Philosophical Atheism: A Review

 

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

 

Ernest Nage’s essay, “Philosophical Concepts of Atheism” appeared first in Johnson E. Fairchild’s 1959 philosophy anthology, “Basic Beliefs: The Religious Philosophies of Mankind,” and then, in 1997, in Peter A. Angeles’ “Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God.” Nagel stated that his purpose in writing the piece was to “show how atheism belongs to the great tradition of religious thought.”

“No!” I wanted to shout at the open book. “Atheism has no connection to religion beyond the suspension of belief in its claims pending sufficient evidence to the contrary.” I pressed on, determined to debunk Nagel’s tagging of atheism as a philosophy and a component of religious thought. Atheism, I would counter, is simply the disbelief in a god or gods. Nothing more. Nothing less. To call it a philosophy is like calling creationism theory a philosophy. Mere disbelief does not make a philosophy of atheism. To insist on the atheist philosophy argument play too easily into the laughable theist claim that theism is a religion.

"Philosophical Concepts of Atheism" begins with a definition of theism as the view “that the heavens and the earth and all that they contain owe their existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-consistent, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous and benevolent being, who is distinct from, and independent of, what he has created,”

That is a definition of a transcendent god, but it does not address pantheism. Did Nagel feel that pantheism was not subject to criticism? Or that it is not a part of “the great tradition of religious thought”?

Also, defining atheism as a philosophy presented a greater challenge that forced the author to break atheism into two categories and four sub-categories: (1) “those which hold that the theistic doctrine is meaningful, but reject it either on the ground that (a) the positive evidence for it is insufficient, or (b) the negative evidence is quite overwhelming; and (2) those who hold that the theistic thesis is not even meaningful, and reject it (a) as just nonsense of (b) as literally meaningless but interpreting it as a symbolic rendering of human ideals.”

That, too, aroused some kickback from me for the “or” in (1.a.) and (1.b.). Why not “and?” Can’t we question supernatural claims for both insufficient positive evidence and overwhelming negative evidence? Of course it can. I do not see why an atheist cannot hold both positions, and that (2.a.). is an added legitimate position. Nagel appeared to claim that the three positions are mutually exclusive. I contend that they are not.

 

It is when he takes on theists’ arguments for the existence of their god that his essay shines. He dismantled the argument from design, and the cosmological and teleological arguments. His thoughts on the ontological argument- the claim that because God is a perfect being, “he is one whose essence or being lacks no attributes.” Nagel’s debunking caused a problem: Repeating Immanuel Kant, Nagel said that “existence” is not an attribute. Understanding that premise is above my pay grade. Why is it not an attribute? His answer to the question requires a greater education in philosophy than I currently hold. So, I will put that into the category of “weak atheists’ arguments” until I can better understand the attributes of existence. And why it is not itself an attribute.

Moving on.

Speaking of weak arguments, tackling the argument from design is- for someone of Ernest Nagel’s intelligence, like shooting fish in a barrel (pardon the cliché). He first takes apart the watchmaker argument on which so much of the argument from design depends, and then he dismantles the “Divine Mathematician” segment of creationists’ insistence on filling any hole in scientific knowledge with a supernatural deity.

Then, we come to my favorite: the Problem of Evil. Apologetics for evil have been so thoroughly debunked that it would be redundant to discuss Nagels’ disposal of them. It, like the argument from design, is beneath Nagel’s attention. That he expended ink and intellectual energy on the topic can only mean that such apologetics were a common response to unbelief in 1959.

 

Having dismissed the common claims of evidence for a supernatural being or beings, Nagel turned his attention to his stated purpose in drafting the essay: to “show how atheism belongs to the great tradition of religious thought.”

 He wrote that “philosophical atheists have not shared a common set of positive views, a common set of philosophical convictions which set them off from other groups of thinkers.” On asserting that “there has never been a what one might call a “school of atheism,” he then sets out from there to establish a school of atheism. He rejects from discussion of philosophical atheism the “’village atheist’ whose primary concern is to “twit and ridicule those who accept some form of theism.” Those of us who have suffered gross and minor injustices at the hands of Christians for our refusal to join their club reject his rejection, Nagel’s off-handed dismissal rings hollow. The “village atheist” with some training in rhetoric can display the intellectual capacity to debate supernaturalism from a philosophical perspective, but he can also engage feral religion in metaphorical back-alley brawls.

He parses philosophical atheists into three major groups: (1) those which “reject the assumption that incorporeal agents can exercise a causal agency.; (2) atheists generally agree that “controlled sensory observation is the court of final appeal in issues concerning matters of fact,” a wordy way of saying that the empirical method (of which I considers methodological naturalism as a significant component; Nagel does not elaborate) is the final arbiter in disputes of fact; and (3) philosophical atheists “have generally accepted a utilitarian basis for judging moral issues. It is on this claim that I wrestle with. Years ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with that, but reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” changed my mind about utilitarianism as a basis for morality, but I have yet to find its replacement.

In summary, “Philosophical Concepts of Atheism” offers effective arguments against the claims of the existence of a supernatural entity or entities but falls short of providing evidence that “atheism belongs to the great tradition of religious thought.” He wrote an otherwise brilliant essay that would have served better if his stated purpose had been to debunk common arguments for supernaturalism.

