February 24, 2023 The Survival Podcast ended with a bang. I mean, the punch in the face. When I heard it on Friday, I immediately thought I should cut out that audio. Low and behold, Jack did it for me (at least he put a clip on mewe which prompted me to get it before I lost it).
Right for the wrong reasons is that you don’t get a say on how things go. You are promoting ‘dangerous misinformation’ by disputing the status quo. You don’t get a vote, opinion/facts/truth doesn’t matter.
This is the link to the audio for the show that he refers to as being banned from YouTube for dangerous information. By the way, each of the thirty points is source cited.
End Your Programming Routine: You know that I am not about believing unsupported conspiracies. But when the preponderance of the facts are on your side, we as humans (should) know when right is right. We are in real trouble if we don’t get this concept. I would say one of the most profound presentations I have ever heard.
And here we are my friends, the end. It has been seven long months of mostly Fridays analyzing this very long book. I should say, I am going to have one more and that will be my total book summary next week. I will stop looking at each chapter and themes but consider the book as a whole.
I don’t want to completely ruin the ending so I am not going to talk about what exactly happened, even in summary. But, what I will say is that the ending didn’t fully fit into the flow of the rest of the book (to me). That is all I am going to say about that.
The thing that I am going to talk about today is the symbolism of the Taggert Transcontinental bridge across the Mississippi. This bridge has been mentioned in many chapters throughout the book. I want to talk about what it means and what it doesn’t.
As the story goes, the bridge was built in 1885. It was originally forbidden by the barge companies running up and down the Mississippi river. Nathaniel Taggert was even sued and lost in his ability to build it. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled on the matter that he eventually won the ability to build the bridge. And so he did “with his bare hands’ as the story goes.
Apparently, there are very few crossings of the Mississippi river and this bridge is one of them. Throughout the book as things progressively got worse, there was always hope because the bridge still stood and was functional. Most of the track problems seemed to happen in the mountain west or southwest. The fact that the bridge was still available allowed the possibility of transcontinental service by rerouting around the problem areas.
It is said that Rand developed a psychological discipline called Objectivism. In a nutshell, it is the use of reason and logic as a basis for belief. I suppose that this is different than the Freudian school which are the three personalities or the Frankl school of experiential development. From a logical basis, I can understand that bridge functioning = potential hope. But I really see the error in that line of thinking is really too simple of an analysis.
Just think using a simple example. I am still alive so therefore I have a chance at becoming an millionaire. What I didn’t say is that I haver terminal cancer and that I am on life support. Yes, there is a chance that someone could hand me a lottery ticket and I could become an instant millionaire in the next drawing. It is possible. What isn’t said is the probability is almost zero. Even if that did happen, so what. I wouldn’t live long enough to cash it in. I wouldn’t live long enough to spend it or possibly write it into my will to give it away.
I don’t have a problem with Objectivism per se. It seems like a perfectly fine way to run as railroad as they say. But, it does seem to be a fatal character flaw with Dabny and it is certainly no proof that this is a valid discipline; the very idea that Ojectivism is based. Now, I don’t want to get all philosophical, this is an area that I have little education or training. But, I believe that logic only exists on facts and facts only exist on what is, not what could be.
So as in life, decisions have to be made. Facts forecast probable outcomes and those are the basis of decision, not facts themselves. Each decision is a gamble based on probability, risk and potential reward. Logic by it’s nature cannot be involved with uncertainty. That would mean that A may not result in A and because A might eventually equal B or A might equal C.
Just like I could win the lottery on my deathbed, so could a catastrophic event happen in business or government. Near certainty is not certain, it is almost likely. This is where the saying ‘barring uncertain circumstances’ comes from. On one hand, I admire the never give up mindset. But, I will say this is the attitude of running an empire, not creating one. Because I believe that you have to quit things that don’t work or won’t work.
