One month to go: 4/20/2013

4/20, which should in a just world come to be remembered as Cannabis Freedom Day, is the day I have set for when I go on strike (namely, ceasing publication of this blog and withholding any further products of my mind from public circulation) unless the eminently reasonable demands I have set forth here are met.

I want also to reiterate the point I made here, concerning this nation's monumentally stupid (i.e., in the terms I used there, fucking ridiculous) and anti-American drug policies.  We have a head of state who has unashamedly sold out his own youthful party base, for no explicitly stated reason, since no reasons are being so much as offered these days by the anti-American, freedom-hating prohibitionist segment of this nation.  All the good ideas in circulation are on the legalization (for adults 21 and over) side, and what's more, any sober and honest observers of today's political scene know this beyond any reasonable doubt.  It's a goddamn shame that the head of state, a former University of Chicago lecturer in constitutional law, hasn't either the decency to voice a bully-pulpit opposition to these disgraceful drug policies or the courage to come out and explain himself to the American people when his drug czar says he's going to continue enforcing the idiotic federal drug policies in those states where majorities have voted for sensible legalization.

And this is one of only several no-brainer issues (see my list of demands) that the political Establishment - save for a few good apples in a rotten, rotten bunch - is either too ignorant or too malicious to so much as lift a finger to address.  Anyone with a lick of sense knows that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine wouldn't stand for this disgraceful state of affairs for a single minute, that what we have now is a bastardization of the nation's founding ideals - and a thoroughly pointless and unnecessary bastardization at that.  It defies common sense (a favored ideal among the Framers and supporting authors).

Many signs point today toward a crumbling republic.  We now have a gross federal debt meeting or exceeding the nation's Gross Domestic Product, a situation seen only once before in the nation's history - at the end of World War II, when the U.S.'s position of dominance in the world was locked in for decades to come.  We don't have that today.  We have a population falling behind in global competitiveness, due to a decadent culture which fails to convincingly promote intellectual values.  This is due in good part to an intellectual class that has - in a way that is quite self-aware, I'll add - made itself all too irrelevant to the "mundane" concerns of the people, and which has failed to achieve even in the modest task of incorporating Aristotelianism squarely into the curriculum.  We have a political Establishment corrupted by money and ignorance.  We have a ticking fiscal time bomb to the tune of $107 trillion (present value) that our politicians have no idea how to defuse.  There's a looming retirement crisis to go along with that $107 trillion time-bomb in the old-age-insurance schemes.  We're pretty much at the mercy of whatever climate change happens in the coming decades, with too many global-warming-denialists and downright lazy sonsofbitches around for there to have been intellectual energies directed toward contingency plans by now.  We have the Chinese already choking in their own smog, which is sure to have ripple effects that will hit home one way or another.  We have theocratic regimes hell-bent on getting nukes, in an age when theocracy and dictatorship as such should easily have been relegated to the dustbin of history.  And so on.

Our potential saving grace will be the wonders of technology, but we can only be best assured to win the race with the coming Cluster Fuck if we actualize the human potential that makes such wonders possible: the human intellect.  Aristotle had some choice things to say about that subject, words which we as a culture ignore or overlook at our own peril.  There are modern-day neo-Aristotelians that have been shouting this theme from the rooftops, only to be marginalized and shunned by the very intellectual class that's supposed to be promoting the interests of the people, to be serving as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge.  Whatever else people of all different creeds believe and/or disagree about, there can be no reasonable disagreement with or disbelief in something all true wisdom-lovers would agree with, and that's the vital need to maximally actualize our intellectual potentialities.  It's the key to everything else of positive value in human life, the basic principle of a defensible ethics, the underlying solution to socio-political challenges, the basis for cultural flourishing.  From the standpoint of this philosopher, it's a no-brainer, the basis of all received wisdom ("common sense") throughout human history, a principle that should permeate ethical, social, cultural and political life like it's second nature.  Jefferson and Franklin grasped it (what would this nation's history be like without these two?); philosophers as such pretty much endorse it implicitly if not explicitly as a way of life; educators grasp it well enough to grasp the importance of their profession; scientists, inventors, and visionaries grasp it well enough to be in the line of work they're in.  Cultivating human intelligence should be our highest priority, whatever other admirable priorities we have.  And yet, where and when do we ever hear this theme being broadcast loud and clear, affirmed loud and clear by individuals of our acquaintance, and so on?  If it were a widely-received cultural norm, I think we'd know about it - and experience its life-enhancing effects - by now.  So, whence this disconnect?

