SERIOUS CONSULTING

DECEMBER 2, 2010. Most people don’t want to access their own imagination. They want to use the products of other people’s imagination. That’s the limit of their courage.

As many of you know, I have been working with private clients for years. This type of consulting is unique.

It focuses on imagination and power.

Recently, this work has escalated.

Some people, surveying the economic scene, have realized that, more than ever, they need to tap into imagination as the primary force for shaping a future that frees them from constant minute-to-minute worrying.

These people have made a leap.

They not only want new solutions. They want a new way to approach their own desire and their own vision.

My consulting work doesn’t present patterns of success to people. It doesn’t present a picture and say “copy this.”

Imagination equals power.

Again, here is the problem. Most people won’t commit to their own imaginations. They just won’t. They want to access the products of other people’s imaginations. That’s their farthest reach. That’s their limit.

And do you know the consequence of that?

Well, think of it this way. If a person denies his own freedom, he has a tendency to want to limit the freedom of others. In some cases, he wants to destroy it.

The same condition applies to imagination. If a person denies his own, he tends to deny imagination even exists. And if he sees it anywhere, he derides it, tries to step on it.

He is stepping on the most powerful force there is. He’ll gain nothing by it—except to further diminish himself.

My work involves liberating the power of imagination.

I find great success when a person commits to expanding his own conception of how far and wide he can create a future.

If he can’t make that commitment, if he piles up one excuse after another, he will sink like a stone.

If he looks for a cloud of magic to descend on him and transform his life, and if, in the meantime, he waits and waits and does nothing, he loses.

If he obtains some kind of inspiration from lofty words, but never moves off the dime, and instead merely observes “the passing show,” he experiences a sense of decay.

This commitment I refer to—does it involve struggle? Of course it does. Nothing truly important comes without effort. This puts some people off. They associate struggle with drudgery, because that has been their experience. But work in the direction of making imagination manifest in the world is uplifting, fiercely satisfying, and ultimately joyous.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

for inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS: CONFUSION

NOVEMBER 23, 2010.  These days, doctors often run antibody tests on patients to see if they have a particular disease.

What is an antibody test?

In the simplest terms, it is aimed at detecting a person’s immune system responding to the presence of a specific germ.

A doctor suspects you have disease X, which is caused by virus Y.  He takes a blood sample, and that sample is examined for the presence of antibodies which are specific to virus Y.

If you test positive for the presence of those antibodies, he says you have disease X.

However, there is a vaccine that is supposed to protect a person from disease X, and this vaccine does what?

IT PRODUCES ANTIBODIES SPECIFIC TO VIRUS Y.

In that case, you are said to be immune from virus Y.

That’s right.

This is what is called a contradiction. 

In the first instance, when your body naturally produces antibodies to virus Y, the doctor tells you you have disease X.

But if the vaccine produces those same antibodies, you’re said to be immune to disease X.

In purely practical terms, this contradiction is good for business.  Medical business.  On the one hand, they diagnose more cases of a disease.  On the other hand, using the same logic to obtain an opposite conclusion, they sell more vaccines.

Have fun with the contradiction.  Chew it over.  Maybe you’ll decide we’ve humans have evolved to the point where we don’t have to pay any attention to logic.  Maybe not.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANLYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

A VACCINE CHALLENGE TO MAINSTREAM RESEARCHERS

HAS A TRUE CONTROLLED STUDY ON A VACCINE EVER BEEN DONE?

By Jon Rappoport   

NOVEMBER 22, 2010.  Before I describe and issue the challenge, I have to state that most controlled tests of drugs never meet adequate standards of science.

There are flaws and gaps and holes.

How should a controlled trial be done? 

Let us suppose we are going to test the safety and efficacy of a new vaccine to prevent X, a disease researchers claim is caused by Virus Y.

There will be two groups.  The first group of 700 children will receive the vaccine.  The second group of 700 will receive a neutral harmless solution.

No one operating the trial will know which group actually gets the vaccine and which group gets the “placebo.”

Here are the conditions that should be met in the study.

First, we must establish that disease X is really caused by Virus Y.  A third group of 700 children who have been diagnosed with X are tested.  In at least 90% of the 700, Virus Y must be found by direct isolation.  This means no indirect tests are run.  (No antibody assays or PCR-type assays are acceptable.)  Technicians must find Virus Y in at least 630 children. 

Second, in these 630 children, technicians must find Virus Y in sufficient quantities to make it obvious that the virus can cause harm.  Mere traces of Y are not enough.  You need an army to make war on the body. 

I will tell you that this first step alone, this first condition, will disqualify the rest of the study in many instances.  It will turn out there is insufficient evidence to maintain that researchers have found a specific disease entity caused by a specific germ.

