Caller: Ronni In Oregon
The Song-and-Dance Retinue that is ‘Red Symphony’
The Song-and-Dance Retinue that is ‘Red Symphony’
And Communism is Monopoly Crony Capitalism
But Now… All that’s Green Will Turn to Gold
<|>
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome. Lark In Texas with you… on this Saturday – October 22nd, 2011 – for the next hour.
Republic Broadcasting exists to bring forth real news and information… you’d be hard-pressed to find… anywhere else.
As are you, I’m Justa Numerican… concerned about the same things you’re concerned about… the separating of facts… from fiction… and the best investment value… for our time… spent together.
This is why… YOU too… are as reliable… a news medium – in what’s left of America – without a doubt.
And besides all else… you’re tuned to RBN… because you can handle the truth!
<|>
Our call-in number today… is 800-313-9443. Your calls are an important part of what makes this network unique…
… Since RBN is talk radio… entirely supported by producers… of first-quality products… and YOU… are a one-of-a-kind listener!
So check out that website. Republic Broadcasting [dot] o-r-g – is well worth a visit!
If you’re from my neck-o-the-woods… and you’ve tuned to 1140… on the AM dial –
that’s KHFX out of Cleburne, north central Texas, and points beyond –
we’d especially like to hear from YOU!
<|>
For detailed program notes of this broadcast – or any of those previous – refer to the web address http://larkintexas.blogspot.com … and you will find the web log… for Justa Numerican.
<|>
Many of you know that I’m an avid listener to the conversations generated across this network. And truth to tell, it’s mostly due… to my living life… as a hermit…
… That I even have the time. I purposely removed myself from commerce when I discovered that the communitarians had taken over this government… and that my right to own those fruits derived from my lifetime of labor… had been stolen from me… under their ludicrous claims… of a body of law… called communitarian law. Not only do they claim to be the perpetual lienholders of my land… and of my household effects… but they have also staked… a slave-master’s claim… on me… as their slave.
Now you’ve heard it said – “the devil’s in the details” – but have you ever considered this adage [this truism]… as a universal maxim… of law? While the many are focused solely on the generalities, it is the few… laser-focused on the details… that generally accrue… the lion’s share of the wealth.
And this is what has happened, ladies and gentlemen. We Americans who haven’t been a part… of this web of deceit… have been asleep at the switch… and the train called Liberty… has jumped its track. Wreaking havoc for all… of us concerned…
… So now we must beg the question: What is wealth, Master?
How might one adequately address… procuring, securing, and then preserving for one’s posterity… even the accrual of wealth?
Especially when liars, thieves, murderers – one could call them pirates – have already claimed you as their prize?
He who accepts the benefit must stand to the burden
So hmmm …would that mean… we are their beasts… of burden? Are you down with submission? Where will we register our complaints… about the food, the water, or the air we all breathe… when…
"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!"
~Sir Walter Scott
3 Dichotomies: Predator-Prey | Master-Slave | Host-Parasite
Splitting the Difference: Risk-Reward | Cost-Benefit | Profit-Loss
Symbiosis: Ways in which our captors manage their stolen booty
2 Incessant Subliminal Messaging Themes: Apply (Beg; Induced to enter into another unconscionable contract); Submit (So what else can one do? You will submit… or else you will die – you useless eater, you!)
Retinue
The retainers or attendants accompanying a high-ranking person
A group of attendants or followers: entourage, following, suite, train. See over/under
IN BRIEF: The body of persons who attend to a person of importance in travel or public appearance
A retinue is a body of persons "retained" in the service of a noble or royal personage, a suite (literal French meaning: what follows) of "retainers".
Etymology
The word, recorded in English since circa 1375, stems from Old French retenue, itself from retenir, from Latin retenere, hold back, retain.
Employment
Such retainers were not necessarily in the domestic service or otherwise normally close to the presence of their lord, but also include others who wore his livery (a kind of uniform, in distinctive colours) and claimed his protection, such as musicians and private teachers.
Some were a source of trouble and abuse in the 15th and early 16th century. Often their real importance was very different from their rank: on one hand, sinecures and supernumerary appointments allowed enjoying benefits without performing full service. On the other hand, 'having the ear' of the master can allow one to act as a confidant in an informal capacity; or in some cases, even as a spy under the guise of an innocent musician.
•Sometimes used in the context meaning the supporters or followers of a medieval knight.
Contrast
A retinue is sometimes confused with an entourage, which is the far less stable body of people that followed whether or not they were - or claimed to be - retained or protected by the prominent person they served.
For example, a prince's entourage would not only include professional courtiers, but also various bishops, clerics and other clerks, senior members of the aristocracy and other more occasional advisers, translators et cetera, who would often not be part of a sovereign's (more permanent) retinue, even though that could comprise a surprising variety of functions, from menial to lofty.
See also
•The Roman Cohors amicorum was rather similar, and this use of the word cohort (derived from a battalion-size military unit) for a dignitary's 'friends' was the root of the Italian word corte 'court', which via the French cortège gave rise to cortege, which can also mean a train of attendants.
•Manrent, a Scottish clan bond
•Druzhina in Rus
•Svita
Dichotomy
A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts, meaning it is a procedure in which a whole is divided into two parts. It is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are:
•jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and
•mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts.
The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other.
In the community of philosophers and scholars, many believe that "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't really a distinction."
•Division into two usually contradictory parts or opinions: "the dichotomy of the one and the many" (Louis Auchincloss)
•Astronomy. The phase of the moon, Mercury, or Venus when half of the disk is illuminated
•Botany. Branching characterized by successive forking into two approximately equal divisions
'A division into two' (from Greek dicho- meaning 'apart' and -tomos meaning 'cutting'). The word has long-established meanings in technical domains such as logic, astronomy, and the life sciences; in the 20th century it moved into general use to mean 'a difference or split' (e.g. a dichotomy of opinion) and often implies a contrast or a paradoxical circumstance:
By a dichotomy familiar to us all, a woman requires her own baby to be perfectly normal, and at the same time superior to all other babies—John Wyndham, 1957
The coffee-table featured a couple of Shakespeare texts and a copy of Time Out—an intriguing dichotomy—Martin Amis, 1973.
Dallas Citizen’s Council
The bid-ness of America is bid-ness!
Incorporated November 22nd, 1937
JFK Murdered November 22nd, 1963
JFK’s undelivered remarks for Dallas Citizens Council, Trade Mart, Dallas, Texas, 22 November 1963
Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis both died on this same date, November 22nd, 1963
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4th, 1826, exactly 50 years after The Declaration of Independence was signed. Another ex-President, James Monroe, died on July 4th, 1831.
<|>
The Center for American and International Law
Founded in 1947 as the Southwestern Legal Foundation, it is located at 5201 Democracy Drive, Plano, Texas 75024-3561
<|>
Jordan Maxwell… on Words
Christianism
They are Throwing it in our Faces
(Jordan Maxwell)
I don't know if anybody is noticing...but, the "BS" is in your face.
Scroll down slow and think about what you are seeing...
1. May 1st - Illuminati Founded
2. May 1st - 'State Holiday' For All Communists
5. May 1st - Obama Kills bin Laden Again
Jordan Maxwell
www.jordanmaxwell.com
(818) 932 0457
<|>
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/red_symphony.htm#11
http://www.illuminati-news.com/052106a.htm
By Dr. J. Landowsky, 1968 (reprinted 2002)
Translated by George Knupffer
The matter does not stand as is claimed by Marxism, that as the result of the elimination of contradictions there arises the synthesis. It is as the result of the opposing mutual fusion, from the thesis and anti-thesis that there arises, as a synthesis, the reality, truth, as a final harmony between the subjective and objective. Do you not see that already? In Moscow there is Communism: in New York Capitalism. It is all the same as a thesis and anti-thesis. Analyze both. Moscow is subjective Communism, but Capitalism objective - State Capitalism. New York: Capitalism subjective, but Communism objective. A personal synthesis, truth: the Financial International, the Capitalist-Communist one. "They."
<|>
Lloyd Blankfein – Banks Stealing from American Goys is "God's Work"
<|>
A postscript… to last week’s broadcast…
No-one else… in this whole wide world… is remotely qualified to be the sole finder of fact… as it relates to a unique set of circumstances… relative to… the absolute ownership… of the property… which is your own life. To maintain otherwise… is a preposterous assertion… and must be challenged… at every turn!
~A summary judgment issued by Lark In Texas
<|>
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to Complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.
--Alexander Fraser Tyler, Cycle Of Democracy (1770)
<|>
The Ultimate World Order as Pictured in “The Jewish Utopia”
By
Robert H. Williams
(1957)
"THE JEWISH UTOPIA", discovered by the author in
an unlisted Jewish collection in the library of the University of
Texas, is the authentic and complete plan of the Zionists for
world domination. It pictures the ultimate "new social order"
which the Zionists hope to establish after they have used Communism,
democracy and a third world war to gain their ends.
THE ULTIMATE WORLD ORDER is an analysis of "The
Jewish Utopia", with photographs and excerpts from the original
text — as Pictured in "The Jewish Utopia"
If the Communists think they are going to conquer all the nations
and set up a world government under a dictator of their own choosing they
may be in for a surprise. For their parent, the sect which originally launched
the Communist movement as an offshoot to accomplish a specific and temporary
purpose, has plans for an ultimate world order of its own; and this
sect, commonly called Zionist, now vastly overshadows the much cruder
Communist machine in skill, finance, organization and influence.