End Your Programming Routine: As we wrap up our time here with this book, I have to say it has been an amazing journey for me. My eyes were already open, but it is so strange to read events of fiction written over seventy years ago coming alive in real or near real time. I think if you asked people fifty years ago, this was a playbook of what not to do. Now, it seems like a playbook of what is happening. That is sad. What you do about it is be informed on the issues, but live your life for yourself and not others, just like John Galt.
This is the second to last chapter and we are heading to the big bang. Last chapter we had Galt’s refusal to cooperate, so where does that leave us? Well in true government fashion, we need to double down on failed efforts. Because more of the same will eventually work, right?
I keep saying that things are not going well but truly they are failing at this point. I think that our own experiences have proven that failing is often hard to recognize when you are in the middle of the collapse. You need a point of reference in order to establish how much change has actually occurred.
I am going to skip the chapter synopsis but to say that Dr Stadler and Cuffy Meigs blow themselves up at Project X trying to take over a portion of the country. Numerous high level government officials quit because of hopelessness and others just go straight strongman.
I want to go back to the idea of collapse. I have heard it describe as slow collapse because it doesn’t happen overnight. I suppose that there are those immediate changes like in the case of a coup. But, I actually think that this is normal. If we think about near history collapses like the Soviet Union it was fairly quick as over the course of a couple months. It probably seems fast because we condense history but I am pretty sure that three months of hell doesn’t seem fast at the time, especially if you are in it.
The course of Atlas Shrugged seems to run over multiple years. If there were concrete date references, I missed them. But I do distinctly recall descriptions of different seasons and we went through multiple winters and falls in the book. My point with this is that this would be termed a slow collapse.
There are so many things that we are born into that we never knew any different. Recently, I have heard many comparisons to the speculation of 2023 and 2008. For those that don’t study or remember history, 2008 was when the US government had a policy of “Too Big to Fail”. Different pundits are predicting that 2023 is going to be worse than 2008. Let’s take a look.
Yesterday, I was reading a headline “223,000 non-farming jobs added in December 2022”. The subtext of the headline was that this number blew expectations out of the water. And the implications from that is that things are so much better than expected and you should feel good about this too. I say this in context that also released in the Twitter files the FBI paid Twitter $3.5million for the ability to influence who and what was allowed to be posted on twitter.
Now I ask you, even if the numbers are truly accurate can we even trust any source at this point? Even if we believe that to be true, how many jobs were lost. I saw a lot of sizable numbers between Meta, ABC, Twitter and Amazon. You see, when you add 200 but lose 500 there is a lot to be desired. The headlines I was reading to support this writing was saying the ‘hot economy is starting to cool’. I am thinking to myself ‘what hot economy’? It’s hard to say that seven interest rate increases and 50% inflation equals a hot economy,
Anyway, I am probably going to get out of my lane if I keep going because I am not going to provide proper source citing for this. My point here is that we are in collapse and we have people telling us how lucky we are going to get. At the risk of mixing politics and economics, I ask are we more free today than we were in 1980 or less? Since there is no evidence that anyone can provide that we are more free, we have failed liberty. And that is a collapse in my book.
End Your Programming Routine: This topic could warrant an entire series. I also think that there is very little that be done about all of this, especially as an individual. I suppose the good news is that it is not a violent collapse. Smart money recognizes the situation and takes advantage of it. Don’t be afraid to study the rules and find the loopholes, there is still profits to be made in my lifetime. And that is all we need to be successful and by proxy happy.
Reading Atlas Shrugged gave me a fundamental paradigm shift. Not only did it inspire me to look into philosophy as a discipline but change my appreciation for it in general. I guess it never occurred to me that fundamental understanding of the same definition is critical to proper logical analysis. It sounds so simple but I guess that I have never done it before.
End Your Programming Routine: I think this is where we start the end your programming routine. We need to understand the fundamental questions in life to be able to successfully manage and thrive. I am definitely thinking of doing more in this line, including study of philosophy. I enjoyed it, I hope you do too.
