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Without Critical Thinking, the Public Will Lose Its Mind

3/31/2010

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One of the few issues that unites almost everyone is opposition to waste.  No one openly favors wasteful spending or wasting opportunities, for instance.  So I want to identify those who have wasted something even more valuable, our time and to demonstrate the much-needed use of critical thinking.

We can start of with those who have made false statements about Barack Obama.  Their inane comments would all have been disposed of easily had only they listened:

False:  Obama was not a natural-born citizen and is not eligible under the Constitution to serve as the President of the United States.


True:  Obama is a natural-born citizen because he was born in Hawaii, as his birth certificate and newspaper clippings prove.  He is also a natural-born citizen because his mother was a citizen of the United States.  Even if he had been born in Kenya, as "birthers" contend, he would be natural born and could serve as the President.

False:  Obama is a Muslim.
True:  Obama is a Christian.  It does not matter if he were a Muslim, anyway.

We can then move on to the insidious comments made by "Tea Party" members and others in the health care reform debate:

False:  The federal government takeover of the health insurance industry is unconstitutional as a violation of states' rights.

True:  Even if we choose to see it that way, it is no more a violation than the federal government's control over policies enacted by states about medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide.

False:  We can't have health care reform that is socialist.
True:  We already have socialism in our nation in the form of the use of individual taxes to pay for libraries, the police and air quality, as well as many other things that individuals cannot do by themselves.  It is also worth pointing out that the military and federal officials participate in health care plans that could be described as socialist.

False:  We cannot trust our government to handle health care.
True:  That may be so, but can we trust private corporations who continue to raise premiums sky high?

We could continue with any one of a number of obviously false statements that many people in our nation fell for.  But the point is that fewer and fewer people seem to think or want to think about what they are being told.

Discussion of the national debt serves to bring this idea home.  While we know the national debt to be well over $12 million, few understand how it got to be this way, what its significance is and what we can do about it.  Too many keep parroting the line that Obama has put us in serious debt.

The fact is, his predecessors going back to Reagan (and excluding Clinton) have brought us there.  Under Reagan and Bush I, the debt as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product rose from 40 percent to 70 percent.  After Clinton lowered it, Bush II took to it 80 percent. (Source: http://zfacts.com)

But none of this mattes as much as the historical context.  The United States had huge debts after World War II.  It was worth getting these debts through high spending (namely, World War II) because the spending brought on a dynamic economy, which lasted from the late 1940s until the early 1970s.

With critical thinking, we could see the whole picture that the United States needs a healthy economy to pay off its debts and may have to engage in spending that will help the economy to be able to make the payments.  Without critical thinking, we are left with bumper sticker messages with which to engage a war of words.

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We Must Make Our Economy Independent of Permanent War

3/27/2010

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Republicans and Democrats have given us great theater over the recently-passed health care legislation.  But when it comes to the one issue that determines the future of our nation, there is complete agreement.

They all give war a chance.

When was the last time Congress voted against a resolution backing the President’s authority to use force?

When was the last time a President declined to use force?

When was the last time a credible candidate for President vowed to end a war?

With peace popular (note that few presidents have started a war in a re-election year), it is surprising that none of the questions above has a recent answer.  Obviously, the mass of public opinion is not the real reason for these political decisions.  So who pushes our nation to go to war?

Those who gain from war.

The contractors who make the weapons.

The stockholders of these contractors.

The intelligence community.

The companies that make equipment for war.

The talking heads on television who tell us their “expertise” on defense matters.

The politicians who got onboard first for war.

This is not a new idea.  Smedley Butler wrote War Is a Racket to describe the beneficiaries of World War I.  But the thought bears repeating.

We are always at war and/or on our way to one anywhere we can concoct a good excuse to make one happen.  The lies about Iraq should have made that abundantly clear.

War gives public policy a focus that nothing else can.  It tells our leaders what industries to favor, which side of an argument to give presumption to and how to interpret foreign nations and their actions.