The Communist plan for rubbing out all national, religious, cultural
and racial lines and submerging the world in formless, characterless chaos
for easy domination is grandiose enough. To say that there is still another,
more grandiose plan beyond that for which the Communist machine was
set up is indeed to challenge the credulity of most of us, especially of us
Anglo-Saxons who are too busy with our humdrum routines to pull the
propaganda curtain aside and see the giant hiding there.
Not many years after I began studying the Communist movement,
trying to understand it, I noticed a hint that Communism was not to be
the ultimate world order. Heinrich Heine, German-Jewish poet and Communist
youth leader of the 1830s and 1840s (friend and co-revolutionary
of Karl Marx) spoke of Communism as temporary.*
Why and in what way temporary? What did this far-sighted master
strategist of revolution see as the successor to Communism? Is it not disturbing
enough that a machine dedicated to liquidating all opponents, wiping
out the nations as such and the best blood of the races and blending the
remnants into a faceless brown slob (see picture from a UNESCO book elsewhere
herein) — is it not disturbing enough that this the Communist machine
already enslaves nearly half the people of the world and is armed with
hydrogen bombs?
* The Heine prophecy of the destruction of Russia nearly a hundred
years before the event is so revealing and so amazing as to justify quoting
at some length. Note the picture of a nationless, raceless world, "one flock
and one shepherd . . . with an iron staff":
"Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable
straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern
tragedy....
"It would be war; the ghastliest war of destruction . . . The second act is the European
and the World Revolution, the great duel between the destitute and the aristocracy of
wealth; and in that there will be no mention of either nationality or religion; there will
be only one fatherland, the globe, and only one faith, that in happiness on earth . . .
How could the drama end?
"I do not know; but I think that eventually the great sea serpent (Britain) will have
its head crushed and the skin of the Northern Bear (Russia) will be pulled over its ears.
There may be only one flock and one shepherd — one free shepherd with an iron staff,
and a shorn-alike, bleating-alike human herd! . . .
"... The Gods are veiling their faces in pity on the children of man, their long-time
charges, and perhaps over their own fate. The future smells of Russian leather, blood,
godlessness and many whippings. I should advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their backs."
If Communism is only temporary, what is to be the ultimate novus
ordo seclorum, the new order, of society if the successors to the Jewish revolutionaries,
Marx and Heine, accomplish their aim? Who are to be the
masters of the new order and what do they want to do with our children
and grandchildren?
It goes without saying that no man can escape concern about such a
scheme if it has powerful backing.
For years I have felt that somewhere there must be a master plan
showing what Heine and his fellow planners had in mind for us, after the
fires of Communism burn away the heritages of the various races and cultures,
religions and nations; after Communist monsters have killed out several
generations of what they rightfully call "the leadership personnel", all
who might have the intelligence, skill and courage to resist.
But I little expected ever to have this ultimate master plan, this chapter
beyond the Communist Manifesto, in my hands. Of the hundreds of documents
I have collected on activities of the Marxist revolutionaries — including
originals or photostats of official government reports, Intelligence
releases, Communist papers, Zionist organizational reports to their members,
Jewish histories of revolutions, biographies of their revolutionary leaders,
etc. — I have never seen anything comparable; for this small book sketches
the general outlines of the ultimate goal hundreds of years ahead, toward
which all the various activities of the Zionists and their "liberal" dupes are,
wittingly or unwittingly, contributing.
Banker Explained "Occupy America" Scam
<|>
Occupy Wall Street: A Comment Never Made… Until Now
I don't doubt the altruistic intent of these folks... but come on... "Workers of the World Unite" sloganeering... and in-your-face class warfare... in_this_country... all_over_again? Americans have become so brain-dead that most refuse to believe a job is actually totally unnecessary... to one's survival... even to one's prosperity... or well-being. Independence of mind and thought is being systematically bred out of us as a people - as if we were… mere domesticated cattle... bred for slaughter. And it just makes me sick to my stomach... how Americans are being toyed with... as if we were but a bull in a bullring... and that brave bullfighter [sic]... administers death by a thousand cuts... before mercifully... delivering his final coup de grace... right_through_America’s_heart!
[Note for the record: Altruism was/is a word dreamed-up... from whole cloth... by Auguste Comte, the so-called "father of sociology"... and thus an advocate for socialism. Ideology was a word first coined by the Jacobins... during the time of the French Revolution... during which an ingenious Frenchman's invention - the guillotine - was used to great effect... in fomenting... their infamous reign of terror. Henceforth, our English words... terrorist and terrorism. Also... along with that other Anglicized French term... agent(s) provocateur... are these the memeplexes... the signs-of-the-times... we are re-witnessing... today!
Utopia - a word first coined... and also a famous book title by Thomas More, a defender of the Catholic faith... during a time when Protestants... held sway over the government... of post-merrie olde England - was shown to be... an impossible dream... when its inventor was sent to the Tower of London... and eventually dispatched to heaven... after-words… of his own beheading!
Today... every organized church, temple, and synagogue group... in America... is socialist... and communitarian. As are the proles who frequent them!
Those illuminated… have adopted secular humanism... as their credo. Yet most do not know... that it is a legal centerpiece... of the globalists' stated ideals for their grandiose scheme... of totalitarian governance ---- and your enslavement… to their [“scientific”] designs.
And today… academicians… syndicats of hopelessly corrupted finance capitalists, assurance peddlers, and legal practitioners… along with their internationalist lackeys the world over… are forcing the rest of us… to adopt their supremacy of communitarian law.]
Unfortunately, my experience with "Ron Paul people" in the past was that most were just as unreceptive to the deceptions of the communitarian agenda as were the "Alex Jones crowd"... "the oathkeepers"... "the Constitutionalists"... "the 99%ers"... and the rest. They were [and still are]… innocents… and political neophytes – just as I was… then.
Socialist communitarians include corporatists, humanists, "good citizens who vote their pocketbook", people always demanding "fairness" before their elected government representatives [cowardly servicing their slave-masters and, of course, to beef up... the oversight, regulations and tax schemes... on those dirty polluters, useless eaters, war profiteers, and evil rich bastards], etc.
In fact, most communitarians in America today simply have no idea that [now]… they really are... [socialists] communitarians!
Communists + Capitalists + Fascists* + Socialists + Democrats + Libertarians + Republicans = Communitarians
Cultural/Economic [Communist] Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism + Post-Industrial Age Police State-Military-style Fascism = Communitarianism
{Syndicalists are trade unionists and members of any professional [or blue-collar] trade association. And "free trade" is NOT free assembly... free enterprise... or anything whatsoever... having to do with free market capitalism...... which will... not only [ultimately] lead... to the undoing of our nation-state --- like the one we still call the USA --- but it will collapse... ALL national governments... and deliver them... into the waiting arms... of the international socialists [and their central bankers]. This is... Trotsky's [and the murderous, militarist, racist Marxists'-Leninists'-Neoconservatives'] grandest dream... at last... come true!}
It also will have served the grand designs of the British Fabians... the Israeli and American [Zionist Jew and Christian] socialists... the Russian and Chinese communists... but most especially... the European royals... and their partnership with the City of London/Wall Street funny money crowd... who funded [with counterfeit notes] this vast_criminal_communitarian [totalitarian]_enterprise... into existence!
After all... is said and done... it was/is... the Fed's... and the Bank of England's... toxic currency... gentlemen’s agreements… chicanery… and racketeering… that made it all coalesce.
Syndicalists
Public Schoolteachers, College/University Professors, Public School-College-University Administrators/Employees
FBI, CIA, BATFE, All Civilian Law Enforcement Personnel
Military, Homeland Security, Civil Service Personnel
Lawyers, Attorneys-at-Law, Councilors-at-Law, Judges, Politicians, Employees
Hospital Administrators/Personnel, Allopathic Drug Dealers, Doctors, Physicians, Diagnosticians, Researchers, Nurses
USG Personnel, State of ____ Government Personnel, Bureaucrats, Ambassadors, Lobbyists
Bankers, Bank Officers, Bank Employees
Insurance Agents, Executives, Company Employees
Government Contractors/Grant Funders-Recipients
NGO's, PPP's, Foundations, Charities, Faith-Based Organizations
Churches, Temples, Synagogues
Anyone connected to Big Ag/Big Media/Big Pharma
All Federal/State Agencies & their Agents
Unwitting Dupes/Useful Idiots with [or without] a J-O-B and a paycheck
(Did I leave anyone out?)
In 20th century America, William James Sidis popularized the word "libertarian" as much as [or more than] anyone. But then... he advocated for a purer... direct form... of democracy - the kind he claimed was once practiced by American Indian tribes! The same Amerindians... all those evil Christians wantonly murdered... and then nearly genocided... to extinction. http://sidis.net
*Corporatists
<|>
“Arrival at truth is many-layered… because it requires… the lifting of veils. It requires quietude and introspection. Today men speak of evolution… revolution… even devolution. Yet too few speak of involution – looking inside one’s self, or turning inward – that they may look before they leap.”
