A Cowboy Country Thanksgiving

"The Eternal has brought you into a good land, a land

with streams and springs that issue forth from valleys

and mountains. . . A land where you will eat bread

without scarcity, where you shall lack nothing;

a land whose stones are iron, and out whose hills

you may dig gold and silver . . . And you shall eat and drink

and bless the Eternal your G-d for the good land..."

--Devarim 8:8-10

We don't think Moses was talking about this land when he told our ancestors that they had been freed from Egypt to work a land flowing with milk and honey, and where their flocks and children and gold and silver would increase by their own hands. But when we traveled to Cowboy Country, and sat down to Thanksgiving dinner on our own ranch, we certainly understood how they felt.




The morning of Thanksgiving brought snowfall, and the Rasta Jew looked out and said, "This is the best Thanksgiving ever!" as he laid a fire in the stone fireplace.

The cabin smelled of the slow roasted turkey, and not having a double oven, of the pies baked the day before. We felt warm, and with a full larder, we felt blessed. The hard work of the spring and summer, finding and buying the ranch, and the fall's labor of beginning to prepare it for our future work, was laid aside for a day, so that we could celebrate that quintessetial American holiday celebrating the fruits of our productive work.

In the late morning, the sky cleared and our customary walk before the feast was spent walking the boundary fences, repaired the day before. The Engineering Geek found the repairs he and the Rasta Jew had made to be sound. The fences must be walked each week this season, as the elk are about, and walk over and through barbed wire as if it did not exist. We walked together, the Engineering Geek and I, talking of the future, while the Rasta Jew held down the fort and played with the dogs.







Returning from a few hours of wind, snow and sunshine, we found a fire had been laid anew, and the Rasta Jew provided us with some music to cook by while we made the gravy and the mashed potatoes, and laid the table for the Thanksgiving feast.


I had brought with us my crystal wedding bowl for the cranberry sauce, my harvest tablecloth, wine glasses and special Thanksgiving tchotkes to make the festive table. The slow-roasted, free-range turkey made the best centerpiece.







The prepared table, minutes before we sat down, a congregation of the three of us, ready to eat and be satisfied, and bless the Eternal for bringing us into this new land of ours, a land that by the work of our hands will become even more productive and beautiful.
Before we said the blessing over the bread, we told the story of the Mayflower Compact, the Plymouth Plantation, and the lesson learned anew of the tragedy of corn collectivism American-style. We ended that lesson with a singing of America the Beautiful: "Oh, Beautiful for Pilgrim's feet whose stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for Freedom beat across the wilderness . ."




Any occasion upon which there is singing, blessing and candles bring forth the canine members of the household, because they have come to expect a share of the challah, the bread over which the blessing is said at the beginning of the meal. This night, they had to make do with crescent rolls and turkey, which pleased them as well, and attention all around.

At the ranch, even Lily does well, and Shayna is ranging further and further from the porch. With an invisible fence that covers a good acre of territory, they all get plenty of running space and many interesting places to sniff and explore. Another item on the Thankful List--the ranch has saved Lily's life. A day of ranging through meadow and trees, and she's tired and content. The hierarchy has gotten settled, and the dogs are getting along.

Unlike that of the Pilgrims, our Thanksgiving ends with the Blessing for Food (after eating), as we have been told: "You shall eat and be satisfied and then bless the Eternal . . ." Then dishes, and then relaxing around the fire, talking about the days to come, and enjoying each other--just the three six of us--celebrating Thanksgiving in Cowboy Country.

Authority, Bystanders, and Dehumanization: Why Resistance is Important

This morning, I opened my local newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal, to find a headline that offered a false dichotomy to airline travelers. It read:

"YOUR PICK: FULL BODY SCAN OR PROBING PAT-DOWN"

The story highlighted the controversy newly set off by John Tyner, who told a TSA screener not to "touch his junk" or he'd have the TSA guy arrested.
And a week before the "don't touch my junk" hero from San Diego, there was Megan McLain. Africana Online writes:

McClain, a radio host for the libertarian leaning show “Free Talk Left”, was one of the people that did not feel comfortable with the invasion of privacy. She told the TSA screeners that she was uncomfortable with the scanner. On a radio interview this week, she explains the humiliation that followed. TSA agents immediately began yelling “Opt out” when she voiced her discomfort. They brought her to an area where they were going to proceed with new pat down techniques. McClain was familiar with this technique and had some questions first. The technique is more invasive than physical molestation. TSA agents actually squeeze and twist breasts.

The agents were not very cooperative when McClain asked some questions. They handcuffed her to a chair and began yelling at her. She was not in a private area and other passengers had to walk around her. The TSA agents called in 12 police officers because McClain asked to speak to a supervisor. They lectured her for 30 minutes on terrorism while she remained cuffed to the chair. By this point, McClain was crying and shaking. She was unable to wipe her face and felt utterly humiliated. The agents and officers would not allow her to touch her possessions. They eventually ripped her airline ticket in half. Four different agents had her ID and were writing down information, presumably to do a back ground check on her. After about an hour of verbal abuse, the police officers escorted Ms. McClain to the ticketing counter where she had to find another way home since she had missed her flight. (Emphasis added.)

According to the grassroots organization We Won't Fly , incidents like this are being reported by airline agents every day now, as the holiday flying season approaches. And it is vitally important that we understand what is going on. These virtual strip-searches are both useless and unnecessary to airline security, and because of the attention "opt-out's" draw from other TSA agents and bystanders, they may be dangerous. So why is Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland (In)Security so determined to publicly invade the privacy of ordinary, law-abiding Americans at our airports by conducting Fourth Amendment prohibited searches that in any other context would be called molestation? Today in a news story about the growing outcry against these practices, Napolitano said:

"It's all about security. It's all about everybody recognizing their role."