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Who Killed William Goebel?

 

William Goebel (photo: public domain)

 

“Assassination is probably the only enterprise where private industry is not more efficient” ― Pierce Brown, Iron Gold”

Governor William Goebel and his friends Frank Helm and the Kentucky state Attorney General W.J. Hendricks walked to Helm’s First National Bank of Covington, Kentucky, when they came upon John L. Sanford, who had been leaning against a metal rail as though waiting for someone. With his right hand in his pocket, he shook hands with Helm and Hendricks with his left hand, turned to Goebel, and said, “I understand that you assume authorship of that article.”

“I do,” Goebel said.

Sanford pulled out a firearm. He shot at the governor, piercing his clothing. Goebel drew his own weapon, fired once, and killed Sanford with a single shot to the head. Goebel pocketed his weapon, called is brother Justus, and turned himself in to the police. A previous threat by Sanford to kill Goebel and the testimony of witnesses to the shooting acquitted Goebel the charges of dueling and murder.

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The Goebel-Sanford feud began years earlier, when Senator Goebel introduced a bill that reduced tolls on Kentucky’s roads, bridges, and railroads, including the Roebling Bridge between Covington and Cincinnati, one of Sanford’s investments. In retaliation, Sanford arranged through powerful men to block Goebel’s chance for a seat on the Court of Appeals.

Later, Goebel moved three of Covington’s accounts from Sanford’s bank to Frank Helm’s First National Bank of Covington, further enraging Sanford., who then threatened to kill Goebel.

Sanford had practiced for some time a custom of the period in which citizens could post scandalous remarks about their enemies in newspapers. Goebel retaliated by posting a comment about Sanford in which he referred to his enemy as “John Gon — h — ea Sanford. The sexual disease insult resulted in Sanford’s assassination attempt.

John L. Sanford was not the Senator’s only enemy. Indeed, Senator-turned-Governor Goebel possessed an abrasive personality that attracted the ire of powerful men.

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Before he ran for office in the Senate, he worked in his private legal practice where he took on corporations and railroads. For fifteen years he fought against corporations who abused their power over workers and the widows of men killed in train wrecks. During those years, he never lost a case against the L&N Railroad, the most powerful corporation in the state.

On entering politics in 1887, the Senator fought for the rights of blacks, women, and the working class while fighting abuses by corporations. The company that suffered most from Goebel’s populist crusades: the L&N Railroad. Goebel sought to have railroads pay their fair share of taxes, to raise those taxes, and to curtail the L&N monopoly’s generous lobbying that gave the company immense power in state government. When a bill to abolish the state’s Railroad Commission came before the Senate, L&N President Milton H. Smith’s lobbyists spent lavishly to encouraged friendly legislators to kill the bill. On learning of the lobbyist’s influence, an investigative committee sought and failed to get an indictment against the lobbyists, but the bill to abolish the commission died in the General Assembly.

During the 1890 convention to rewrite the state constitution to comply with amendments to the U.S. constitution. Goebel included in the new document a provision that secured the Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulated railroads.

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In 1899, Goebel ran for governor or and won the Democratic Party’s nomination at the raucous party convention held at Louisville’s Music Hall that the New York Times described as “a continuous performance of howling farce. . . .” (Walker)

L&N’s chairman, August Belmont wrote in 1999 a letter to Goebel saying he would do all he could “to counteract the evil influence of your unjustifiable hostility.” He told Goebel’s friend, Urey Woodson, that He and his associates had spent 500,000 dollars to defeat Goebel. L&N’s president, Milton Smith, took charge of the campaign against Goebel’s run for governor.

Goebel told Woodson that, as his first act as governor, “he would ask for a special grand jury and get an indictment against Milton Smith and his cronies for criminal libel and put them in in jail for at least two years.” (Walker)

Kentucky Secretary of State Caleb Powers participated in (and allegedly organized) a meeting to plan an armed force from the eastern part of the state to descend on Frankfort to influence legislative action.

Goebel lost the election, but the Democratic State Central Committee found thousands of illegal ballots and asked for a recount that gave Goebel a leading edge in the race. The Democratically controlled General Assembly voted to give the election to William Goebel over William Taylor. Taylor sent out letters to friend to hurry to the capital. Many of those friends came from the rugged eastern mountains and arrived with weapons. Most of them came by way of fee passes on the L&N Railroad.

On January 30, 1900 — the day before Goebel was to assume office — he walked across the capitol plaza with two friends when a shot fired from the Executive Building struck him in the chest.

William Taylor seized control of the governorship, immediately declared a state of emergency, sent letters to friends requesting that they hurry to Frankfort, and called out the militia.

Democrats attempted to meet but were barred from the capitol by the militia. They met secretly at the hotel where Goebel lay dying and invalidated enough votes to declare Goebel as governor and John C. Beckham as lieutenant governor.

Over protests of his physicians, Goebel was sworn in as governor on his deathbed on January 31, 1900. He ordered the legislature to assemble and rescinded Taylor’s call to the militia. His order was ignored.