<|>
4 False ~Isms which Purport to Validate, Justify, and Make Self-Evident… the Need [Necessity]… for the Equally False ~Ism… of Communitarianism
Scientism
See: Lying Scientists
“These guys have bad science down to a science.”
Say NO to GMO video
According to Stenmark, the strongest form of scientism states that science has no boundaries and that all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor, with due time, will be dealt with and solved by science alone. This idea has also been called the Myth of Progress.
The primacy of science in all considerations applicable to problem-solving – the Golden Rule be damned! (“After all, how can we allow something so un-scientific to enter into our conclusions… based upon the consensus… of our oh so learned opinion?”)
Radical Honesty/Futilitarianism
A school of thought, or belief system, that all human activity is futile.
Brad Blanton
Radical Honesty: How To Transform Your Life By Telling The Truth (1996)
Beyond Good and Evil: The Eternal Split-Second Sound-Light Being (2006)
The New Revised Edition: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth (2005)
The Truthtellers (2004)
Radical Parenting: Seven Steps to a Functional Family in a Dysfunctional World (2002)
Honest to God: A Change of Heart That Can Change the World (2001)
Practicing Radical Honesty (2000)
Futilitarianism
(Brad Blanton, 2004)
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Dante was the First Futilitarian. His prophetic book tells us that to get to heaven, we must first journey through hell. And to journey through hell, we must first abandon all hope—which means we must abandon all hope for heaven as well.
The principle of the hopelessness of hope is the founding principle of the World Futilitarian Church. Our church is also called The Church of the Damned (otherwise known, simply, as the Damned Church). I am The Pope of No Hope.
We Futilitarians believe only two religious precepts, which we hold on to with all our might in order to crowd out any other possible religious beliefs:
Forget it. It's futile.
Futilitarianism
(July, 2005)
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943
(Think: Ezekiel Emmanuel and the “duty to die” doctrine which is part-and-parcel of Obamacare)
Darwinism
A theory of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also called Darwinian Theory
(Think: survival of the fittest as a justification for waging “silent war”… on the unfit)
Malthusianism
(Biology) The theory that population increases more rapidly than the food supply unless held in check by epidemics, wars, or similar phenomena
A doctrine about population dynamics developed by Revd. Thomas Malthus, according to which population increase comes up against ‘natural limits’ which trigger famine and war and have the effect of reducing overall population levels
In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) published his Essay on Population in which he put forward the theory that the power of a population to increase is greater than that of the earth to provide food. He asserted that population would grow geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, and so on) while food supply would grow arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on). When population outstrips resources, Malthusian checks to population occur:
1. Misery: famine, disease, and war.
2. Vice: abortion, sexual perversion, and infanticide.
3. Moral restraint: late marriage and celibacy.
Malthus's predictions were not borne out in eighteenth-century Britain, perhaps because of the agricultural revolution, with its associated increases in output, and with the opening up of the New World, which provided an outlet for excess population in the form of emigration and agricultural production. Other theorists pointed out that the capacity of a population to feed itself depended on the prevailing economic system; Marx, for example, believed that capitalism, rather than excess population, was responsible for low living standards.
More recently, however, the Club of Rome has put forward Malthusian-type predictions of disaster due to population increase.
(Think: John Holdren, co-author of The Population Bomb, and today… Obama’s science commissar)
Idiocracy
(A Hollywood film review)
(A Hollywood film review)
<|>
Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
George Dvorsky
Sentient Developments
Propaganda 2.0 and the Rise of ‘Narrative Networks’
DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced concepts think-tank, is looking to take propaganda to the next level, and they’re hoping to do so by controlling the very way their targets perceive and interpret the flow of incoming information.
The Pentagon believes that by engaging in ‘narrative control’ they can alter an individual’s grasp on reality and the way in which they evaluate current events. Simply put, DARPA is looking to shape minds with stories.
Now, this isn’t an entirely new concept. The notion of narrative control, or narrative networks, has been bunted around for a few years now.
It’s been said that history books are written by the victors. Well, these days hopeful victors are trying to write current events. State actors are increasingly disclosing information in a way that constructs a kind of story. It’s through the careful construction of desirable narratives that state actors are hoping to control the beliefs and actions of targeted audiences. It’s a classic case of the pen being mightier than the sword—but in this case it’s a pen that digs deep into the very psyche of the individual.
<|>
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793, to 28 July 1794) (the latter is date 9 Thermidor, year II of the French Revolutionary Calendar), also known simply as The Terror (French: la Terreur), was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution." Estimates vary widely as to how many were killed, with numbers ranging from 16,000 to 40,000; in many cases, records were not kept or, if they were, they are considered likely to be inaccurate. The guillotine (called the "National Razor") became the symbol of the revolutionary cause, strengthened by a string of executions: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité (Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans) and Madame Roland, as well as many others, such as pioneering chemist Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade.
During 1794, revolutionary France was beset with both real and imagined conspiracies by internal and foreign enemies. Within France, the revolution was opposed by the French nobility, which had lost its inherited privileges. The Roman Catholic Church was generally against the Revolution, which had turned the clergy into employees of the state and required they take an oath of loyalty to the nation (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). In fact, many French priests were imprisoned or executed, among them Blessed Hunot and Blessed du Vivier. In addition, the First French Republic was engaged in a series of French Revolutionary Wars with neighboring powers intent on crushing the revolution to prevent its spread.
The extension of civil war and the advance of foreign armies on national territory produced a political crisis and increased the rivalry between the Girondins and the more radical Jacobins. The latter were eventually grouped in the parliamentary faction called the Mountain, and they had the support of the Parisian population. The French government established the Committee of Public Safety, which took its final form on 6 September 1793, and was ultimately dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, in order to suppress internal counter-revolutionary activities and raise additional French military forces. Through the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror's leaders exercised broad dictatorial powers and used them to instigate mass executions and political purges. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, a period called "la Grande Terreur" (the Great Terror), and ended in the coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the so-called "Thermidorian Reaction", in which several leaders of the Reign of Terror were executed, including Saint-Just and Robespierre.
Origins and causes
After the resolution of the foreign wars during 1791-1793, the violence associated with the Reign of Terror increased significantly: only roughly 4% of executions had occurred before November 1793 (Brumaire, Year I). Causes of the Terror include innate issues with revolutionary ideology, the need of a weapon for political repression, and unscripted events leading the revolutionaries astray from their pure ideologies.
The Terror
On 2 June 1793, Paris sections – encouraged by the enragés Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert – took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they persuaded the Convention to arrest 31 Girondist leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot. Following these arrests, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety on 10 June, installing the revolutionary dictatorship. On 13 July the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat – a Jacobin leader and journalist known for his bloodthirsty rhetoric – by Charlotte Corday, a Girondist, resulted in a further increase in Jacobin political influence.
Georges Danton, the leader of the August 1792 uprising against the King, was removed from the Committee. On 27 July Maximilien Robespierre, known in Republican circles as "the Incorruptible" for his ascetic dedication to his ideals, made his entrance, quickly becoming the most influential member of the Committee as it moved to take radical measures against the Revolution's domestic and foreign enemies.
Meanwhile, on 24 June the Convention adopted the first republican constitution of France, the French Constitution of 1793. It was ratified by public referendum, but never put into force; like other laws, it was indefinitely suspended by the decree of October that the government of France would be "revolutionary until the peace".
On 25 December 1793 Robespierre stated:
“The goal of the constitutional government is to conserve the Republic; the aim of the revolutionary government is to found it... The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death... These notions would be enough to explain the origin and the nature of laws that we call revolutionary... If the revolutionary government must be more active in its march and more free in his movements than an ordinary government, is it for that less fair and legitimate? No; it is supported by the most holy of all laws: the Salvation of the People.”
On 5 February 1794 Robespierre stated, more succinctly that "Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice; it flows, then, from virtue."
“The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
— Maximilien Robespierre, 1794
The result was policy through which the state used violent repression to crush resistance to the government. Under control of the effectively dictatorial Committee, the Convention quickly enacted more legislation. On 9 September the Convention established sans-culottes paramilitary forces, the revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On 17 September the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined crimes against liberty. On 29 September the Convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods, and also fixed wages. The guillotine became the symbol of a string of executions: Louis XVI had already been guillotined before the start of the terror; Marie-Antoinette, the Girondists, Philippe Égalité, Madame Roland and many others lost their lives under its blade. The Revolutionary Tribunal summarily condemned thousands of people to death by the guillotine, while mobs beat other victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little reason beyond mere suspicion, or because some others had a stake in getting rid of them. Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported minimal crimes.
Another anti-clerical uprising was made possible by the installment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October. Hébert's and Chaumette's atheist movement initiated a religious campaign in order to dechristianise society. The program of dechristianisation waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included the deportation or execution of clergy; the closing of churches; the rise of cults and the institution of a civic religion; the large scale destruction of religious monuments; the outlawing of public and private worship and religious education; the forced abjurement of priests of their vows and forced marriages of the clergy; the word "saint" being removed from street names; and the War in the Vendée. The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight. The climax was reached with the celebration of the goddess "Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November. Because dissent was now regarded as counterrevolutionary, extremist enragés such as Hébert and moderate Montagnard indulgents such as Danton were guillotined in the Spring of 1794. On 7 June Robespierre, who favoured deism over Hébert's atheism and had previously condemned the Cult of Reason, recommended that the Convention acknowledge the existence of God. On the next day, the worship of the deistic Supreme Being was inaugurated as an official aspect of the Revolution. Compared with Hébert's somewhat popular festivals, this austere new religion of Virtue was received with signs of hostility by the Parisian public.
