You Work for Steyer?

This odd and unexpected query came my way in the late summer of 2014 as a reply to a post on a Facebook exchange about the proposed Keystone XL northern leg. And how did I get there?

I had jumped into an existing, and already quite extensive, FB thread, adding some information that I had picked up largely from a podcast interview clip of Greg Palast. Greg asserted that the KXL would primarily benefit the infamous Koch Bros., conveying their tar-sands material from their Canada operations down to their Gulf Coast refinery, and the refined product would probably go mainly to markets overseas, as it evidently does now. According to Mr. Palast, the Kochs would save about $1 Billion a year by getting their raw material from their Canada operations rather than Venezuela, as they were currently doing.

A quick Google search had yielded informative articles from reliable sources confirming the multi-million-dollar Koch holdings in Canada tar sands operations, and their Gulf Coast refinery setup as well. Armed with some confirmable specifics, and basically trusting Greg Palast as a dependable source for the rest of it, I readily dove into the KXL thread with the evidence about the Kochs.

A day or two after I offered my input, I got back that strange question, accompanied by one or two others and the usual bogus BS about the purported benefits of the KXL project. Did I have some vendetta against the Kochs? Did I have a climate change axe to grind?

The woman’s Steyer question implicitly assumed that anyone spending that much time posting and discussing environmental issues on FB must be getting paid for doing so. It might be one thing to discuss your latest recipe or your cat’s recent antics, but who would put in that kind of time on an FB page just out of concern for breathable air and a livable environment? Not her, obviously. I thought her question quite likely revealed something about her own motivations, and while I could not prove that she gets an income from the Kochs, I do know that the petrochemical dynastic duo buys a lot of propaganda in various guises, so I suspected that she might very well number among that bought-and-paid-for crowd, or she may have a first cousin on the board at TransCanada.

Since I could really only guess at the woman’s reasons, I replied by telling her that if I had the honor of working for Tom, I would openly and freely admit it, which is something the Koch Bros. writers never do, to the best of my knowledge. I didn’t mention it, but I certainly understood that if you collect a paycheck to further the malevolent interests of a pair of filthy-rich sociopathic jerks to the detriment of everyone else, then you might have something to hide, whereas if you work for someone trying to do something positive, you have no need to hide that fact. 

Anyway, not too surprisingly, the FB exchange ended there, as the KXL defender apparently couldn’t craft a readable response. I meant what I said, though, and if I had the privilege of working for Mr. Steyer, then I would not make a secret of it. I would hope, however, that I could do something more substantive in the fight against fossil fuel pollution than simply countering pro-fossil-fuel Facebook posts, which I will happily continue to do for free.

The Real Connection Between Iraq and 9/11

When this idea came to mind not long ago, it gave me a chuckle, and so I thought I might share it. I won't claim, however, that it's totally original -- I may simply have heard it years ago from a progressive talk show host like Thom Hartmann or Sam Seder and I just don't remember that I did, so if you've heard this one already, feel free to criticize. Anyway, to put it in a form that Alex Trebek could appreciate: Can you name the Bush/Cheney administration's 2 biggest screw-ups?

So there you have the real connection between Iraq and 9/11. Given the huge numbers of people who suffered and died as a result of those screw-ups, the chuckle doesn't last long, and has a dark edge to it. The thought arose, though, as I mulled over the implications of a recent Mother Jones article I'd read that explains why Jeb Bush can't seem to answer any questions about Iraq.

The MoJo article centers around Paul Wolfowitz, who acted as one of the chief architects of the Bush/Cheney adventure in Iraq. Evidently, Mr. W. took his national security cues, at least in part, from a book by a Harvard professor centering around a grand theory that could be titled Saddam Did It All. And by all, this professor meant not just 9/11, but also the year 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Not having read the book, but only the MoJo article, I don't know if the professor also connected Saddam to D.B. Cooper or the Zodiac Killer, but I would guess all Mr. Hussein's crimes, according to this Harvard author, occurred after the Iran/Iraq war ended in 1988, since, as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark reminded us in his book The Fire This Time, Saddam only became an enemy of the U.S. after he stopped killing Iranians.

While such grand unifying connections might exist on rare occasions, this one greatly strains the bounds of believability to those of us who live in the reality-based community that the Bush administration spoke of with such disdain. The theory doesn't make much logical sense, and doesn't fit basic facts, but it does explain much of what the Bush/Cheney bunch did. It explains the excitement they clearly showed when announcing Saddam's capture, which always seemed strange to me. It also explains so many of the Bush/Cheney missteps, from the failure to capture bin Laden when they had him cornered to the failure to plan for an occupation of Iraq following the end of armed conflict, and even to the failure to heed pre-9/11 intelligence warnings of an impending attack. If Saddam did it all, then capturing him would stop all the really bad things from happening.