On February 1, 1900, Taylor signed vouchers to pay the militia (President Redman). Farmer’s Bank refused payment on the grounds that Taylor had usurped the office.

A court order restrained Taylor from interfering with the legislature. Alonzo Walker was deputized to serve the order on Taylor, but Taylor would not permit him to enter, so Walker tacked the order to the door, whereupon Taylor ordered the militia to apprehend him.

William Goebel died February 3, 1900. Lieutenant Governor John Beckham was sworn in as governor. The funeral train, February 6, 1900. On that day, Judge Moore ordered the release of Alonzo Walker. Taylor initially ignored the order but soon gave in. Goebel was buried with great pomp and ceremony on February 8.

Taylor withdrew the militia two days later. The legislature was permitted to meet for the first time since the crisis began.

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Surveyors determined that the shot came from Caleb Powers’ office. Warrants were issued for the arrest of Powers and John Davis, state Capital Square policeman.

“Governor” Taylor ordered the militia to deny Sheriff Sutter entry into the capitol to serve the warrants.

Powers and Davis escaped Frankfort disguised as soldiers and accompanied by twenty-five soldiers to Barbourville, a stronghold of the Taylor faction. Police chief Ross of Lexington stormed the train with his entire force and took Powers and Taylor prisoner after a desperate battle.

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In 1909, Governor Augustus E. Willson pardoned all parties involved in the Goebel assassination.

End

Sources:

[1] The Late Governor Goebel, Marianne C. Walker. HUMANITIES, July/August 2013, volume 34, Number 4. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/julyaugust/feature/the-late-governor-goebel. Accessed 08/14/2019

[2] Nicholas C. Burckel, 1974, William Goebel and the Campaign for Railroad Regulation in Kentucky, 1888–1900 https://filsonhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/publicationpdfs/48-1-5_William-Goebel-and-the-Campaign-for-Railroad-Regulation-in-Kentucky-1888-1900_Burckel-Nicholas-C..pdf citing The Louisville Courier-Journal, October 17, 26, 1899. Accessed 11/07/2021

[3] “Caleb Powers: United States Representative, Politician,” “The prosecution charged that Powers was the mastermind, having a political opponent killed so that his boss, Governor William South. Taylor, could stay in office.” https://prabook.com/web/caleb.powers/1060693

[4] “Goebel Shoots Sanford” www.nkyviews.com/Kenton/text/Goebel_shoots_sandford.html

 

 

Shareholder versus Stakeholder

 

Photo by Barnes & Noble

 

An interest in corporate greed and the corruption of the democratic system by corporations led me to the bookstore and there to scan Lynn Stout’s The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public. On closer reading, I found that I did not get what I expected from the book. I read, not a rant against Milton Friedman’s insane economic views, but a reasoned and sober review of the problem with the idea of shareholder primacy.

Lynn Stout (September 14, 1957-April 16, 2018) was at the time of publication of The Shareholder Value Myth, the Distinguished Professor of Corporate and Business Law at the Clarke Business Law Institute, Cornell Law School. Ms. Stout died at age 60 after a long struggle with cancer. She graduated summa cum laude from in 1979 and earned a master’s degree in public affairs in 1982, both from Princeton University; and a J.D. degree from Yale Law School also in 1982

 

Through news media and internet slop, I had been led by online news and social media to the belief that shareholder primacy was the corporate law of the land. That belief was shot down by the author by only the second paragraph and the fact is repeated throughout this, the last publication before the author’s death. Shareholder primacy (or shareholder dictatorship, as she referred to it at one point) is not corporate law. The book’s author established the fact with careful documentation and meticulous attention to detail. She established connections between the more infamous corporate scandals to the ideology of shareholder value, and yes, she made clear that shareholder primacy is an ideology.

Adolph Berle, an early proponent of that ideology in his 1932 publication The Modern Corporation and Private Property, had abandoned his position by the time of the 1954 printing of his The 20^th Century Capitalist Revolution (found here: https://ia804605.us.archive.org/31/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.190591/2015.190591.The-Twentyth-Century-Capitalist-Revolution.pdf). Economist Milton Friedman, however, didn’t get the word that shareholder primacy was a dead issue, or he disagreed with it, in the creation of the Friedman Doctrine through his 1971 New York Times article, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” (https://yieldpro.com/pdf/infographics/2024/0910/friedman.pdf)

The book links various corporate corruption and criminality to shareholder primacy ideology; disasters ranging from the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill to escalating CEO compensation that reached five hundred times that of the average employee by 2003. The rue professional, Stout pulls that off without a hint of rant or rave, but with well-researched references and a cool, detached voice. Her telling of the 1919 Michigan Supreme Court’s Dodge v. Ford decision and its relation to the myth of shareholder primacy as a legal requirement, alone, makes the price of the book a bargain. ($20.95 at Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-shareholder-value-myth-lynn-stout/1110855846?ean=9781605098135.)

 

Lynn Stout delivered on the book’s subtitle, How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public. She challenged Friedman’s opinion on the social responsibility of corporations by introducing the stakeholder: the debtors, contractors, employees, and the public. I found her argument convincing that “shareholders and debtholder alike have equal—and equally fallacious—claims to corporate ‘ownership.’” (Stout, 38)

She went from there to knock down the claim that shareholders are the “residual claimants” in corporations, that is, the party that has priority access to the residual profits of a corporation after it has met its legal obligations.