Although the first part of the statement is patently untrue, the second part is telling. We've got to know our role, fellow peons, and give up our rights like good little do-be's, submitting to even the grossest invasion of our privacy for the sake of some higher purpose. And pay for the privilege to the tune of the cost of the airline ticket and our self-respect.

More telling is how those who dare to question the false choice given them are being treated. The TSA Gestapo tactics humiliate the few who have enough self-respect to question their authority, and in the manner of petty power mongers the world over, they do not allow the third choice, the one in which their intended victim is allowed to change her mind and not fly at all. Notice that Meg McClain was reduced to tears, powerless to even wipe her face, and unable to claim her personal possessions.

To submit to the virtual strip-search, or permit oneself to be sexually molested in public, or be reduced to utter humiliation as punishment for refusal, these are all actions that render a human being powerless over her own person and property, and thus are dehumanizing. The purpose of such activities on the part of government "authorities" is to instill fear of ever questioning, protesting, or even so much as stepping one toe across the increasingly narrow line of normal. The fear is meant to be felt by both the victim and the bystanders. During the Shoah, the Nazis and their collaborators raised such tactics to high art in order to control the populations of countries across an entire continent. Make no mistake, these tactics exist to do the same to freedom-loving Americans.

Bystanders. Note that I Ieft out the word "innocent." There are no innocent bystanders. A person standing by, knowing what is going on is far from "innocent." Although we are not perpetrators, we are made complicit by the act of witnessing the dehumanization of others. Our silence in the face of the dehumanization of the victim not only shames us, making us far more likely to remain silent in the presence of even more egregious crimes against our liberty in the future, but that very shame we feel dehumanizes us as well. It breaks the bonds of good will we ordinarily feel toward our fellow countrymen and women, destroying any real community and replaces it with conformity and obedience powered by fear.

This is why resistance is so vitally important.

There are two kinds of peaceful resistance available to us. There is passive resistance. In this case, refusal to fly is passive resistance. By choosing the third option--the one that the TSA, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and my local newspaper--and by choosing it before ever going to the airport, we are practicing passive resistance. Let the airlines* go bankrupt if need be, we say. We will not pay to be virtually strip-searched or groped by some Gestapo pervert.

*And to those who say that the fault does not lie with the airlines, well they take our money and allow our rights to be violated without so much as a whimper. And remember the nickel-and-diming for each additional check-through bag? The long waits without a bathroom on the tarmac? Being packed into planes like sardines and fed peanuts on cross-continental flights? Airlines have not been good to their customers for a very long time. With few exceptions, they haven't earned our money and the goodwill it represents.

The passive resistance shown by a large number of people, like those who are calling the airlines and their trade organizations to communicate their displeasure and refusal to fly, can go a long way. The fact that such passive resistance as that voiced in blogs and on chat rooms and discussion lists is showing up on the front pages of newspapers, and has caused Congress to convene a hearing shows how successful it can be. And more importantly, passive resistance also protects one against the shame and loss of self-respect that goes with the meek bystander syndrome.

Even more effective in this regard is active resistance. I decided not to fly last year, and I drove to Continental Congress. but if I ever have reason to be in an airport, and I saw another human being being dehumanized like Meg McClain was, I have decided that come hell or high-water, I would conquer my fears and begin to chant "This is wrong! This is wrong!" I would do so, not hysterically, but as politely and firmly as I could manage, over and over. I would not expect to stop the petty tyrants of the TSA, but I would let them know that at least one witness knows the truth of what they are doing. I expect that in true Alice's Restaurant* fashion, others would join me. There might be consequences. But as the living heir of men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and braved hanging to bring themselves and their posterity liberty, I ought to be able to take it. And keeping my humanity, my menschlicheit, in a place where there are no human beings is very important to my own self-respect.

*"If one person walks in and sits down and sings 'You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant', they'll think he's crazy, and they won't take him. If two people walk in together, sit down and sing 'You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant', they'll think they're queer and they won't take either one. But if three people--can you imagine, three people?--if three people walk in, sit down and sing 'You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant', why then it will be a movement! And that's what I'm starting. The Alice's Restaurant Massacre Movement. And all you have have to do to join is wait for it to come around on the guee-tar and sing 'You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.' In harmony." -- Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant Massacre.

There are other forms of active resistance. If you are going to be near an airport that has the Porno-Scans on the day before Thanksgiving, be sure to make up a sign and join the protests that are scheduled to occur. And if you are traveling, you can always join in on National Opt Out day, in which you opt out of the scan and elect to suffer the indignity of a molestation pat-down. Remember, during the French Revolution the workers threw their sabots (wooden shoes) into the gears and ground them to a halt before they could grind down the workers. And thus we get the word sabotage. Except opting out in great numbers will not destroy property, but it will slow down the terribly dehumanizing system enough to make a point. And if everybody is being molested together, with bystanders chanting "This is wrong!", as a witness, why then it becomes Civil Disobedience. Thoreau would be proud that some of his spiritual descendants still live and breath under the friendly skies.

Finally a note to those cynics who say: "National opt-out day, protests, and refusing to fly. These will not change anything. It will not make (the ubiquitous) them change the policies. They mean to establish tyranny over us and they will do it."

Well, maybe it will not make them change. There is precious little we can do to change the ubiquitous 'they'. But it will change us. It will change us from shame-faced and culpable little mice, scurrying about with shoulders hunched, afraid of the petty tyrants of the TSA, into proud practitioners of Civil Disobedience. Sure our actions could have consequences. They might not let us fly, or they might call out the riot police and arrest us all. If they do that, then link arms and go downtown singing. I Won't Back Down is a good one.

Read The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. Our ancestors were made of sterner stuff than we, no doubt. But if they could brave British Regulars at the North Bridge, and the winter at Valley Forge, then we can certainly brave the temporary inconvenience of missing a flight, or donning the plastic handcuffs for the TV cameras and the video cams of strategically placed bystanders. If it gets on camera, TSA CANNOT win. It will go viral within minutes on You Tube.

