Tag Archives: Libertarians

Ayn Rand SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Let me first begin with how I was exposed to Ayn Rand. I am in high school and awhile back my teacher was doing a course on homelessness. In a ‘prompt’ that she gave me as to what are the causes of homelessness, I answered CAPITALISM. A week later I was astonished to get back my paper with a Zero. I showed this to many people all of whom agreed that it was in no way deserving of a zero. My dad and I took this question as to why I had gotten a zero on  my paper to the teacher. I wasn’t expecting much but even after one hour of asking my English teacher why I had gotten a zero on my paper she had no reasonable answer other than that I had not followed the ‘format’ correctly, even though I had a previous organizational sheet on which I based my writing on following her format. she ended by saying I was a horrible writer;  we gave up trying to get to through to such a numbskull.

I didn’t quite understand why she had given me a zero until a couple months later, and so began my experience with Ayn Rand. My teacher took us to get the book. As I read the summary I knew it would be some sort of method for her and d-11 to push their politics on students;  however I had no previous knowledge of who Ayn Rand was.  The next day in class she gave us a powerpoint on the background of Ayn Rand and what the book Anthem was about. It was filled with negative comments on communism including that communism supposedly takes away knowledge, individuality and free expression.   As I was assigned to read more and more of Ayn Rand I realized how horrible of a writer she was. I started to listen to Ayn Rand’s interviews. I then understood that  they were forcing me to read a writer who didn’t believe in helping anyone, because she was a racist, a nationalist and a pure evil witch. These interviews can be found on <youtube> and <bluecorncomics> among many other articles revealing Ayn Rand to be a racist.

The more and more I read into the book the more i was infuriated at the pure ridiculousness and hypocrisy of it.  In the ending chapters it is written by Ayn Rand that

“The word WE is the lime poured over me, which sets and hardens to stone, crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages. What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? What is my wisdom if even the fools can dictate to me? What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and the impotent, are my masters? What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey?”

As i read this I wasn’t sure whether to laugh, throw up, or rip the book apart . I was sickened by how when I had expressed my “free speech” I was given a ZERO; by how I had to read an author who believes being selfish is  a virtue. And by how every day, whenever I went to class instead of being taught English literature I got the teachers Right Wing, anti-communist politics thrown into my face. Each time a question on the book was asked I didn’t hear an opinion on whether the book was good or bad i only heard questions on how communism takes away individuality and how  Ayn Rand is right on what her idea of what communism is? I said the teacher was expressing personal opinion and the whole class started to yell at me to shut up. I got so alienated and depressed after they  said that communism makes robots, and brain dead people  even though I couldn’t find more brain dead robots as hard as I looked than the ones that were sitting right next to me.

I couldn’t take the class anymore as it was an insult to who I was, what I believed in, and all the people I respected were continually insulted and lied about. I started skipping the class after my dad not only talked at a school board meeting but also to my assistant principal, in both cases we were given the cold shoulder and treated horribly rude. I decided to go to the class again and deal with it. As I read the quote given above in that class and as I looked around i became terrified of being like them. I was torn between staying and swallowing my believes and to be JUST LIKE THOSE SHEEP or to get up and leave. The overwhelming fear of being lost into them made me get up and walk out of the class. Later that day the assistant principal took me out of a class and made me feel like an outsider, like a weird person that needed to be put in a psychiatric hospital. I complained that I was being pushed politics in a public school and his response was that no other students felt like I did. When I told him that the teacher had given me a zero and was now failing me out of the course, who had said I was a horrible writer; he said He didn’t believe me and that I was wrong. He told me that if I was to walk out again I would have to deal with the consequences even though he wouldn’t deal with a teacher pushing politics.   He smiled as I cried for being  looked at as being an idiot and a weirdo kid ; it took me about two hours to get with it. We continued to try to get me switched out of the class, which finally we did only to find that Ayn Rand was being taught in that course too and  in all English classes for that matter.

I realize I will probably never get them to change, to respect students, parents and INDIVIDUALITY. But this  continuing fight which is probably the hardest I’ve ever had to fight proved to me that I would stand up for myself against a herd of flesh eating zombies, that I would NEVER BE LIKE THEM . And I felt pride in knowing I stood up to being brainwashed by  anti communist right wingers.