If, however, this first condition is met, we go on to phase two.

This second condition assures us that the two groups of 700 children are initially comparable.

The general immune-system status of all 1400 children must be matched.  We can’t have an overbalance of immuno-compromised children in one group, for example. 

Likewise, the general nutritional status of the two groups must be evenly matched.  This is common sense, as well.  If 500 children in the first group are eating a junk-food diet, as opposed to 100 in the second group, that would be a major flaw.  Tests for nutritional status would be conducted.

The medical and medical-drug histories of all the children in both groups would be brought to the table.  We need to make sure these histories are clean, because we don’t want children weakened by such past treatment to take part in the trial at all.

As closely as possible, we want to make sure that children who have suffered adverse effects of environmental chemicals are ruled out of the study.

Now, we give the vaccine or the placebo to all 1400 children.

The children are closely monitored for 18 months, during which time all possible adverse events are recorded.  These would include any episodes of illness, fever, mental imbalance, and, of course, any cases of disease X that arise in either group.

At the end of the 18-month period, the frequency of all possible adverse events are investigated, and we have a picture of the placebo group versus the vaccine group.

We continue to monitor both groups for the next five years, to record how many cases of disease X occur in the placebo group versus the vaccine group.

Then we will know something.  Did the vaccine work to prevent disease X?  Was the placebo group just as successful, or more successful, in warding off X? 

(I will grant that markers and tests for initial immune status and nutritional status and definitions of vaccine-related adverse events—all these factors are up for grabs and controversies.  But unless these matters are settled, no accurate studies can be done.)

Here is my assertion: this kind of controlled study on vaccines has never been done.  It has never been done for any vaccine anywhere, at any time.

And I have no reason to believe it will ever be done.

If you can show me the existence of this kind of controlled study on a vaccine, send me the citation.

If none exists, we can say that the kind of test which would assure us vaccines are safe and effective has never been carried out.

Of course, researchers are fond of arguing back that the reduction of infectious diseases in populations by vaccines is an established fact.  Sorry.  There is a literature that claims most, if not all, infectious diseases were dying out before vaccines were introduced.  And if a disease that was vaccinated against did not appear later on, but other strange and troubling and severe disease conditions surfaced, we are not assured the vaccine was safe.  Nor should we be.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

WHEN DOES GOVERNMENT STOP GROWING?

NOVEMBER 22, 2010.  If history is any judge, government keeps growing.  It’s a tree whose nutritional needs are fed by money—and it can create money, so it feeds itself.

I’m not aware of any organism in the natural world that manufactures its own food.

Of course, eventually everybody looks around and realizes that the invention of money out of thin air has reached an impasse. 

Suppose, as national governments face bankruptcy because no one takes their money seriously, they will be forced to cut services and pensions.  Will that stop their growth?

Or will they find other ways to expand their functions?

Such as criminal arrests, prosecutions, new laws defining a wider range of what is criminal, and then more arrests and prosecutions…

Governments never seem to catch on to the idea that they aren’t like businesses.  A company, of course, wants to expand.  But a government—at least the republican form of constitutional government—is supposed to be acutely aware of its mandated limits.  It’s supposed to operate within a narrow context.

However, it doesn’t work out that way.  Government links its own survival to the notion of getting bigger.

In America, the judiciary was tasked with assuring that constitutional limits would prevail.  That idea went the way of an extinct species a long time ago.

Now we have government as a protection racket:  “If you the citizen will depend on us, we’ll protect you.  If you can’t see your need to rely on is, we’ll invent new ways you have to, until you see the light.”

As this process develops, the idea of freedom and what it means begins to disappear.  Well, it would, because freedom isn’t about government protection. 

Dependence replaces freedom.  Dependence needs a public relations team.  The idea has to be dressed up and explained in a way that motivates and even inspires people—because it doesn’t work so well when you come right out and say to people, “We want your dependence.”  It doesn’t have a proper ring to it.  It doesn’t sell.

So the PR “humanitarian” element comes in.  “It’s good for everyone if we all rely on each other.  We all need each other.  We’re a great big village of eight billion people.  No object or person exists apart from every other object or person.” 

People like this.  They believe it’s true.  It feels like a religion.

“You see, it isn’t about government getting bigger and enforcing dependence and redistributing wealth.  No, no.  It’s about government acting in line with a universal law.  Interdependence.  We’re all in this together.  Government is just a part of the equation.  Government, therefore, is humane.” 

Government is, well, a church.  It’s an aid operation.

We must all save everybody, and government is our best vehicle for doing that.  Sure.