And for those of you who would protest, but you just cannot bear the idea that you might never fly again, Sam Adams had words for you. They're not kind, but they are to the point:

"If ye love wealth better than liberty,
the tranquility of servitude
better than the animating contest of freedom,
go home from us in peace.
We ask not your counsels or your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.
May your chains set lightly upon you,
and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
--Sam Adams, Speech at the Philadelphia Statehouse,
Second Continental Congress, August 1, 1776.

There is a time for prudence, but that time is not when your countrymen and women are being dehumanized before your very eyes. Those who first dehumanize another will dehumanize you, and when you are no longer human beings in their eyes, then your very life is at stake.

The Mark of Cain

"It was after the passing of days that Kayin brought

from the fruits of the soil, a gift to YHWH,

and as for Hevel, he too brought--from the first-

born of his flock, from their fat parts.

YHWH had regard for Hevel and his gift,

for Kayin and his gift he had no regard.

Kayin became exceedingly upset and his face fell.

YHWH said to Kayin: Why are you so upset?

And why has your face fallen? Is it not thus:

If you intend good, bear-it-aloft, but

if what you intend is not good,

at your door is sin, crouching,

towards you he lusts--but you can rule over him.

Kayin said to Hevel his brother . . .

But then it was, when they were out in the field

that Kayin rose up against his brother

and he killed him. . .

YHWH said to [Kayin]:

No, therefore, whoever kills Kayin, sevenfold

will it be avenged. So YHWH set a sign for Kayin

so that whoever came upon him would not strike

him down. Kayin went out from the face of YHWH

and settled in the land of Wandering, east of Eden.

Genesis 4:3 - 8, 15 - 16; The Shochen Bible,

(translated by Everett Fox)

It is hard to understand why a man might rise up and murder one he calls his brother, his friend and companion. Even when both men are flawed, having had run-ins with the law, it is hard to imagine what would impel a man to such anger that he would not stop, that he would beat his friend to death and leave him lying in a pool of blood by the side of the road..

This is the same primeval story that was told first in Genesis, and in its aftermath, the question of what is in those ellipses--what happened that one man would rise up and kill a man that he loved as a brother--this same question haunts me today. It has haunted me since I found out Friday night that the Professional Revolutionary, a man that I knew, worked with, and ultimately had to distance myself from, had killed another young man that I know, the Virtual Artist, who was just pulling his life together after his own troubles with the law.

Nobody knows what Kayin/Cain said to his brother, Hevel/Abel. Nobody knows what Hevel said or did in reply, if anything. The context of the story makes it clear that it is mythos, a story that introduces the meaning of choosing evil over good into the context of a primeval setting after the birth of man as a moral being. No explanations are given, for no rational reason for the murder, the first fratricide, are possible.

What we do know is that a human being can be waylaid by passion, but that the human being can master it. For even though Cain felt the need to compare himself to his brother, and to believe that his brother received favor that he did not, the issue is not that. In the story, G-d makes no mention of that feeling, but tells Cain that the passion he feels can be mastered. This is the difference between an animal and a human being. An animal does what it does based on instinct and not thought. A human being, endowed with the ability to differentiate between good (life), and evil (death), can and must choose actions compatible with life and avoid death. That passion is an animal spirit, "crouching at the door" like a predator, but that the human being can be its master.

In the story, we do not know how that passion was inflamed to the point that Cain could take the life of his brother.That part has been left out, replaced only with the silent ellipses that remind us that there were words between the passion and the action. Although the text is silent on how Cain killed his brother, the midrash and commentary tell us of violent murder: Cain bashed in his brother's head with a stone.

So it is with the death of the Virtual Artist at the hands of the Professional Revolutionary. What words passed between them when the Revolutionary went to visit the Artist? We don't know. Who said what, who did what, and who threw the first punch? We don't know. Only one man is left to speak, and we are not privy to what he has said. We only know the consequences of what was transacted between them: the brutal murder of the Artist in what appears to be the result of passion unbridled by any thought; of rage so great that even after the Artist must have been down, the Revolutionary continued to hit him until near death, the Artist was left alone by the side of the road, awash in his life's blood. Left alone, to be found by a passer-by, he died en route to the hospital.

Even though I hate the sin, the action of a man I know that destroyed the life of another man I knew, I remain haunted. My anger at what happened to the Artist makes me loath the man who did it. My horror at the violence of the death makes me wish that I had never had a conversation or shared a meal with the murderer. I feel tainted.

And yet, as surely as I mourn the death of the Artist, so I find myself filled with sorrow at the unforgivable nature of the act of murder the Revolutionary committed. For in that moment, at that stark point of choice, he gave up his humanity. I am haunted by the unchangable direction of time, by a deed so final that no mending of it is possible. I am haunted because there is no reconciliation possible between the man and the friend he killed. And I mourn for the loss of the Revolutionary, too, and for the loss of any hope of an understanding between us in the fullness of time; I mourn for him as I would for a child of my own, lost to the land of wandering, east of Eden.

For the other part of the story is the confrontation of Cain with the finality of his action. His brother's blood cries out from the ground, and is consumed by the soil. And so the soil will no longer sustain the murderer. He is no longer of the earth, to live among his fellow human beings in peace. Instead, he will wander, an exile homeless to the end of his days, marked by the sign that he has murdered his brother.

The mark of Cain. It is not the punishment for murder. That is the exile and the wandering. But the mark is a sign meant to set Cain apart for all time. The mark is the memory of what he has done, a memory known to himself and to others, so that he wanders restlessly outside the good will one human being has toward another; the murderer wanders outside the very presence of human regard. The mark of Cain is the mark of exile not from the very soil of the earth, but from the regard of every other human being.

