody comes to my house to cut my throat, my first order of business is to prevent it from happening.  I’m not going to debate on the merits and causes and motives of the mission.  I can take care of that after the mission has been successfully foiled.  It is too late to prevent 9/11 from happening.  It is imperative that we deter the perpetrators from making a habit of it.

And here lies my quarrel with Islam. A crime has been committed in its name. Where is the rest of Islam to at least condemn the deed? Where is the outrage? It is not forthcoming. The rest of Islam, as a doctrine, is simply incapable of condemning it because it does not see it as a crime. It sees it as an achievement in the name of Islam, something worthy of a jubilant celebration.   I definitely am not one of those who would argue that there is the slightest possibility to justify or explain away 9/11.

The role of American Moslems needs to be looked into in this connection. The only protest I have come across from that community is about its being victimized, resultant to, or as a “fallout” of 9/11.  In a way this is understandable if pathetically pathological in its absurdity.  It stresses the fact that this would be the last place to look for Islamic moderates.

At this juncture, I contend, assert and maintain that to convert into Islam from religions associated with the Judeo-Christian cultural traditions is a definite act of intellectual regression. The fact that geographically and historically Islamic cultures have been associated with repressive governments is no accident of history. It is rooted on the proscription of the notion of Free Will from the tenets of Islam that makes its adherents exceptionally vulnerable and susceptible to fear and repression.

Conversely, the assimilation of the concept of Free Will into the doctrines of Judaism and Christianity has undeniably made these religions hospitable and conducive to the flourishing of liberty and kindred values associated with democratic cultures and institutions. This in and of itself makes the latter religions decisively superior to Islam.

It was the liberation of the power of the mind from the clutches of ignorance and religious dogma that propelled Western Civilization, as we know it. Converting into Islam is tantamount to renouncing the benefits, accrued by default, from the moral and intellectual legacy of the ages of reformation, renaissance, and enlightenment.  It is, ipso facto, a tragic and pathological intellectual suicide of the grossest order.  One must have been utterly and completely disenfranchised from such traditions to become an Islamic convert.

I think I have spoken my peace or have beaten this horse dead many times over.