Ms. Stout packed a lot of punches into a thin book, covering such areas as the principal-agent model of corporate structure That model states that the owner of a business, assumed to be the shareholder, hires an agent, the manager(s) to run the business. The principal-agent model gained traction in the business world with the 1976 publication of a work by Michael Jensen of Harvard Business school and William Meckling, University of Rochester (Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure) The author knocks down that argument by pointing out the corporation’s responsibility to the stakeholder and role of the stakeholder in the corporate structure.

Before reading The Shareholder Value Myth, I knew only enough about corporate law to consider Milton Friedman’s and the Chicago School’s as intellectually unhinged. I thank Lynn Stout for providing solid framework to support that opinion.

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Wealthfare

 

Photo by Roman on Unsplash

 

An old friend called to wish me a happy birthday. The conversation began with some rehashing of old times before it veered into the politics of welfare recipients and the mass deportation of immigrants, as conversations so often do in these days of authoritarian rule and its white-hot hatred of “the Other.”

“Who is going to do the jobs that immigrants are doing? Who is going to perform the back breaking grunt work and the tedious, mind-numbing jobs that Americans refuse because there is something better out there for them?” I asked.

“When Americans get hungry enough, they will take those jobs,” he said.

His remark left me speechless. He expressed a desire for his fellow Americans to experience such levels of hunger that they would be compelled to accept low-pay and often back-breaking jobs they have declined for decades.

On one hand, my friend claimed that Americans would take the low-paying and often thankless jobs that immigrant now perform when they face desperation, but then, he complained that poor people are poor because they are lazy.

What is wrong here? The problem concerns the need of the authoritarian mind to punish our most vulnerable, and I see this hunger in all my authoritarian-minded friends, acquaintances, and online discussion partners. It is a feature of many social media posts. When they heap their social and political opinions on me, I see that no cruelty is too severe against brown-skins, transgenders, homosexuals, immigrants, atheists, liberals, civil service employees, and non-Christians. Those people against whom they bend their rage are to be purged from “their” culture, and eliminated with cruelty, rounded up like cattle and sent to foreign hellholes or deprived of all civil rights and censored. Respect is reserved for those sufficiently deprived of melanin. Those authoritarians express outrage ranging from outright bigotry to cold, calculated contempt when discussing their plans for The Other.

They tell me that the poor are lazy. The homeless are voluntary. Why are my taxes paying people to not work? They ask. And in each of their statements decrying the poor, they regurgitate the lies and innuendos that still haunt us from the 1980s. Their vision of the government-assisted poor is straight out of the Ronald Reagan’s hasty generalization in his promotion of the “welfare queen” as the typical welfare recipient.

Since the Reagan administration, wealth disparities have grown dramatically, income-tax rates for top earners have fallen, and overseas manufacturing and automation have reduced the availability of blue-collar jobs.

The one thing all my circle of authoritarian ideologues share is a vision of the government-assisted poor as welfare queens when, in the real world nearly every American adult has relied on a major government program. Rich and middle-class families draw on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family ¹

^·          We provide more for those who need it the least, creating a welfare state for the upper income bracket.²

^·          The four-hundred richest Americans are taxed at the lowest rate—23 percent.³

•     The US spends more than twice as much on the upper class as on national defense.⁴ We spend it on benefits like the mortgage interest deduction which benefits the upper-income class. In 2013, 73 percent of the program benefited the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans.⁵

I call that “Wealthfare.”

WEALTHFARE

People who used non-cash government benefits, like tax breaks, were unlikely to see themselves as beneficiaries of a government presence in their lives.⁶ We see a similar dynamic at work when the beneficiaries of wealthfare—the 10-to-20 percenters—swear by how their hard labor created their success. It calls to mind the old joke about the person who was born on 3^rdbase and thought he hit a triple.

For example, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on tax subsidies for homeowners, while only $53 billion went into direct housing assistance for low-income families.⁷ Low-income earners were born at the batter’s box and facing Roger Clemens on the pitcher’s mound.

Homeowners claim the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes and they may do so for the length of the mortgage—while the lifetime limit for cash welfare to the poor is five years.⁸ Yet, I have heard, frequently and loudly, that those who receive cash benefits have no incentive to work. That is class warfare at its finest. Wealthy Americans enjoy a wealthfare state that is surpassed only by that provided for the corporate state.

PLUNDERBUND

Some facts:

No number better captures the decline of the Unties States into a new state of feudalism and oligarchic rule like: CEO pay rose 940 percent between 1978 and 2018. Worker pay rose only 12 percent.⁹ Rents increased 45 percent. Healthcare cost increased 101 percent between 1984 and 2018. ¹⁰ That increase in rent came, in part, from landlords raising rent when states increased the minimum wage. Landlords also raised rents after the COVID-19 rescue packages, but commentators preferred to blame rent increases on inflation.¹¹

Now, in mid-2025, the Trump “Big Beautiful Bill” requires that the poor again sacrifice so that the wealthy can enjoy even more riches and power.

