2. It’ll take a lot of rats to clothe plus-size models in the latest fashion accessory.

3. Encouraging us to keep the weight on, the American Heart Association endorses Nintendo’s Wii. Please put aside your shovel and turn on the TV.

4. Japan’s Prime Minister has put an ex-swimsuit model in charge of solving the problem of declining birthrate in that country. Ratcheting up planetary ecological overshoot is an idea whose time has come.

5. Also on the topic of objectifying women in the name of sex, Charlie Sheen has ensured one of the world’s stupidest television shows will remain on the air by settling for $2 million per 22-minute episode to play a misogynist adolescent. The new season will have to wait until he pays his dues for beating his wife and threatening to kill her. For his indiscretion, he’ll serve 30 days in jail (or, more likely, barely supervised community service).

6. Apparently trying his own hand at situational comedy, BP CEO Tony Hayward says BP is capturing a majority of the oil from the spill, as well as claiming the gusher is spilling only 10 million barrels of oil each day. The media play along, naturally.

7. It’s no wonder ethical investors include BP in their portfolios.

8. By now, we’re probably all aware who’s to blame for the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s those pesky environmentalists, of course. Sarah Palin says so.

9. Last week’s article in the New York Times is yet another fine piece of journalism, considering the source. If the article had been written by a semi-literate 12-year-old, it might have warranted a passing grade in an American elementary school. The paternalistic piece of ass-wipe disguised as journalism quotes a single “prepper” and a single authority. The latter, Daniel Yergin, is the renowned energy optimist who believes crude oil emanates from a limitless, juicy nougat in the center of the planet. Even the title points the wrong direction: For the dozen or so of us who care about the living planet, we’re preparing for the best of times, not the worst.

Also last week, in a rare moment of introspection the Times asks whether we shouldn’t self-induce genocide. As if we’re not.

10. And, on the topic of genocide, self-proclaimed uber-environmentalist Bill McKibben is begging Barack Obama to resurrect our energy policy so we can keep propping up the omnicidal machine of civilization. McKibben is becoming increasingly desperate to finish the job of destroying the living planet on which we depend. With examples such as these, Sarah Palin seems right on the mark.

As Berra pointed out in his 1997 book, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!, he didn’t utter many of the quotes attributed to him. With that caveat, I’ll take artistic license in this essay. And, of course, I realize that the following predictions are fraught of peril. As Yogi reportedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Barack Obama is surpassing Orwell’s worst nightmares, although the groupies formerly known as Lefties have failed to notice. Obama’s medical-care plan allows the Internal Revenue Service to sequester your money, with penalties, if you fail to pay for health [sic] insurance. Meanwhile, with support from the increasingly impotent Securities and Exchange Commission, Obama has destroyed the primary advantage of keeping your money in a Money Market fund. This ultraconservative investment formerly was famous for its accessibility, but Obama took care of that. You can no longer access your money if your fund manager is concerned about a run on the bank.

Beware Barack. As Yogi said, “Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”

Barack Obama’s primary concern is the ongoing economic implosion of the country — although I doubt Obama will be hanged in effigy, much less replaced by Sarah Palin in 2012, even the Wall Street Journal admits the country is hanging on the economic precipice — and he is spending considerable effort keeping the age of industry alive. His behind-the-scenes gangsters are almost certainly levitating the stock markets to maintain confidence in that ultimate con game, according to economists Mike Whitney and Nouriel Roubini. There’s nothing new about this illegal activity — the Plunge Protection Team was formed in 1988 under the Reagan administration — but I doubt they’ve ever been so busy. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the United States is headed down the path of financial insolvency even as the government attempts to paper over the economic predicament associated with peak oil, most recently by doubling public debt with a single keystroke.

Manipulation of the markets is just another way to lie to the public allegedly served by this administration, “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”

Meanwhile, your average consumer continues to believe the media hype about the vaunted skills of mostly clueless mainstream economists. Most states face worsening economic conditions, and the only question is which states can slash services fast enough to forestall bankruptcy in the year ahead. Will these consumers put up with the endless bailouts certain to continue well into this year?