The End of the Reign
The repression brought thousands of suspects before the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, whose work was expedited by the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794). As a result of Robespierre's insistence on associating Terror with Virtue, his efforts to make the republic a morally united patriotic community became equated with the endless bloodshed. Finally, after 26 June's decisive military victory over Austria at the Battle of Fleurus, Robespierre was overthrown by a conspiracy of certain members of the Convention on 9 Thermidor (27 July).
The fall of Robespierre was brought about by a combination of those who wanted more power for the Committee of Public Safety, and a more radical policy than he was willing to allow, with the moderates who opposed the Revolutionary Government altogether. They had, between them, made the Law of 22 Prairial one of the charges against him, and after his fall, advocating Terror would mean adopting the policy of a convicted enemy of the Republic, endangering the advocate's own head. Before his execution, Robespierre tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide by shooting himself, but the bullet merely shattered his jaw, and Robespierre was guillotined the next day.
The reign of the standing Committee of Public Safety was ended. New members were appointed the day after Robespierre's execution, and term limits were imposed (a quarter of the committee retired every three months); its powers were reduced piece by piece.
This was not an entirely or immediately conservative period; no government of the Republic envisaged a Restoration, and Marat was reburied in the Pantheon in September.
<|>
Jacobin Club
The Jacobin movement encouraged sentiments of patriotism and liberty amongst the populace. The movement's contemporaries, such as the King Louis XVI, located the effectiveness of the revolutionary movement not "in the force and bayonets of soldiers, guns, cannons and shells but by the marks of political power" (Schama; 1989; 279). Ultimately, the Jacobins were to control several key political bodies, in particular the Committee of Public Safety and, through it, the National Convention, which was not only a legislature but also took upon itself executive and judicial functions. The Jacobins as a political force were seen as "less selfish, more patriotic, and more sympathetic to the Paris Populace" (Bosher; 1989; 186). This gave them a position of charismatic authority that was effective in generating and harnessing public pressure, generating and satisfying sans-culotte pleas for personal freedom and social progress.
The Jacobin Club developed into a bureau for French Republicanism and revolutionary purity, and abandoned its original laissez faire economic views in favor of interventionism. In power, they completed the abolition of feudalism that had been formally decided 4 August 1789, but had been held in check by a clause requiring compensation for the abrogation of the feudal privileges.
Maximilien Robespierre entered the political arena at the very beginning of the Revolution, having been elected to represent Artois at the Estates General. Robespierre was viewed as the quintessential political force of the Jacobin Movement, thrusting ever deeper the dagger of liberty within the despotism of the Monarchy. As a disciple of Rousseau, Robespierre's political views were rooted in Rousseau's notion of the social contract, which promoted "the rights of man" (Schama; 1989; 475). Robespierre particularly favored the rights of the broader population to eat, for example, over the rights of individual merchants. "I denounce the assassins of the people to you and you respond, 'let them act as they will.' In such a system, all is against society; all favors the grain merchants."
Robespierre famously elaborated this conception in his speech on December 2nd, 1792:
"What is the first goal of society? To maintain the imprescribable rights of man. What is the first of these rights? The right to exist."
Robespierre famously elaborated this conception in his speech on December 2nd, 1792:
"What is the first goal of society? To maintain the imprescribable rights of man. What is the first of these rights? The right to exist."
The ultimate political vehicle for the Jacobin movement was the Reign of Terror overseen by the Committee of Public Safety, which was given executive powers to purify and unify the Republic. The Committee instituted requisitioning, rationing, and conscription to consolidate new citizen armies. They instituted the Terror as a means of destroying those they perceived as enemies within: "Terror", said Robespierre, "is only justice that is prompt, severe and inflexible".
<|>----------<|>
Imprescribable
1. Not capable of being lost or impaired by neglect, by disuse, or by the claims of another founded on prescription; -- of rights.
2. Not derived from, or dependent on, external authority; self-evidencing; obvious.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
Not founded on prescription; existing independently of law or convention; not justly to be violated or taken away. Also imprescribable
Wiktionary
Not subject to prescription: absolute, inalienable.
<|>----------<|>
Cultural influence
The cultural influence of the Jacobin movement during the French Revolution revolved around the creation of the Citizen. As commented in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract, "Citizenship is the expression of a sublime reciprocity between individual and General will" (Schama; 1989; 354). This view of citizenship and the General Will, once empowered, could simultaneously embrace the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and adopt the liberal French Constitution of 1793, then immediately suspend that constitution and all ordinary legality and institute Revolutionary Tribunals that did not grant a presumption of innocence.
The Jacobins saw themselves as constitutionalists, dedicated to the Rights of Man, and, in particular, to the Declaration's principle of "preservation of the natural rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression" (Article II of the Declaration). The constitution reassured the protection of personal freedom and social progress within French society. The cultural influence of the Jacobin movement was effective in reinforcing these rudiments, developing a milieu for revolution. The Constitution was admired by most Jacobins as the foundation of the emerging republic and of the rise of citizenship.
Foes of both the Church and of atheism, advocating deliberate government-organized terror as a substitute for both the rule of law and the more arbitrary terror of mob violence, inheritors of a war that, at the time of their rise to power, threatened the very existence of the Revolution, the Jacobins in power completed the overthrow of the Ancien Régime and successfully defended the Revolution from military defeat. However, to do so, they brought the Revolution to its bloodiest phase, and the one with least regard for just treatment of individuals. Although they doubtless consolidated republicanism in France and contributed greatly to the secularism and the sense of nationhood that have marked all French republican regimes to this day, their methods discredited the Revolution in the eyes of many who had previously supported it. Despite the fact that there were Jacobins among those who brought down Robespierre and the rest of The Mountain, the resulting Thermidorian reaction shuttered all of the Jacobin clubs, removed all Jacobins from power, and condemned many, well beyond the ranks of the Mountain, to death or deadly exile.
<|>
Congress of Vienna
(1814 – 15) Assembly that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. The powers of the Quadruple Alliance had concluded the Treaty of Chaumont just before Napoleon's first abdication and agreed to meet later in Vienna. There they were joined by Bourbon France as a major participant and by Sweden and Portugal; many minor states also sent representatives. The principal negotiators were Klemens, prince von Metternich, representing Francis II (Austria); Alexander I (Russia); Frederick William III and Karl August, prince von Hardenberg (Prussia); Viscount Castlereagh (Britain); and Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (France). The Congress reduced France to its 1789 borders. A new kingdom of Poland, under Russian sovereignty, was established. To check possible future aggression by France, its neighbours were strengthened: the kingdom of The Netherlands acquired Belgium, Prussia gained territory along the Rhine River, and the Italian kingdom acquired Genoa. The German states were joined loosely in a new German Confederation, subject to Austria's influence. For its part in the defeat of Napoleon, Britain acquired valuable colonies, including Malta, the Cape of Good Hope, and Ceylon. The Vienna settlement was the most comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen, and the configuration of Europe established at the congress lasted for more than 40 years.
<|>
Congress of Verona
The Congress of Verona met at Verona on October 20, 1822 as part of the series of international conferences or congresses that opened with the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, which had instituted the Concert of Europe at the close of the Napoleonic Wars.
The Quintuple Alliance was represented by the following persons:
•Russia: Emperor Alexander I and Count Karl Robert Nesselrode (minister of foreign affairs);
•Austria: Prince Metternich;
•Prussia: Prince Hardenberg and Count Christian Gunther von Bernstorff;
•France: The duc de Montmorency-Laval (minister of Foreign Affairs) and François-René de Chateaubriand;
•United Kingdom: The Duke of Wellington, who was taking the place of Viscount Castlereagh after his tragic suicide on the eve of the congress.
Whitaker Chambers
(Born April 1, 1901, Philadelphia — Died July 9, 1961, near Westminster, Md., U.S.) U.S. journalist and principal figure in the Alger Hiss case. He joined the Communist Party in 1923 and worked at various times as an editor at New Masses, The Daily Worker, and Time magazine. In testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in August 1948, he named former State Department official Alger Hiss as a fellow member of a 1930s Communist spy ring. Hiss denied the charges and sued Chambers for slander. In the trials that followed, Chambers produced material he claimed Hiss had given him to pass along to Soviet agents. His autobiography, Witness, was published in 1952.
<|>
Walter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning
(Born Sept. 23, 1889, New York, N.Y., U.S. — Died Dec. 14, 1974, New York) U.S. newspaper commentator and author. Educated at Harvard, he became an editor at the fledgling New Republic (1914 – 17). His thinking influenced Woodrow Wilson, and he took part in the negotiations that culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. After writing for and editing the reformist World, he moved to the New York Herald-Tribune, where he began his "Today and Tomorrow" column in 1931; eventually widely syndicated, it won two Pulitzer Prizes (1958, 1962), and Lippmann became one of the most respected political columnists in the world. His books include A Preface to Politics (1913); Public Opinion (1922), perhaps his most influential work; The Phantom Public (1925); and The Good Society (1937).