Is class warfare an incidental result of the American system, or is it a engineered? That’s a question each person must answer for themselves. We can only hope they base their answers on the evidence, and not on their emotional triggers.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 Suzanne Mettler, The Government-Citizen Disconnect (2018) Quoted in Matthew Desmond, Poverty, in America (Crown Publishing, 2023) 92. “96 percent of American adults have relied on n a major government program”

2 John Guyton, et al., “Tax Evasion at the Top of the Income Distribution: Theory and Evidence,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 28542, March 2021, Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 121.

3 Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (New York Norton, 2019, 13-16: Internal Revenue Service, IRS Provides Tax Inflation Adjustments for Tax Year 2020, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2019.), Quoted in Desmond, Poverty 2023), 95

4 Congressional Budget Office, The Distribution of Major tax Expenditures in 2019 (Washington, D.C., Congress of the United States, 2021). The FY 2023 military and national defense budget is expected to exceed $838 billion. Congressional Budget Office, “Congressional Budget Office Cost Estimate: HR 7900, National Defense Authorization Act for Fisccal year 2023, At a Glance.” July 6, 2022. Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023), 93.

5 Ben Casselman, “The Tax Deduction Economists Hate”,: FiveThirtyEight, April 3, 1015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tax-deductions-economists-hate/. Quoted in Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S Poverty. (Ben Bella Books, 2021) 55

6. Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy (2008) Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 95

7. Matthew Desmond, “House Rules.” The New York Times Magazine 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap.

8. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America (2023)

9. Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO Compensation Has Grown 940% Since 1978,” Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/.

10. Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S Poverty. (Ben Bella Books, 2021) 6-7

See also: Sumit Agarwal, Brent Ambrose, and Moussa Diop, “Do Wage Increases Benefit Intended Households? Evidence from the Performance of Residential Leases,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper 19-28, Julu 2019. See also Atsushi Yamagishi, Minimum Wages and Housing Rents: Theory and Evidence,” Regional Science And Urban Economics 87 (2021): 1-13. On the history of landlords raising rents following wage increases, see Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Mumford, City in History. Quoted in Desmond, Poverty (2023) 79.

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Fifteen Minutes

Photo by Nick Agee on Unsplash

 

Asked to imagine an ideal walk in an ideal environment, I instantly pictured a 15-minute city, that controversial idea that makes perfect sense to all but the conspiracy theorists. I am a city boy at heart. I grew up in a boring semi-rural area populated by boring white people. I longed for cultural diversity, the excitement of city life, with its concerts and festivals, and expressions of culture from borders far beyond the confines of the Kentucky hills.

The city of my choice doesn’t exist, or if it is out there somewhere, I am unaware of it. It is a city of mixed-used zoning, one in which I live in an apartment above a consumer-oriented business on a street served by automobile, rail, bicycle rentals, and clutter-free sidewalks. There is, of course, at least one bookstore withing walking distance of my apartment, and a coffee shop, convenience store, café-style restaurant, and a bar. The addition of a public library would be a nice touch.

That is an ideal denied by the current political regime and the extreme-right wing’s Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Page 635 of that document calls for defunding the precise types of public transportation that would aid in the development of so-called “Fifteen-Minute Cities” or “Smart cities” described above. The document alludes to the Covid pandemic but ignores its (temporary) contribution to the reduction in public transit ridership.

Regrettably, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act13 authorized tens of billions of dollars for the expansion of transit systems even as Americans were moving away from them and into personal vehicles. Lower revenue from reduced ridership is already driving transit agencies to a budgetary breaking point, and added operational costs from system expansions will make this problem worse. The Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program is another example of Washington’s tendency to fund transit expansion rather than maintaining or improving current facilities. The CIG program, which began in 1991, funds only novel transit projects. These can include new rail lines (regardless of the demand for preexisting rail in the area) and costly operations such as streetcars.

Project 2025’s promotion of personal vehicles (read, automobiles) is merely maintaining the status quo and its massive donations to politicians and fails to account for transit usage over time--fears of COVID fade and commuters are again taking advantage of public transit. The better the public is served by public transit, the greater the number of riders. Washington’s never-ending campaign to force Americans into automobiles provides a vicious circle of lower mass transit budgets resulting in reduced services which results, in turn, lower usage by the public; a self-fulfilling prophecy. The use of private automobiles as mass transit, and its contingent covering of city neighborhoods in concrete cannot continue at the current pace. The fossil fuel industry’s nearly $800 billion federal welfare (wealthfare?) subsidies were reduced in 2021by executive order under President Joe Biden, though the order was defied by Americas Import-Export Bank and its nearly $100 billion loan to an oil refinery in Indonesia.

 

The 15-Minute City concept has drawn conspiracy theories from the dark corners of the internet. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has remarked, in his continuing campaign to make himself relevant:

"The idea that neighbourhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're 'allowed' to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea — and, make no mistake, it's part of a well-documented plan."

That, from a guy who says women should be barred from the workplace because they wear lipstick. Apparently, lipstick on a woman in Canada turns men into lusty automatons unable to control their urges or fulfill their employment obligations because that woman in lipstick has filled them with erotic thoughts. Yeah, that’s a sample of his though process.

