Distribution of Labor, Capitalism, and Obama

"Barack Obama and Joe Biden will enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate to help families pay rising bills. This relief would be a down payment on the Obama-Biden long-term plan to provide middle-class families with at least $1,000 per year in permanent tax relief." [emphasis added] http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/#jumpstart

Where did these so-called windfall profits come from? The question really begins with where do profits come from, and why? And there is still another question which leads to an answer to both: What historical event caused the ability to make profits, when before that event capitalism did not and could not exist?

The mechanical clock changed history in the direction of capitalism. Without the clock, or something else metaphysically the same in its historical-industrial importance, there would be no capitalism. Before the mechanical clock there wasn't any capitalism; the clock was the metaphysical impetus to start the industrial revolution. That impetus needed capital to keep it operating and the industrial importance of the clock was that it demonstrated that anything--so it was believed--could now be mechanized, thus saving time in the form of manpower, and effort also in the form of saved manpower.

Savings equal profit, and it must begin with a savings of human effort.

So, before the mechanical clock, there was no capitalism, because the clock provided the mechanical means for the distribution of labor. How?

"Mechanical clocks replaced the old water clocks, which, by the 13th century, had been around for millennia. Water flowed steadily into a vertical tank and the rising water level indicated the time of day. That's simple enough, but, like mechanical clocks, water clocks had become ornate structures with gears and dials. Like mechanical clocks, they tolled the hours and displayed the planets.

"What makes a mechanical clock is a mechanism called an escapement -- the balance wheel on a watch or the pendulum on a grandfather's clock. An escapement ticks in a steady rhythm and lets the gears move forward in a series of little equal jumps." John Lienhard; University of Houston; http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1506.htm

"Regular time-keeping and order was an essential feature of monastic life, especially under the Benedictine Rule. Work and prayer were controlled by the clock. This pattern of work was later transferred to secular working practices, and became a feature of early factory organization. It is primarily for this reason that Lewis Mumford traced the origins of the Industrial Revolution back to the tenth century.

"Writing in the 1930s, Mumford identified the clock as the key machine of the industrial age." [emphasis added] time for technology

Secular working practices were such that the machines built on the metaphysical premise of the clock, the premise in the belief that anything man could do with his hands could be done better and faster with a machine, did not become evident as "division of labor" until the machines had been built, which then naturally divided labor--one man would operate one machine, another man another, and so on, dividing the labor of the manufacturing process. This is where the time and labor savings came in to play.

But it took another six centuries after the invention of the clock until Renaissance science made the metaphysics of machines a reality. Until then, machines were still rare; the metaphysical belief that anything done by man could be done mechanically was about to be given its form and shape.

Coin-striking machines powered by horses were some of the first, followed by the loom, and of course the Gutenberg's Press. Gutenberg's press allowed the printing of one of the first encyclopedias, intended not to instruct about the things in the universe, i.e., history and such, but to instruct men in how to perform the professions, which for centuries had always been taught in guilds. We now call them "how-to" books, and they are written on every subject imaginable.

It was actually believed that no occupation could be properly learned except when taught by a master to a journeyman. That encyclopedia greatly expanded the ability of men to master new trades.

The division of labor is "the specialization of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase the productivity of labour. Historically the growth of a more and more complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation processes." Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labor

Without this division, made possible by the metaphysical nature of the desire to create machines to do man's work better and faster, there could be no capitalism. But modern men have been taught that capital is a natural resource, or at the very least is printable by the government.

It is neither. Capital is the value of increased production with the attendant savings in manpower, which lowers prices to affordable levels, so that consumers can afford them, thus driving up production and lowering prices more. (The first calculators, introduced in the late 1960s, cost $1000.) Other industries spring up to support those already operating, such as manufacturing of bags to carry store-bought goods; Ipod covers; cell phone headsets; car polish; as well as new products previously unheard of.

Factories that produce goods at affordable prices, that people want, make profits.

Therefor, there is no such thing as a "windfall profit". The American auto manufacturers that made billions of dollars when they served the market are now in the red by billions of dollars every month because they failed the market--the market did not fail them.