Prominent leaders who try to stop wars get killed (the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr.) while war supporters like Nixon and the Bushes get elected.  Peace candidates like Dennis Kucinich get marginal support.

Our leaders see the world as a chess board on which to try out weapons and kill off our “enemies.”  Why?  Because the economy thrives on Halliburton, not the Veterans for Peace.  So we can expect more assassinations and false-flag operations until we stop using war to feed the economy.
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Replace the Pledge of Allegiance

3/17/2010

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I want to change the Pledge of Allegiance.

The one we have been reciting from kindergarten on for over fifty years does not represent the values we as citizens of our nation should live by.  First, here is, line by line, what is specifically wrong with the current pledge:

I pledge allegiance

The dictionary defines pledge as a “solemn promise.”  Usually there are consequences to breaking promises.  But what are we pledging are allegiance to?

To the flag

We promise to be loyal to a flag?  This makes no sense.  We need loyalty to something more substantive than a piece of cloth.

Of the United States of America

Should we be loyal to those who wave the flag of our nation on the one hand and commit acts of treason on the other?  The perpetrators of the crimes of 9/11 did not burn the flag; they wore and continue to wear it on their coats.

And to the Republic

Yes, we live in a republic.  This means other people vote on our behalf.  But does a republic exist when the representatives consistently vote against the interests of the people they serve?  How about when decisions made, like the decision to go to war in Iraq, are based on lies told and lies believed?

For which it stands

So the flag stands for the Republic.  This sounds like we should believe in our flag and the Republic.  That works fine unless you doubt the words of those who carry the flag on our behalf.

One nation

We are one nation composed of many states and jurisdictions.  When the federal government contradicts a state government or forbids or discourages a state to carry out an investigation of a crime (as in the JFK assassination), the idea of one nation becomes a bit confusing.

Under God

The Knights of Columbus urged Congress to include this line during the days of Communist scare.  To assume we have the blessing of a deity after our nation’s actions of invading helpless nations and killing innocent people is either chutzpah or it suggests that God is not watching us.

Indivisible

Divisions tear our nation apart.  The last time our nation resembled indivisibility was after 9/11 but that division required several government lies about the attacks to stick it together.

With liberty and justice for all.

The Patriot Act alone has taken away several liberties by substantially weakening the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments.  People are harassed for speaking out against government policies.  Laws are proposed to send dissenters away.  Forget about freedom of speech.  There is so little freedom to even think about liberty and justice for anyone except those in power.

What should we pledge loyalty toward?

We ought to promise to ourselves to seek the truth about those in power, tell the truth about ourselves, act with ethics toward others and show compassion to the rest of the world.
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Don't Let Pentagon Tragedy Blind You into Scapegoating the Innocent

3/7/2010

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Why does a person buy a firearm, travel across the country and then shoot two guards at the Pentagon?

Because a man who recently did just that also died in the shooting, we may not get an answer to the question.  But the national media came up with several guesses:

1)     The man, John Patrick Bedell, was a skeptic of the official 9/11 theory (a “9/11 Truther”).

2)    Bedell suffered from bipolar disorder.

3)    Bedell used marijuana.

But what did any of these labels stuck to Bedell have to do with his use of violence?  Millions of people in the United States and across the world tell booksellers, blogs and pollsters that they do not believe the official theory as to 9/11 that nineteen Arab suicide hijackers took over four planes and crashed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Yet no one who studies crime has stated any rise in crime among these truthers or any connection between believing in an alternative theory and using violence.

As for his apparently untreated mental illness, approximately 5.7 million people in our nation suffer from bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic-depressive illness.  But this illness causes a person to drift from a depressive phase in which their brain slows down to a manic phase in which they become excited.  In the first phase, a person with the disorder typically cannot concentrate well enough to plan harm to another and in the second phase, the person is too giddy with excitement to want to harm anyone.

And who has heard of marijuana use ever being linked to violence?  No credible study supports this conclusion and it seems out of place here, as Bedell did not commit a crime with the intention of making money, as some drug users do in order to buy more drugs.

