"Harmful" Books

Wikipedia's article on Human Events magazine has its list of the ten "most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries". Here it is, this is great:

1. The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, by Mao Zedong
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan
8. The Course in Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes

Now, nobody's gonna argue about Mein Kampf, except for the fact that it is below The Communist Manifesto, which, although a lot of grief came from the implementation of its ideas, was not a call for hatred and genocide, so, if I were compiling this list, I'd put Hitler's book somewhat higher than the Marx books and Mao's book. Of course, just behind Nazism and Communism is Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Conservative's hate this book because it put an end to the credibility of claims by conservative males that they never masturbate.

Democracy and Education dared to claim that a person's personality is formed by a combination of inborn inclinations and environmental factors, leading foolish liberals to believe that criminal behavior may be caused by something other than demonic possession.

The Feminine Mystique pointed out that some women may actually have ambitions beyond simply being wives and mothers.

The Course in Positive Philosophy made the obviously satanic claim that belief should be based on reason and evidence.

Beyond Good and Evil annoys everybody by getting into the hands of sophomore arts majors, and the ideas in Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money ended the Great Depression, but did so without advocating tax cuts and therefore must be forever banned.

SUBPOENA POWER!!!

Now that the Pugs control the House, they can start Ken Starr-style witch hunts against the Obama administration like they did to the Clinton administration. What will they prosecute him for, you ask? Well, "[a]reas ripe for investigation include Obama's health care policy, its response to the BP oil spill, and the multibillion-dollar bailouts of automakers, banks and the troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

In other words, they're going to throw whatever bullshit allegations they can think of at him until they find something people will fall for.

Fuck the Innocent, I'm running for President!

Rick Perry, the re-elected Governor of Texas, is rumored to be considering running for President. A scary scenario considering the recent imbroglio involving the investigation of a recently executed inmate, Cameron Todd Willingham. Willingham's house burned down, killing his children, and he was convicted of murder by arson and sentenced to lethal injection. Sometime after the execution,

"the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation's top fire scientists—first for the [Chicago] Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson."

That's from the August 2009 Chicago Tribune.

When an investigation was about to be conducted by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, Governor Perry replaced the Chair of the commission who then cancelled the investigation.

This is scary shit. What kind of evil prick do you have to be to interfere with something like that? Even if the dude turned out to actually be guilty, there is clearly evidence in this case that any person with a conscience should want the state to look into.

Perry, of course denies that he was trying to interfere with the investigation, but he has a lot to answer for. To be fair, the people he replaced were about to reach the end of their term limits, and would have had to be replaced in the middle of the investigation. Perry said that "it makes a whole lot more sense to make a change now than to make a change later." However, the people he replaced asked to stay on for the beginning of the investigation and got no reply. One of the replaced prosecutors even said that "it would be disruptive to make the new appointments right now." The soon-to-be-expired terms seem to be an awfully convenient excuse to block an investigation that is potentially politically damaging.

The Psychological Attraction of Religion

One of the reasons religion has the power over people that it does is that it not only gives people clear moral instructions, relieving them of the burden of making moral decisions on their own, it forges their emotions into compliance with those instructions through their pretty fairy tales. This is the biggest advantage religion has over secular systems of morality. Although you may be able to convince yourself of the moral rightness of a particular action through your own reasoning, you may not be able to motivate yourself to perform that action through the same kind of rational deliberations.

Here's a nun talking about this very phenomenon. Especially after about 3:30.

John Maynard Keynes FTW!

Buying $600 Billion worth of debt is probably the right move. Put more money into the economy, people will buy more stuff, and businesses will make more stuff, and have to hire more people in order to do so. This works. The standard right wing response is that pouring money into the economy will lead to massive inflation and we'll end up like Weimar Germany. The important difference, of course, is that one of the problems with this economic downturn is deflation, not inflation. The problem is not that prices are too high, it's that nobody has any money so there is little demand in the economy resulting in prices being too low. Inflation is not what people should be afraid of. We need more inflation.

Sure, the US Dollar has sunk a little in comparison to other currencies, but the fact remains that jobs aren't growing because people aren't spending, and people aren't spending because they are broke.

Compromise on What?

Now that the Democrats no longer have the House, Obama says he's willing to compromise. "Compromise" to Republicans, of course, means doing everything they tell you to. To Obama it means "to yield to Republican demands on tax cuts," which is bad enough considering it means that in order to get tax cuts for the middle class, he has to give tax cuts to everyone richer than the middle class, thus cutting off the the vast majority of money that could have been used to pay down the deficit.

Well, at Least They Gained a Democratic Governor

Amazingly, prop19 didn't win. The contributions from the alcohol industry and other interested parties successfully scared people into believing that nurses and school bus drivers would be showing up to work high and their employers would, for some reason, not be able to fire them for it.

But on the bright side, while I actually liked Arnie, I'm glad that the governor of California is now a Democrat.

Creepy NephilimFree

Nobody's surprised, except maybe at how long it took for this kind of thing to come out.

Taking the Credit

Well, the election is tomorrow, and with the economy beginning to look up, the Republicans seem poised to get into power just in time to take credit for the recovery. Here's a good New York Times Article about it.

Of course if the Democrats hang onto power, the Republicans will still try to take credit, but fewer people will fall for it. This seems to be standard Republican sophistry. They still like to tell you that the economic boom of the Clinton administration was all because of Reagan's policies, even though he was two presidents prior.