<|>
Sheldon Richman on Searching for the Balance Between Liberty and Power at the Historical Freeman Magazine
<|>
Baruch Spinoza
Philosopher (1632-1677). Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Marrano family from Portugal that had fled to Holland and returned to Judaism. As a child, he received a formal Jewish education in the Ets Ḥayyim Talmud Torah. Upon completion of his studies, he began to delve deeply into the works of the medieval Jewish philosophers, such as Gersonides (Levi Ben Gershom) and Maimonides, both of whom profoundly influenced his views and philosophic system.
From the age of 22, Spinoza began to draw closer to the Christian circles in the city and to express an interest in the general sciences. His "atheistical" and heretical views aroused concern both in the Jewish community and in Amsterdam's Calvinist circles, leading to his Excommunication by the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656. Following this, he left Amsterdam and spent most of the rest of his life in The Hague, earning his livelihood by polishing lenses for reading glasses.
Spinoza's philosophic thought is complex and difficult, combining metaphysics, ethics, psychology, anthropology, political thought, and the philosophy of religion. The religious base is one of its major hubs, as Spinoza offers man an alternative to the established religions.
His first great work was the Theologico-PoliticaI Treatise (1670), in which he criticized the major tenets of religion, protested against the subjugation of the state to religion, and preached freedom of the spirit and thought. He also expounded his views on the Bible, which paved the way for subsequent Bible criticism. The book shook the foundations of traditional theology and caused a major storm, after which, Spinoza no longer dared to put his ideas into print and only lectured on them before his faithful disciples.
His most important work, the Ethics, was published after his death. In it he developed his pantheistic theory, in which he identifies nature with God, as expressed in his famous saying, "Deus sive natura" ("God or nature"). Its major thesis is the idea of the unity and necessity of all reality, disavowing the exercise of Divine will to order the universe and arguing instead that all things follow naturally and changelessly, as things given, from the very existence of God as such.. When Spinoza used the term "nature," he was not only referring to the world or to all of physical nature, but to everything that exists. Biblical monotheism appears in Spinoza as if in the highest degree of purity, having been purified of all the historic additions of worship and commandment. In this sense, there is a clear link between his thought and the history of Jewish thought.
Spinoza also identified, clearly and profoundly, the new political reality in Europe, and discussed its significance for the fate of the Jewish people. As a result, he was critical of the Jewish heritage, both from a philosophical and a modernizing viewpoint. His major conclusion was that the laws of the Halakhah were not in keeping with the new culture, which meant that a change in the status of religion in the life of the individual and the state was required. Because of his views, he was considered a heretic even after his death and his teachings were proscribed by both Christians and Jews. Only at the end of the 18th century did philosophers begin to study his ideas. Since then his writings have become an inseparable part of modern philosophy.
<|>
The Infomocracy Dilemma: Revolution or Disengagement?
<|>
Cloward–Piven Strategy
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward (1926–2001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty". Cloward and Piven were a married couple who were both professors at the Columbia University School of Social Work. The strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in The Nation magazine entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty".
The two were critical of the public welfare system, and their strategy called for overloading that system to force a different set of policies to address poverty. They stated that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party, thus forcing it to implement a national solution to poverty. Cloward and Piven wrote that “the ultimate objective of this strategy [would be] to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income...” There would also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven. These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national Democratic Party then-splintered by pluralist interests (through its cultivation of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national solution to poverty); and relieving local governments of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a national solution to poverty).
<|>
Public Authority Figures: 1950-
Edward R. Murrow
Walter Cronkite
Howard K. Smith
Frank Reynolds
President John F. Kennedy
Senator Everett M. Dirksen
Senator J. William Fulbright
Senator Strom Thurmond
Senator Mike Mansfield
Senator Joseph McCarthy
Gore Vidal
William F. Buckley
General Douglas MacArthur
Reverend Billy Graham
Senator Robert Byrd
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Senator Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson
Speaker of the House Jim Wright
Chris Matthews
Tim Russert
Senator Paul Wellstone
Admiral William Fallon
<|>
Neither Aryan Nor Jew
This site is for serious researchers of the "higher tribalism" (Aryanism, Zionism, Nihonism, etc.), Globalization and World Government. I cannot support those who deny the common humanity of the different peoples, or who oppose intermarriage between them. Freedom for the Rich is Slavery for the Poor. World Government affects everyone - everyone therefore needs to know about it.
Cannot the case be made that the most useful information is more often gleaned from what is not said? As compared to what is said? ~Lark
Casuistry
•Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead.
• The determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or conscience by analyzing cases that illustrate general ethical rules.
Plausible but invalid reasoning: fallacy, sophism, sophistry, speciousness, spuriousness. See correct/incorrect, true/false.
(Latin, casus, a case) The approach to ethical problems in which the circumstances of cases affect the application of general rules; a casuist is one who distinguishes and marshals the relevance of different cases and rules. The Resolutiones morales (1659) of the Spanish ‘prince of casuists’ Antonio Diana (1585-1683) discusses some 20,000 cases. The term is often used pejoratively, implying the multiplication of doubtful distinctions, and their use to defend apparently self-serving and conflicting moral verdicts. Casuistry as a discipline declined in the 17th century with the rise of Protestant and pietistic approaches to religion and morality. However, ‘situation ethics’ provides the ground for the re-emergence of attention to the special circumstances of any object of a moral verdict.
Casuistry (kăzh'yūĭstrē) [Lat., casus=case], art of applying general moral law to particular cases. Although most often associated with theology (it has been utilized since the inception of Christianity), it is also used in law and psychology. The function of casuistry is to analyze motives so individual judgments can be made in accordance with an established moral code. The term is often used in a pejorative sense to indicate specious or equivocal reasoning.
Notions, Ideas, and Methods - casuistry: skill in science and application of moral decisions and judgments; employment of specious reasoning in moral questions
In applied ethics, casuistry (/ˈkæʒuːɨstri/) is case-based reasoning. Casuistry is used in juridical and ethical discussions of law and ethics, and often is a critique of principle- or rule-based reasoning. The term "casuistry" originates from the Latin casus ("case").
Casuistry is reasoning used to resolve moral problems by applying theoretical rules to particular instances, and by extracting or extending theoretical rules from (novel) particular instances. The term is also commonly used as a pejorative to criticize the use of clever but unsound reasoning (alleging implicitly the inconsistent— or outright specious— misapplication of rule to instance), especially in relation to moral questions (see sophistry).
Examples
While a principle-based approach might claim that lying is always morally wrong, the casuist would argue that, depending upon the details of the case, lying might or might not be illegal or unethical. The casuist might conclude that a person is wrong to lie in legal testimony under oath, but might argue that lying actually is the best moral choice if the lie saves a life. (Thomas Sanchez and others thus theorized a doctrine of mental reservation.) For the casuist, the circumstances of a case are essential for evaluating the proper response.
Typically, casuistic reasoning begins with a clear-cut paradigmatic case. In legal reasoning, for example, this might be a precedent case, such as pre-meditated murder. From it, the casuist would ask how closely the given case currently under consideration matches the paradigmatic case. Cases like the paradigmatic case ought to be treated likewise; cases unlike the paradigm ought to be treated differently. Thus, a man is properly charged with pre-meditated murder if the circumstances surrounding his case closely resemble the exemplar pre-meditated murder case. The less a given case is like the paradigm, the weaker the justification is for treating that case like the paradigmatic case.
Meanings
Casuistry is a method of case reasoning especially useful in treating cases that involve moral dilemmas. It is also a branch of applied ethics. Casuistry is the basis of case law in common law, and the standard form of reasoning applied in common law.
Casuist morality
Casuistry takes a relentlessly practical approach to morality. Rather than using theories as starting points, casuistry begins with an examination of cases. By drawing parallels between paradigms, so-called "pure cases", and the case at hand, a casuist tries to determine a moral response appropriate to a particular case.
Casuistry has been described as "theory modest" (Arras, see below). One of the strengths of casuistry is that it does not begin with, nor does it overemphasize, theoretical issues. Casuistry does not require practitioners to agree about ethical theories or evaluations before making policy. Instead, they can agree that certain paradigms should be treated in certain ways, and then agree on the similarities, the so-called warrants between a paradigm and the case at hand.
Since most people, and most cultures, substantially agree about most pure ethical situations, casuistry often creates ethical arguments that can persuade people of different ethnic, religious and philosophical beliefs to treat particular cases in the same ways. For this reason, casuistry is widely considered to be the basis for the English common law and its derivatives.
Casuistry is prone to abuses wherever the analogies between cases are false.
History
Western casuistry dates from Aristotle (384–322 BC), yet the zenith of casuistry was from 1550 to 1650, when the Jesuit religious order extensively used casuistry, particularly in practicing the private Roman Catholic confession. The term casuistry quickly became pejorative with Blaise Pascal's attack on the misuse of casuistry. In Provincial Letters (1656–7) he scolded the Jesuits for using casuistic reasoning in confession to placate wealthy Church donors, while punishing poor penitents. Pascal charged that aristocratic penitents could confess their sins one day, re-commit the sin the next day, generously donate the following day, then return to re-confess their sins and only receive the lightest punishment; Pascal's criticisms darkened casuistry's reputation. Since the 17th century, casuistry has been widely considered a degenerate form of reasoning. Critics of casuistry [who?] claim its argumentation is specious and intentionally misleading.