As the reporters of this crime, the media used labels not relevant to the incident.  But now many of those who have heard the reports have likely wrongly concluded that the media guesses of 9/11 truth, bipolar disorder and marijuana contributed to Bedell’s intent to commit murder.

The unfortunate consequence of this labeling is that three groups of people will be stigmatized for something that they had nothing to do with.  In a society where voters urge politicians to be “tough on crime” and where civil liberties have shrunk dramatically since the advent of the “War on Drugs” and the events of 9/11, false labeling will enable our government to scare decent citizens into hiding who they are for fear of being profiled.

We must stop our government from scapegoating anyone.  This is how the Nazis got started and after they played upon the ignorance of their people, they succeeded in getting Germans to approve of the second-class citizenship and eventually the detention and murder of people in several groups: Jews, communists, the disabled, the gays, etc.

Cross-examine the reports about the Pentagon shooting and work toward a society where people are still innocent unless proven guilty.
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The Lies That Bind: Why the Public Must Cross-Examine Its Leaders

3/3/2010

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 “Nixon Gives Medal of Freedom to G. Gordon Liddy”
 “Experts agree that AIDS is a myth”
 “Clinton Removed from Office for Lying about Consensual Affair”
  
   What do you think about these headlines?  You may quickly conclude that none of them ever happened and that is true.  But there is more to it.
   These are headlines that could have happened if citizens simply accepted what their leaders told them and refused to question anything.  It demonstrates that we have it within ourselves the power to research what we are told.
   Upon the news of a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in June 1972, much of the media and the public figured it was just politics.  Even when allegations mounted that President Nixon had covered up White House connections to the break-in, most people believed Nixon when he said that there would be "no whitewash at the White House."
   The decision by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and some leaders in Congress to pursue the matter further was a decision to challenge or cross-examine the President's story.  They were willing to acknowledge the possibility that Nixon had lied and covered up the matter, which first took the understanding of why Nixon had a motive to lie.  Like most leaders, he feared embarassment of getting caught and had trouble coming up with a convincing apology after the story took hold.
   By his silence over the issue, President Reagan implied that there was no AIDS problem in the United States in the early to mid-1980s.  As the number of cases of people, particularly young gay men, contracting a mysterious illness skyrocketed, more and more community leaders demanded action from Congress and the President to identify this disease and to fund research to find a cure for it.  Yet it took years for Reagan to comprehend the problem and to speak of it.
   Those who urged a new policy on AIDS challenged Reagan and other politicians on the grounds that government is not always a superior source of information.  Politics often determines who leads government agencies charged with handling a general issue.  Ignorance among politicians about the disease and, to some extent, homophobia prevented them for taking the problem seriously.
   When the news broke that President Clinton had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and then lied about it at a deposition, most Republicans and some Democrats wanted to impeach him.  When Clinton made it clear he wasn't going to leave without a fight, Republicans in the House went ahead and impeached him.  Name calling over his misconduct continued and was reported frequently to the public, with some going as far as to say that it was not only a legal issue, but a moral one.
   With Clinton clearly guilty as charged, a sizeable group in the public decided to defend the President against impeachment and removal from office.  In doing so, they saw through the emotional pleas that some leaders made that leaving Clinton in office was a catastrophe in the making.  These defenders calmly read the Constitution and concluded that Clinton had not committed treason, bribery, high crimes or misdemeanors (his lie at the deposition was not a crime, but rather a matter handled by the judge who fined him, reinstated a case against him and suspended his law license).
   We must remember these lessons when we hear lies from our leaders.  They have motivation to lie to us about serious matters because they are humans who have their own agendas - not just policies but their own viability as politicians.  The government is also not the best source of information.  On issues in which government agents may be involved (ex: Watergate, 9/11, etc.), we should not expect full candor or honesty from our leaders.  And we should never cave in to a threat of a disaster without reasoning.  Abandoning reason and failing to read history is the greatest disaster of all.  
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