Tea Partying with the Freak Brothers

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Whew! These Occupy posts are far more difficult to pry from myself than their predecessors; the hands-on mechanics of putting the earlier stuff into practice in the present world, amongst the isolated pools of individuated consciousness we humans represent, each with his or her own vision of the whole, has been at the very least disorienting. I’ve lately revived an old motto i swiped from the good people at Oat Willie’s down in Austin, Texas: Onward Through the Fog! How odd is it that i’ve recently connected with some folks that hark back to that place in ways that are deeply surreal. Oat Willie’s and Fat Freddie will seem to be completely out of place in this bit, in which i mean to address the notion of cooperation amongst disparate factions, but not permanently i hope. By the end of this post, i hope to connect Occupy, The Tea Party, disparate passions, and yes, Hippies. It will be necessary to engage in some relatively surreal thinking.

Last night on a new Facebook page, “UNITE: OCCUPY,” (cap lock and all), i got into a conversation about this stuff started by a guy that asked whether anyone thought a joint event between Occupiers and Tea Partiers might be possible. Sure, i said, our Colorado Springs group had lots of Tea Partiers among its earliest enthusiasts, and although many have pulled away, there still exists a close association with many that veer sharply toward the Te Party camp, especially among Ron Paul supporters. The common ground Occupy shares with the Tea Party, at least t a grass root level, is substantial. There can be no doubt of the equally substantial differences. I suspect that it would take some pretty serious ideological barnstorming to bring the two camps together, but nothing prevents the groups from at least tentative discussion to find commonalities.

Tonight our Occupy group staged a talk by Tea Party stalwart, Constitutionalist Mike Holler. Mike seemed for all appearances to be an earnest and well-versed supporter of Constitutional “fundamentalism,” if you will. He peppered his talk with lots of my favorite quotes from my favorite founding fathers. He got a little testy about the revisionist history his kids bring home from college early on–perhaps indicative of one point of separation between Occupiers and Tea Partiers. Some of those are important. Occupy is international, where the Tea Party can display degrees of jingoism. I, personally, respect the earnest efforts of our Enlightenment founders, but recognize that they were flawed, and aver that their document was dated by racist, sexist, and elitist provisions and thinking that they might be excused from by noting their temporal milieu. We don’t have the same luxury. Occupy is legitimately grass root, supported by sweat and blood more than funded, where TP is, or at least became very quickly corporately funded “astroturf,” disingenuously proffering libertarian ideals as a smoke screen for corporate license to plunder. Occupiers are in my experience far more diverse than Tea Partiers. Socialist and Anarchist Occupiers are common, as are assorted races, genders, orientations, and religious persuasions, where Tea Partiers seem to my limited observation to be relatively homogeneously white Christian capitalist patriots. Mike interjected that both groups had been misrepresented by the media, and that seems likely to be so given that mainstream media seems content to misrepresent ’bout anything they report in this country, but Fox news and the rabid right like the Tea Party so much i have to wonder if he’s fallen victim to a personal soft spot.

Mike spoke eloquently enough in his effort to simplify the Constitution, focusing on issues of freedom, and state’s rights. He said very little with which i could find disagreement. He pointed out two major points of confluence between Occupy and the Tea Party–personal liberty, and a rally-cry, “No more Bailouts!” I suspect he fastidiously avoided some points he knew or at least feared might be contentious, like for example the ludicrous assertions i’ve heard often that environmental warnings from the scientific community stem from some kind of Satanic control scheme from the–well just whom is never too clear. The Vatican or something. Commies, i guess. That just maybe the best way for Tea Partiers and Occupiers to interact, though, for now, concentrating on the common aversion to what amounts to Fascism. Interacting from that perspective could exclude much conversation. It could put the Tea Party in the same position as the Occupy movement, after their Fascist sponsors withdraw in horror. Whatever. We Occupiers got on just fine with Tea Party Mike–“Mr. Constitution.”