We are getting close now, I can almost taste it. After this chapter, there are approximately 40 pages and two chapters remaining. I have to say, I didn’t anticipate completely what happens in this chapter and I am still noodling how this is going to end. So let’s get into it.
This is the chapter that follows the 60 page statement by John Galt. Immediately, the government representatives that were hijacked are stunned. The entire country is in a tailspin, of course and government continues to put up a false front. This is where the plan to coopt John Galt starts to happen.
Dabny looks up Galt’s address despite being warned not to. Her finding him draws the government to him as well. They capture John Galt and he is then held in an attempt to give the appearance that he has joined sides with the status quo.
The entire book has been this chess match of proxy conflicts between the group saying they represent ‘the people’ and the group of people that say that they represent ‘the individual’. In this chapter, we have direct interaction between the two groups. Surprisingly, Galt gets captured and is held prisoner in the attempt to win him over to the side of the people.
I suppose, this is where the rubber meets the road in this chapter. It is sometimes a good strategy to emulate what is successful for your own purposes. For instance, I have heard the advice that if something is working in a particular genre, then that means that there is a market and the possibility for it to work for you. In more plain language, I will use an example.
In today’s day and age, there is a kind of career as what is called ‘an influencer’. The nearest way I can figure is that people get money for being a celebrity of sorts. It is enough money to be a full time job and sometimes significant amount of money. So, because that is a career, that means that there is room for others to do the same thing even in the same space. The same can be said for contractors or widget makers too.
What isn’t said or known is the formula on how to make it actually work. Certainly, there are attributes like appearance, use of popular platforms, consistency of interaction but there are also intangibles; one of them that I would call luck. My point with all of that is that emulating success is a way to obtain it. I think we have quite the opposite in Atlas Shrugged.
One of the characteristics of obtaining success is authenticity. Politicians are in a way influencers as well. Recently, a former pope just died. During his time at the head of the Catholic church, he was seen as a traditionalist or conservative. This direction of the church was really seen as a shift from the populist direction of his predecessor.
I am not a Catholic, but a Christian so I am adjacent. There is no doubt that the Pope is an important figure to people in that religion. My sense is that even though there was strife over policy, there was no doubt that he was a man of faith and genuine in his beliefs. What I am trying to say is that whether we agree with the direction I don’t think that we can disagree on the intent.
That is the thing that any organization which tries to coopt a movement or attach itself to a rising star could possibly make it work. Of course Atlas Shrugged was not going to work because the government really didn’t believe in the same things as John Galt. They wanted to use his popularity and be seen as associated with him rather than embrace his beliefs. The reason that I say this is because they truly don’t need Galt to fix the problem, they need to change their beliefs and therefore the policies.
I sometimes think that a parliamentary style government would be better than our government. But, then I think that Parliaments are so much more subject to opinion with the ‘no confidence’ card that can be played that I am left with no good government options. You might think that makes a government more responsive to the people but my observation is that it is an entity that is more manic.
End Your Programming Routine: Just like Lord of the Rings and a score of other fiction works, you cannot control the power if you are not worthy. Simply attaching your name to a rising star doesn’t work without being genuine with your convictions. Even at the point of a gun, John Galt refused to cooperate. Because after all, are you going to murder someone on a national broadcast? Before completely chancing it, know your environment and risks. If you stand for your convictions, you can’t be swayed, even by force.
Well, well, well… we meet again. I have to say that this is one of those chapters that goes completely off of the rails. It is completely and unnecessarily too long. It is an over sixty page soliloquy by John Galt and his reasons for doing what he has done. I actually think that this is probably Rand speaking. I think that the this probably could have been done very effectively in 10 pages. It took me probably six hours to read this and even then I don’t think I got most of it.
After the last chapter, he finally did it. Reardon finally through in the towel. As a result Mr. Thompson was going to give a national address. In case you don’t recognize the name, Mr. Thompson is the President at the time. Not so fast, John Galt hijacks the broadcast and here is the longest statement in written history.
