It's Official: No, Obama Can't, And He Never Wanted To Anyway

The articles:

1. Tom Sullivan: President Obama Loses His Base: He Just Ran Out of Slack
2. Glenn Greenwald: White House as helpless victim on healthcare and The underlying divisions in the healthcare debate
3. Matt Taibbi: Obama's Big Sellout
4. David Sirota: The "Candidate vs. President" Canard

And now it's official at last:

1. Barack Obama is not a progressive.
2. Barack Obama is a bought and paid-for conservative Clintonite corporate shill who is selling out American democracy to corporatist dictatorship.
3. Barack Obama has officially jumped the shark.

Progressives, you've been had. Big time. That "change agent" you (and, shamefully, I too) elected? Not to be seen. He suckered the American people for everything. The ex-community organizer just proved himself to be one of the worst of the neoconservative Blue Dogs. For all we know, he planned the total abortion ban in the corporate welfare health care "reform" (sic!) bill. Turns out the libertarians were right after all.

On the other hand, he's actually done some things right...

The page: The Obameter: Obama's Campaign Promises that are Promise Kept In previous posts entitled "No He Can't" (part 1 and part 2), I've harshly criticized President Obama's insistence on continuing his predecessor George W. Bush's imperial wars and white-elephant bank bailout, and his willingness to sign a health care reform bill that is little different from Bush's corporate-welfare Medicare reform bill. On the really big issues, then, it seems he's the typical cowardly Democrat who kowtows to Operation Permanent Republican Administration. It's the little issues where he actually succeeds, as this entry's featured link should prove. (And it helps that he doesn't like Bush any more than I do.)

Now click that link again and pay close attention. On the war, promises 134 and 167 are the ones I'm so harshly criticizing. But remember, he actually did promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan till Osama bin Laden is dead, Al Qaeda is annihilated, and the Taliban crushed. The last is impossible, though, since the war itself is empowering the Taliban extremists. Colonial war tends to do that. Think: Viet Cong. Still, he's criticizing the Bush-Cheney cowboy chauvinism and fundamentalist Americanism. But still, by escalating the Afghan war and spreading it into Pakistan, he's created his Vietnam. Remember, the Vietnam War destroyed not one but two presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Even so, he's promised to end Bush's pet war, the one in Iraq (promises 119 and 125), though so far he hasn't gone so far as to actually de-escalate it, at least not yet.

I like promise 222, loosening restrictions against Cuba. Still, he should end the embargo completely and restore diplomatic relations; that would eliminate the perceived necessity for all that Cold War nationalist bluster on both sides.

He's also kept his promises on other issues, some dear to liberals (or which should be), others reversing repressive, theocratic, and anti-scientific decrees and laws signed into law by Bush. So you can't say Obama hasn't done any good things as president — unless, of course, you're an irrational wingnut neocon or born-againer who hates his guts, thinks he's not even American, and maybe even wants to kill him (the Psalm 109:8 controversy).

It's only on the big issues that he's failed. (With one exception: little by little, he's starting to take little steps toward ending the long-standing and destructive policy of drug prohibition, though it's partly because of the increasingly violent drug war in Mexico.) But it's the big issues that threaten to destroy not just his presidency, but the country. Ultimately, the oligarchic republican system established in 1787 is unsustainable, and will have to be superseded by something far more democratic. The criticism and praise will continue as his term progresses and he keeps or breaks his promises. Keep your eyes peeled, your ears to the ground, and stay tuned...

No He Can't, Part 2: Obama Says War Is Peace, Jumps The Shark

The article: Nobel-winning Obama defends war in call for peace - Yahoo! News

So the latest chickenhawk warlord who rules the world, who might as well be called George Bush III because he loves loves LOVES war so much, the neocon in liberal's clothing called Barack Hussein Obama, accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in order to defend the negation of peace. He pays lip service to the peacemakers, then defends his true calling, All-Conquering Khan of the World, his true title. Apparently God's got him on Shrub Bush's hotline! "Some will kill; some will be killed." But what's important is that the killing must must MUST continue, at all costs! For the infinite glory and profit of America's corporate welfare kings!