If I read Mr. Peterson’s quote correctly, I can assume there are no traffic laws in Canada. The idea that bureaucrats can decide where you are “allowed” to drive shows up everywhere, here in the states. We have traffic lights and turning lanes, speed limits speed bumps and speed traps and school zones and all manner of signs telling us where to go, when to go, and when not to go. That does not change with the implementation of the 15-minute city.

 

Notes

“A study of 100 major cities found that median central city permitted apartment dwellers to live on only 12%  of its residential land.”

62% of all homes in the U.S. are single family detached structures. Desmond, Matthew. Poverty, by America. Crowne Publishing, 2023, pp. 115-115

 

 

Alternatives

“Grifter” Gemini AI-generated image

 

I thought Bernie Sanders was going to be The Man, the Destroyer of Worlds. He would upset the New World Order and bring Sanity back to the USA. This, I opined, was our Super Villian, the protagonist of the World Story who would save us all from ourselves.

That’s a lot of capitalization just to say Hillary was not that person and The Donald had told so many lies that I knew he was untrustworthy to follow through on his promises. So, when Trump won the election, I settled in for four more years of mundane Washington politics.

It took only two days after the inauguration for me to see the fallacy in my thinking.

The television was on for background noise, and I was only half listening when I heard the words, “alternative facts.” That got my attention. I am a collector of words and phrases that resonate with me; like “adorkable,” “cockwomble,” and “Backpfeifengesicht.” * I raced to my computer to record “alternative facts” as my new favorite.

On learning that the phrase came from the Trump White House, my transformation from Trump as cockwomble, and Backpfeifengesicht began to move to Trump, my savior, the man who would come as the Destroyer of World I had waited so long for.

Now, eight years later, the destruction has begun. I have become a MAGA, awaiting the final and long overdue collapse of the New World Order created by years of professional politicians thinking themselves entitled to office in the government of the world’s richest nation; entitled without regard to what the people wanted, only what their donors demanded, and wealthy parasites feeding off the poor.

Trump says he will change that, and I think I believe him, but there is that problem with the 35,000 lies and the alternative facts.

 

Backpfeifengesicht: German compound word for a 'face that should be slapped'

##

The Great American Dumb-Down

 

Photo By Roman Eisele - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87283346

MISEDUCATION

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, of the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. –Ray Williams, Wired for Success article July 07, 2014

The Texas Senate is pushing for the enforcement of its legislator’s preferred religion on the state’s children by requiring that the Christian scripture’s Ten Commandments be to be displayed in public schools. Senate Bill 10 passed on a 20-1 vote along party lines. Earlier. Senate Bill 11, allowing students to take time from the serious work of study to pray- a form of wishful thinking- to infringe on the three Rs. The bill ignored the fact that students are allowed to pray without the Senate’s input; they just cannot be guided or forced into the ritual by school staff. The dumb-down crowd pushing for a Taliban-like enforcement of their beliefs will not likely stop at mere displays and private time.

With the sweeping victory of Donald Trump into the White House and his party taking majorities in the nation’s senate and House of Representatives, such extreme politics have become the norm, not the exception. We can expect to see further bills from more conservative states introducing similar measures if the Texas effort succeeds and, being that it is Texas that those states will emulate, we can count on an authoritarian frenzy to sweep all but the most scientifically literate locales.

The United State has a long history of such attempts to dumb down the citizenry. Early in our history, Congress rejected George Washington’s proposal for a national university because it might offend the dominance of Christian universities in the nation’s educational system, ¹ thus beginning America’s long flirtation with what journalist Charles P. Pierce called’’ “Idiot America.”² The drive to force a bronze-age knowledge system onto the public, combined with the undercurrent of anti-intellectualism that rises to the surface with alarming frequency and driven with doctrinal Christianity’s obsessive need to force it’s dogmatic beliefs onto the world go back in U.S. history at least to the time of the First Great Awakening that captured the fledging nation between the 1730s and the 1770s. Christine Leigh Heyrman at the National Humanities Center writes: “Throughout the colonies, conservative and moderate clergymen questioned the emotionalism of evangelicals and charged that disorder and discord attended the revivals.”³ Now, some 275 years later, those conservatives embrace the very emotion over intellect they once rejected as a necessary component of political ideology. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” someone once said, with feeling.

Look into any talk radio program, read any social media meme promoting far-right propaganda (and some from the left-- those devious libtards are waking up) and you will find appeals to emotion; Outrage, anger, revenge, hate… One might search for days without seeing a single message designed to stir the intellect.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov

Thomas Jefferson “was the first distinguished victim of a decisively anti-intellectual attack, and the assault on him (leveled principally by Federalist leaders and members of the established clergy) set a precedent for subsequent efforts to render an active, curious mind either trivial and ridiculous or evil and dangerous...The capacity for reflective, creative, and critical thought, finely honed argumentation, and public persuasion—talents one might other­wise assume well recommend a candidate for the office of president—were transformed into the gravest of liabilities.”⁴

 

A highly influential, if not seminal, work by Richard Hofstadter, defined anti-intellectualism as: “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life”.