There is a lot of good stuff here that just makes sense, but really there are two things that I want to talk about. The first one is the name of the section ‘A is A’. On the surface, you might think that this is kind of gibberish. But, it makes perfect sense because it is exactly as it sounds and it is exactly what is happening today.
What John Galt is saying is a functioning and proper society must be accept the reality that one thing cannot be another. Or said another way, A cannot be B otherwise it would actually be B and not A. As one example let us talk about gender. It is pervasive throughout the school system and soon throughout society that there are more than two genders. In fact, at our local high school we had a homecoming king, queen and a non-binary (something or other).
There are kids that are X, there are kids that allegedly identify as they/them or literally plural. This stuff doesn’t even make sense. This creates all kinds of issues related to sports competition and even locker room assignment. I have even been seeing stories about how people went through gender re-assignment and now are trying to transition back to their original gender. These are kids that don’t even know what they are going to do after high school thinking that they are born in some deficient manner with respect to their gender. I would argue that they don’t even know what being either a man or a woman is supposed to be.
Like any good Libertarian, I could care less if someone wants to identify are a cat, but A is A. It is dangerous to deny biology and reality because we are convincing ourselves that it doesn’t exist or we can wish reality is not really true if we tell ourselves that it isn’t. We should probably do away with all the homecoming nonsense anyway, I don’t see much value.
The second thing that I want to talk about is to quote John Galt directly. “The evil of the world is made possible by the sanction that you give it. Withdraw you sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to win on your enemies terms or win at a game that they are setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those that enslave you, do not beg for alms from those that robbed you be it subsidies, loans or jobs do not join their team to recoup what they have taken by helping them rob your neighbors.”
It goes on but it makes the point so elegantly. This is what I have been saying about politics all along. No matter the side, either side is taking from someone to further their own agenda and personal riches of the people that are connected within. We need to stop thinking that we can vote ourselves out of the problems we have. To be frank, our problems are the result of us voting in the first place. Picking a side endorses the system into existence.
I do this as a hobby and because I am trying to change people’s programming. The fact of the matter is that I am not surprised that a single contested race did not end the way that I wanted. I didn’t vote for third party candidates or just ‘throw in a protest vote’. I voted for what I thought was the lessor of the two evils. But I also did it to make a point that my local society is 180 degrees of my own personal beliefs.
I have talked about scientific laws and theories before. A theory is something that cannot be either completely proven or disproven but a law is something that cannot be disproven. The theory of relativity is a theory because we can’t actually test it. We cannot travel at the speed of light to find out that we have aged relative to the speed that we have travelled while others have aged relative to the distance that we travelled in that time. If we start to tell ourselves that Newton’s first law is Force = sunshine/rainbows instead of mass * acceleration then we haven’t accomplished anything other than making ourselves collectively dumber. For those that don’t know E = mc^2 is the exact equation as F = m*a, more on that some other day.
End Your Programming Routine: It doesn’t surprise me that my philosophy falls on deaf ears. In the book, John Galt is willing to wait for the collapse of society because it is the only tool he has remaining. It seems like the course of the book lasts five years or so and accelerates quickly. We are watching and even enabling our own collapse as we live and breathe, it is just happening so much slower that we are not even seeing it. Like John and his peers, there might come a day where I realize that my efforts to change programming are beyond my reach or ability. And like Dabny at this point, I am not willing to give up.
I think that it is fitting that we end the calendar year on Atlas Shrugged. This has been a monumental review series for me. There has been so much good and relevant content that seems to be evergreen even though it was written in the 1950s. This chapter is no exception.
Hank Reardon’s family tries to backtrack on their relationship with him. They try to apologize to him because the state has seized all of Reardon’s assets and he has no more liquid cash to keep paying them. Reardon’s family wants him to start clearing assets so that he has cash flow to keep supporting them which Hank refuses to do.
