(va: To dupers and dupees everywhere) The Thinker by Auguste Rodinat the California Palace of the Legion of HonorImage from Wikimedia CommonsPublic Domain: Author, Karora On odd occasions, one can encounter contrition in the red-white-&-blue, balloon-strewn ballroom of 6-AM, post-convention chaos. That’s where I encountered PR. He was alone, seated in Thinker repose, a damp hanky drying …
In his book entitled, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, John Ralston Saul profiles certain technocrats from the latter-half of the 20th Century whose devotion to systems and theories have led our “promising” civil society down the path to perpetual war, economic tyranny, and pernicious dogma. Now, in the first decades of …
(*sprouted from an intended Documentary) [In light of the talking heads that have surfaced recently from the constitutional shallows to take credit for the demise of Osama bin Laden, we disclose a(n aborted) simulation meant to explore in greater depth those constitutional shallows. Of course, one prefers not to mock others, but when “those others” …
(Tea Party 1 : Tea Party 2) To the offended: You may be adamantly against the recent stimulus packages and bailouts of Big Business (as proffered by GWB and BHO), but if you are a laissez-faire capitalist or corporate libertarian, you are a porter for economic tyranny (as in T-Party) whether you admit it or …
After nearly four centuries of Republican government, Rome began its century-long descent toward tyranny1 beginning about 133 BC with the murder of the Gracchus brothers.2 Perhaps the chief facilitator of that descent was the conservative/traditionalist group of elites in the Roman Senate—a group that came to be dubbed the optimates (“the best”).3 They claimed to …
(OR: Ayn Rand Romanticized) Mark Sanford, the recently beleaguered Republican governor of South Carolina, presented his pitch for the current relevance of Ayn Rand in Newsweek, November 2, 2009. He wrote, “What strikes me as still relevant is [The Fountainhead’s] central insight—that it isn’t ‘collective action’ that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it’s the …