Mike largely expressed notions we Occupiers could embrace. I suppose he could have done a bit of research and tailored his speech toward that end, but i think we just agree; he seemed a grassroot kind of guy, to me. He briefly alluded to schisms within the Tea Party, and there’s no sensible reason to avoid acknowledging the same within Occupy. Last night’s event was attended by Occupy people that have had such extreme altercations in their attempts to wrestle a semblance of ideological unity from a stubbornly liquid platform that it could easily enough have disintegrated into bedlam. I attended with my dear friend Thomas, with whom i often disagree. In fact, he and i often disagree so strongly that sometimes i feel like smacking him in back of the head. I expect he feels the same way about me at times. Maybe much of the time. Take note, war-mongers of the world: Thomas is a great guy, and even though we disagree with one another, sometimes strongly, neither of us has smacked the other in back of the head. Get it?

So here we were last night, disparate Occupiers engaging a Tea Party mouthpiece in a room full of people that have all experienced the vagaries of human interaction under a fairly pressurized circumstance over the past few months. No butterflies fluttered around the room, but no one worked up a bickering session, either. We worked together. All of us. One could recall the old adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but that would be devolution. I prefer to imagine that those with arguments present recognized the futility of scrapping amongst friends, if only below the radar of their Egos. Whether my nobler hopes for those pained souls in the room last night are valid or not, the assertions i made in these non-pages well before Occupy began remain true. The system we wrestle against is collapsing around our heads. And the solution is spiritual, to a far greater extent than it is temporal.

Fat Freddy is a comic book character that lives in Denver. Seriously. I met him a little while ago. (This only seems out of place, i promise.) Mr. Constitution Mike Holler expressed the opinion last night that our American republic, our constitutional federation of states, is in its final throes; that we are in a position where, ” it’s too late to save the country, but too early to start shooting.” Mike seemed tentative in expressing his hope that God might pull some kind of supernatural rabbit from his celestial hat to resolve our monumental national woes. I expect he feared perturbing the often non-Christian sensibilities of the Occupiers. He needn’t have worried quite so much–we may be largely skeptical of literal interpretations, but we’re pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. When i met Fat Freddy–an icon of counter-cultural activism important to me since childhood, an old-school Hippie with connection to the most famous and infamous of that crowd–he singled me out and pulled me aside to explain in some detail his expectation for a spiritual upheaval in coming days. Freddy’s taken up with the Urantia Book, a tome i’ve heard Christians disparage as devilish. I couldn’t see anything devilish about what he showed me. He earnestly explained his expectation for resolution. Soon.

We had come to Denver to talk about foreclosures and bank jiggery-pokery with another guy, and pulled up at Freddy’s house without knowing it. It just happened that way. These old Hippies like Tea Party fave, Ron Paul. (Follow along, now, i know it’s weird, and yeah, i know a lot of Occupiers don’t like Paul; i’m not sure about him myself). Also in attendance at that meeting was a woman i had been conversing with on line for quite a while in the context of Occupy. It took me nearly through the whole meeting to recognize her, because i knew her to live down in the Four Corners neighborhood of Colorado. She lives at Freddy’s now. This juxtaposition is so weird that now i’m expecting the Mad Hatter, or Lewis Carroll himself to pop up at some meeting quoting from Jabberwocky. Mike Holler holds out for resolution to the country’s woes in a traditional Christian context. My own suspicion, shared with J.B.S. Haldane, is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. But somewhere in the mix i am convinced that some divine Thing many of us think of as God is deeply interested in the little proceedings here on our little blue marble and that our interactions are subsequently and necessarily thus influenced.

We live right here. We have no choice but to manage things on a coarse, physical level; but we also live, i think, on an overlapping and less tangible plane, where we have more influence than we might ordinarily imagine. At the same time, things seem to occur herethere without our conscious direction. We’ll need to keep plugging away at things like grasping the Constitution, and taking on massive, quixotic quests like fighting banks and a world full of renegade, intransigent governments and power brokers, not to mention our own internal battles, as finely defined as within our own Souls. We’ll need to recognize the Truth in one another, even when it’s obscured by a bunch of worldly disagreement and fog. And so far as i can tell, were learning. Whatever that means.

Reprinted from hipgnosis.

How the US and Georgia violated the South Ossetia peace plan

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map_nato_021120.gifThe Russians have issued a peace plan for Georgia and the US to accept, and SURPRISE!
It’s the same peace plan that was in place before, which the US and Georgia violated by entering and attacking South Ossetia. The peace plan calls for non- aggression in South Ossetia to be monitored by peacekeeping troops. FACTBOX-Peace plan for Georgia: what is it? This peace plan is essentially the same one that the European Union has already proposed and that was already once in place.

