The Binary Circumstance

Today saw crude oil futures hit a record above $90/barrel for the first time.

Also of note is the fact that the housing slump has also hit the Bay Area which had seemed somewhat immune in previous reports.

In the Bay Area - which, by the California Association of Realtors’ measure is made up of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Solano counties - sales of existing, stand-alone homes plunged 45.6 percent between September 2006 and September 2007, while the median sales price slid 5 percent to $702,240. September’s median was a whopping 17.7 percent below May’s peak of $853,910.

On a brighter note, new home sales increased in September. When you look closer at the numbers, however, it’s not as good as it sounds.

For those who love to point to Sweden and a socialist heaven on earth, it’s important to remember that all taxpayers in Sweden are required by their tax structure to support religion. Up until 2000 they even had an official state religion.

From Wikipedia:

Religion in Sweden was originally pagan, but with Christianization in the 11th century the country became Catholic. Since the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s the Church and state has been separated. However, the Lutheran Church of Sweden (Swedish: Svenska kyrkan) held the position of state church until 2000.

Today, the government a cozy relationship with religions, which are supported with tax dollars.

Since the separation of church and state in 2000, eight recognized religious denominations, in addition to the Church of Sweden, raise revenues through member-contributions made through the national tax system. All recognized denominations are entitled to direct government financial support, contributions made through the national tax system, or a mix of both. The state does not favor the Church of Sweden at the expense of other religious groups in any noticeable way. Since the population is predominantly Christian, certain Christian religious holy days are national holidays, but this does not appear to affect other religious groups negatively. School students from minority religious backgrounds are entitled to take relevant religious holidays.[2]

No recognition or registration is required to carry out religious activity. Religious groups that want to receive government aid may apply for it. The Government considers the number of members in the group and its length of establishment, but applies no specific criteria.[2]

Religious education covering all major world religions is compulsory in public schools. Parents may send their children to independent religious schools, all of which receive government subsidies, provided they adhere to government guidelines on core academic curriculum.[2]

This is interesting to note because the Nazis, which were also socialists, also had a cozy relationship with religion, a relationship that survives to this day due to Germany’s support of religion with tax money.

In the years leading up to Hitler’s assumption of total state power, the most serious potential opposition to his mad solutions were those within Germany’s Catholic and Lutheran churches who objected to the excesses of National Socialism.

Historically, churches and religions have, more than once, played the role of society’s only check against political oppression. Accordingly, governments have often harbored hostility towards them—particularly since they postulate a higher authority than the state.

But Hitler circumvented that problem in 1933. In return for maintaining state support for the churches, Hitler secured an agreement that the churches would not oppose the National Socialists’ rise to power.

Practically overnight, both churches developed active participation in advancing the goals of the Nazis. The Lutheran press began to talk of the Jews as the “natural enemies” of Christianity. The Catholic Church even agreed to an oath of fealty to be taken by all bishops, agreeing “Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise—as becomes a bishop—loyalty to the German Reich and to the state … and to cause the clergy of my diocese to honor it.”

[…]

The government, to this day, forces all German citizens to pay for the costs, payroll, construction fees and other expenses of churches selected for preferential treatment—the Catholic and Lutheran churches.

If he or she has not resigned his church membership, every German citizen pays a “church tax” to fund the operations of the Lutheran and Catholic churches, a system which sets Germany apart from all other nations. More than 17 billion DM—approximately $10 billion U.S.—are collected in church tax revenues annually and handed over directly to the churches.

Yet the income of these churches is supplemented by yet another 16.3 billion DM obtained from public funds collected by the government from all citizens, whether they belong to a church or not.

Individuals who forward Catholic and Lutheran aims in public institutions are also subsidized by the German government, such as religion teachers in schools, professors of theology, bishops and ministers in the army.