There will be the usual parent-child disputes and misunderstandings.  Of course.  That’s natural.  You may not like what government does on Tuesday, and then next week, on Thursday, you may not like what it does.  But all in all, we recognize we’re in this together, and if we try to cut government out of the equation, through some misguided sense of independence, the parent will have to slap our wrists, to remind us of the universal principle…

The government tells us that even with a money crunch, even with a reduction of services, it will somehow find new ways to help us.  It won’t desert us. 

And after all, who cares about freedom anymore?  That’s a worn-out concept.  It doesn’t have zing left. It’s flat, like an old bottle of carbonated water.  Once upon a time, it was bracing.  But these ideas don’t last.  They come and go.  Isn’t that what it’s all about?  Trends.  Fads.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  Freedom was a gimmick.  It sold, and then it didn’t sell.  So we have to find something new and shiny.  Marketing operates that way.  You hype a product for a while, and then people tire of it.  So you have to change the packaging.  Or you put nuts in it, and sprinkle it with sugar.  You make it low-fat.  Then low-carb.  Then gluten-free.  Instead of sugar, you say cane sugar.  Then you discontinue the line altogether.  You shift to another product. 

Take the war in Afghanistan.  At first, it was about going after Bin Laden.  Then it was the Taliban.  Then, when we went back in, it was about building a sustainable government.  Then it was about helping the villagers.  The soldiers were really social workers with food stamps.  Freedom?  American freedom?  A minor PR point.

Government is marketing.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique 18-lesson course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

TSA AIRPORT PAT-DOWNS

NOVEMBER 18, 2010.  In case you’re living inside a tree, I’ll mention that US airports are now doing full body scans of passengers, and apparently there is a radiation risk, or there might be a radiation risk, or there is no risk, or the risk is “minimal.”

I found a TSA employee a few blocks away from LAX selling tinfoil hats.  Business was brisk.  But that’s another story.

If you decline the scan, because you don’t like the health odds, or because you object to having your nude photo taken and distributed on the internet, you can opt for the pat-down.

This is a same-sex grope.  Unless the TSA employee is a transsexual.  In that case, you construct your own definition of what is happening.

Now, having read stories about disgruntled passengers who didn’t appreciate their “junk” being shaken by strangers in an airport, I have come to the following conclusion:

Soon, there will be an incident of sexual intercourse.

And the TSA employee who carried out this form of inspection will say, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

Someone with a cell phone will capture the act on video, and it will garner 500 million hits in the first six hours.

ABC will win the sweepstakes, and having paid the victim four million dollars, Diane Sawyer will do the sensitive interview.

Drudge will discover the victim is a divorced mom with three kids from Cleveland—and moonlights on the side as a hooker.

She will say (but not to Diane Sawyer), “That was the most expensive trick I ever turned—by a long shot.”

Diane, however, will offer, in a low breathy voice: “We know at least one terrorist who had a bomb in his anus, so we must ask, was it only vaginal sex in the airport?”

And the mom/hooker will reply: “If I had gone for the anal, you guys would be paying me ten million for the interview.”

Homeland Security will, upon consideration, issue a release: “Sex is probably the best way to determine whether a terrorist intends to board a plane.”

During this entire episode, President Obama will be visiting US troops in Guam.  He will spend a week with a little-known tribe rehearsing a rain dance.

Hillary Clinton will be aboard a space shuttle orbiting Earth.

In Washington DC, several groups will issue statements demanding a gay and lesbian pat-down option. 

Unobserved, Osama Bin Laden will fly commercial from JFK to LAX, making stops in Columbus, Houston, Phoenix, and San Diego.

An Al Jazeera story will escape notice: “Today, leaders of the Wahabi sect announced the launch of a new air service in the United States.  Traversing a variety of local routes, the commercial planes will accept only Islamic passengers, and will be flown and serviced by Islamic crews.  Explosion Airlines is set to debut in March of 2011.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

BOWING TO THE LEAST

NOVEMBER 17, 2010.  Don your robes, pick up your candles, and shuffle down the aisle of the new faith.    

A central aspect of education has become one of serving the needs of children who only know they want to be entertained and catered to.

These are children who have taken on the appearance of miniature adults who sense that society has swung their way.  Their nameless and faceless battle has been won.

They have achieved a status which has no relationship to achievement. 

From the point of view of the adults, who need to justify and rationalize their capitulation, this is a “special generation.”  These children have come into this world with astonishing wisdom.  They are the prophets and deliverers of the future.  They have been touched by a miracle the universe has granted.

Schools must be built that acknowledge that fact and make learning beautiful.  After all, small gods will be sitting in the seats of rooms.

And if, by some error of judgment, the facilities are not up to the highest standards of comfort and accommodation, education will be stifled and set back.