It was not until publication of The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, that a revival of casuistry occurred. They argue that the abuse of casuistry is the problem, not casuistry itself (itself an example of casuistic reasoning). Properly used, casuistry is powerful reasoning. Jonsen and Toulmin offer casuistry in dissolving the contradictory tenets of absolutism and relativism: "the form of reasoning constitutive of classical casuistry is rhetorical reasoning". Moreover, Utilitarianism and Pragmatism commonly are identified as philosophies employing the rhetorical reasoning of casuistry.
Casuistry in early modern times
The casuistic method was popular among Catholic thinkers in the early modern period, and not only among the Jesuits, as it is commonly thought. Famous casuistic authors include Antonio Escobar y Mendoza's Summula casuum conscientiae (1627), which had enjoyed a great success, Thomas Sanchez, Vincenzo Filliucci (Jesuit and penitentiary at St Peter's), Antonino Diana, Paul Laymann (Theologia Moralis, 1625), John Azor (Institutiones Morales, 1600), Etienne Bauny, Louis Cellot, Valerius Reginaldus, Hermann Busembaum (d. 1668), etc. One of the main theses of casuists was the necessity to adapt the rigorous morals of the Early Fathers of Christianity to modern morals, which led in some extreme cases to justify what Innocent XI later called "laxist moral" (i.e. justification of usury, homicide, regicide, lying through "mental reservation", adultery and loss of virginity before marriage, etc.—all due cases registered by Pascal in the Provincial Letters).
The progress of casuistry was interrupted toward the middle of the 17th century by the controversy which arose concerning the doctrine of probabilism, which stipulated that one could choose to follow a "probable opinion", that is, supported by a theologian or another, even if it contradicted a more probable opinion or a quotation from one of the Fathers of the Church. The controversy divided Catholic theologians into two camps, Rigorists and Laxists.
Casuistry was much mistrusted by early Protestant theologians, because it justified many of the abuses that they sought to reform. It was famously attacked by the Catholic and Jansenist philosopher Pascal, during the formulary controversy against the Jesuits, in his Provincial Letters as the use of rhetorics to justify moral laxity, which became identified by the public with Jesuitism; hence the everyday use of the term to mean complex and sophistic reasoning to justify moral laxity. By the middle of the 18th century, "casuistry" became a synonym for moral laxity.
In 1679 Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions (stricti mentalis), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suarez and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication. Despite this papal condemnation, both Catholicism and Protestantism permit the use of ambiguous and equivocal statements in specific circumstances.
Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (d. 1787), founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, then brought some attention back to casuistry by publishing again Hermann Busembaum's Medulla Theologiae Moralis; the last edition published in 1785 and receiving the approbation of the Holy See in 1803. Busembaum's Medulla had been burnt in Toulouse in 1757 because of its justification of regicide, deemed particularly scandalous after Damiens' assassination attempt against Louis XV.
Casuistry in modern times
G.E. Moore dealt with casuistry in chapter 1.4 of his Principia Ethica; he claimed that "the defects of casuistry are not defects of principle; no objection can be taken to its aim and object. It has failed only because it is far too difficult a subject to be treated adequately in our present state of knowledge." He also asserted, "Casuistry is the goal of ethical investigation. It cannot be safely attempted at the beginning of our studies, but only at the end.
Since the 1960s, applied ethics has revived the ideas of casuistry in applying ethical reasoning to particular cases in law, bioethics and business ethics, so the reputation of casuistry is somewhat rehabilitated.
A good reference, analyzing the methodological structure of casuistic argument, is The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1990), by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (ISBN 0-520-06960-9).
See also
•Applied ethics
•Case-based reasoning
•Dispensation (Catholic Church)
•List of thought processes
•Qiyas
•Rhetoric
•Rhetorical reason
•School of Salamanca
•Situation ethics
•Thinking Portal
•Consequentialism
External links
•Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Casuistry
•Accountancy as computational casuistics, article on how modern compliance regimes in accountancy and law apply casuistry
•Casuistry – Catholic Encyclopedia
•Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas – Casuistry
•1911 Encyclopedia
•Summary of casuistry by Jeramy Townsley
•Casuistry – Online Guide to Ethics and Moral Philosophy
•Casuistry – Oxford Encyclopedia of Rhetoric catalogued at she-philosopher.com
<|>
Probabilism
The doctrine that in some area of science, or ethics, we may settle for hypotheses with reasonable degrees of probability, without being able to obtain knowledge. Probabilism is flanked by the more dogmatic view that we can achieve certainty, on the one side, and the more skeptical view that we cannot even assign probabilities, on the other side. See also confirmation, falsification, and methodology
In theology and philosophy, probabilism (from Latin probare, to test, approve) refers to an ancient Greek doctrine of academic skepticism. It holds that in the absence of certainty, probability is the best criterion. It can also refer to a 17th century religious thesis about ethics, or a modern physical-philosophical thesis.
Theology
In moral theology, especially Catholic, it refers especially to the view in casuistry that in difficult matters of conscience one may safely follow a doctrine that is probable, for example is approved by a recognized Doctor of the Church, even if the opposite opinion is more probable.
This view was advanced by the Spanish theologian Bartolomé de Medina (1527–1581) and defended by many Jesuits such as Luis Molina (1528–1581). It was heavily criticised by Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters as leading to moral laxity. Opposed to probabilism is probabiliorism (Latin probabilior, "more likely"), which holds that when there is a preponderance of evidence on one side of a controversy one is obliged to follow that side, and tutiorism (Latin tutior, "safer"), which holds that in case of doubt one must take the morally safer side. A more radical view, "minus probabilissimus", holds that an action is permissible if a single opinion allowing that action is available, even if the overwhelming weight of opinion proscribes it.
Philosophy
In ancient Greek philosophy, probabilism referred to the doctrine which gives assistance in ordinary matters to one who is skeptical in respect of the possibility of real knowledge: it supposes that though knowledge is impossible, a man may rely on strong beliefs in practical affairs. This view was held by the skeptics of the New Academy (see skepticism and Carneades).
Academic skeptics accept probabilism, while Pyrrhonian skeptics do not.
In modern usage, a probabilist is someone who believes that central epistemological issues are best approached using probabilities. This thesis is neutral with respect to whether knowledge entails certainty or whether skepticism about knowledge is true.
Pyrrhonism
[From Pyrrho, the founder of a school of skeptics in Greece (about 300 b. c.)]
Skepticism; universal doubt
Pyrrhonism, or Pyrrhonian skepticism, was a school of skepticism founded by Aenesidemus in the 1st century BCE and recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the late 2nd century or early 3rd century CE. It was named after Pyrrho, a philosopher who lived from c. 360 to c. 270 BCE, although the relationship between the philosophy of the school and of the historical figure is murky. A renaissance of the term is to be noted for the 17th century when the modern scientific worldview was born.
Fallibilism
Fallibilism is a modern, fundamental perspective of the scientific method, as put forth by Karl Popper and Charles Sanders Peirce, that all knowledge is, at best, an approximation, and that any scientist must always stipulate this in his research and findings. It is, in effect, a modernized extension of Pyrrhonism. Indeed, historic Pyrrhonists are sometimes described by modern authors as fallibilists. Modern fallibilists also are sometimes described as pyrrhonists.
Fallibilism (from medieval Latin fallibilis, "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world. In the most commonly used sense of the term, this consists in being open to new evidence that would disprove some previously held position or belief, and in the recognition that "any claim justified today may need to be revised or withdrawn in light of new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences." This is the taken-for-granted position in the natural sciences.
In another sense, it refers to the consciousness of "the degree to which our interpretations, valuations, our practices, and traditions are temporally indexed" and subject to (possibly arbitrary) historical flux and change. Such "time-responsive" fallibilism consists in an openness to the confirmation of a possibility that one anticipates or expects in the future.
Some fallibilists argue that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible. As a formal doctrine, fallibilism is most strongly associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and other pragmatists, who use it in their attacks on foundationalism. However, it is already present in the views of ancient philosophers that were adherents of philosophical skepticism, including the philosopher Pyrrho. Fallibilism is related to Pyrrhonistic Skepticism, in that Pyrrhonists of history are sometimes referred to as fallibilists, and modern fallibilists as Pyrrhonists.
Another proponent of fallibilism is Karl Popper, who builds his theory of knowledge, critical rationalism, on fallibilistic presuppositions. Fallibilism has been employed by Willard Van Orman Quine to attack, among other things, the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.
Unlike scepticism, fallibilism does not imply the need to abandon our knowledge - we needn't have logically conclusive justifications for what we know. Rather, it is an admission that, because empirical knowledge can be revised by further observation, any of the things we take as knowledge might possibly turn out to be false. Some fallibilists make an exception for things that are axiomatically true (such as mathematical and logical knowledge). Others remain fallibilists about these as well, on the basis that, even if these axiomatic systems are in a sense infallible, we are still capable of error when working with these systems. The critical rationalist Hans Albert argues that it is impossible to prove any truth with certainty, even in logic and mathematics. This argument is called the Münchhausen Trilemma.