The meeting with the government proceeded the meeting with his family. Essentially they were also backtracking because they were afraid that he was going to quit. They were offering what they called an equitable deal by combining all of the profits and dispensing them out by proportional furnace count. This plan was to be administered via the Steel Unification Board just like the railroad. The fact that Reardon had fifty percent more output with a third the amount of furnaces did not sit well and Hank refuses to take the deal.
As Reardon left the meeting he found a riot in front of the gate to the steel factory. The riot was labeled as union driven but was apparently incited by the government reps, specifically Tinky Holloway who was slated to be the head of the Steel Unification Board. I will spare all the intimate details so that you can read the book and all of the twists and turns. Suffice to say, I want to talk about the riots.
There is a term that is called ‘Astroturfing‘. It means that there is something that appears to be organic or natural but really isn’t. In context, it is generally used to describe events such as protests that are often heavily funded or staffed by outsiders. This is what we have with the steel mill riots. where the rioters are not even workers or union members but paid rabble rousers.
Practices like this are used for the optics of the situation. When some event is dubbed the ‘Million Mom March‘ then there darn well be at least one million moms attending or the cause will be deemed illegitimate. You can read the link if you like, I am going to talk about it next.
Wikipedia states that the million mom march organization said that there was 500-750,000 people in attendance. National Park Service estimates 150,000 but the organization’s numbers included 70 satellite gatherings in their numbers as well. If you remember the media coverage, special camera angles were used to make the gathering appear as full as possible and therefore how could it not be one million moms.
This event was a re-branding of Handgun Control Incorporated (which incidentally has been named two other things and is now Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence). So I ask you, what sounds more benign, Handgun Control Inc or the Million Mom March? And what were they really marching for? Were they loving, caring moms or were they trying to impose their political and moral beliefs on others?
Brady has been around since the 1980s and will likely be around forever more. But, their new name sounds a lot like some other organizations like Moms Demand Action; really, not really. If I look at the summary statement when I search the group, I read ‘a grass roots organization’ but on the very same page I see that the parent organization is Everytown for Gun Safety and their actual name is Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
Let us just look a little further. When I search Everytown for Gun Safety, I find that the founder of the organization in Michael Bloomberg. I am not going to say that a billionaire cannot be the founder of some sort of organization, but I am going to have a hard time swallowing the ‘grass roots’ definition.
Grass roots means that it starts with you and me. I seemed to have misplaced my 75 billion extra dollars, so I think I am one of the people. What I am getting at here is that every time we see some sort of national political/equity movement, look a little deeper into the origin story like this one sponsoring Black Lives Matter (Tides Foundation).
Just wait until the next chapter, we are going to learn all about ‘shared prosperity’. I am equally enamored by the self titled definition of ‘charity’.
End Your Programming Routine: I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this but I am all for equality. My definition of equality is just that, equal. If you remember my analysis of Rights in the American Dream Series then you will remember that Rights are actually subjective. This my friends is getting to where it is at. The fact that Rand laid all of this at our feet seventy years ago and we are too stupid to recognize same game different players is our own fault. More on that as we progress. See you in 2023 for the finale.
This was a long one at fifty pages. The good news is that while there are a lot of words, not that much was really important. A lot of back story and setup was going on. That kind of reminds me of year end. There is a lot going on but none of it is important. We spend a lot of time reflecting on the year that was but all those things already happened.
Shortages begin. Jim gloats to Dabny about his acquisition of d’Anconia Copper but all of the sudden the mines are blown up, presumably Djanneskjold. Emma Chalmers (aka Kip’s Ma) is promoting Soy Beans over the traditional grain crop of wheat. For that reason, the rail schedule is being manipulated by Cuffy Meigs to favor getting soy beans to market rather than wheat. Trains are not staged and the wheat crop is ruined.
This series of events begins an entire chapter of civil unrest. Murder, succession, riots and all the things that go along with shortage of basic food stuffs and supplies. There are multiple incidents of mechanical failure which are the triggers to such events and it is implied that the cause is the shortage of copper wire.