Rather than delivering the substance and details of subjects, the schools should be technological temples devoted to the transmission, by osmosis, of the blooming fruits of the culture.

Perhaps I am exaggerating.  But only because the ideal has not yet been reached. 

How can a course be taught, if the textbook is old and a bit ragged—when, all around us, we have glossy cars and razor-thin laptops and little buds for the ears?  Why would children so insulted want to learn?

If a point to be taught in a classroom requires that 30 or 40 examples be strained over by the students, four or five will do, because to push on further would be inelegant and tiring.  The teacher would “lose” the students.

Somehow, a course needs to be instructed so that teacher and student can skip around from one interesting tidbit to another, never tempting the onset of dreaded boredom.

Education is there to serve the needs of the children.  This simple formula must be understood and interpreted to mean that the impulses of the children come first, and through that mesh the teacher will navigate, assuming that the child is already brilliant and correctly instinctive. 

If the teacher stumbles and fails, it is his fault.  He transgressed.  He violated the native intelligence of his pupils.  He must retrace his steps and start again.

Not only in education, but throughout society, serving the needs of others is the prime directive.  The only argument is about how this can best be accomplished. 

The genius is the person who can anticipate all possible needs of others and take steps to fulfill them.

History is rewritten to prove that all innovators were working from a deep concern for the mass of humanity.  They knew what the people required, and they enacted solutions.  This was the only basis for invention and creation. 

In that sense, the Collective was always the first and final goal—according to the revisionists.  The individual creator was merely a carrier and an empty vessel.  When he had been filled to the brim with understanding of the Collective’s needs, he leaped forward and gave humanity the next great breakthrough.  His distinction was his emptiness.  He had no personal desires.  He had risen above that morbid level of living and thinking. 

And now we have The Children.  Civilization must bend to that collective will.  It must gear its efforts to the inchoate needs of the purest among us.  It must worship at that altar.

And if the worship is not learned well enough, then we can turn to the animals and trees and the rocks, and we can elevate that religion.  We can find what we looking for in the substance of stones.

We can always dig deeper and discover a more fundamental illustration of the Collective and deny the individual in more massive and persuasive ways.

We stand at these gates.  This is the promise we are buying and selling. 

Intense and personal desire was always the flaw.  Peace will only come when we have negated it to zero.  Then we will finally be able to pass, back and forth, the coin of the new realm.  A nothing that transcends all struggle.  An amnesia that passes all understanding. 

Children will stand at the front of society’s classrooms and explain this nothing in their ingenious ways.

Equality will have been reached.  We will exist in a pleasant fog of an unending summer morning.

Like butterflies, we will flit three seconds here, three seconds there.  We will occasionally feel the diffused sunlight reflecting from our wings. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

SCIENCE VERSUS THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

THE MISSING DEBATE

NOVEMBER 16, 2010.  To the degree that physics, biology, and chemistry wish to assert that all human processes are physical processes, one major question remains: what is freedom?

There are a significant (perhaps overwhelming) number of hard scientists who claim that every human thought and action should be attributed to chemical changes or the motion of sub-atomic particles.

Therefore, what we normally think of as choices, decisions, alternative possibilities are illusions.  There are no true alternatives.

Human actions, no matter how they look, are always and nothing more than the irresistible effects generated by prior material causes.

If so, then what about the entire effort to form a Republic on these shores based on individual freedom?

But, you see, this debate never takes place.  Opponents don’t convene and state their basic cases.  They don’t engage in a philosophical argument in these terms.

They sidestep the crucial issues.

Is the individual pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness a fragrant sentiment that actually has no meaning?  Is it just another deceptive slogan?

If you believe that all human thought and action is the predetermined result of involuntary physics, then yes, it is just another delusory bit of nonsense.

The Founders might just as well have fought the British for the right to bow before the king without removing one’s hat.

The Constitution might just as well have been written as a command to submit to Allah or a theocracy of the Roman Church.

If freedom is an illusion, what difference does it make?

As I’ve written before, the history of Western philosophy crashed on the rocks at the end of the 19^th century, because these questions were never seriously debated.

In the present technological age, the debate is more important than ever, because, increasingly, the means to alter brain processes are at our disposal.  If freedom means nothing, if it is a hoax, then the right to manipulate the brain without limit, for any purpose, is a given.  And if you don’t find a problem in that, you aren’t looking.

Scientists who are philosophical materialists are faced with this problem: if individual freedom is real, if choices are real, then those choices are NON-MATERIAL.

Choices proceed from something other than what can be found in the human body.

They proceed from something other than what can be found in chemicals or sub-atomic particles.

They proceed from the individual.