However, it is obvious to all that the US and Georgian governments do not feel in the least obligated to abide by this plan since they have already violated it once by unilatrally sending troops into South Ossetia. Further the official US government propaganda mills in the US (the New York Times, Washington Post, George Dubya Bush, Rice, etc.) have made it clear with their continued belligerency that this attack on South Ossetia was only the beginning of the continued US government plan to now constantly attack Russia. They have no desire at all to retreat despite the human suffering their war plans are causing. They want to control the natural resources of Asia for US corporate interests and that is all that counts for them.

It seems clear that this is the new Republican plan to try to advance John McCain’s chances for entering into the White House, too, and since the Democrats share the same foreign policy goals of the Republicans they will not be able to counter the Republican offensive but will instead echo everything the Bush Administration does. The Republican plan is to simply reignite Cold War rhetoric against the nationalist capitalist regime of the country today named Russia, and to attack the Democratic Party for being supposedly weak in this campaign.

Liberal pacifists and academic Left Libertarians in the Peace Movement are also not prepared to do anything against this new neocon propaganda offensive against Russia. They also tag along with the Republicans spewing out constant anti- Chinese and anti- Russia vitriol all on their own. Their mantra has always been merely a call to equally and incessantly blame victims of US aggression alongside the blame they toss out against the US government for causing the chaos and conflict in the world today.

But how can a US Antiwar Movement be built on such a foundation like that? In fact, you hardly see these people active even going through the motions of organizing a US Antiwar Movement. It is all talk and writing for the liberal community that they are engaged in and propagandizing for, and nothing of real organizing an Antiwar Movement. By equalizing responsibility as they do, in fact they expose themselves as being US nationalists themselves despite their criticisms of the US corporate government, simply because who is to blame is not equal at all in the least.

Russia and China are now engaged by the US government in a very real war of worldwide proportions, and yet the public in the US is not even vaguely aware in the least of what their own corporate dictatorship government has planned for us all. Where will the next new fighting be started by the militarists in the White House? How can they be stopped without total disaster occurring? The future indeed does look grim.

One aspect of interest is how the US government used Georgia to muscle out the interests of all the Western European countries besides the United Kingdom This fighting has been a US power government play to mold NATO as it wants it to be molded, the Europeans be damned. See the Wall Street Journal commentary… Splits Emerge Within EU

Russia should not take any US talk of peace seriously, since the US government’s actions since the fall of the exSoviet Union have made it already clear that the US corporations merely want to beat down Russia with a big stick.

Knowing we are in over our heads

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One reason we have governments, for you inquiring civil libertarians, is for guidance. I can certainly think of two matters which might always evade common man’s grasp: nutrition and economics.

In spite of all best efforts to educate a public, we may have to agree that nutrition and economics are too big for the layman to grapple. We elect representatives to Washington to advise our lives about complexities like these.

Take for example the fudgsicle, it’s “low fat” but probably not on the whole going to make you skinnier. By the taste, the fudgsicle is made of sugar. So where does that put it, as obesity causal factors go?

Regulating calorie intake vis-a-vis carbs, electrolytes, supplements, additives, toxins and who knows what, is not a static math problem. It’s about maintaining a buoyant equilibrium as we move our bodies forward in our mortal trajectory. It’s like keeping the steam pressure up on an old locomotive, there was a reason the train drivers were called engineers. A steam engine didn’t start and go like its Lionel Train facsimile, it had to be tended, coaxed and fed lest it a) falter or b) explode.

Not everyone can be an engineer. We can read how-tos, and feel good about taking the levers, but ultimately the pop-guides are written to take us in circles to the next self-help over-simplification.

Likewise, not everyone can understand economic theory. We like to apply our bookkeeping common sense, our coupon-clipping savvy, and Nike GTD ethic to the federal budget: just balance it, but spreading greater prosperity is much more complicated than that. Try conducting even domestic trading with “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

That’s why we elect administrators, that’s why we make them give big speeches to demonstrate their competence. We know we want smart people to be in charge. You’d think that concern would be intuitive, but we have learned it to be otherwise.