If we ask of any knowledge: "How do I know that it's true?” we may provide proof; yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen Trilemma is that we have only three options when providing proof in this situation:
•The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)
•The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
•The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)
The first two methods of reasoning are fundamentally weak, and because the Greek skeptics advocated deep questioning of all accepted values they refused to accept proofs of the third sort. The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options.
In contemporary epistemology, advocates of coherentism are supposed to be accepting the "circular" horn of the trilemma; foundationalists are relying on the axiomatic argument. Not as popular, views that accept (perhaps reluctantly) the infinite regress are branded infinitism.
Baron Münchhausen
Moral fallibilism
Moral fallibilism is a specific subset of the broader epistemological fallibilism outlined above. In the debate between moral subjectivism and moral objectivism, moral fallibilism holds out a third plausible stance: that objectively true moral standards may exist, but that they cannot be reliably or conclusively determined by humans. This avoids the problems associated with the flexibility of subjectivism by retaining the idea that morality is not a matter of mere opinion, whilst accounting for the conflict between differing objective moralities. Notable proponents of such views are Isaiah Berlin (value pluralism) and Bernard Williams (perspectivism).
Criticism
Some suggest that epistemological fallibilism claims absolute knowledge as part of an axiom. Essentially, the statement "This much is certain: nothing is certain" claims the knowledge that: there is no knowledge; thus arriving at a contradiction.
Karl Popper has suggested the methodological approach that the statement be provisionally taken as true until another statement is presented that, after surviving a critical discussion, is accepted as certain. The acceptance of this statement as certain would then be sufficient to reject fallibilism.
See also
Probabilism
Infallibility
Logical holism
Underdetermination
The Problem of induction
Perspectivism
References
1. ^ Nikolas Kompridis, "Two kinds of fallibilism", Critique and Disclosure (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 180.
2. ^ Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996
3. ^ Nikolas Kompridis, "Two kinds of fallibilism", Critique and Disclosure (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 181.
4. ^ Powell, T.C. (2001), Fallibilism and Organizational Research: The Third Epistemology, Journal of Management Research, 4, 201-219.
5. ^ Thorsrud, Harold (2004), Ancient Greek Skepticism, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Further reading
Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. by Philip P. Wiener (Dover, 1980)
Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science, ed. by Edward C. Moore (Alabama, 1993)
Traktat über kritische Vernunft, Hans Albert (Tübingen: Mohr, 1968. 5th ed. 1991)
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper (1945) Vol. 1 ISBN 0415290635, Vol. 2 ISBN 0415290635
<|>
Principlism
Principilism’s virtue: takes consequences and principles seriously Principilism’s vice: how do we balance consequences and principles when push comes to shove?
(Notice the spelling change? This was taken from the discussion surrounding casuistry. ~Lark)
Principlism is a system of ethics based on the four moral principles of:
1. Autonomy--free-will or agency,
2. Beneficence--to do good,
3. Nonmaleficence--not to harm, and
4. Justice--social distribution of benefits and burdens.
Advocates for principlism argue that from the beginning of recorded history most moral decision-makers descriptively and prescriptively have used these four moral principles; that they are part of or compatible with most intellectual, religious, and cultural beliefs.
Principlism formalized into national and international law
Principlism was first formalized as a moral decision-making approach by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in a document called the Belmont Report on April 18, 1979. The Commission came into existence on July 12, 1974 when the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law. After four years of monthly deliberations, the Commission met in February 1976 for four days at the Smithsonian Institution’s Belmont Conference Center which resulted in a statement of the basic ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice, for biomedical and behavioral research. The Commission recommended that the Belmont Report be adopted in its entirety as a statement of the Department’s policy for the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The Belmont Report’s cause of origin can be traced back to December 9, 1946 when the American Military Tribunal started criminal proceedings against 23 German physicians and administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. During the trials, the Nuremberg Code was drafted for the establishment of standards for judging individuals who conducted biomedical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. The Nuremberg Code in its final form was established in 1948 and was the first international document that advocated voluntary informed consent for participants of research on human subjects.
Belmont report and its three core principles
Principlism is a moral approach based on judgments that are generally accepted by most intellectual, cultural and religious traditions. For example, the Belmont Report defines 3 key principles by which to judge the ethicality of biomedical and behavioral research. These principles are:
1. Respect for persons--Autonomy,
2. Beneficence--do good, and
3. Justice--specifically distributive justice wherein those who bear the burdens of research also receive its benefits.
<|>
Added to “Favorite Stories of the Left” (See: Summary Judgment, 10/15/11)
Tragedy of the Commons
The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen. This dilemma was first described in an influential article titled "The Tragedy of the Commons", written by ecologist Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968.
Hardin's Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming. An asserted impending "tragedy of the commons" is frequently warned of as a consequence for adopting policies which restrict private property and espouse expansion of public property.
Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is damaged for all as a result, through overgrazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all.
A similar dilemma of the commons had previously been discussed by agrarian reformers since the 18th century. Hardin's predecessors used the alleged tragedy, as well as a variety of examples from the Greek Classics, to justify the enclosure movement. German historian Joachim Radkau sees Garrett Hardin's writings as having a different aim in that Hardin asks for a strict management of common goods via increased government involvement or/and international regulation bodies.
Hardin's work has been criticised on the grounds of historical inaccuracy, and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources. Subsequent work by Elinor Ostrom and others suggests that using Hardin's work to argue for privatization of resources is an "overstatement" of the case. Nonetheless, Ostrom recognizes that there are real problems, and even limited situations where the tragedy of the commons applies to real-world resource management.
As Hardin acknowledged there was a fundamental mistake in the use of the term “commons." This was already noted in 1975 by Ciriacy-Wantrup & Bishop (1975: 714) who wrote that we "are not free to use the concept 'common property resources' or 'commons' under conditions where no institutional arrangements exist. Common property is not 'everybody's property' (...). To describe unowned resource (res nullius) as common property (res communis), as many economists have done for years (...) is a self-contradiction." Neglecting the difference between common property and open access resources is a major reason of confusion in the debate that followed the 1968 Hardin's article.
<|>
Hardin's Commons Theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on numerous current issues, including the debate over global warming. An asserted impending "tragedy of the commons" is frequently warned of as a consequence for adopting policies which restrict private property and espouse expansion of public property.
Central to Hardin's article is an example (first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd) of a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common parcel of land, on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put the next (and succeeding) cows he acquires onto the land, even if the quality of the common is damaged for all as a result, through overgrazing. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be depleted or even destroyed, to the detriment of all.
A similar dilemma of the commons had previously been discussed by agrarian reformers since the 18th century. Hardin's predecessors used the alleged tragedy, as well as a variety of examples from the Greek Classics, to justify the enclosure movement. German historian Joachim Radkau sees Garrett Hardin's writings as having a different aim in that Hardin asks for a strict management of common goods via increased government involvement or/and international regulation bodies.
Hardin's work has been criticised on the grounds of historical inaccuracy, and for failing to distinguish between common property and open access resources. Subsequent work by Elinor Ostrom and others suggests that using Hardin's work to argue for privatization of resources is an "overstatement" of the case. Nonetheless, Ostrom recognizes that there are real problems, and even limited situations where the tragedy of the commons applies to real-world resource management.
As Hardin acknowledged there was a fundamental mistake in the use of the term “commons." This was already noted in 1975 by Ciriacy-Wantrup & Bishop (1975: 714) who wrote that we "are not free to use the concept 'common property resources' or 'commons' under conditions where no institutional arrangements exist. Common property is not 'everybody's property' (...). To describe unowned resource (res nullius) as common property (res communis), as many economists have done for years (...) is a self-contradiction." Neglecting the difference between common property and open access resources is a major reason of confusion in the debate that followed the 1968 Hardin's article.
<|>
alt.memetics
Memetics is the theory of cultural replicators, based on Daniel Dennett's philosophy-of-mind and the sociobiology of Richard Dawkins. Memetics postulates the meme as the fundamental replicating unit in social evolution, a process which is treated as technically equivalent to biological (genetic) evolution.
This concept is discussed in the alt.memetics newsgroup.
<|>
Numbers 32: 23
But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.
<|>
The Art of Memetics
How the 'seed' of an idea
(like a tree!) can create
a complete ecology.
By Edward E. Wilson & Wes Unruh
Illustrations by Ray Carney
<|>
Ecology
1. a. The science of the relationships between organisms and their environments. Also called bionomics
b. The relationship between organisms and their environment.
2. The branch of sociology that is concerned with studying the relationships between human groups and their physical and social environments. Also called human ecology
3. The study of the detrimental effects of modern civilization on the environment, with a view toward prevention or reversal through conservation. Also called human ecology
[German Ökologie: Greek oikos, house + German -logie, study (from Greek -logiā, -logy).]
Economy is the study of ergonomics and efficiencies related to the management of the physical (material) resources one employs to maintain and produce wealth, health (wellness) and a general feeling of well-being within one’s own household [sphere of influence]. Examines the relationships between the delineation [or hierarchical, utilitarian allocation of] needs/desires as they contribute toward well-being… and the actions (those things, in turn, related to energy) relative to obtaining efficient access to the resources necessary to human survival… and which contribute to the security and general well-being of all concerned within that household [or sphere of influence]. Here “well-being” is pointedly not “welfare” in the socialist sense; and “economy” supplants the [collectivist, statist] term, “economics”, altogether. ~Lark
Ecology has spread rapidly in the 20th century from technical to general use to mean 'the study of the interaction of people with their natural environment'. An earlier spelling oecology, reflecting its origin in the Greek word oikos meaning 'house' (the same root as in economy), is hardly ever used. Ecology has also produced the prolific prefix eco-, as in eco-catastrophe (1969), eco-correct (1994), ecodoom (1973), eco-friendly (1989), eco-label and -labeling (1989), ecopolitics (1973), eco-terrorist (1988), eco-warrior (1987), etc.