The oil companies that made billions of dollars from the high cost of oil and fuel may find themselves in the same place as Detroit if the Obama administration has its way with the energy market, by pouring $100 billion in the next ten years into subsidizing energy industries that until now could not offer what the public wanted at prices the public could afford because they were failing the market. Perhaps that failure was due, in part, to the oil lobby in Washington. What if Obama's policies cause a failure in the oil industry to the point where they are in the red by billions every month? Then, will anti-capitalists give back what they are intending to tax away?

The bare-bones fact is, the only windfall profits in existence will be those which the Obama administration and the Democrats will create for their own purposes, taken from those who provided the product that Americans needed and wanted; and the inflationary $trillion printed for the mortgage bailout. The proof that Americans needed and wanted their private cars is the statistic that public transportation ridership did not significantly increase when the price of gas was going up and up and up.

That is what capitalism is: we buy what we desire and the providers make a percentage--the same percentage at high prices as at low prices.

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Single Sex Education; T.Boon Pickens--Is He for Big Government?

Single-Sex Classrooms are Anti-Discriminatory,

Anti-Stereotypical, Science-Based

If scientific naturalism means accepting the conclusions of science, ala heliocentricity, then it means accepting those conclusions when they are of the science of human anatomy and psychology.

"Galileo, Darwin and Pasteur, the standard examples of the persecution to which innovators are subjected..." http://www.varchive.org/ce/accept.htm

When it was discovered irrefutably that men and women of the same weight handled alcohol differently, that women got drunk as fast as those weight-equal men on half the amount of alcohol, women's-issues advocates cried foul.

Those women's-issues advocates are the "new conservatives" if by conservativism we mean conserving that which is accepted as conventional wisdom because it is socially accepted as true by a majority of people, or at least by people with power. Women's-rights advocates were often morally correct in their time, as it was was usually obvious by direct observation how women were treated differently; consigning all girls to take home economics; preventing them from playing certain sports on the organized school level; comparing the "feminine" to the "masculine" woman and using the "feminine" as the standard to which all women should seek to attain; etc. Many differences in the treatment of females, treatement that held them back or stereotyped them, were obvious.

But it was social-based logic and was devoid of science. It had it merits because discrimination against girls and women was obvious to reason. The science of the brain, when it comes to dividing the genders, is not obvious. But we don't put bras on boys; why do we force them to learn like girls, who do better in groups in classrooms, according to evidence? We dont put the same physical demands on girls, so why should they be forced to act in an academic setting like boys? Boys think better on their feet at certain ages, moving, using their muscles, getting the adreneline flowing. It keeps their attention on the subject.

"The Supreme Court had upheld a series of laws that treated women differently from men--for example, by preventing women from working as bartenders or lawyers under the rationale that women, as members of 'the gentler sex,' were in need of special protection from life's hardships. [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg believed that such sex stereotyping, although ostensibly benign, demeaned women and unfairly limited their opportunities. In her view, the equal protection principle stated in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on race, should bar gender-based discrimination as well. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ginsburg found that promoting this viewpoint was an uphill battle. As she recalled at her confirmation hearings: 'Race discrimination was immediately perceived as evil, odious, and intolerable. But the response I got when I talked about sex-based discrimination was "What are you talking about? Women are treated ever so much better than men." I was talking to an audience that thought . . . I was somehow critical about the way they treated their wives ... [and] their daughters.'"

http://www.supremecourthistory.org/myweb/justice/ginsburg.htm

But this is not what gender schooling is about. "What is right for the brain of a 6-year old girl is not necessarily right for the brain of a 6-year old boy," said the author of "Why Gender Matters," Leonard Sax, MD, PhD, and this applies to genders older than 6. Sax was using just one age group as an example. What is now called "gender discrimination" by the critics of gender-based education is not the same as what Justice Ginsburg was fighting.