Evidently we need at the very least to be taught in our schools that our leaders must have more than the common sense of our drinking buddies. Our educational system must keep citizens up to speed to appreciate that governance is a demanding task. We don’t need to know the complexities, but we need to know enough to tell buffoons like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity that their homespun drivel is for uneducated morons.

Americans and the Iraq War

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The impact the Antiwar Movement has made on Americans is skin deep so far. While at least 2/3 of Americans now dislike the Bush Administration, much of that rejection is because many feel that the current government has poorly managed a war they fully supported. See poll data

Despite the US government’s warfare against the Iraqi people that has gone on since 1991 and produced a total tragedy, only 1/3 of Americans feel that it was wrong to have been attacking that country in the first place.

Why has the American antiwar movement been so lackluster? I think that the main reason has been the demobilization of the US working class. In fact, much of the US working class has been largely co opted by the military and finds its employment somehow connected with continued support of the US war machine. You don’t see working class people attending protests much at all.

Another reason though has been the failure of leadership of the Peace Movement. It is dominated by store keepers, ex-monks, pastors, and nuns and ex-nuns, Mennonites and Quakers. There are also 2 other sectors of this movement whose presence is barely discernible by and large. The largest of the 2 are the college educated liberal types who think that voting for liberal Democratic Party politicians is the outer limit of what they will involve themselves in doing.

Last of the 3 main sectors of the essentially inert Peace camp is the anticapitalist Left, made up of Left Libertarians (Noam Chomsky, Znet, and crowd) and Marxists. The Left Libertairans have great analysis but no organizing ability, and are fairmly embedded in academia as professors, but are largely absent in the working population made up of ordinary citizens. And the Marxist Left, outside of the Workers World Party and its split off sister Party of Liberation and Socialism, has been mainly busy comtemplating their navels. But despite organizing many big demonstrations,the WWP is so sectarian that its national membership remains at several dozens.

Until there is a secular Left that resurects itself from the grave, the religious folks and DP addicts of voting only will continue to demobilize the American people. They will pray and they will vote, but they will not construct an activist movement that builds something different than church based organizations and the corporate Frankenstein called the Democratic Party. They will lobby and pray in fields where missile silos are located. They will pray in churches and vote for Democrats come election day along with attending an occasional forum and attending a military gate or other.

There is no easy solution to finding a way to resurrect the dormant American secular Left. Like the dormant Nazi Era German Left, we now largely are dependent on outside help. The problem is the American people themselves, ‘liberals’ and’ conservatives’ both. Both camps are totally immersed in LaLa Land.

Impeach! Goodbye Dems.

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Bush is claiming Executive Privilege in refusing to shed light on the possible nefarious dealing of his underlings. The press describes any investigation at an impasse “until one side or the other blinks.” Nonsense. Impeach!
 
Cheney surprises everyone by declaring that the Vice-Presidency is actually a fourth branch of government, out of reach of the checks and balances familiar to all. Congressmen want to joke about cutting off his funding, etc, meanwhile Cheney’s boys elude oversight. Impeach!

The Justice Department acting politically? Impeach! The Supreme Court behaving like cronies? Impeach.

Congress pretending to oppose endless war, yet refusing to cut off the funding? And eschewing that power, preferring false “impasses” to the option(s) above?

Apparently it’s the best they can do, at least that’s how the corporate media has it. But why let the corporations tell us what is or isn’t our prerogative? It’s time to impeach the lot of them. If the Democrats don’t want to do what they were elected to do, let’s leave them. And turn away from the TV.

It’s time for real bipartisanship. Real conservatives and real progressives need to bail from the two imposter parties and opt for representatives of their own. If big-oil interests can conspire with big-pharma, insurance, multi-national, communications and agri-biz to plunder America’s wealth, I’d hope from the people’s side, the Greens could join the Socialists could join the Libertarians could join the Reformers could join everyone else, Ross Perot’s upstarts perhaps. We can address our differences after we’ve wrestled the reins from the corporate greed parties. If even that will be possible. But we’re not going to see national health care, less war, or more equitable and just policies until we do.