Barack Hussein Obama, the smooth-talking Chicago conman who convinced us that he's a liberal but is really the second coming of Emperor Shrub, has now definitively jumped the shark. If you remember the 2008 US presidential election, Obama was elected by an antiwar majority. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going badly and bankrupting the country. But not only did the new president continue Bush's bailout of his big banker friends, he escalated both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and is waiting like Bush for the perfect excuse to invade Iran in order to save damsel in distress Israel. He ended up being more of the same, only with the silver tongue of the Devil and a convincing liberal façade. The neocon warhawks are having multiple orgasms over their former seeming enemy's total conversion to the cause of empire.

Obama? No. He Can't.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.

Extra! AP Declares War On Internet!

#Bloggers ap #censorship
In June, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort. The Retort claimed that citing an AP article falls under the fair use law. The AP insists that any citation other than a link constitutes plagiarism under the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (full text in PDF format here). Under the new AP copyright policy, it is forbidden to copy even one word from an AP article without payment. The cost for quoting? $2.50 per word!

You know what this means.

The Associated Press has declared war against the Internet.

Going Public Again

I've neglected my opinion blog here since, actually, Inauguration Day. For some reason, despite my strong opinions and my desire to keep up with current events, I couldn't think of anything to write. I've posted lots of entries on my main and opinion blogs in the past six months, but nothing here. Since then, my attitude has mellowed some; I'm no longer quite the "angry young man" I was last year (this post on my main blog explains part of the reason). But now I feel I'm ready to take on the world again, so I intend to post here regularly now.

Here's a few of the current events that I'm keeping up on right now:

1. The Iranian revolution in progress. Right now, the massive and frequently violent protests over the perceived rigging of the recent presidential election have died down considerably, but the theocratic régime is increasingly divided.
2. The anti-abortion movement seems to be breaking up because the "pro-life" organizations are increasingly far more conservative than the majority of Americans opposed to abortion.
3. The rise of the conspiracy theory of the "birthers", who claim that President Obama is not an American citizen and therefore cannot legally be President. They even have their own website! The big problem they have with Obama, it seems to me, is that he's black. The "birthers" are neoconservatives who are almost all white; they ruled America till January 20 this year, but now they are bitter and even willing to call for violent revolution.
4. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, of course.

And other issues of the day, in their context.

But I'm not going to neglect my opinions and philosophy, either. This blog isn't purely political; I don't call it my opinion blog for nothing.

I hope to post at least once a week at minimum.

Update: Sarah Palin wants her own radio show! Interesting choice for someone who keeps attacking the media. Even so, whenever people ask me about the Alaskan ex-governor's future, I always tell them "Fox News". I have to say it: I told you so!

Inauguration Day 2009: The Day Everything Changed

Is it just me, or do you too think it highly significant that Inauguration Day this year came the day after Martin Luther King Day? MLK Day is an American government holiday established to honor the legacy of the martyred civil rights hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the famous "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the 1963 March on Washington, he gave voice to the idea of equality between Americans of African descent, most of whose original ancestors were brought to America as slaves, and their European-descended fellow citizens. Today, the dream has still not been fully achieved. However, today represents one big step closer.

Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African immigrant, has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Hell has officially frozen over.

What I missed by not posting here for so long...

I haven't been posting here often. In fact, for almost four months last year, I didn't post here at all. And so I missed a whole lot of things, including some very important events. Here's what I missed:

1. First and foremost, the American election, and especially the long process that led to the historic election of Barack Obama as president.
2. The sudden and cataclysmic collapse of the American financial industry and the total extinction of the investment banks, which has all but plunged the world into economic depression. Recently, this was complicated by the collapse of Bernard Madoff's gigantic pyramid scheme.
3. The big December 2008 snowstorm that paralyzed Seattle and the Northwest, with its January sequel. (However, I did take pictures...)
4. And other things that happened, but which I've already forgotten.