If this testemonial from the webpage of the author of the book does not make clear what some women do not understand about males, then I don't know what testimonial would:

"I simply will never be able to express how eye-opening this book has been for me. Yes me -- even though I thought I was a boy-raising specialist. After all, I have produced four healthy and smart athletes. I must know what I'm doing. But many of my boy-raising days I thought I was going mad. I'd come home from some sports event trembling because of the way the coach yelled at my kid. I'd ask my husband and whichever son it happened to be that day how they could stand being yelled at like that. Almost every time husband and son would look at me and not have any recollection of being yelled at during the game. Now I understand!!!!!!!!!" -Janet Phillips, mother of four boys, Seneca, Maryland

Or this critique from a man:

"I think [Dr.] Sax is on to something. Mature men and women do draw on qualities that stereotypically belong to the opposite sex. But the easiest way to get them to that point is to first make them confident about being a man or a woman. . . Sax adds that children are less happy and confident nowadays because no one is teaching them how to be men and women." Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online.

Or this:

"When I was a college freshman, a male teaching assistant I sought help from told me matter-of-factly that women were not good at inorganic chemistry. Had I been armed with Why Gender Matters, about how biological differences between the sexes can influence learning and behavior, I could have managed an informed rejoinder to go along with my shocked expression. . . ."

[from Scientific American] http://www.whygendermatters.com/

It isn't equal opportunity for boys if they are forced to learn in a manner not built for the psychology of a boy's mind. It isn't equal opportunity for a girl who is forced to learn by competing with boys in ways that female brains don't work well in. Each sex is as equally capable of learning the same things as the other; it is in the methods that the differences create equality.

But in April of this year, "the ACLU of Georgia requested that the school district make public any and all plans to segregate Greene County schools by sex [adding that] 'the programs Greene County presented [are] unlawful because they deny boys and girls equal opportunity,' said Chara Jackson, Legal Director of the ACLU of Georgia..."

http://www.aclu.org/womensrights/edu/34804prs20080407.html

"Americans have long since learned that separate is not equal when it comes to educating our young people," said Jeffrey Gamso, legal director of the Ohio ACLU. "This is a throw-it-up-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-will-stick situation." http://blog.cleveland.com/pdextra/2007/12/aclu_against_samesex_schools.html

But it is equal when the needs are different. Activia advertising is aimed a women; there are no men in those commercials. STOP IT! Viagra ads are aimed at men; STOP IT! If we acknowledge our bodies are different, then we must acknowledge that the brains in those bodies are different. If the brains are different, the psychological makeup of the mind will be different.

What is difficult to understand in the role of the ACLU as the opposition to gender-based education, is that it not only comprehends but defends such gender-based issues on other subjects.

From the web pages of the ACLU http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/ come these headlines: ACLU Applauds First-Ever Congressional Hearing on Gender Identity in the Workplace , ACLU Sues Old Dominion Freight Lines Over Firing Of Transgender Trucker , and Transgender Veteran Wins Sex Discrimination Lawsuit Against Library of Congress.

So on the one hand the ACLU expects American law to allow bias in favor of those who claim they are psychologically built differently; on the other hand they want to prevent that same bias when science says the two basic genders themselves are psychologically different.

"Students are celebrating today after last night’s decision by the Nashville school board to protect students and school employees from gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination."

Nashville High School Students Celebrate Comprehensive Non-Discrimination Policy

In the ACLU Letter to the Department of Education on Single-Sex Proposed Regulations Comments the organization says "proposed regulations threaten to reverse years of progress, undermine existing protections against sex discrimination, violate legal guarantees of equality, and encourage school districts to provide educational programs that are inherently unequal."

They can't have their cake and eat it too, but to be fair, the ACLU is not the only critic of single-sex education. But where is the "violation of equality" when a girl's psychology is recognized as being as different from that of a boy as her shoe size is? Where is the "sex discrimination" when boys and girls are given better opportunities to use their minds because they are separated?

Girls in TV shows produced on this subject have claimed--happily--that they were happier learning without the boys around and that it was easier to learn. Boys made similar comments.

If test scores prove that single-sex education is better, then it is blatant discrimination against the genders to force them to learn in an environment that is not made for their genders.

Don't force the boys into feminine psychological settings when it comes to learning; and don't force girls into aggressive male-oriented psychological education.

Separate-but-equal is not discrimination against; it is discrimination for, and that discrimination is based on a growing volume of science. It is not the type of discrimination that Ginsburg and others--including some men--fought against. It is not a form of stereotyping. It is undoing the stereotyping of believing that boys and girls learn the same way, in the same settings, at the same speed. CEC

Is T. Boone Pickens for Bigger Government?