Yogi was right about money, especially the hyper-inflated kind: “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” With respect to the future, Yogi seems downright prescient, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

When Obama’s not burning bridges and bombing countries, he’s pumping money into walls in the Middle East and along the U.S./Mexico border. Intelligent people, undoubtedly including Obama, have known for years that walls never work. As even those of us with poor powers of observation know, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

Advice for Obama from Berra: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama is scaling up the war effort, with no limit in sight. His military adventures enjoy a free pass from his neo-conservative base of self-proclaimed liberals. Will he provoke a new member into the elite nuclear club?

Channeling Yogi, one more time: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Reason arose in Greece about 25 centuries ago, and is perhaps best known from Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. Plato (ca. 428-348 BC) uses the conversations of Socrates to pose and explore questions in considerable detail. Although many of the issues and associated conversations seem unsophisticated to contemporary readers, these initial attempts to employ logic to study the natural world and the role of humans in the world are remarkable precisely because they were the unprecedented. The contributions of ancient Greece to the material worldview that characterizes modernity cannot be overstated; that so many of the contributions came from Athens, a city that never exceeded 250,000 residents, is simply astonishing.
Although the ancient Greeks laid the foundation for modernity, few bricks were added to the structure for nearly two millennia. During the early seventeenth century, the empiricist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and the deconstructionist René Descartes (1596-1650) ushered in the Enlightenment, thereby triggering a flurry of construction to the edifice of knowledge. Almost overnight it became clear that the world was a material one that could be observed and quantified by all who dared think and observe. Nature obeyed rules and humans were big-brained animals capable of discovering and describing those rules.
Thus, the Enlightenment eroded the role of authority as a source of knowledge. In the wake of Giordano Bruno’s heinous execution by the Catholic Church, Bacon recanted earlier statements in which he denied the Ptolemaic view that Earth was the center of the universe. But the erosion of authority that began as a trickle quickly became a flood, and the Church was increasingly marginalized as a source of knowledge.
David Hume (1711-1776), in his initial written piece of philosophy, presented a compelling case against miracles, hence against religion: “Of Miracles” was published in 1748 as an essay in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understandings. This essay should be required reading for anybody interested in understanding reason and religion. Considering the ludicrous religious statements coming every recent U.S. President and every recent presidential candidate, it should be required reading for them, too.
Shortly before Charles Darwin formalized the theory of evolution by natural selection in the Origin of Species (1859), Schopenhauer (1788-1860) used Plato-like dialog to question the basis of religion in his well-known essay, “Religion: A Dialogue.” Can you imagine such a nuanced and reasonable debate between candidates for political office in our burgeoning theocracy?
Notably influenced by Schopenhauer and writing shortly after publication of Darwin’s dangerous idea, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) vociferously spread the word about God’s death (probably unaware that Max Stirner had declared the death of God shortly after Nietzsche’s birth in his 1845 book, The Ego and Its Own). Nietzsche predicted Reason would overwhelm worldviews based on mysticism, a prediction that turned out to be hopelessly optimistic. As S. Jonathan Singer concludes in his 2001 book, The Splendid Feast of Reason, it appears unlikely that more than ten percent of people are capable of employing reason as a basis for how they live. Singer likely did not know he was echoing Schopenhauer, although Schopenhauer’s use of dialog in his essay clearly indicates he knew he was echoing Plato in reaching the same conclusion. In any event, the absence of reason on the campaign trail represents a distinct and disturbing departure from reality, though it closely matches the ten percent figure given by Plato and Singer. Are the candidates pandering to the public, hence satisfying our obvious desire to be lied to? Or do they really lack the ability to discern fantasy from reality?
Which is worse?
Nietzsche expressed his views on Christianity early and often in his writings, most popularly with Thus Spoke Zarathustra; I recommend that classic book and, for the condensed version of Nietzsche’s view, The Antichrist (the latter, which probably should have been titled The Anti-Christian, represents Nietzsche’s views on God particularly clearly and vehemently, and if you’re short on time, I recommend sections 1-9, 29-39, and 47-49). The Antichrist was intended to be shockingly blasphemous, but it cogently makes many important points and articulates them vividly. The Antichrist is an excellent and strident follow-up to Schopenhauer’s thoughtful essay.
To further muddy Nietzsche’s clarity, be sure to read the 1953 essay published in Look magazine by Bertrand Russell (1903-1959):”What is an agnostic?” Russell was the world’s last philosopher of significance, and his views superbly reflect reality. The birth of postmodernism often is traced to 1960, the year after Russell’s death. I don’t think it’s causal.
Collectively, these four essays illustrate the capacity for, and importance of, Reason. Reason is the basis for understanding the material world. As such, it serves as the foundation upon which we can understand and practice conservation of species and cultures. That is, we can conserve the last remaining shards of nature only through description and understanding rooted in reality. Or, of course, by bringing down the entire world’s industrial economy. The latter seems a lot more likely than application of reason to the issue.
Mysticism has proven an insufficient foundation for conserving nature. Ultimately, I suspect it will prove inadequate for saving humanity as well. Although we could blame the lying clowns who represent us, the politicians merely reflect the populace, and therefore contemporary zeitgeist. Like it or not, the politicians we elect are six flights below the lowest common denominator in large part because we cannot reason our way up the stairs.