There are advantages to keeping your readers informed about current events, or at least your take on these events. The tradeoff, however, is that this is time-consuming. I have limited time, and much of it is taken up by writing my novel. So I haven't really been keeping up lately. For almost four months, I hardly even touched my computer at all.

I hope to get myself informed enough to comment more often here. Since it takes time to do so — that is, to research what I'm writing about, for one thing — I probably won't post as often as I'd like. Still, I should at least try...

Finally: This Blog Gets Its Final Name

At last, I found the right name for this opinion blog. It is "Take Nothing On Faith", which just happens to be the motto I live by, just as "with great power comes great responsibility" is Spider-Man's. Now, how did I come up with this title? Archetypically: it came to me while I was brushing my teeth.

Also, I found out why my recent posts look so screwy in their layout. I found out when I was preparing to post this very entry. It was the post template, something that can be corrected in my settings. Believe it or not, it's a bug in the regular Blogger, one that amazingly does not exist (or has been corrected) in Blogger in Draft. Somehow regular Blogger has been turning my newlines into spaces. I corrected the problem manually in this post, then I corrected it definitively in the settings menu — in Draft, of course. Problem solved. Now I'm ready to start posting here again. Stay tuned...

Nihilism and Three Levels of Mindsets

In my previous entry Atheism Without Nihilism, a pious Christian posted an anonymous comment that, in retrospect, made me realize that between people with differing mindsets, no communication is possible. To the religious mind, atheism is defined as nihilism. Why? Because of religion's definition of "value": all value is of God, and is therefore supernatural by definition. If God doesn't exist, then value doesn't exist. Ergo, atheism = nihilism. period. And so if you deny the existence of a Supreme Being, to avoid nihilism you must redefine the meaning of value so that it refers to this world and not the world above. However, you can only make the redefinition if your mind has evolved to a sufficient level of complexity. Thus, I need to speak of mindsets.

I learned about three evolutionary levels of mind by reading Richard Brodie (his site here), specifically Virus of the Mind. These levels are:

1. gene-driven, meaning concerned only with one's instincts and appetites;
2. meme-driven, meaning concerned with one's ideology or religion, sometimes at the expense of life itself, one's own or others'; and
3. self-driven, of a sufficiently high level of consciousness that one can define the way one defines their life.

These three levels of consciousness are obvious enough if you observe people long enough. They were first described by, believe it or not, the ancient Gnostics, who were notoriously unworldly but who saw the effects of people's level of consciousness and divided them into "hyletics" or materialists, "psychics" or conventionally religious people, and "pneumatics" or truly spiritual people. Modern science made the "pneumatics" into objective realists, people who treat reality and themselves with objectivity. The religious mentality has become every bit as apparent among Gnostics as among more conventionally religious people. So the schema itself has evolved, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Now the thing about mindsets is that minds operating on a higher level can understand those at lower levels, but lower-level minds cannot understand those at higher levels. The religious mind cannot understand the scientific mind; people who operate according to dogmas (religious or ideological) defined as Absolute Truths cannot possibly conceive of the higher mindset in which people submit everything to objective inquiry and take nothing on faith.

So, to answer the question as to whether atheism is nihilism: yes &mdash but only on the second, meme-driven, dogmatic (religious and ideological) level of consciousness. But on the third, self-driven, scientific level of consciousness, definitely not. Indeed, the Level 2 belief in a Supreme Being, or at least Absolute Truth, strikes the Level 3 mind as itself nihilistic, because it drains all value from the world and leaves it a desolate wasteland from which Level 2 longs to escape to the world above. So Level 2 minds like my anonymous commenter's and Level 3 minds like mine are doomed to talk past each other. Less tolerant Level 2 minds simply declare "holy war" against all other minds that are like them, and become terrorists.