By that definition, anti-intellectualism has reached a fever pitch in modern American life. Consider that…

•     One-third of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. “Nearly 6 in 10 believe that the bloody predictions of the Book of Revelations—which involve the massacre of everyone who does not accept Jesus as the Messiah—will come true.”¹
  
•     Two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught alongside of evolution in public schools.
•     Forty-eight percent accept any form of evolution—even theistic evolution.
•     Twenty-six percent accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
•     An astounding 42 percent believe all life has existed in their present form since the beginning of time.^{1a. 5.}

Those numbers a scary, but they are not the whole story. Though it appears that Americans are prone to magical thinking based on a particular religion as expressed in a particular sacred text, yet “A majority of American adults…cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible.^1b

A 1998 study from the University of Texas found that one-fourth of public-school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth at the same time. Be afraid for our public-school students. Be very afraid.

The battle to keep knowledge and not opinion and belief in the public’s perception of reality was aptly addressed by Pastor Ray Mummert: “We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, uneducated segment of our culture.”^2.

Given that he thought he was attacking intellectualism, he likely did not think his message through.

The really surprising thing about Intelligent Design (ID) theorists is that they miss the larger point about explanation, which is that to explain something by invoking something itself unexplained is to provide no explanation at all ^6.

American media is replete with such campaigns to malign intelligence and expertise, but we cannot lay the blame entirely on religion for the persistence of anti-intellectualism in America. The political system has contributed more than its share of efforts to dumb down the populace.

 

JUNK SCIENCE

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who developed a pseudo-science based on Lamarckism, defined bybritannica.com as “a theory of evolution based on the principle that physical changes in organisms during their lifetime…could be transmitted to their offspring.” The term has come to signify the suppression of or refusal to acknowledge, science for ideological reasons,⁷ such as that of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his fellow conspiracy theorists.

A recent study is reportedly held up by Kennedy and conspiracy theory mongers as revealing a link between vaccines and autism. That study, The study “Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid” does not show a relationship between vaccines and autism, regardless of Mr. Kennedy’s claims to the contrary. The study has a long list of flaws as documented by the American Council on Science and Health⁸, and the publisher of the study, itself, faces criticism across the world wide web as a fake science blog, and not a scientific journal—although, in fairness, there exists a number of sites praising the publisher, the "Science, Public Health Policy, and the Law."^9.

A few micro-incidents that sought to stupefy the American public:

·         George W. Bushe’s favorite climate “expert,” novelist Michael Crichton. Left a legacy for the delight of conspiracy theorists on the level of RFK’s vaccine disinformation drive.¹⁰ His climate change denial still resonates with the “alternate facts” set, twenty-two years later.

·         America’s disconnect with reality was on full view when an untold number believed that the Democratic Party ran a child-trafficking ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. Such is the state of the nation’s critical thinking capabilities. Elon Musk widened the gap between reality and the gullible set when he revived the story in late 2023,¹¹ proving once again that the wealthy are not smarter than you; only luckier.

·         The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines "factoid" as "1: an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. 2: a briefly stated and usually trivial fact. Here, that definition is expanded to, a fact stripped of all nuance and context. Factoids are not usually used in the media, but they are effective in use among friends, relatives, and associates. In this sense, factoids are intended to produce specific inferences. Someone might tell you, in reference to undocumented immigrants sent to New York City, “The government gives illegal immigrants in New York City free luxury hotel rooms and credit cards. Credit cards!”

You are supposed to imagine hundreds of immigrants bound for El Salvador living in the Waldorf Astoria while shopping with their government-issued Platinum American Express cards. But you know that New York City has contracts with area hotels to hold several rooms for official visitors. It cost less to house immigrants there than to lease rooms anew. And those credit cards? Limited to use for food and baby supplies only. Your conspiracy-minded uncle neglected to divulge that part as it didn’t serve his narrative. That, or he was merely disinformed.

In that event, he was in large company.

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Bibliography

1. Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon Books, 2008) 18

1a. Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason, 22-23

1b. Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason, 25

2. Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (Anchor Books, 2010)

3. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Department of History, University of Delaware, “The First Great Awakening,” ©National Humanities Center, Accessed April 22, 2025, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/grawaken.htm

4. Susan Searls Giroux , “Between Race and Reason: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” Stanford University Press, September 16, 2011, https://truthout.org/articles/between-race-and-reason-antiintellectualism-in-american-life/

5. “Public’s Views on Human Evolution,” Pew Research Center, December 30, 2013, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/

5a. “Public Divided on Origins of Life: Religion A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties,” Pew Research Center, August 30, 2005, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2005/08/30/public-divided-on-origins-of-life/

6. A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism (Bloomsbury, 2014) 111

7. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, 2005) p.12

8. Junk Science, Bought and Paid For: The Latest Anti-Vaccine ‘Study’ is a Political Stunt, By Andrea Love, Ph.D. and Katie Suleta — Feb 07, 2025, https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/02/07/junk-science-bought-and-paid-latest-anti-vaccine-study-political-stunt-49291

9. Science, Public Health Policy & the Law – Bias and Credibility, "Overall, we rate Science, Public Health Policy & the Law as a pseudoscience source based on the frequent publication of vaccine misinformation to promote vaccine hesitancy. We also rate them Low for factual reporting due to false claims and inappropriate claims of being peer-reviewed." https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/science-public-health-policy-the-law-bias-and-credibility/