Sometimes a national diet is the result of a necessity and sometimes it is a result of a decision that someone else makes. Take for instance ancient China. Diets consisted of vegetables, local protein and rice in the more southern region. Cultures that grew to a large population had a large agrarian component for obvious reasons. A society needed a huge amount of calories to sustain growth. Those calories largely came as a result of carbohydrates.
Contrast these relatively huge population numbers in Asia against protein oriented cultures such as Mongols, Germanic barbarians or prairie native Americans. Those populations were tiny in comparison. Part of the reason is that animals contain a large number of calories compared to carbohydrates by the acre but they also have a degree of chance related to procuring food. It was not practically possible for these societies to grow to such a large size given their efforts to survive.
Something quite transformational happens when a society becomes agrarian. They also become docile and weak. No longer is freedom valued over security. The individualistic characteristic starts to become an identity of a collective. This is not an exhaustive treatise on the types of societies or their diets per se but an argument with the generalities of such.
It is sort of ironic that the American stereotype of a farmer is a hard scrabble, protagonist of sorts. When in reality, they have silently become the serf in the collective machine. They are the foundation of big food which is the fuel tank of the imperialistic regime. Not only do they feed the world but they are the first advocates of the patriotic propaganda. Talk about the slaves proud of their chains.
Lest you think that I am picking on farmers, I am simply saying that they are the enablers to the agrarian society. It’s not that I don’t think they work hard, they sure do. If I had a choice to hang out with the red, white and blue crowd or the high earning liberals you can guess who I would choose. The real problem for me is that I don’t belong to either.
So, where does this leave us? I believe that the soy bean reference is an homage to the versatility of the legume as a food source and the Asian origin a hotbed of communism in the 1950s. At least the classical definition of communism contained a 100% planned economy and society which included a diet steeped in classical diet. I don’t know for sure, but I would be willing to guess that North Koreans have limited choices when planning meals.
It is the sociopath that want’s to rule others. And by ruling others doesn’t just mean creating the laws from a legal standpoint but also how big their house has to be, how much rent is too much rent to charge, how fast you can drive, what is too big to fail and let us not forget what to not eat. The way the new world order is going, meat is on the out just like surcharging portion size. We literally have the ‘food plate’ to guide us on a diet that leads straight to obesity and diabetes.
I am speaking off the cuff and I should do the research rather than speak in speculation but I don’t have the time at the moment. Soy has been linked to phytoestrogen and the feminization of America. We colloquially call them ‘man boobs’ but it is much more than that. An increase in allergies and obesity and heart disease for a high soy diet which ironically we have with a highly processed diet.
Here is one to whet the appetite because I felt bad about just speaking in platitudes.
All that being said, I am relatively sure that if you ate soy beans every day there would be no real consequences. But that is not how we use them in our diet. More on that another day.
End Your Programming Routine: Dangerous speech filtration is now protecting us from seeing the truth or even lies. While we can still read whatever books we want, we are a society that is becoming too lazy to bother. On my recent flight to Indianapolis, not a single reading light was on, including mine which was broken. Maybe they all were but I estimate one in thirty lights on a typical flight. Everyone is on a device or built in screen on the plane. The longer we live with portable electronics, the less reading lights are on during flights.
Reading is not the solution, but the indicator of critical thinking. TV is called programing for a reason. It is entertainment not stimulation. I think fiction is a healthy part of being well rounded but too much fiction becomes fantasy. And, when we live in fantasy, we forget to question whether a soy based diet is the right choice or even a proper choice.
I kind of go off today. I sat down and just started writing because what is happening in the book holds such a mirror up to our own society. I guess that I can only say how ironic that the parallels of the 1950s are matching the 2020s so many times. It just has to be that they are not parallels but truths because that is the only justification that would make logical sense.