That was surely the essence of the documents on which the American Republic was founded.

One of the major political implications of philosophical materialism is the burying of the individual in the mass; and the mass is the group, the herd, the population, the collective.

The individual becomes a passé concept; a quaint, old-fashioned way of looking at the world.

In its place come the needs of the group.  And these needs can be measured and calculated and spun out on to charts, so that an overarching bureaucracy can distribute whatever items will best accommodate Everyone, according to some unchallengeable algorithm.

With the demise of the individual “as an object of concern,” wealth, property, ideas, and ambition can be ruled by Central Planners.

If you look around you, you will see that this is happening at an accelerated rate.

It may seem that the deep philosophical questions are of no importance to us, but that is not the case.  The failure to argue at that level leaves the playing field wide open to opportunistic encroachments on our natural rights as individuals.

Furthermore, it is clear that, were a real debate to take place, philosophical materialism could be dealt a severe blow—by an old Socratic strategy, called reduction ad absurdum, in which the implications of an argument are shown to lead to an untenable position.

For instance:

If all human action and thought are the result of involuntary chemical and physical changes, then we have no freedom to choose to act on what we hear, read, and understand.

Therefore, the very proposition that all human action is invariably dictated by, for example, brain chemistry is of no value.  Why bother to announce that, since knowledge of it would make no difference—since none of us can choose our responses to such an announcement?

And as for attempting to manipulate the brain in order to create “a better society,” why propose or defend that strategy, since the strategy is already being enacted on a purely deterministic basis, without free choice?

All those scientists seeking to find out more about the brain are doing what they do without the freedom to choose.  They are simply playing out the string in their laboratories, robots programmed for certain actions.

The concepts “better” and “worse” have no meaning at all, in any context. 

The very notion of considering alternatives in any sphere is meaningless, since we don’t have the ability to make choices. 

Since the beginning of time, if time ever began, a second-by-second inevitable course was set in motion for all species everywhere. 

If no choice in any realm is really possible, then how do we understand the meaning of “understanding?”  Isn’t understanding surrounded and illuminated by the notion of possibility, of various choices that can be made based on that understanding?  What is there to know or understand if freedom is a delusion? 

What I doing writing these words, and what are you doing reading them?  They mean nothing; they are nothing.  My action in writing, and yours in reading, are predetermined and unfree.   

Philosophical materialism leads us to this untenable position, this reduction to absurdity, and on these and other grounds, it should be rejected.

And instead, freedom should be reinstated to the place where it belongs.

As should its explication in the founding documents of the Republic.

And then we can discuss what the “non-material basis of freedom” might mean.

Everything in this article is for people who can think and reason.  Just because many people cannot engage in such activity doesn’t mean those of us who can should abandon the field to them.

If we do, they will act in accordance with materialistic considerations, whether they understand them or not.

Just as those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, those who don’t understand philosophy are doomed to act as if they do.

Freedom has philosophic context, and it burns brightest for those who know what that context is. 

On that basis, both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and drafted.  The founders were not men who merely acknowledged freedom and grunted in affirmation of it, as if it were a pork chop lying in the sand.   

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE FOR EDUCATION

By Jon Rappoport

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

NOVEMBER 15, 2010.  I wrote this Declaration yesterday.  There is no mechanism as yet to accumulate signers and endorsers.  I thought of waiting until such a system did exist, but decided instead to post the Declaration now and send it out.  By your responses, I’ll gauge what to do next.

___________________________ 

A hundred fifty years ago, Americans recognized that all serious discourse depended on the use of the faculty called Reason.

The rules of discourse, science, and law all flowed from that source.  These rules could be bent, twisted, and used in devious ways—but then people would know that.  They would be able to point out where the arguer had gone wrong.

A common bond existed in schools of the day.  The student was expected to learn how Reason operates, and for that he was taught the only subject which could lay out, as on a long table, the visible principles: LOGIC.

This was accepted. 

But now, this bond is gone.

The independence engendered by the disciplined study of logic is no longer a desired quality in students.  The classroom has taken on the appearance of a fact-memorization factory; and one may even express grave doubts about the relevance of many of those facts.

A mind trained no farther than rote parroting—regardless of how neat and precise it may look—is a listless mind with no center.  It reaches out for vagaries and abrupt spectacular lies, hoping to find what it is missing.  But the search produces nothing of value, because to discover logic, one must learn the whole subject as a branch of knowledge, not as a flicker of common sense sparking here and there in the landscape.

A society filled with people who float in the drift of non-logic is a society that declines.  And in its decline, it accepts preposterous leaders and bizarre, self-sabotaging programs.  Ideologies that deny individual freedom and independence are welcomed with open arms, because they mirror a muddled people’s desire to confirm that failure is the inevitable fate of all of us.