When I learned of the Artist's death by the hand of his friend, closer than a brother, I tore at my clothes in anger and cried out: Baruch Dayan Emet! Blessed is the Judge of Truth! And we will mourn for him, and cry out at the horror of his death. We will gather to remember his short life, and to express our unfathomed sorrow that he no longer shares the earth with us, his life untimely taken.

But there will be no such cry, no such mourning together, no such remembering and sending forth for the Revolutionary. My sorrow for him will be expressed in silence, his loss from among us deemed necessary and right. Because he has taken upon himself the Mark of Cain in that one aweful moment of choice, a moment about which the story is silent.

And so in silence will each of those of us who knew him mourn his loss from among human kind.

Back to the Galt Mines

Now that the election is over, we can get back to the work of liberty.
That seems an odd statement to some, but it is true just the same. It is true in that for many people who have woken up in the past two years, the election was somewhat of a distraction.
It was a necessary distraction, to be sure, but a distraction none-the-less.

A few weeks ago I wrote about this, starting with the thesis that taking the red pill, that waking up to the reality of what has happened to our country over the past century, also means that the newly awake sleepers will necessarily go through a mourning process. And that the distraction of the election--although necessary, too--elicits a kind of desperate clinging to the idea that if we can just get the right people or party elected, we can go back to the time before this present Crisis, and even perhaps get a few more winks of sleep in, before facing reality.

Now the election shows us how well all of our hard work pays off. The people who have tried to talk to their representatives, only to be rebuffed with evasions; those who went to town hall meetings, only to be called crazy; those who protested the costly Obamacare bill that would require them by force of law to make certain purchases, and were called racists and rubes; all of those people who were ignored have now had their say at voting booth. The ballot box has prevailed. And it prevailed with a great sea change that left the uncomprehending congress-critters looking like fools. This was a great victory for those of us who have held Tea Parties, networked, spent time and treasure going to meetings and conventions, congresses and Constitution courses.

And we should celebrate it.
I will say that again. Once more, with feeling:
WE SHOULD CELEBRATE IT.

We should recognize what can be accomplished by determined, liberty-loving people. We, who have been ignored, dismissed, laughed at and called names, have by our persistent emphasis on principles and values, been heard. We know we have because even before the returns were in, we heard the self-anointed arbiters of culture on MSNBC and in the halls of power stop using derisive terms and talk to us on our terms. That change--from "tea-baggers" to "the Tea Parties"--tells us we have been heard. And that is what we ought to celebrate.

However, we must recognize that being heard is only the beginning of the beginning. It is not even the Churchillian end of the beginning. And being heard does not mean that the action we want will follow. It almost certainly won't. A battle won is not the campaign. And it is certainly not the whole war. The second American R3volution is just beginning. It can easily die aborning if most of those awakened sleepers decide that they have won the whole thing in one easy election, hit the snooze alarm, roll over and go back to sleep.

We're not hardly finished. In fact, we have just begun.
Over the next two years there are two major tasks that we must accomplish. The first is to become educated and principled with respect to the Constitution and to the philosophy of liberty and natural rights that is its foundation. Secondly, we must insist that the people we send to Congress represent our interests.

First Educate Ourselves and Our Children:

The other day I saw a You Tube video that made humor at the expense of a group of lefties who were long on talking points that originated from others, and short on knowledge. A Second City reporter walked through the crowd at the Rally for Sanity with a sign that said: Obama = Keynsian? Another Second City reporter followed with a camera and mike, and got the reaction of members of the crowd. Most of the people were prepared to believe that Keynsian = Kenyan, and rather indignantly and hilariously took off on diatribes against the notion that Obama was not born in the United States. This highlighted the ignorance that is masked in talking points and invective. And Liberty people who know who Keynes is, and what Keynsian economics is, and even who Hayek is and what he wrote, had a good laugh.

But the problem illustrated by this stunt exists among liberty people, too. On a number of occasions, I have heard Tea Partiers and others make statements or advocate positions that sound good on the surface, but that are actually antithetical to liberty and individual rights. Some issues that have been mindlessly supported by different groups within the patriot movement betray an ignorance of the Constitution itself. Almost invariably, when asked the provenance of the idea, I have been told that it was the position of some politician or political party. Talking points will not a revolution make! We must clarify our values, and make sure that positions that we support are in line with our principles. If we are educated in the bed-rock foundation of the Constitution, the idea of natural rights that are inherent to all individuals, then we have no need of talking points. We can speak directly from our understanding of and passion for Liberty.

Secondly, the Congress Must Represent Our Interests:

The majority of the new Congress will not be composed of liberty people. A few have those credentials, but most are politicians. And all of them are walking into a lion's den of corrupted interests. The Republicans are--as a party--no better than the Democrats. We saw that with the collapse of the Republican Revolution from the election of 1994. Instead of honoring their "Contract with America", they became as supportive of tax-and-spend, and grandstanded with a failed and costly (both in dollars and in political capital) attempt to remove the president by impeachment. We saw the same co-option occur with President Bush's agenda, and the loss of the House to Democrats in 1996. While it is true that the Obamaniacs completely mistook that election and the election of 2008 as a mandate to take this country leftward, this does not excuse the Republicans.

Further, a few people of principle elected to Congress can easily be dismissed, as Ron Paul has been continuously over the course of his career in Congress.

In order to prevent the co-option of our new Congress by corrupt and venal forces in government, and in order to prevent the actual liberty people among them from being dismissed and rendered ineffectual, we must do two things.

1. Feet. Fire.
It will be easy enough for this new Congress to take one presidential veto and turn it into an excuse not to buck the system. Therefore we must continually remind them that they DID NOT WIN. Rather, the Democratic Socialists (formerly the Democratic Party) LOST. We did not elect these guys, rather we threw the bums of the other party out. The new Congress has no mandate for their agenda; rather they have marching orders for OURS.
Remember those calls to our Congress-critters during the past two years? They should continue, although perhaps on a more friendly basis. We must let them know we are watching and that they represent us.