And to those Democrats who fear that abandoning their so-called representatives will release them to the dark side, it shows what little faith you had in your candidates in the first place. The results are already in from last election: having a Democratic representative in Congress, unless it’s John Conyers, is like having no one at all. If the politician you elected really has firm intentions, he’ll have them without you. It’s time to nurture someone else, someone with potential, into power.

Have you seen Barack do anything? Hillary? You’ve seen Edwards capitulate to a fraudulent election. Gore too. You’ve seen Kucinich pretend that the Democratic tent was inclusive enough for voices against the war and that turned out to be a lie. The Dems have no one unsuited to do their bidding, and what a surprise, it’s not yours.

Contrasting the Libertarians with UFPJ

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The Democratic Party-tied, United For Peace and Justice (the largest beginning of a kernel of a national US antiwar coalition), has been a disaster for those wanting truly to mobilize antiwar sentiment in the US. So has the Democratic Party-tied organization, MoveOn.

Meanwhile, the remnants of the old leadership of the US antiwar movement during the Vietnam Era continue to busy themselves talking in Marxist tongues and contemplating their own navels at Louis Proyect’s do-nothing site, Marxmail.

But what about the Libertarians? Check out John Walsh’s commentary, ‘Shaming the Official Antiwar Movement‘.

How the Democratic Party supporter’s sectarianism holds back building the antiwar movement

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John Walsh has just published an outstanding article at Counterpunch about how the sectarianism of the leadership of the national UFPJ (united for Peace & Justice) is holding back the construction of a much larger and more active antiwar movement.

The UFPJ is one of two national antiwar coalitions, and is dominated by Democratic Party supporters that refuse to work with others in a united manner. Control is what this ‘coalition’ is about, and central to that is their desire to use control to help elect Democratic party politicians who often go on to betray the antiwar cause.

As the Democratic Party continues to rot, some liberals just refuse to let go. Their grandparents believed that the DP was the party of change, as did their moms and dads. These liberals just refuse to deal with the basic reality that through the generations, all the ‘change’ the DP has brought has been from a net BAD to a net much WORSE. To these types, this addiction to the Democrats has been much harder to fight than even that of being addicted to food, alcohol, heroin, and tobacco.

Let’s be real. The UFPJ has failed to mobilize the American public into the streets in protest, where asses if they had this war would have already been over. The issue of stopping the US military from rambling along zonkers under the Bush Administration direction should unite us all, Libertarians, liberal Christians, Socialists, Anarchists, and the Democratic Party liberal voters, too. Unfortunately, each group has often acted as if they owned how opposition to Bush should be allowed to unfold. The net effect has been a diminished response to any action from the public at large.

The UFPJ has been about the worst of the sectarian offenders due to the obvious fact, that the Democratic Party leadership itself is not really antiwar, but just mildly anti-Republican instead. The UFPJ leadership is made up of liberal democratic Party voters who hope only to lobby to put the DP into offices, and not oppose very much the Democrats politicians already there. Letter writing, lobbying, and prayer are the type of strategies they most often want to engage in. That, and action that gets people arrested, such as sitting down in the middle of the street, or crossing onto military property or into recruitment offices. Working with non liberal Democrats to enlarge public protest rallies and marches is not anywhere much on their radar.

Unity, not sectarianism. And unity not just to elect Democratic party politicians, but unity to stop US militarism in its place and then to roll it back and out of American life altogether.

Sorority girls

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LineupI have nothing, nothing, nothing against sorority girls, nor society girls, they’re just fine.
 
I remember sororities at college. They provided camaraderie and support for women in educational institutions that had only comparatively recently become co-ed. And sororities prepped girls for the veneer surface of — I don’t know — a life of little academic enterprise after college?

Sororities taught girls social skills and cemented a community fashion. Not fashion in the creative sense but rather a pageant of the accepted norm. Beauty as a dress code that everyone could feel excited about despite it being ludicrously conformist. Sororities also reinforced the preening considered necessary to attract the ambitious corporate male who sought a domestic arrangement in much the same way that he courted a career. For girls who were neither creative, independent, nor perhaps all that complicated, sororities extended the home economics lessons to the prospect of hiring maids.

What do sorority girls do after college when their only idea of extra-curricular means to hold an ice cream social? I don’t want to demean what they do, they have children of course, and run communities. And when there is time, they do lunch. And when there’s charity afoot, these girls do as their sororities did and conduct a benefit.