Therefore…      

When in the course of human events, education becomes so degraded that young students are no longer taught to reason clearly:

Citizens have the right to rebuild that system so the greatest contribution to Western civilization—logic—is reinstated in its rightful place.

Logic, the key by which true political discourse, science, and law were, in fact, originally developed, must be unearthed.

That key, without which the American Republic could never have been founded, will be inserted into the lock of our society, so that a rejuvenation can eventually take place.

Logic and reasoning, the capacity to think, the ability to analyze ideas—which has been forgotten, which has been a surpassing virtue in every free civilization—will be restored.

We fully recognize that once a vital thing has been misplaced, buried, and covered over by mindless substitutions, people cannot immediately recognize the original thing has any importance, meaning, or existence. 

To declare its importance makes no sense to “the crowd.”  They look bewildered and shake their heads.  They search their memories and find nothing.

They prefer to adhere to rumor, gossip, accusation, wild speculation, and fear mongering as the primary means of public discourse and assessment of truth.

These habits light their paths.  These reflexes give them some degree of pleasure.  These idols become their little gods.

To win out over such attachments and superstitions, we will have to pledge our efforts to the long term. 

But if our labors bring rewards, we can once again bring import to education, and to the founding of the Republic that cut a wide swathe through darkness.

A string of direct and distracting abuses has saddled our schools.  Among them:

Teachers believe they need to entertain children, in order to capture their attention;

School systems have substituted the need for public funds in the place of supplying a sound education;

Under the banner of political correctness, school texts have been sanitized to the point of sterility, in order to avoid the possibility of offending, to the slightest degree, any group;

Therefore, students rarely confront information in the form in which it is delivered, in a flood, every day, to people all over the world;

Students have, in this respect, been coddled;

Subjects, such as sex education, which belong in the family, have been delivered into the hands of schools and teachers;

Indeed, in certain respects, schools are asked to substitute and stand in for parents;

Masked as “learning opportunities,” various political agendas have been inserted in school curricula;

The basis on which the founding documents of the American Republic were debated and drafted—logical thought—has been eliminated from the curriculum as a serious discipline;

Therefore, students drift and grasp at superficially attractive ideas and fads of the moment;

In this respect, freedom has been reinterpreted to mean “mental incapacity and wandering thought”;

The vast contributions of the ancient Greek civilization, where logic as a crucial subject was born, have been minimized or summarized in sterile fashion;

The profound devotion to logic by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the father of the Constitution, has been forgotten altogether;

Logic, the connective tissue which binds together the progression of ideas in rational argument, has been kept away from students;

The result is the production of shallow minds that cannot see the architecture of reasoning;

Students, at sea, begin to invent wholly insufficient standards for accepting or rejecting various points of view and supposed authorities;

Students lose their true independence without ever having gained it;

The low level of overall literacy in our schools is matched only by the non-comprehension of rational thought;

In the presence of these and other deficiencies and abuses, students are pushed through, from grade to grade, graduation to graduation, as a bureaucratic function, regardless of their ability.

Therefore, in light of these intolerable circumstances, citizens of good intent declare that, in all ways possible, we will change this system.  We will urge, demand, and if necessary assume responsibility for, teaching children the missing key to education.

Logic; the capacity to reason, to think lucidly; to separate sense from chatter; to discover deception and avoid being influenced by it; to remain free and independent from the shifting opinions of “the herd”; to maintain personal liberty in the face of every spurious enticement to abandon it; to come to grips with those competitive sets of First Principles which will either lead to freedom or slavery; these are the stakes in our time.

This is the crossroad.

We choose the path that can bring us the fulfillment of a worthy goal.

We choose reason over vacuous mindlessness. 

We, who still know the power of the mind, and who understand how the founders harnessed that power to shape the great documents that yielded up, and still yield up, liberty, can bring, out of the dust of recent history, an education that truly trains the intellect.

Logic is the foundation of such an education.  

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.

NAKED FREEDOM

NOVEMBER 14, 2010.  First Principles are not popular.  They require coherent thought.  People would rather focus on an example, a case, a scandal, and wring the most sensational possible conclusions out of it—thereby removing its connection to any principle.

They would rather measure time by one piece of gossip after another.

The result of this mental deficit is a kind of permission to let the future leak in as it will, until it becomes a river that takes us wherever it leads.

But suppose we are able to marshal our resources and think about the basis of the Republic?

*                    *                    *     

The rise of science has swept all before it.  New inventions and technology have convinced the masses that science is synonymous with “workable,” “necessary,” and “governing.” 