We must hold their feet to the fire. We must insist that they propose the bills that we want to be heard, such as a repeal of the egregious and tyrannous Obamacare legislation. We need to remind them that we know that the Senate will likely not go along, and that Obama will likely veto it all. WE. DON'T. CARE. These trials will establish a record for the election of 2012. That record will be the basis of who will get thrown out next time.

To this end, I am sending each of the Congress-critters from New Mexico a simple postcard reading: It's the CONSTITUTION, stupid!
We need to keep the Constitution ever before their eyes, so that they may not stray from the path of Liberty. We must bid them: Remember, remember the 5th of November, election day 2012. We brought them into Congress, and we can take them out.

But we must not only sternly remind them of why we sent them up. We must also provide them with support for doing the right thing.

2. Support the Liberty Reps:

Michelle Bachman is proposing that the Tea Party Caucus become the Constitutional Caucus. She argues that the caucus should be named for the main unifying focus of the Tea Party movement, a return to Constitutional governance. We should urge Congresswoman Bachman to keep the focus on the Constitution, and the limited nature of the government that it created. All other issues, no matter how dear to conservatives or libertarians, should not constrain the membership. Some issues are not federal issues at all and should not be allowed to divide the caucus. If this is done, such a caucus can become a bastion of support for our new-be representatives, and it will give them the get-up-and-go to get up and do what needs doing.

But we should not leave support to the caucus alone. These guys and gals represent US. We ought to pledge ourselves to keep apprised of what our particular representative is doing and saying, and not only hold his/her feet to the fire when needed, but also call or write our support when he/she does the right thing, or makes a good speech. Let them know that we will support the hard actions that are needed to bring Liberty back to the center of our government.

It is time to celebrate. A victory is a victory, and every one of them is important to this ongoing campaign for the peaceful Restoration of the Constitution. But we're not done.
Why, we've only just begun . . .

So after that victory drink or dance or moment, it's . . .

. . . Back to the Galt Mines.

Glenn Beck's Monkey Show: This View of Life

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its

several powers having been originally breathed

into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this

planet has gone cycling on according to the

fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning

endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

have been, and are being, evolved."

--Charles Darwin, 1859: On the Origin of Species

In my second entry on the topic of Glenn Beck's misapprehension of the theory of evolution, I discussed the fallacy that he spoke on his radio show; the idea that humans evolved from monkeys, or even from apes. Darwin's theory does not posit this idea at all; rather human beings, as well as the great apes, have descended from some common ancestor that in certain features and functions resembles us both, however remotely. But I am not quite done, because another idea was expressed, later in that same hour of the radio broadcast, that is also fallacious: Glenn Beck's claim that collectivists require Darwin's theory, because they must have a view of human individuals as endlessly malleable and therefore perfectible by other humans or, in the case of socialists and outright communists, by some unspecified "social force" that generally turn out to be a force perpetrated by tyrants.

This idea turns on another common misunderstanding of Darwin's theory, one that became a force in American politics at the end of the 19th century, the idea called "Social Darwinism."
Social Darwinism can be defined as any number of political ideologies that use Darwin's theory to suggest that societies evolve in the biological sense and that certain individuals in society are more "evolved" than others, and that they have an obligation to direct human evolution to specific ends. This ideology has nothing to do with the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, except the usurpation of Darwin's name. And in Darwin's name, a whole host of fallacies have been developed to limit human freedom: the Nazi concept of the Obermenschen (supermen) is one, and so is the American progressive idea that a better citizen can be bred through eugenics.

Social 'Darwinism' includes two fallacies that make the ideology foreign to Darwin's theory. The first is that societies evolve biologically, meaning that society is an entity that natural selection acts upon, and that action changes gene frequencies due to various social pressures. The second is that Darwinian evolution is goal directed, and that natural selection is more than a mechanism, that in some way it is working to a specific, predetermined end.

I think the first fallacy is driven by a complete misunderstanding about how Darwinian evolution is defined, and the second by an equally powerful misapprehension about how natural selection works.

A society is nothing more than a grouping of individuals that are distinguished by location, and perhaps by a shared nationality and culture. There may be numerous social groups in that larger amorphous thing that we call society, and those different subsets may very well have their own unique subcultures and value systems. There is not much that defines a society except the obvious: that members of a society tend to socially interact with one another at some level. A society is not some mystical synergistic whole. It has no self-awareness and no will. If societies evolve, those changes are not biological, and they are not driven by natural selection.

Natural selection acts on the relatively fixed phenotype (the way that genes are expressed) of the individual, producing change over time in biological populations. That evolution--for change over time is what the word evolution means--is measured by the change of gene frequencies in a population over time. Individuals do not evolve, but biological populations do. A biological population is not some random group of individuals that interacts socially. Rather it is a group of individuals that can and do interbreed with one another. That they can interbreed means that they are members of the same species, but being a population means that these individuals have access to one another for the purpose of reproduction. Thus alleles (specific forms of each genes) are spread around that population. There are numerous biological populations of human beings on the earth, separated by geography and by culture and by language, which are but different barriers humans have to reproduction with one another. None of these barriers is perfect, and by migration of individuals from one population to another, novel alleles are introduced to populations, changing the gene frequencies in each population. Thus, evolution is always occurring.

When I said above that natural selection acts on individuals, I meant that the genetic traits of an individual vary in expression, creating as many unique phenotypes as there are individuals. Within a given environment, some expressions of a trait will lead to a robustness that allows an individual to survive and pass on those traits, while other expressions of the same trait may--in that same environment--lead to a weakness that means an individual does not live long enough to reproduce, or reproduces less often. Evolutionary "fitness" is defined as the number of offspring an individual has, thus influencing how many copies of the allele is passed on into the next generation, thus spreading through the population in greater or lesser numbers.