I saw such a benefit recently, an enormous social function, an annual society event, the cumulative product of countless sub-subcommittee meetings. I could say that the beneficiaries of the charity could have mattered not the least, but that would in this case be most inaccurate. Two factors:

At Newborn Hope the fuzzy bunny factor is in overdrive. Money raised is “for the babies!!!” Specifically babies born prematurely in rural areas without access to urban hospital programs. The money goes for brochures and nurse training programs which teach, basically: Get that baby to the city stat! Money sometimes goes directly for taxi vouchers to accomplish that end.

So it’s not just that the NBH charity is for a demonstrably compelling, in-your-arms-tangible cause, but the chief beneficiaries, as with traditional sororities, are the sorority girls themselves. Making a rough estimate of the figures, I can approximate that well over half of the resources generated by NBH go to feeding itself. Throwing the big party, holding all the planning meetings, that’s the primary function. The money these women spend goes to pay for the luncheons and the overhead. It’s a great boondoggle for The Broadmoor and the shops which get to advertise through the annual function, the NBH fashion show.

The time which the girls expend toward putting it all together is also a large resource redirected. The girls are not driving the taxis nor holding any babies. These philanthropists are holding lunches, paying for the lunches themselves, eating the lunches themselves, and planning for themselves the next one. While it might be uncharitable to ask these ladies to give directly, albeit unselfishly to a good cause? Do premature babies have to settle for only a fraction of their self-serving dollar? Such sorority-style events are very similar to a retail store charity model where an advertized small percentage of sales, nothing extra from the customer’s pocket, is promised to go to a charity.

And what about the charity of premature babies? Wouldn’t a public health matter be best addressed by a public health program? Here you have rich Libertarians who would rather contribute their table scraps to the cause, rather than support taxes to improve the health system thereby resolving many health problems, among them premature births.

And in Colorado Springs there is the Christian Anti-abortion element. NBH plays straight into the hands of the Respect Life crowd. Anything that forces a pregnant woman to commit to her pregnancy, prematurely.

The Westside Pioneer

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There’s a little publication on the Colorado Springs west side that’s notoriously non-political. Maybe I shouldn’t say notorious, it’s just a neighborhood weekly. Let’s say it persistently proclaims its non-allegiance. And it’s true, it won’t print anything controversial or having to do with issues or the means to take action.
 
The other day however, on the lead article, above the fold, there appeared a headline bashing a Democratic candidate for pulling out of a scheduled debate. The scheming had been convoluted, the Republican having chosen a date which conflicted with another more broadly attended event. It was the kind of maneuvering which always attends political match-ups. Democrat Mike Merrifield had to pull out of the debate and the Westside Pioneer was there to flash the bulbs and gloat.

The supposedly non-partisan paper didn’t break it’s apolitical stand, it defends, rather it reported the truth. I say half the truth. Representative Merrifield wasn’t afraid to debate Republican Kyle Fisk, he indecorously had to sidestep the New Life Church protege’s trap. But the Westside Pioneer printed just the first half. The half that made the Democrat look bad.

An apolitical paper weighing in against the Democrats. Why am I not surprised?

Because when someone tells you they are non-political, they are actually endorsing the powers that be. Nothing political about those in power, oppressing, taking advantage, doing the milking, taking the lion’s share of the cream. To attempt to dislodge the corruptness is political. To ask that a newspaper call attention to the graft is political.

So what is the Westside Pioneer but a Bushite, Neocon, Warmonger, Social Security Thieving, Human Rights Abusing, Constitution Burning, Union Busting, Pro Big Business Globalization, Anti-community, Anti-small business, Anti-social safetly net, media tool. Well, the Westside Pioneer is probable nothing but Libertarian, opposing government involvement like overpasses and emminent domain. But that’s the rub with Libertarians. They do give a whit whether their welfare is advanced at the expense of another’s liberty. It’s every Libertarian for themselves.

The guy who sits on the fence, watching the wolves descend upon the sheep, not crying out but instead choosing to cry “nothing to see here,” may not be pro-wolf, but he’s certainly not looking out for the sheep. Too bad the sheep keep buying his paper.