Jim Taggert’s wife confronts him after listening to the radio program that Dabny spilled the beans on her affair with Hank Reardon. The nature of the conversation was more about who was really in control of Taggert Transportation. This is a night that Jim was supposed to be at a party whereby he was celebrating that he would acquire d’Anconia Copper by government takeover. Incidentally, I thought a person could only own one business? OK, so there is a story gap or things are so broken now that it doesn’t matter.
A series of arguments occur in this chapter. The last one being that Jim has an affair on the very night that all of this takes place with Lillian Reardon. What I really want to talk about is the language that Jim uses during the argument. “Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody? I’ll do as I please, and you will keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else”.
Here is the mindset of the well healed and better than you liberal. I don’t actually like the term liberal because it does the term injustice. In the days of communism, this is the Politburo. This is the upper class of the party that is not bound by the same rules as the rest of 99.9% party members. While the entire country is standing in soup lines, the party leaders are eating caviar every night.
I don’t usually name drop, but in this case I think that it helps illustrate what I am am saying. You have the Jeffery Epstein/Prince Andrew types that operated above the law for so many years. They must have crossed some unknown line to move from a position of privilege to outcast. These people were born into positions of unknown wealth. But they believed that they could have/do whatever they wanted. In some cases, I guess the consequences are still not realized. I suspect that there are many more of these type people, I just don’t know who they are.
There is a huge list of liberal loudmouths like Whoopi Goldberg/Michael Moore and the likes. These people earned a voice by acquiring wealth and fame. Make no mistake, they are not in the politburo class but they are the useful idiots. By continuing to spout off and act like they represent a class they continue to keep focus on themselves allowing the real puppet masters to continue with the play, unseen and unknown. They are continued access and pretending that they are part of the class as long as they perform their useful activities. I do believe that when the chips are down, we will see them sniveling and begging like the rest of the country.
There are some that have entered the scene by luck like AOC. Again, I would put her into the useful idiot category. She is not there, but may end up in charge by a series of calculating political moves. Everyone knows Gorbachev/Yeltsin/Jung Un. Some on that list left their mark by changing their ways and some never will. These are the public/political figures that enjoyed the life of politburo while the majority of the country was living a different standard.
I am not sure yet how to categorize those that move between the politburo and the spotlight. Maybe they are the true ruling class and I just cant see it. The Bill Gates/Zuckerberg/Bloomberg silicon valley types. These are the ‘do-gooders’. They want to censor your speech because it is potentially harmful. They want you to stop eating meat because of potential links to climate change. They want to limit your portion size for your own good.
I was reading an article when I was working on this post titled ‘How did the Democratic Party become the party of the billionaire?’ It really didn’t answer the question but the answer seemed very clear. It is the party that wants to limit other peoples freedoms so that others can get rich. Using a populist platform i.e. unions and welfare, it is so much easier to dupe people into thinking they are doing the right thing while they are getting screwed. All you have to do is write some entitlements for some while taking more for yourself. All they see is the free pizza for life, meanwhile I am also getting all you can eat salad bar, open bar, chicken wings and you get the point.
As long as this Ponzi scheme will last my useful working life, that is all that matters. It is why communism failed in the USSR, Vietnam, Cuba and China. North Korea only exists at the whim of China because it is another useful idiot in global politics. The brand of socialism that we are building will eventually fail, it has to. But, whether it will ultimately persevere is irrelevant, I only live one life and this is it – minimum viable product of government so that I can get mine.
I probably haven’t done a good job linking my rant to the story here. What got me thinking about all of this was Jim’s behavior. He thinks that he is capable of doing or having whatever he wants. This got me thinking about what I call people in the ruling class doing whatever they wanted despite the laws (i.e. Epstein). Not being a very public figure, I had to link public figures to the ruling class specifically media stars etc. I had to justify the behavior of the other figures in relation to the politburo to be clear in the structure.
The truth is, I don’t know. Every time we find out about living lives above the law, they go just like we expect. The thing is, we don’t know what is happening until after it happens. So, I suppose you can call this accusation, but it is my truth.