It seems I was wrong about T. Boone Pickins being all for capitalism and keeping government out of the market. "WE Demand", Bad Science, and Socialism Disguised as "Political Will"

The T. Boone Pickens' Energy Independence Plan has nothing behind it yet but empty words. In is called "An economic revival for rural America," and in total it reads:

"The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies.
"Building new wind generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years. But it will take leadership.
On January 20th, 2009, a new President will take office.
We're organizing behind the Pickens Plan now to ensure our voices will be heard by the next administration.
"Together we can raise a call for change and set a new course for America's energy future in the first hundred days of the new presidency — breaking the hammerlock of foreign oil and building a new domestic energy future for America with a focus on sustainability.
You can start changing America's future today by supporting the Pickens Plan."

http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/

In effect, this makes it sound as if Pickens, perhaps America's best known "oil man," is calling for government interference in the working of the energy market. And the "Pickens' Pledge" saying, "Today we can announce 17 Members of Congress have signed on!" "http://www.pickensplan.com/news/2008/09/23/pickens-pledge-avalanche/?tr=y&auid=4047163 only makes those 17 look like big-government interference-spenders in the private sector. The "Pledge" is not even in a cut-and-paste format, so you have to go see for yourself how devoid of any real "planning" it is. http://www.pickensplan.com/thepledge/

While I do not disagree that America must lower its deep dependence on imported oil, and probably must use wind and natural gas as Pickens says it does (he's the expert, not me,) this call for independence does not require "leadership" if that "leadership" means giving billions of taxpayer dollars--as Obama is calling for--to "investors."

Pickens himself has proved it is not necessary, that capitalistic enterprise alone can do it. Pickens' own website says it best:

"Developing wind power is an investment in rural America.
To witness the economic promise of wind energy, look no further than Sweetwater, Texas.
Sweetwater was typical of many small towns in middle-America. With a shortage of good jobs, the youth of Sweetwater were leaving in search of greater opportunities. And the town's population dropped from 12,000 to under 10,000.
When a large wind power facility was built outside of town, Sweetwater experienced a revival. New economic opportunity brought the town back to life and the population has grown back up to 12,000.
In the Texas panhandle, just north of Sweetwater, is the town of Pampa, where T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Power is currently building the largest wind farm in the world.
In addition to creating new construction and maintenance jobs, thousands of Americans will be employed to manufacture the turbines and blades. These are high skill jobs that pay on a scale comparable to aerospace jobs."

If Pickens can do this on his own, if Warren Buffet can invest $5 billion into one bank, if other rich capitalists can put their money here and there, then why are they not doing what Pickens is doing in energy?

The "leadership" needed in Washington is the leadership to get out of the way by reducing government interference where it exists, where it prevents greater investment by either capitalists or by people like you and I.

Do you know you can put up a wind turbine--expensive yes, but you can do it--and the energy companies are required by law to buy back whatever energy you don't use within your own household? That is a strikingly good law, since the power companies are government-allowed monopolies in the first place.

How about leadership that makes it easy for neighborhood cooperatives to put up a few turbines and run the neighborhood at lower costs than buying from the big company, while selling back the surplus?

Why does every plan for "leadership" require making government bigger and spending the taxpayer dollar for the plans they "guarantee" will make energy cheaper for us in the long run? Who cares about the long run if we have to pay upfront for plans put into operation by the government-allowed monopolies that are set up for the purpose of using our tax dollars?

If the Pickens' Plan does not require using government money, but only requires getting goverment out of the way where it may be in the way, why doesn't Pickens tell us this? "Leadership" without definition always means tax-and-spend. "Leadership" properly defined in a free market nation means letting the free market work.

Pickens is making it work. He's putting thousands of people to work. He reducing his own community's dependence on energy generated by natural gas.

Why can't other rich people be convinced to do that same? That, Mr. Pickens, is real leadership, and it is what you yourself ought to be doing since you are proving to be the expert.

Mr. Pickens, your plan and your pledge have meat on them, and it seems to be the meat off the backs of the already bankrupted American taxpayer.

But if the new law President Bush and the Fed and the Treasury department want is passed, none of this will matter, because the Fed and the Treasury dept. will absolute power to rule your pocketbook and no court in the land and not even Congress will be able to stop it. [See The Last Nail in the American Fascist Takeover.]