Therefore, when a person makes a decision that is obviously and clearly unscientific, and therefore self-defeating, friends and family and co-workers and professionals urge him to reconsider and change direction.

This pressure can nearly have the effect of law, and, in fact, legislatures have passed laws that support science and forbid challenging it.

At this point, I could cite various examples of false and deceptive science—I have maintained an enterprise, over the last 30 years, in which I document such cases.  So I would have no trouble illustrating where and how science has been dressed up to look real, when it is actually hoax and fraud.

But here I don’t want to do that.  I want to make a simpler point.  It is framed by the question: how far does freedom extend?

Is it an act of freedom for a patient to deny a life-saving treatment widely accepted as such, and acclaimed as the only possible choice open to him in his circumstances?

Or is it an act of suicidal ignorance?

And if it is the latter, how might that modify what freedom consists of?

Suppose, for instance, a doctor diagnoses this patient with cancer and tells him that his only chance for survival lies in accepting chemotherapy?

And suppose the patient refuses? 

Put aside, for the moment, the matter of whether chemotherapy would be effective.  Ignore what other therapy the patient might favor.

Consider this extreme situation solely in the light of whether the patient has the right and freedom to discard his doctor’s sober advice.

This is precisely a test case, because widespread acceptance of what good science consists of is being challenged by a patient who has no medical background or expertise.

Actually, we don’t know whether the patient is challenging the science; we only know that, from the point of view of experts, that is what his refusal amounts to.

The patient is simply saying no. 

Does he have that right?

Does he have the guaranteed freedom to make his choice, even if that choice leads to his death?

Should society have a higher right to countermand his decision?

In the future, we will see more and more test cases, and the tendency will be to rule out the patient’s liberty.

Therefore, we had better get it right now.

Freedom is freedom.  If you limit it on the basis of science, or magic, or religion, and if you limit it for one person, you are setting a precedent that can limit it for others. 

Try this example.  I am standing on my own property.  In my hands are blueprints I have made for my new house.  I am already building it myself, alone.  I am standing under the skeleton.

The city in which I live has a copy of the plans.  Employees in the building department have determined, scientifically, that this structure will not stand.  It will collapse. 

My house will be erected in the center of an acre of land.  If it falls, it will fall on me and no one else.

Sheriff’s deputies are standing on the edge of my lawn with weapons.  They are threatening to come in and arrest me, before I kill myself under the falling beams. 

Do they have the right to stop me?

Do I have the freedom to build my house exactly as I have planned?

We live in an age of official and unofficial meddling. Everyone believes he has the right to interfere in other people’s business, “for their own good.”

Such a belief has a twin—we must help everyone who needs it regardless of expense, regardless of where the money comes from, regardless of what the asserted need is.

Each belief re-enforces the other.

This is the society we are turning into.

Conversely, if we allow the patient to refuse chemotherapy, if we permit the builder of the crooked house to put up that structure, and if we are publicly willing to say we understand the consequences may be dire—and still, we are willing to forego interference, we are tacitly admitting that we don’t have to help everyone, everywhere, at any moment.   

If we stand up and limit the amount of help we are willing to give “to everyone, everywhere, at every moment,” if we are willing to assert that limit publicly and specifically, then we are closer to admitting that individuals have the right and freedom to risk injuring or even killing themselves.

This is a crossroad. 

Obviously, there is tremendous sentiment on the side of political correctness: we must interfere; we must intervene; we must save the misguided.

The same situation and issue is involved in the government’s foreign policy decisions.  Are we obligated to intervene in every foreign war or massacre?

Whether you view history and the future through the eyes of policy or conspiracy, the result falling out of the hopper is the same.

To the degree that we abandon first principles and the philosophy of freedom, and allow, instead, a case-by-case carving up of the tree of liberty, we will end up with a hollow root, and that which we once cherished will be gone, a faint remnant of a forgotten era.

Despite the sentiments of utopians and rainbow seekers and all-enveloping do-gooders and apocalyptic enthusiasts, freedom always did have consequences.  You can’t be for freedom and also insist on eliminating risk.  And in the test cases, where the popular belief is that an individual, following a horrific strategy, is going to cut his chances of survival, you have to stand back.  You have to learn that intervention is not the final answer, except if we want a society in which protection ultimately emanates from law backed up by the barrel of a government gun.

There are, and will be, increasing numbers of people who insist that protection must be the first principle of existence.  They will dress it up, they will flood the decks with quasi-religious swill, they will carry out the mandate with a grave smile of purity, they will cite science, they will issue messianic commands, they will turn themselves inside out to protect Everything. Under the flag of a new dawn, they will insist.

Their lives are not their own.  To imagine they are alive, they want yours.