End Your Programming Routine: I spoke only about people associated visibly with the democratic party. Make not mistake I think people on the other side are just as vile. I tell myself that George W Bush was a rube. But then, how does an idiot graduate from Yale, own a professional baseball team, become governor and then president? No, pure evil. There is a reason that no-names like myself speak of altruistic principals. We are not getting anything from the system. If I was would I be so cavalier to denounce it? I’d like to think so
I suppose that you could say that we are becoming fast friends: Friday’s with Ayn Rand. We started this journey July 8 so that makes us five months in with still nearly two months to go. Crazy because on one hand, it seems like it is just wizzing by but on the other hand, it seems like this had been going on forever.
I am not sure why Rand does this. Within this chapter, there are three distinct things going on and really could have been three chapters. At least the second sequence leads to the third and is loosely associated, but they really are three separate happenings. Once again, I am not going to give a plot synopsis but talk about it.
This chapter is titled ‘Anti-Greed’ which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for once. I think I would have titled it ‘Truth is a Choice’ or maybe ‘Choices have Consequences’. At the beginning of the chapter, Dr. Robert Stadler is whisked away for a demonstration. It turns out the demonstration is a new weapon. A weapon to end all wars and bring peace forever (sound familiar?). It is Stadler’s science and experimentation that provided the basis of this new weapon even though the research was allegedly unrelated.
The weasel that is Dr. Floyd Ferris has been working with the government to create this new weapon without the knowledge of Sadler. When it comes time to do the Public Relations after the demonstration, Ferris essentially blackmails Sadler to either stand for the new weapon as a show of unity or face the consequences. Sadler, being a prototypical liberal turns out to be spineless and goes with the flow.
Later in the same chapter, James Taggart informs Dabny that she is booked on the Bertram Scudder radio program. Her survival for over a month is cause for national celebration and an event to promote unity. Dabny refuses to do it until she is called on by Lillian Reardon. At such time Mrs Reardon threatens Dabny with blackmail about her affair with Hank Reardon unless she goes on the radio show. Dabny does go on, but it is not a repeat of the Sadler affair.
I am a believer in Social morals and codes. I think they are necessary for well functioning society. I guess to me that those are really derived from a higher power and not necessarily an obligation to a peer. For instance, do not lie is not in the 10 commandments.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Notice that this is not written as Thou shalt not lie, it is more circumstantial than that. Do not lie at the expense of someone else. When it comes to the truth, some truth’s are not earned when they are purely for someone else’s gain. As an example “Do you own firearms?” Now, I ask you what business is it of yours? What are you going to do with this information? Who really wants to know? To me, this is baseless questioning where the worthiness of the truth is subjective.
I am not naïve. The fact of the matter is that most lies do harm someone else. I am merely pointing out that we are not biblically commanded to always tell the truth. Ironically, when I read the biblical analysis this is all in reference to business type proceedings be court or trade. I think that if we look at the other related commandments.
2. Thou shalt not have any other gods before me
4. Honor thy mother and father
10. Though shalt not covet
These are all directing us to remain faithful and have a form of lying associated. I do find it interesting that they are directed at specific people God, parents and peers. There really is no code of conduct for spouses, children, slaves or extended family. If you are taking the Christian approach, extended family could be neighbors but I certainly don’t see people within the nuclear family impacted by these commandments. My wife is not my neighbor – you get the point.
How did we get here you ask? If I quote Hank Reardon from the chapter “People think that a liar gains victory over his victim. What I have learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself to then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked.” From a biblical lie, even in the case where someone ‘gets away with lying’, they are still trapped in that alternate reality.
End Your Programming Routine: This chapter actually had another theme in it that I completely ignored. But what I wrote about was so much bigger. Tom Gresham is famous for saying ‘a lie is only a lie if you deserve the truth’. Sometimes, it takes guts to tell the truth and sometimes a lie is completely justified. You just have to know when is the right time for either.
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