For the next month, I will make it a task to diagnose, to uncover the source of, this disconnect, for therein lies the way to a sweeping solution.  Who knows what I'll uncover by then, or what is to happen after that calendar date.  One can only hope that cannabis will be minimally available to me during this period of time, to expand the range of cognitive opportunities - just as Jefferson (and, in all likelihood, Thoreau) would have wanted, of course.

Today (2/20/2013)

That date could mean only one thing - the two-month mark on the countdown to the 4/20 Ultimate Cliff. Yes, for any newbies reading this, that's the date I've set for going "on strike," withdrawing the products of my mind from public circulation, unless a number of eminently reasonable demands are met by that date, including the legalization of cannabis for all adults 21 and over in all jurisdictions in the United States (preferably coupled with a solid program of public education on the effects of cannabis, to go along with education in tons of other subjects the totality of which form an integrated conceptual whole very much needed by the youth, who naturally yearn for cognitive integrity in their most intellectually-formative years).  The right to toke is there in the Ninth Amendment, and it's what Jefferson would support in a heartbeat.  It's a right Bob Marley would get up and stand up for.  It's a cognitive Saganizer for many, and potentially many more.  (So who are the effing idiots standing in the way, exactly?  They should be pushovers.)  Put that material in your in your "primacy of intellect" pipe and smoke it.

Mental exchange of the day:

CRITICS OF AYN RAND: "You have no children in your novels."

AYN RAND TO CRITICS: "Those authors you like so much? They have no heroes in theirs."

CRITICS OF AYN RAND: "Touche!"

AYN RAND TO CRITICS: "Checkmate, assholes."

Is this like shooting fish in a barrel, or what? :-D  Man, if only the Left (and its comically-ignorant reddiot spawn) could mount a remotely respectable criticism of Ayn Rand of all people, a full half-century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged....  Instead, what we get today from them is mostly intellectually-childish imbecility.  What we have here is a failure to integrate, and therefore a loss of great amounts of intellectual credibility for leftists.  Viz.:

"The political aspects of Atlas Shrugged are not its theme.  Its theme is primarily ethical-epistemological: the role of the mind in man's existence - and politics, necessarily, is one of the theme's consequences.  But the epistemological chaos of our age, fostered by modern philosophy, is such that many young readers find it difficult to translate abstractions into political principles and apply them to the evaluation of today's events.  This present book may help them.  It is a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged." -Ayn Rand, "Introduction," Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, p. ix (pb).

I dare anyone to go find and someone who's read through Rand's corpus of writings thoroughly (it couldn't exceed a dozen or so volumes, could it?  how effing hard can that be to do?), and engaged the secondary literature (including the spoken canon - in other words, the infamously excruciating mind-numbing drudgery of Leonard Peikoff lecture courses), and still come out talking the same shit - or anything remotely like that shit - about her.  I effing double and triple dog dare anyone to do it.  I think if there were such an individual, I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about her/him by now.  (I consider myself to be pretty thorough/perfectivist about this kind of shit.)  The only thing that the Left has got her on is her bad polemics, and the Left ain't no sweetie-pie itself in that department, all the academic resources at its avail notwithstanding.  Anyway, the role of the mind in man's existence is key for Rand, and absolute independence of the mind (given the nature of the mind and its functioning) is thereby also key.  None but poorly-trained intellectual imbeciles - like Donny, out of his element, like a little child wandering into the middle of a movie - would have a problem with that, right?