It is environment that effects the fitness of a certain trait. A trait that creates an effect that leads to the allele being passed on in great numbers in one environment, may have no such effect in another environment, or may be deleterious to the individual that carries it in a third environment. For example, the recessive allele that blocks the deposition of pigments in the eye, caused the blue-eyed phenotype, has no effect in northern climates, where the solar angle is low, but in equatorial locations, it results in a much greater risk of cataracts and cancer at a younger age. Thus one might expect to find more of the recessive "blue-eye" alleles in northern populations than in equatorial ones. Since there may be more than one direction of pressure on a trait (or suite of traits) at any given time, the end result is a variety of expression, creating those "endless forms most beautiful" of which Darwin spoke. In any given species in any given environment, not all traits are under selection at any given time. It really depends on the variety of alleles, and upon the rate of environmental change that a species may be experiencing. The point here is that fitness is not some fixed array of parameters that have been ranked by some conscious process of choosing. It is simply what variations on a trait, among those present, are most beneficial to the differential reproduction of the individuals within a population that carry them.

And this brings me to the second fallacy held by the Social "Darwinists": the fallacy that evolution has some direction, some predetermined end. Since natural selection acts on the variations of a trait that happen to be present in a given population at a given time, there can be no "goal" for evolution. If, as Stephen J. Gould used to say, we could rewind the tape of the evolution of life on earth and begin it again, we would not see the same movie. Evolution would likely run a wildly different course.

There is a random element to Darwinian evolution, and this is why species eventually go extinct, ending their contributions to the future of life on earth. Sooner or later, a variation on a trait that would allow a species to get through a certain set of environmental changes will not be present in any of the biological populations of the species; or else there will not be time for a beneficial variation to spread through the population, and the species will die out. Just as death is part of every individual life, extinction is the destiny of every species.

I think that this lack of direction, this randomness that exists in our being here at all, in how species come and go upon the earth, is the most unsettling idea about evolution of all for many people. It certainly changes one's view of one's place in a very large and random universe. And yet, it also magnifies the uniqueness of each individual life on earth, and places a premium on human self-awareness, which is what sets our species apart from the other lives that share our planet.

Since evolution has no direction, and since no individuals in a species are "more evolved" than any others, two things are true. One is that there is no perfection awaiting the future of human life on earth. We are what we are, and as human beings we exist within certain parameters that make us human. Although we are all unique, our uniqueness exists as variations on the theme of human being. Individuals do not evolve. Each of us can only play the genes we were dealt. The second truth is that no human beings are wiser than any others in their ability to know how to shape human evolution to certain ends. There are no philosopher-kings who can see outside the cave, and select for certain traits in order to bring the rest of us to what they believe is their level.

The Social "Darwinists", who have arrogantly arrogated to themselves the role of gods and goddesses, do so using a perversion of Darwinian evolution in which selection is anything but natural, and fitness is defined as those traits they most admire in themselves. Traits that may have very little to do with the traits that are actually under selection in different human populations. Unfortunately, there are those--like Glenn Beck--who have so little knowledge and understanding of Darwin's theory, that they equate the unifying theory of modern biology with an ideology that is based on a misunderstanding of evolution by natural selection; an ideology that is as profoundly wrong as are the misperceptions of the creationists. This is what I mean when I say that the leftists and the collectivists are often equally as ignorant of Darwin's theory of evolution as are those on the religious right.

But I believe the collectivists on the left are the more dangerous. The creationists are for the most part reacting to the usurpation of their power to pass their religion on to their children. All of the equal-time debates, all of the legal challenges they make are in response to public education. If creationists were no longer forced by law to pay for their children to be instructed to accept an idea that they believe is against their religion, there would be no debates and no legal battles. But those on the left believe that they have some mandate to act as those who would select out the traits that they believe do not contribute to the perfection of humanity in the next great step of "social evolution." But all such traits originate in the phenotype of individuals, so this means that certain individuals must be selected out. This is what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a notorious progressive, understood his role to be when he ruled that a woman could be forcibly sterilized for the good of the State, saying:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for a crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." (Buck vs. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

Here Holmes imagines himself to be the agent of selection, a selection that is not at all natural. He further implies that there is some direction to evolution, that a certain kind of human being--his kind--has some destiny that is the pinnacle, the perfect end of evolution. An end that would result in a deadly sameness, in which there would be no variation for natural selection to act upon. An end that would result in destruction and death, as it always does. An end that would result in the ultimate extinction of the human species from the face of the earth.

Nothing could be further from the true nature of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. This view of life predicts infinite variation in infinite combinations developing over time from so simple a beginning. There is indeed a grandeur in it, a grandeur that is missed by all of those who misapprehend the beauty of life on earth in all its wonderful variety.

Glenn Beck's Monkey Show: Not Even Wrong

“Even my fellow biologists are unacquainted with the
many lines of evidence for evolution, and most of
my university students,who supposedly learned evolution
in high school, come to my courses knowing almost nothing
of this central organizing theory of biology.”
--Jerry A. Coyne; Why Evolution is True. 2009.

In my last blog entry, I gave an overview of the problems I heard in Glenn Beck's latest attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection. To recap briefly, those problems are errors in knowledge, distractability from the main point and reason for the discussion, and philosophical errors at the level of premises, reasoning and argumentation. The blog entry can be found here.

In this blog entry, I will discuss Glenn Beck's misapprehension of the modern theory of evolution because it is not even wrong. By this I mean that Beck's argument on his show, that evolution cannot be true because he has never seen a half-monkey, half human, is so off the mark that it is not even an argument. It is a straw-man, and does not rise to the level of an argument that can even be discussed. The phrase implies that even an argument that is wrong, would be better than this one.