And if the Fed and Treasury come to have this absolute power, then Atlas might as well shrug right now, wave goodbye, and leave us all to the moral darkness that no amount of natural gas or wind power can alleviate. CEC

Publishing Note Re: Reader Comments

I have made the attempt several times to allow the posting of reader comments to this blog. I have followed all the directions set by Google (yes, I've read the directions, several times,) but as of yet it isn't working. If you wish to comment, please email them to the address below. If you know how I can fix this, please email.

Thank you.

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

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© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

Saturday's Musing, CutN'Pastes, and Quotes

CATO Concerned with "Who" Gets to Implement Income Taxes; not Concerned that Income Taxes are Wrong
"Poor Charlie Rangel. The chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee got some bad press in July when the sweetheart deal giving him four rent-controlled apartments became public knowledge. Now he’s getting another dose of bad publicity because he somehow forgot to report $75,000 on rental income for his luxury villa at the Punta Cana resort in the Dominican Republic.

"New York State law classifies filing a false city or state tax return a felony punishable by up to four years in prison..."

"In a good tax system, governments only tax income earned inside national borders – the common-sense practice of “territorial” taxation. As such, the only government that should be concerned about Rangel’s Domincan Republic income is the Dominican Republic. The Ways & Means chairman is only in trouble with American tax authorities because the United States has a very imperialistic system of “worldwide” taxation. [italics added]


"It’s worth noting that the chairman has not tried to fix this policy. Indeed, he wants the make the IRS bigger and the tax code more onerous."

Now wait a minute--in a good tax system, a government would not attempt to tax the means of production, meaning it would not tax the efforts to produce, which means it would not tax the produced earnings of either individuals or of corportations. What would replace income tax is outside the scope of the discussion, namely that taxation of productive capacity reduces that capacity.
Cato-at-liberty http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/



CATO Gets This Wrong, Too
Cato-at-liberty reported that during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, John McCain spoke about pledging federal support for alternative energy so the United States can reduce the amount of energy it imports from abroad. Cato-at-liberty then tied it to another project, quoting the Repulican candidate: “When I’m president,” McCain told cheering delegates, “we’re going to embark on the most ambitious national project in decades. We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t like us very much. We will attack the problem on every front.”

Cato-at-liberty then asked: "Specifically, where did that $700 billion number come from?
That is far more than what we pay for imported energy. In 2007, Americans spent less than half that amount—$319 billion—for imported energy of all kinds, including oil and natural gas. Even with higher energy prices in 2008, our total bill for imported energy this year will be nowhere near $700 billion."

When I first heard McCain make that pledge, about a week ago, he didn't seem, then, to tie it only to the money we pay for oil. It seemed he was talking about the money we altruistically send to help nations in poverty, and to help feed them, and to help care for them medically, etc., when in the end all our altruism gets us is criticism on the political front from some of those nations--not to mention a bigger tax bill.

I think if he wins, one way he will lower our taxes is by vetoing money to those nations. McCain "vowed that he would halt aid to hostile countries [by saying] 'We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much..." [italics added]
Minneapolis Star Tribune, MN http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGQD_enUS290US290&q=McCain+nations+that+don%27t+like+us+very+much

Atheists Who Don't Deny the Existence of Gods?
Austin Cline's blog in About.com states: "Many people insist that atheism is really the denial of the existence of God" but that this "pretends that atheism is exclusively about their god, the god common to Christians, Jews, and Muslims."

Why doesn't it apply to any god, like Diana or Zeus, or like Ngai, the Maasai name for God? Why doesn't it apply to the Xhosa name of Uthixo? to the Chinese God Shangdi? I'm certain there must be atheists in those cultures who deny the existence of any and all gods.

But Cline goes on, adding, "[That definition of atheism] focuses on a narrow sub-set of atheism and atheists to the exclusion of all others." What other atheists are there but those who deny the existence of gods?

"Standard dictionaries," he says, "list 'disbelief in god or Gods' as the first and primary definition of atheism."

Does this mean that an atheist can believe gods exist, but not believe in them? What nonsense is that?