10. Michael Crichton, author of State of Fear, leaves global warming disinformation legacy, https://whistleblower.org/politicization-of-climate-science/global-warming-denial-machine/michael-crichton-author-of-state-of-fear-leaves-global-warming-disinformation-legacy/

11. Philip Marcelo, “Elon Musk and others spread meme reviving unfounded ‘pizzagate’ conspiracy theory,” November 29, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-pizzagate-conspiracy-elon-musk-abc-657657139374

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The Day the Music Lived

Every time I stood up, I saw flashing lights and felt as if I was going to pass out. Though my most recent chemo infusion was two weeks ago, I continued to suffer its side effects. As I lay on the sofa where I tried in vain to muster the energy to get up and do something productive, when a Beatles song, “Penny Lane,” cued up on the radio. I cannot listen to the Beatles without recalling the days in 1964 in which I was introduced to the British rock group.

 

Military service isolates its members to varying degrees from popular culture in the civilian world. Every weekday the occupants of barracks on the US Naval Training Station in Bainbridge, Maryland assembled on the roadway in front of the World War One- vintage wooden structures and marched in military formation to the Communications Technician School, then called Radio “A” School. The barracks were not air conditioned, resulting in open windows to catch whatever breeze presented itself. One memorable day, we were taking our usual shortcut to barracks when I heard music coming from an open window as we passed.

Wow, I thought. Who is that?

I had given up on ever hearing another revolution in music like Bill Haley and the Comets, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis and that of Elvis's magic in his recording of "Heartbreak Hotel"during the first incarnation of rock music. The music I heard that day haunted me. I decided that it must have been a throw-away tune that some barracks dweller would appreciate but would disappear into his record collection to be heard only by his friends.

The “A” school had a policy in which, at the halfway point of the six-month long course, attendees in the top 10 percent of the class would be awarded with a day off. I was too broke to go off base, so I resolved to spend my free day at the base library, then attend a movie at the base theater with the last few coins in my possession before payday (“the day the eagle shits.” In Navy parlance).

An open rack in the library featured a teen magazine with the image of four young men on the cover.

Holy crap,” I thought. Look at all that hair!

The magazine cover featured the Beatles, of course, and "all that hair" would be considered neatly trimmed by the standards that followed. The song I heard as I marched under a barracks open window was “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Soon after that day, my long-hoped-for revolution in Rock music arrived. Now, sixty-four years later, I remain a faithful Beatles fan, and I long for the third revolution in rock music, when I might again be thrilled by a new sound- a sound not before heard by human ears; a "third wave" in rock music.

I am an old man now, so please hurry.

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Does Cancer Have a "Skip" Button?

 

Surviving Amateurish Advertising

On making the decision to do a series of blogs about the personal experience of dealing with a cancer diagnosis, I had not counted on the ravages of chemo treatments side effects, especially the deep and demotivating fatigue. During those times I had no willingness to do anything other than lie on the sofa with YouTube to keep me company.

In time, I became steeped in video streaming lore and culture. I watched hours of content, advertising, and content about content. I watched streaming videos to make of me something of an expert in its advertising: enough to warrant a letter to the king of video streaming services.

 Dear YouTube.

I have enjoyed many of your streaming channels ranging in interest to cabbage recipes to Kantian ethics, and from writing with ink to zebra camouflage, and I have nothing but praise for your contributors. However, most of your advertising has the “look and feel” of promotional videos produced by a cinematography classroom of eight-year-olds.

Wait. I take that back. Our theoretical classroom could produce more professional quality ads than a hefty percentage of ads I see on your service.

Let me offer some advice to your advertisers. First and most important, any ad that runs longer than thirty seconds must be interesting if I, for one, am going to give it my attention. Ads that tip the clock at forty-five seconds must be interesting and informative. If an ad lasts longer than forty-five seconds, it must be interesting, informative, and entertaining. Advertising that does not meet these criteria gets skipped. Most people simply go for another beer or coffee during those ninety-second ads that feature screeching or ultra-authoritative voices that reek of desperation.

C’mon, YouTube, you damn near own a monopoly in the service you provide, and yet your advertising comes across like amateur hour. You are a visual media. Act like it. Get imaginative companies to sponsor your product.

With our mutual interests at heart, I am,

 Sincerely,

Ken Shelton

 

I had subscribed to YouTubes competitor, Nebula, but soon ran into a problem there: That streaming service does not like controversial topics, and so one of my favorite channels left Nebula rather than compromise their message. Kudos to them, but woe to me. I’m back to YouTube for cutting edge video content  peppered with amateurish, boring, ads that left nothing to do to break the monotony and misery that follows chemo treatments.

͢Those treatments are completed now, and the fatigue and nausea side effects have all but disappeared. Now, perhaps, I can get back to my original intent here—that of offering friendly, upbeat advice for the cancer novice.

Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot of advice I can offer other than, if you’re going into chemo, be prepared for a lot of television. But if you intend to spend your time on video streaming services, make sure spare batteries are at hand, super-easy-to-prepare meals are stocked in, and your remote “skip ad” button is functioning.

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