What I am not going to do is try to convince anyone that the theory of evolution is true. I accept the evidence for evolution, which is so varied, so strong and so convincing that its reality is not even a casual discussion among biologists. However, there is so much evidence, on so many levels and coming from so many fields in the natural and physical sciences that it would take more than one book to recount it all. The interested reader can begin with Jerry Coyne's book, cited above, and continue with many well-written and documented books in the popular scientific literature. There is also another reason, and that is that is useless to argue either major or minor points of the theory, citing evidence, when the real problem is on a different level. That is, most people who refuse to accept the evidence for evolution by natural selection do so not because of this or that point has not been adequately addressed, but because he or she has a religious view of the world that includes biblical literalism, which is incompatible with most of modern science. Argumentation without a general agreement on world view is futile. And I believe that the problem is a political one and not scientific at all, and as a libertarian I do not believe that it is my place to use the force of law to change another's beliefs. I have written my opinion about the issue of evolution and science education here .

Glenn Beck's problem is not that he does not accept the evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection. Although it is clear that he does not. His problem lies in that he attacked the theory citing a half-baked non-observation as evidence against it, and that indicated to anyone who knows the theory well that he does not know it or understand it in even the most rudimentary sense. This is not uncommon – as Coyne indicates in his book (quoted above). The purpose of this blog entry is not to change anyone's mind about evolution, but to discuss this common error that becomes the logical fallacy commonly called “the straw man argument” with amazing frequency.

The sum total of Glenn Beck's argument against evolution was that it was not likely to be true because , he said, “I haven't seen a half-person, half-monkey, yet.” When this statement came out of Beck's mouth, I shouted “Thank you, Bishop Wilberforce!” at the radio, because this was so reminiscent of the early arguments against evolution. From that time until this, the caricature of a blend of two species is, well, specious. It is a straw man put up in order to mock the opposition and to implant in the minds of listeners (or at least those who are ignorant of the actual theory of evolution) an idea that has never been a part of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Either Glenn was not paying attention during his high school biology class--a distinct possibility--or he is intentionally making a mockery of the theory in order to woo the most ignorant of his listeners. This second motive is also a possibility, however, it was not well-thought out, for in so doing he probably caused the majority of his listeners (including a NY News Tea Party reporter here) to do a double-take.

For those who have forgotten, or those who have never learned it, here is the theory of evolution by natural selection in a nutshell: The variation that we see among living organisms today arose gradually over time, brought about by a process called natural selection. There are five ideas that are necessary to any explanation of Darwin's theory and they are: evolution, speciation, the common ancestry of all life, natural selection, and gradualism. Evolution means change over time, and according to evolutionary theory, those changes in the genetic code of existing populations that create traits that give certain individuals a reproductive advantage – that is, traits that make it more likely for that individual to survive to reproduce – will become more common in the population over time. This change in the gene-frequencies of a population indicate that it is evolving.

Most of the time these changes in gene-frequencies occur naturally over time because successful reproducers pass those advantageous traits to their offspring, whereas those individuals who do not successful reproduce have no effect on the future genetic makeup of the population. This is natural selection*. Speciation usually occurs because enough variation occurs between two populations of the same species that they can no longer reproduce with one another. This is usually due to two populations being isolated from one another for some reason. Although speciation is arguably the most spectacular of the phenomena that the theory of evolution by natural selection explains, it is not the only one, or even the most common. But speciation is an effect of natural selection that has occurred many times over the history of life of earth, and that does mean that all species share a common ancestry; that is a link with every other species that is either a close relationship or a distant one, depending on how far back in the history of two species the divergence occurred.

*Although natural selection is by far the most common mechanism for evolutionary change in a population, it is not the only one: others such as gene-flow among populations, and the loss of genetic variation due to population bottlenecks and founder effect do have some influence.

For the purposes of our discussion about Glenn Beck's straw-man, the most important word in the paragraphs above is population. Populations evolve, individuals do not. That is because an individual's phenotype is fixed by the particular genotype he or she inherited. Some changes in gene expression do change over the lifetime, but an individual does not suddenly acquire half a genome from somewhere else. Therefore, one would not expect to ever see an individual that displays half the phenotype of one extant species and half the phenotype of another. Rather, if a biologist predicts that two species are closely related, she then expects to find many common traits between, and some important differences. Those common traits point to an ancestor species that is common to both of the related species. That ancestor species may or may not still be flourishing on earth. Extinction is also an important phenomenon that is predicted by the theory of evolution by natural selection.

With respect to human beings, monkeys do share common ancestry, which is indicated by enough common traits so that both monkeys and human beings are in the same taxonomic order: monkeys and humans are both primates. However, the most closely extant species to which humans are related are the great apes, all of whom are classified in the same taxonomic family – hominidae – which means “human-like”. The closest extant related species to humans is the chimpanzees. However, this does not mean that humans evolved from chimps. Nor does it mean that one should expect to find a half-chimp, half-person in the fossil record. Rather what we do find is that humans and chimps show a greater than 98% commonality in our genomes. We have enough traits in common to know that we had a common ancestor that walked the earth rather recently.

Another facet of Glenn Beck's mistake is that he equates some form of Lamarckism, the idea that evolution occurs by the passing of acquired traits to future generations through the genome, with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. If this occurred, then one could say that individuals evolve. This is a philosophical mistake that Glenn actually shares with the communists, who promoted the neo-Lamarckian ideology proposed by Lysenko. This fallacy is necessary to the modern collectivists, but the Darwinian theory of evolution is not. Darwinisms is in fact at odds with it. But that discussion is part of the next blog entry on this topic. Stay tuned!

Glenn Beck's Monkey Show: Overview

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
--Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 15.

If a little learning is dangerous, then no knowlege at all can be positively deadly. Or at least, embarrassing.

Yesterday, Glenn Beck made a fool of himself on his radio program.


As with many bright people, he did so by assuming he understood something that he did not. He did what he tells his audience not to do by making a judgment about a scientific theory on the fly, and it was clear that he had no clue what the modern theory of evolution actually is and what it is not.