Most readers will shrink away from my analysis.  They would prefer not to consider these extreme test cases because, while the prospect of allowing someone the freedom to harm or even kill himself might be privately acceptable, to publicly state it is policy is going too far.  Better to stay in the shadows.

However, consider this.  If five years from now, the number of patients who can legally refuse chemotherapy is reduced, because new regulations have been put in place, then ten years from now, the number of patients who can, say, refuse vaccines might be reduced.  And then, the number of patients who can refuse prescribed antidepressants might, in fifteen years, be reduced by similar regulations.

And then, on another front, the same basic concept that forbids a man from building a crooked house that might collapse on his own property is extended.  He can’t smoke in his house.  He can’t grow certain kinds of plants that might cause a random neighbor to suffer an allergic reaction.  He can’t raise his voice to his children.  He can’t own a bicycle unless he owns a helmet designed to government specifications.      

And then, 30 years from now, every patient under the national healthcare plan must accept all drugs prescribed by a government doctor.

And no property owner can protest a microwave scan of his house that automatically records and collates unpaid tickets, private debts, owed taxes, and memberships in groups of any kind.  He can’t drive his car out of his garage unless he is taking, on schedule, every drug his doctor has prescribed him.

Well, it’s good science.  For the greatest good of the greatest number, it’s all been figured out and expressed in regulations. 

When people don’t have the sufficient mental capacity to recognize or think cogently about First Principles, these are the consequences.            

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for home schools and adults.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

ANOTHER OPEN LETTER TO HOME SCHOOLS by Jon Rappoport

NOVEMBER 13, 2010.  Imagine this.  The key subject that turns a mediocre education into a brilliant one has been eliminated from most schools of any kind.

It’s true, and that subject is logic.

James Madison, thought of by many as the father of the Constitution, studied logic intensely at the College of New Jersey.  In fact, we have 122 pages of Madison’s own handwritten notes from the course.  The course followed the pattern laid down in a famous 17^th-century book, Logic or the Art of Thinking.

As a college student, Thomas Jefferson studied philosophy and logic under Professor William Small, at William and Mary.  Small had come to the college from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he, in turn, had studied under William Duncan, a renowned logician and author of Elements of Logick.  Indeed, Jefferson later remarked Professor Small went a long way toward shaping his life.

In both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we can see that the development of the content is achieved by a brilliant logical progression of ideas.

The philosopher whose work contributed most to the founding documents of the American Republic, John Locke, once wrote, “Logic is the anatomy of thought.”

To most students and teachers alike, these are buried secrets.  And for good reason.  The public school system of the United States has gradually eliminated this branch of knowledge, logic, from its curriculum.

Why?  Because the modern shapers of American education decided that the independent ability to reason was not a useful goal.  It’s that simple.

When you stop and consider it, creating strong and independent minds runs counter to the “flow” of education.  Instead, courses are meant to imprint data on student minds.  Period.

If students were taught the secret of logic, they would eventually be able to establish a position apart from peer pressure, apart from the Collective, apart from “the herd of sheep.”

They would be able to question, analyze, and dissect information with a skill that surpasses mere grumbling and adolescent dissatisfaction.

They would, in fact, fulfill, on an individual level, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.       

Teachers are meant to prepare students to go out into the world armed with the very best tools of thinking and reasoning.  Teachers are meant to train students so they have strong independent minds.

Let me point out that there is a difference between encouraging students to rebel and have grossly inflated opinions based on nothing—and showing them how to think and reason with power.

In the former case, you are turning out pretentious people who are walking on thin ice.  In the latter case, you are imbuing students with superior skills that will stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives.

Were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison no better than rebellious teenagers out to cause trouble?  Or were they mature men who saw through the manipulations of tyranny?

In society today, we are faced with a flood of information wherever we turn.  There are three general goals implied by all this information: one, maintain things as they are, maintain the status quo; two, search for the conspiracy behind events; and three, buy into grandiose solutions to our problems.

A student who is well ground in logic does not unthinkingly fall into any of these urgings.  Instead, he examines what he is reading, hearing, or watching.  He takes apart information and judges it on its own merits, on a case by case basis.  He finds the logical flaws and gaps in it.  He can assess the value of any argument and come to a rational decision about it.

Having and using this skill is one of the primary aims of a proper education.  Without a serious study of logic, this aim goes begging.  The student drifts on a sea of random, disconnected ideas and opinions.  Eventually, as an adult, to keep himself from living in a state of confusion, he grabs on to some authority and allies himself with it.  There is no predicting what that authority will be. 

Is this the future we want for our students?

Or should we teach them how to reason, how to apply logic, how to have the kind of power the founders applied to their circumstances, in order to create, on these shores, an independent and free society?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com