In addition to collecting their church tax, the government also subsidizes the churches in matters of property maintenance, renovation and construction to such a degree that these churches have amassed great material wealth. The total property covered by these churches is estimated at 5,000 square kilometers, which is considerably larger than one entire German state. And the value of this property is estimated in excess of 400 billion DM.

It is important to keep this in mind when considering the recent events in Burma (MyanMar) where the military government has violently suppressed demonstrations by Buddhist monks. Most of the monks have disappeared.

The Roman Empire declared Catholic Christianity the official religion of the Empire after many years of trying to suppress the religion.

In addition, the Bush administration has for years found every way possible to funnel tax dollars into faith-based social programs. To ignore the facts of history is to facilitate its repetition.

I have for years written of the similarities between religion and statism. I even wrote a book about it. The existence in the past and present of this type of tax-supported relationship between church and state illustrates how forced public financing of churches is a way to bring religion under government control so that churches can be used as an additional tool to control the population, rather than having to deal with resistance from religion.

The same rule applies to the marriage of government with science and health care. Once dependent on tax dollars and regulated by the government, both science and health care become political allies of the state. At that point, both science and health care are political tools for controlling the population to guarantee their dependence and their allegiance to the state.

I’ve always said that the war in Iraq was an excuse to shovel billions in taxpayer money into the pockets of politically well-connected individuals and corporations while at the same time enslaving the American people. The war on terror was a legitimate goal, but the war in Iraq never has been.

Iraq is about the oil, something the Bush administration has always denied. From the London Review of Books:

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked.

[…]

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions.

[…]

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

[…]

On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

This is a very interesting article and well-worth reading.

When you consider the economic and political benefits to the western world it’s easy to think the cost in billions of dollars and lost life was all worthwhile.

That’s until you think about what new sources of energy could have been developed with all the billions spent in Iraq to preserve the existing power structure and an obsolete oil-based energy platform. Those new technologies could have been sold to the world without the loss of life and without enslaving the American people who will pay for the war for generations to come.

The Left-brain, Right-brain test that I linked to has got me thinking about some of the basic premises of Objectivism.

The silhouette is nothing but a shadow surrounded by light, a two-dimensional image that suggests a movement that can only happen in three dimensions. To create the illusion of movement, the shape and position of the shadow oscillates back and forth in much the same way as a rubber band would be stretched and the contracted, stretched again and contracted.

The eye are just seeing the light and dark shifting back and forth in the image, but the mind turns it into the representation of a three-dimensional spinning motion. And according to the test, whether the viewer is using their left or right brain determines whether the dancer is spinning counter-clockwise or clockwise respectively.

The purpose of the test is to show how our interpretation of visual stimuli is greatly impacted by which side of our brain is dominant at any given time. Our perception of the objective reality of the image is interpreted in a way that depends on the wiring of our brain, and everyone has a predisposition to use one side of their brain.

So what exactly does objective reality mean when our interpretation is based on the wiring of our brain and will of necessity differ from those who have a bias toward using the other side of the brain?

If the dancer was live and was spinning in a circle in three-dimensions, the vast majority of people, no matter which side of their brain dominates, would see it the same way and agree on whether the direction of the spin. But the fact remains that the reality of the image looks different depending upon the wiring of each individual brain. So who’s right and who’s wrong?

In Objectivism, having a mind that is consonant with objective reality is not just a question of rationality but of morality. So who’s moral? Those who see it clockwise or those who see it counter-clockwise.

Of course, neither. There is no morality without choice. Rationality and morality come into play in whether you accept that individual perceptions are different based on the wiring of the brain. Since that is an objective reality, it must be accepted as part of the metaphysical basis for your Objectivist beliefs.

To pass laws based on perceptions that are based on a view of the world that is common to those who use one side of their brains would certainly be a violation of the rights of those who use the other side of the brain. It would render perceptions based on one side of the brain as illegal and immoral, even when there is no harm to others, except to the egos of those who believe their view of reality is the only legitimate view.

Clockwise or counter-clockwise? Left or right?