Sarah Palin is "Nebulously Like Me"
"She's a gutsy gal with a lot of personal appeal. She’s a former Miss Alaska runner up, a big-game hunter and an NRA member, a basketball player and a sports fan. She’s tough in the motherhood arena, choosing to have kid #5 even knowing he would have down syndrome; she gave birth and was back to work in three days and still makes time to use a breast pump at night. It’s the intangibles that could make her a big help to McCain—the nebulous sense of “like me” and [she's got a] “good story” that comes from her humble origins, can-do, unpretentious demeanor, and her penchant for all-American stuff like hunting and sports."
Jean Kazez "Talking Philosophy" http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=374

Christ With a BIG Penis
"A statue by Terence Koh of a tumescent Christ in Gateshead has led to predictable howls of outrage, followed by the now familiar scratchy noise of lines being drawn in the sand. "Enough gratuitous offence to believers!" says one side; "enough kowtowing to religious sensitivities!" say the other.

"This case is actually clear-cut because the Christian suing the Baltic Centre is theologically confused. Every good Bible-believing Christian must know that Christ was all God and all-man (which is an impressive 200% being) and that he is "one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are" (Hebrews 4:15). That means it is orthodox belief that Christ had a penis, which was at least once erect. Even the evangelical minister who taught us RE knew that, and I remember him admitting how troubling he found the thought of his saviour suffering sexual temptation.

"But not all complaints about religious offence can be so easily dismissed as failing on their own terms. What are we to say of these?

"Saying that we have a right to offend skips over the question of whether we are right to offend."
Whether or not someone is "right" to offend is not yours to choose, Mr Baggini. No law could ever be structured on the "correctness" of one's free speech offences.

"Free speech is indeed precious, but that doesn't mean that we have to defend without qualification every moron who abuses it. [W]e should not always be in as much of a hurry to defend the offender, even when we allow their right to offend."

Defending the offender's right to free speech is not the same as "defending the offender" of his offences, Julian.
Julian Baggini http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/03/art.religion?gusrc=rss&feed=artanddesign

Are You Contradictory About Your Beliefs About God?
The Philosopher's Magazine Online asks, "Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?"

"In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion. In each case, apart from Question 1, you need to answer True or False. The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency. This means to get across without taking any hits, you’ll need to answer in a way which is rationally consistent. What this means is you need to avoid choosing answers which contradict each other. If you answer in a way which is rationally consistent but which has strange or unpalatable implications, you’ll be forced to bite a bullet."

It is going on midnight, and it's been a long day. I think I'll take TPM up on their game, but not until I've had enough sleep to use my critical thinking skills.http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/god.htm

Quotes For Your Weekend

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
W. Edwards Deming

Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time? Senator Jesse Helms

All my life I've wanted to be someone; I guess I should have been more specific. Lily Tomlin

In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest; -- guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. Thomas Carlyle

There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it. Christopher Darlington Morley (1890-1957)

"The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt." Ayn Rand; "Atlas Shrugged"

It's kind of fun to do the impossible. Walt Disney

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us. Jane Austen; "Pride and Prejudice"

The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats. Ayn Rand

"The American Dream [is] one of the greatest ideas in the history of human achievement . . . It thrives today in an age when its core components of freedom and opportunity are open to more Americans than ever before. It holds a real, identifiable place in the American heart and mind, and it informs the aspirations of everyone from farmers to software developers, from detectives to bankers, from soldiers to social workers . . . It defines us as a people, even as we add to its meaning with each new chapter in our national experience and our individual actions."
Dan Rather

Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you still have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analyses, you have got not to forget to laugh.
Katharine Hepburn

Character contributes to beauty. It fortifies a woman as her youth fades. A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful. Jacqueline Bisset

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
Erich Maria Remarque; "All Quiet on the Western Front"

The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny — it is the light that guides your way. Heraclitus

The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence. Edward "Eddie" Rickenbacker

Anger is always concerned with individuals, ... whereas hatred is directed also against classes: we all hate any thief and any informer. Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot. The one aims at giving pain to its object, the other at doing him harm; the angry man wants his victim to feel; the hater does not mind whether they feel or not. Aristotle; "The Art of Rhetoric"

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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism tm, the educational arm of the Assemblage. This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®