Is not the body the temple of one’s soul?
<|>
<|>
RELIGIONS OF FEAR AND HATE
Meme Theory and Memetics
Harry Mobley
The World is under a God Spell
The gospel is actually a Jewish written spell
<|>
Androgynous Future for “Goys”?
Fakir
1. A Muslim religious mendicant.
2. A Hindu ascetic or religious mendicant, especially one who performs feats of magic or endurance.
[From Arabic faqīr, poor, from faqura, to be poor, be needy.]
<|>
Snake-charming
<|>
Catalepsy
A condition involving the sudden suspension of sensation and volition and the partial suspension of vital functions. The body assumes a rigid appearance, sometimes mistaken for death, and the victim remains unconscious throughout the attack. On occasion, the cataleptic state may be marked by symptoms of intense mental excitement and by apparently volitional speech and action. Sometimes the symptoms are hardly distinguishable from those of hysteria.
The period covered by the attack may vary from a few minutes to several days, although the latter occurs only in exceptional cases. An attack may recur, however, on only trifling provocation in the absence of strong resistance by the victim.
Catalepsy is said to be caused by a pathological condition of the nervous system, generally produced by severe or prolonged mental emotion, and should not be confused with hypnotic trance. The belief that the condition may occur in a perfectly healthy person is probably fallacious. There is speculation that catalepsy, like ecstasy and mediumistic faculties, may at times prove contagious.
Catalepsy is associated with schizophrenia and hysteria, and there is reason to believe that it can be self-induced in certain cases. Eastern fakirs have been known to cast themselves into a cataleptic sleep lasting for months, and cases have even been reported where they permitted themselves to be buried, being exhumed when the grass had grown over their graves.
Some forms of trance induced by hypnotism appear similar to the cataleptic state.
Sources:
Dendy, W. C. Philosophy of Mystery. London, 1841
<|>
Psionics
A term coined by science-fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr. to denote a combination of radionics and psi phenomena. His editorial "The Science of Psionics," published in the February 1956 issue of his magazine Astounding Science Fiction, discussed "psychic electronic machines." One such machine was invented by Thomas G. Hieronymus (U.S. Patent No. 2,482,773) and resembles the black box of radionics. Campbell described the machine in an article later that year. Campbell is also remembered as the publisher of L. Ron Hubbard 's initial article introducing Dianetics to the public.
Sources:
Campbell, John W., Jr. "Psionic Machine-Type One." Astounding Science Fiction
(June 1956)
Radionics
Scientific assessment of Radionics
Radionics devices contradict principles of biology and physics, and no scientifically plausible mechanism of function is posited. In this sense, they can be described as magical in operation. No plausible biophysical basis for the "putative energy fields" has been proposed, and neither the fields themselves nor their purported therapeutic effects have been convincingly demonstrated.
No radionic device has been found efficacious in the diagnosis or treatment of any disease, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not recognize any legitimate medical uses of any such device. According to David Helwig in The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, "most physicians dismiss radionics as quackery."
Internally, a radionic device is very simple, and may not even form a functional electrical circuit. The wiring in the analysis device is simply used as a mystical conduit. A radionic device does not use or need electric power; though a power cord may be provided, ostensibly to determine a "base rate" on which the device operates to attempt to heal a subject. Typically, little attempt is made to define or describe what, if anything, is flowing along the wires and being measured. Energy in the physical sense, i.e., energy that can be sensed and measured, is viewed as subordinate to intent and "creative action."
<|>
Psi
Greek letter used in parapsychology to indicate psychic or paranormal phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP) or psychokinesis (PK)
<|>
RetroPsychoKinesis Experiments Online
<|>
By Daniel Bell
Note: This article has a special place in Year 2000 literature, as it was the first major paper written on the Year 2000, way back in 1967. The distinguished author, sociologist Daniel Bell, helped to organize "The Commission on the Year 2000," sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. Within two years, there arose a great popular fixation on life in the year 2000, which Bell said had all the characteristics of a hoola hoop craze! As this lead article for the Commission on the Year 2000, Bell explains that they saw its role not so much in "making predictions, but to the more complicated and subtle art of defining alternatives" as U.S. society moved toward the turn of the century.
<|>
World Game of Chaos
Men have always been attracted by the mystical lure of the chiloi, the Greek word for a thousand from which we get our religious term chiliasm, the belief in a coming life free from the imperfections of human existence....
Behold The Pale Horse
[Carnegie Foundation of New York medallion logo – image from 1911]
To get funding for the Commission on the Year 2000, Daniel Bell went to the Carnegie Foundation and spoke with Richard W. Gardner. In 1999, Slate Magazine published an email from Daniel Bell to his son, David Bell concerning Turn of the Millennium programming that ABC was doing - including a segment on the Commission and “predicting the future”. Excerpts:
The Jennings producers have scheduled a segment called "Prediction," and I was called because in 1965 I had initiated the Commission on the Year 2000, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and our major report, "Toward the Year 2000," had been reprinted last year by the M.I.T. Press; as was this year my book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, by Basic Books, with a new 30,000-word foreword.
I think of an episode of my friend Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been a member of the Commission of the Year 2000. He was being baited on television by a hostile commentator, who began: "Professor Brzezinski, you are a Kremlinologist." "Yes," said Zbig, "if you like that clumsy word." "You tell the State Department what goes on in the Soviet Union," the man continued. "When they listen," said Zbig. The man then sprang his trap: "How come you failed to predict the ouster of Khrushchev?" And Zbig, who is quick on his feet, replied: "Tell me, if Khrushchev couldn't predict his own ouster, how do you expect me to do so?"
The simple point is that one can "predict" only if you have an algorithm, a decision rule that tells you how to sort things out. Or where there is a firm set of rules for institutional succession. When I initiated the Commission on the Year 2000, I went to John Gardner, then the head of the Carnegie Corporation, for funding. John said: "You have written an interesting memorandum, but give me a prediction." "It is very difficult to predict," I said. "Well, if you don't give me a prediction, you don't get the money."
…This is running on, but to anticipate you, or any reader: Can I return to John Gardner's question and give one prediction about the next century? No, not a prediction (for that is not the way to think about it) but a relevant social framework to identify issues and problems. What we are witnessing is a change in the "axis" of world socio-political
organization; namely, one of widening economic integration (crossing national boundaries)and increasing political fragmentation (within national boundaries).
The economic dimension is a "change of scale," as all national economies are absorbed into a global framework. The fragmentation is occurring because (as I remarked a decade ago)the national state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems. The national state was a 19th-century innovation in response to the breakdown of local economic exchange. Now the national state becomes defensive against the international onrush of capital, currency, commodity, and even demographic flows. And in imposing social programs from a national center, it becomes unresponsive to the varieties and needs of different localities.
…All this is called devolution, to rhyme with "evolution" (and not to rhyme with "revolution").
But it was in fact, a “revolution” - slow-moving, soft-war - “war in the context of everything else” including dis- and mis-information in the media, Dadaism, psychological warfare, insurgencies, “creative destruction” of our economy, our education systems and our culture.
Engineering
“The Great Society”
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed John W. Gardner of the Carnegie Foundation to be the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Gardner then became the Architect of the “Great Society”. But it seems that Gardner was just the government liaison for the ‘Community of World Futurists - and Mind *******’.
Why would I say such a thing? I say it because Futurists whether they have degrees or not - are no different than Madame Zolla, the crystal ball reader at the carnival. When these people are given authority status in the society with license to design the infrastructure - transportation systems, the economy, the education system, and the society around their visions for the future, you end up with chaos. And that’s what we - and the world are living through right now - chaos created by the Futurists. It’s no different than being mugged by con artists.
The reason Futurists presented as pillars of the community are able to create chaos is because they live in the fantasy world of Utopia. They promote the idea that you can design the ideal society - perfectly engineered to give everyone everything they want and need. The engineers design and the useful idiots implement. Since the majority of people are obedient to authority figures as Stanley Milgram proved in his experiments on obedience in the early 1960’s, Futurists in power are free to try and create their Utopia - our chaos - and the result is life in a world of absurdity.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
~~ Voltaire
<|>
A Few Words to a Young Writer
(Auteur = Artiste = Author):
Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
Copyright © 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin
<|>
http://www.henrymakow.com/the_death_of_the_sentence.html
Does Faulty Grammar Signify Decadence?
Sheep don't need to write. They just need to bleat.
<|>
http://www.illuminati-news.com/moriah.htm
Does Faulty Grammar Signify Decadence?
Obviously the hidden agenda is to dumb down the new generation, and to make them a burden to society instead of an asset.
Sheep don't need to write. They just need to bleat.
<|>
http://www.illuminati-news.com/moriah.htm
The Secret Order of the Illuminati
(A Brief History of the Shadow Government)
By Wes Penre, Nov 12, 1998 (Updated September 26, 2009)