So.  Where does that put our cultural discourse, going forward?  Is it more intellectually-childish imbecility from leftist player-haters, or more in the way of heroes, the benevolent universe premise, sense of life, and such?  Does this here blog more or less become Ground Zero for that cultural discourse in the near future?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  Something to think about.  Glenn Beck is already outdoing you leftist fools in the intellectual department, for crying out loud, and he's yet to even take a Peikoff course, or read Norton's Personal Destinies, or log thousands of hours of Howard Stern show listening, or Saganize his cognition, or memorize much of the film canon and then work to integrate it into a functioning mental unit for later processing.  And yet, while Beck discusses Ray Kurzweil ("The Singularity Guy"), the media "progressives" focus instead on the latest cabinet nominee filibustering; do you see some effed-up priorities on someone's part here?  If these fools can't tell by now that the theme of Atlas Shrugged is not empathy-disregarding capitalist ubermensch-ism (a chicken-shit strawman in any event), but the role of the mind in man's existence, that's Exhibit A right there that they're doomed as an intellectual and political movement.  Exhibit B would be when they claim that the fundamental virtue for Rand is "selfishness" instead of the correct answer as to the chief Randian virtue: (Aristotelian) rationality.  Such piss-poor comprehension of ideas!  Whence does this pathology emerge and fester?  By golly, I put it in the most extreme terms applicable and it's still 100% spot-on, as any objective truth-observant light of history shall document.  Not too bad, huh?)

Also, you can't separate aesthetics from the rest of the philosophy.  Just thought I'd throw that out there off the cuff for consideration.  (Benevolent universe premise and heroism and sense of life - they being as much at the core of Rand's philosophy as her method of intellectual integration and her advocacy of reason as human beings' only absolute.  Why does the Left hate all that so efffing much, or so it would appear?)  Also, how does that principle integrate with the film canon, anyway?  Anyway, the goal remains: a neo-Aristotelian utopia.  Aristotle and Jefferson rolled into one, minus the slavery stuff and other imperfections.  Doable.  But how quickly?  Keep in mind that Jefferstotle doesn't suffer fools gladly.  Checkmate in 3...2...1...

Jesus and academic philosophy

Just as with such historically-relevant figures as Mortimer Adler, Mitch Albom, Woody Allen, Randy Barnett, Glenn Beck, Ingmar Bergman, William F. Buckley, Warren Buffett, Frank Capra, George Carlin, Dale Carnegie, William D. Casebeer, Andrew Dice Clay, Carl Th. Dreyer, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Anne Frank, Viktor Frankl, Ben Franklin, Erich Fromm, 'Good Guy Glenn' Greenwald, Hal Hartley, Bill Hicks, Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Jefferson, Carl Jung, Martin Luther King, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Hugh Laurie, Jeffrey Lebowski (the loser, deadbeat Lebowski), John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Seth MacFarlane, Gustav Mahler, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Abraham Maslow, Ludwig von Mises, Theodore Olson, Thomas Paine, Robert Pirsig, Ayn Rand, John D. Rockefeller, Fred Rogers, Marquis de Sade, Carl Sagan, Arthur Schnitzler, William Shakespeare, Snoop Dogg (Snoop Lion), Steven Spielberg, Lysander Spooner, Howard Stern, Jan Svankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Henry David Thoreau, The Ultimate Warrior, Jimmy Wales, Orson Welles, Kanye West, Ken Wilber, Billy Wilder, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Thom Yorke, to name but a few, there appears to be surprisingly little attention paid in academic-philosophy circles these days to arguably the most historically-influential figure of them all, Jesus of Nazareth. (!)

I believe what we have here is a failure to integrate.

(ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHER: I'll tell you what I'm blathering about: I've got information, man.  New shit has come to light!  Now, has it ever occurred to you that, instead of running around blaming me, given the nature of all this new shit, that you could, uh, uh, uh, quite-readily, uh, observe how the Dude, Walter, and Donny map on amazingly well to Plato's tripartite division of the soul?  (Far out!)  Has that ever occurred to you, man?  Sir?  ACADEMIA: No, Mr. Ultimate, that had not occurred to us.  ULTIMATE: Well, okay, so you're not privy to all the new shit, so uh, you know, but that's what you're supposed to be paying me for.  Speaking of which, would it possible for me to get my new lyceum venture funding in cash?  I'll have to check with my accountant, but I think it might bump me into a higher tax)

Why is this so important?  Well, it's important to approximately a billion people out there in the unwashed masses, not to mention the billions more throughout history who were deeply influenced by this historical figure.  So uh, professional philosophers, in keeping with their professional obligations, should be dialecticizing quite rigorously with this historical personage along the following lines: what is it about this guy that appeals to so many decent, hardworking, upstanding folks, and how can that be seamlessly integrated into standard academic-style moral philosophy?  See, out there, across the fruited plain, there's much interest in this man.  Way up there in the gilded ivory towers, on the other hand, they're talking about other things, admittedly of considerable importance (at one time in history it was about such things as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but I think they might have advanced a little beyond that since then), but little by the way of tying-in with what is of deep and vital significance to those folks down there.  Seems very provincial and cloistered or what have you, am I wrong?  (AS: Those are good burgers, Spirited Warrior Soul.  SWS: Shut the fuck up, Appetitive Soul.)

I thought philosophy was supposed to be preocuppied to the point of overflowing with matters of deep and vital importance with respect to the human condition.  Meaning of life, and whatnot.  Would the non-ivory-tower-dwelling people way down there ever know that, looking way up at the gilded ivory towers?  They've got that one Book to provide them guidance, at least.  Are the gilded-ivory-tower-dwellers providing anything comparable, beyond a few stray crumbs once in a while?  You've got Rawlsy-pooh going on and on about maximin solutions to a hypothetical bargaining situation, while you've got the Good Book going on and on about preparing one's soul for eternal salvation; which of the two are the folks down there in thatched-hut land going to find of greater use and relevance to their lives?  Do the gilded-ivory-tower-dwellers even give a shit enough to make themselves more relevant to the plebs?  To the money-grubbing business owners who produce the goods that make many a comfortable ivory-tower lifestyle possible?

The very least the gilded-ivory-tower-dwellers could do (the pen being mightier than the sword, etc.), is launch a highly effective and coordinated campaign to get cannabis legalized, so at the very least those people way, way, way, way down there could experience the same cognitive advantages of which Carl Sagan and the strict-drug-regimented Dude spoke.  I mean, isn't that what Sagan would do?  (How many of the gilded-ivory-tower-dwellers way, way, way, way, way up there have even read Sagan?  What have they been doing all this time?  How many of them have even memorized every line in Lebowski, like they're fucking s'postuh so that they can communicate on a level field of play with all the achievers out there (and proud we are of all of them)?  If they have failed to achieve, even in that modest task which is their charge, then they're out of their element, like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and)  What would Jefferson do?

WANDA: What would Plato do, Otto?

Okay, okay, I'll roll back point No. 7 in my list of Ultimate Cliff demands to account for the fact that world peace between nations, and between governments and their own peoples, is much more doable if all the nations are democratic, seeing as how, as a matter of inductively-certain fact, democracies practically never go to war with one another or have governments massacring the citizenry.  This is a fact widely and amply conveyed in no uncertain terms by the ivory-tower-dwellers to the fruited-plain dwellers, is it not?  And if not, why not?  So what desperately needs to happen is a way-fun-and-productive re-creation of the School of Athens, only all the participants are getting semantically hyper-primed with Kanye West music (e.g., "Get 'em High"; "Can we get much higher?"), and a lot of dudettes need to be there too, of course, for the music to make perfective sense, and there needs to be a thick, thick haze.  The cultural and technological singularities would happen in a jiffy, am I wrong?

10 percent finder's fee, at least?

What Would Duder Do?

What Would Bob Marley Do?

What Would Jesus Do?