For the record, I listen to Beck several times a week, although I have been listening less and less this fall because it is getting harder and harder to actually hear Glenn make his point. This is because in the past year he has brought on a friend from Texas, Pat Gray, who generally distracts Glenn from his more serious points, causing a number of listeners, including me, to reach for the dial. Pat Gray appears to be far less thoughtful than Glenn, and is clearly not as well read. When the banter begins, it devolves quickly and the show becomes frustratingly difficult to follow, and downright silly. I don't have time for that, and clearly from discussions with other thoughtful patriots, neither do they.


That said, it is quite clear that Glenn Beck is not stupid, as many of the leftist blogs claim. The so-called discussions of this issue at places like the Huffington Post come across as equally ignorant and worse, devolve to ad hominen statements. There is a large difference between rational disagreement and the kind of mean-spirited, angry, profanity-driven drivel that the lefties regularly spew out against Beck. However, this does not excuse Glenn from the equally ignorant attack on the theory of evolution that he made during a clearly ADD hour on his show yesterday.


Most laymen do not understand the modern theory of evolution. It is not that it is not understandable or even all that complex, though wading through the plethora of evidence for it takes time and study. It is that it has either been taught badly or not taught at all. This is the fault of the generally poor science teaching that goes on in America's K-12 institutions, private and public. With very few exceptions K-12 science education has treated the discipline as a series of disconnected facts that must be committed to memory and regurgitated, rather than as a method for discovering how the physical universe works using observation through our senses and their extensions. It is also the fault of a political divide that has been handled badly by scientists, creating a hostility towards all science among those who are expected to pay for it all without having the faintest idea of what it actually is. (I will have more to say about this later).


Collectivists and progressives at the extremes of both political parties have seized on this divide, and have used it to their own political advantage. On the right, it has been used to promote a kind of populist know-nothingism that lets those pols manipulate the religious passion of their constituents for Christian dominionism and theocracy. On the left, it has been used to promote an agenda of thinly disguised eugenics in which a scientific theory has been hijacked to bolster a collectivist ideology and a socialist agenda. (I have already said a bit about this here). It is clear that neither left nor right has the intellectual high ground here, nor the moral decency to promote and appreciate thoughtful and intelligent ideation among their constituents. A pox on both their houses!


Glenn Beck's ignorant diatribe betrayed several problems. One is that his notion of the scientific theory of evolution betrays an ignorance not only of the theory itself, but of science in general, and how the work of science is done. It is clear that because he has heard twaddle from equally ignorant others, he believes he knows what it is without having actually studied it. He would not make such statements in regard to areas he actually knows something about. So he has made an error of knowlege compounded by a certain ignorant arrogance, in that he did not question his lack of education in the field of science. Clearly his motto to "question everything" was left behind as he thoughtlessly spewed forth, compounding his embarrassment of ignorance with every sentence.


Glenn also has a problem organizing his thoughts that was clearly evident here, and in other monologues. His reasoning starts out with a good series of propositions and then his thinking stops at a certain point, and he rarely gets to the logical conclusion of his thought. Often he makes connections that seem to be leading somewhere interesting, and then he veers off, unable to complete the line of reasoning. He stops short and leaves his listeners in confusion or yelling at radio, "finish it, man!" Part of the problem here is the aforementioned Pat Gray, who nit-picks unimportant diction rather than letting the reasoning come to the conclusion of thought before cleaning up the proposition. Another part of the problem is that ADD that I mentioned earlier. Glenn has made no secret of it, as indeed he can't. Glenn distracts himself, going down rabbit-holes, and on snipe-hunts of thought, chasing extraneous thoughts prior to making a conclusion. And being that distractable means that the conclusion is never made.


Finally, Glenn Beck has a philosophical problem, and this is the most important. Although he reasons well up to a point, he often cannot bring the conclusion home, because he cannot or will not take his ideas to the most logical conclusion. This is not limited to his attacks on science, but can also be heard in other topics he discusses. For example, if Beck really believes in the sovereignty of the individual, which is clearly stated in the 9 Principles of his 9-12 project, then he cannot continue to advocate for the social control that is part and parcel of conservative political thought. Although he says that he is libertarian in thought, and that he trusts the American people, he cannot quite match his thought to those words. Lately, as Glenn has become increasingly a preacher in the Great Awakening style of Jonathan Edwards or George Whitfield, I have begun to suspect that this inability to bring home the most logical conclusion to his chain of reasoning may lie in the contradiction between the idea that human beings are fit for liberty, and his religious notion that man is fatally flawed by original sin.

Two of these problems are weighty enough to deserve blog entries of their own, and so I shall go into much more detail about Glenn's fundamental misunderstanding and ignorance with respect to the modern theory of evolution in my second part. In the third, I shall address the philosophical knots he mananged to contort himself into with his claim that those who accept the evidence for evolution by natural selection must deny the inherent nature of the rights of man. The ignorance of the first leads directly to the ignorance of the second. That is, the misunderstanding and misapprehensions that Glenn speaks with regard to what Dennett calls "Darwin's dangerous idea", lead directly to his ignorance of the history of the idea, and the wicked stepchildren it has been distorted to create: Social Darwinism and Lysenkoism. The first, in the hands of the American Progressives, gave us eugenics and forced sterilization, and the second, in the hands of Soviet Communists, gave us the planned famine that killed millions of Kulaks.

These discussions are worth taking a bit of time and blog-space to have, because the issues that Darwinian evolution bring up, and the ignorance of what the theory actually means, is widespread, and not limited to one political pole. If the religious right has used such ignorance to advance their cause of social control, the left has turned a scientific theory into a dogma and ideology to be decided not by the evidence, and not by hypothesis testing, but through the ideology of consensus science, something that never was and never can be. This has grave implications for new and unfounded pseudo-scientific theory that is more akin to religion than it is to science: global warming. The secular, collectivist left is using this idea to advance their own agenda of social control. And the implications are just as totalitarian as anything your hot-farting fundamentalist dominionist can dream up.