Let’s start with Barack Obama, the current “Democrat” trying to get past the Republican smear machine. I can’t imagine he’ll be successful, in large part because, as Stalin pointed out, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.” The Republicans are infamous for stealing elections, and they’re working hard to steal this one. But they’re starting out by labeling Obama a “liberal” (I’m old enough to remember when that was a good thing), even though his political hero is Ronald Reagan, who ran away from the liberal label during his presidential campaigns.
Before Obama we have to go back nearly eight years to that most recent Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Actually, I steal a line from my older and wiser brother in referring to Bill Clinton as the best Republican president since Eisenhower. But Clinton called himself a Democrat, so I’ll run with that, for now, while pointing out that his success depended greatly on his ability to outflank Congressional Republicans on the political right. Before Clinton, we have to go back to 1977-1980 to find Democrat Jimmy Carter, who is widely regarded as the worst president in my lifetime (incorrectly, in my opinion).
Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush were sandwiched between Carter and Clinton, and the Reagan-Bush years are widely recognized as the years that led the way into neoconservatism in this country (actually, the notion was gaining traction by the time Reagan spoke at the Goldwater GOP convention, but that’s a quibble). Reagan was formerly a liberal Democrat with Trotsky-esque tendencies, as were the founders and early leaders of neoconservatism.
Thus, I trace the demise of political parties as disparate entities to Reagan’s election in 1980. With the 1980 election, the United States embraced a single ideology: economic growth. Political party no longer mattered because the ideology crossed party lines. And this dangerous ideology absolutely required imperialism. This country lacks the resources, particularly fossil fuels, to become self-sufficient while also growing our economy. By 1980, you might as well start calling nearly everybody in this country a Demoblican, or a Republicrat, or, more simply, a Democratic-Republican.
For that reason, I think this election matters little and perhaps not at all. Previous elections mattered a lot. This one, not so much. And I doubt your vote in 2012, should you be allowed to cast one, will even be counted. Obama, McCain, or — most likely, in my view — Palin (in the wake of McCain’s death) get to preside over the smoldering remains of the U.S. economy before 2012.
Of course, America as Empire is hardly new. FDR wriggled us into World War II explicitly to maintain supply lines, hence access, to fossil fuels. And before FDR, we can trace imperialism, or colonialism, or economic growth at the point of a gun, or whatever label you want to place on Empire, to the tenure of Woodrow Wilson. The famous “Wilson Doctrine” indicates that the United States should not attempt to create an empire, but rather a global democracy of equal and independent nations. But Wilson’s brand of democracy was restricted to the “right” people. His soaring rhetoric rings hollows when contrasted with his deeds, which included brutal U.S. invasions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, inspired by racism. As an aside, Wilson is associated, and sometimes credited, with the conspicuous rise of neoliberalism in the United States. Neoliberalism is the economic equivalent of neoconservatism.
While we’re thinking about racist imperialists, we can go back further. Thomas Jefferson was, and is, widely recognized as one of the most enlightened of the founding fathers. As I mentioned and documented in an earlier post, imperialist Jefferson commented about native Americans: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” Jefferson, along with James Madison, founded the Democratic-Republican political party.
I couldn’t make up this stuff.