Those of us in the reality-based community know that the real world doesn't work like this, even for those who want to build an empire and create their own reality by doing so. Older right-wingers sometimes seem to miss the old Soviet Union because during the Cold War it functioned as a unifying enemy. The fall of the evil empire left behind a world that's much too complex to fit their simplistic evil vs. good formula. However, because they only see the world through that 2-toned lens, they connect the dots and tie together those who have become adversaries of the U.S., with no understanding of the forces that drive those adversaries. The bad guys must hate us for our freedoms, and not because we steal their oil and drop bombs on their heads, simply because they're bad guys, and not real people with real reasons for doing what they do. Timothy McVeigh had a much different motivation for detonating his truck bomb than the Ramzi Yousef bunch did when they detonated theirs, but right-wingers need to tie them all together and link them to Saddam because that view can fit into the right-wing mind, whereas the complex reality cannot.

So therein lies Jeb Bush's dilemma. He believes in this bogus Saddam connection to 9/11, as do, evidently, his brother, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the core of Dubya's national security contingent, as well as others from the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) crowd and the like, but what can he say when the liberal (fact-based) media comes around with their gotcha questions about Iraq? If he tells them the truth, he knows they'll rip him to shreds because he can't back it up with facts, yet he doesn't want to deny the truth because he wants to give potential voters a sign that he knows the truth just as they do, and if they elect him for the big national security job, he'll keep them safe from the same phantoms that they all believe in, since he believes in those phantoms as well. The truth is that the real connection between Saddam and 9/11 exists only in the minds of a delusional Harvard professor, the Bush brothers, Cheney, Wolfowitz and other right-wingers, but unfortunately, the bad decisions that these types make based on such delusions can have catastrophic real-world consequences, and that's a fact.

Ayn Randed Part 6: Self-interest, Enlightened or Not

To conclude, or not to conclude: that became a question when, in writing the previous segment, I filled five paragraphs and got to my punch line without covering all the major ideas I had wanted to mention. What more do I need to say? Well, having relearned the value of honesty and self-respect from Ayn Rand's writing, I found many of her own pronouncements strangely at odds with the essence of one of her central philosophical conceits, as if she crafted an entire philosophy without understanding its wider implications.

After cutting myself free from the anchor of Christian fundamentalism that I had grown up with, I drifted for a while, and toyed with the idea that I didn't actually need a moral compass. Soon enough, and possibly as a consequence of that thought, a pair of low-level criminals who actually lived the reality of that idea would become part of my social circle. While I initially accepted them as new friends, it didn't take too long for me to decide that I didn't need or want to continue having any contact with either of them. At that junction, I discovered Ayn Rand's work, and reading her writings reminded me of the value of honesty and self-respect, as well as the connection between those two concepts.

Ms. Rand makes the point in her philosophy that a criminal lacks self-respect, and hungers for it, because his own mind tracks his actions and convicts him of his own wrong-doing, no matter how much he may try to cover that self-knowledge with rationalization and/or mind-altering substances. The thief knows somewhere inside his head that he is a worthless thief, and so he can never fully respect himself. I recognized this reality in the two criminals that had become acquaintances, and understanding this helped me to determine that I didn't really want these two jerks as friends. It also led me to ask myself about the worth of my own integrity, and to answer myself that I certainly valued it more than an extra handful of coins that a cashier might have given me by mistake. From then on, if the person at the register added in an extra nickel, I would give it back, and feel very good about doing so.

Cheaters never prosper, or so goes a saying that many children learn early in life. Expand that thought just a bit by considering long-term implications, and you have Ms. Rand's essential concept of enlightened self-interest. In this regard, it's truly not in a student's enlightened self-interest to cheat on an exam rather than to acquire the knowledge to answer test questions correctly.

However, in real life, cheaters not only prosper, but often outshine their more-principled colleagues. The cheater may score the undeserved high grade-point average, the unearned college diploma, and the unmerited highly-compensated cushy corner office. Then, those who suffer the fallout of the cheater's lack of requisite knowledge may very well be good, honest, well-meaning types who have the misfortune of finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knows the degree to which professional incompetence played a role in, say, the recent oil spill near Santa Barbara? In the aftermath of such a catastrophe, incompetent management and the usual focus on maximum profitability seem neither enlightened nor self-interested, particularly when those factors often create the trigger for catastrophe. Yet, the cheaters of the petrochemical industry seem to prosper handsomely while the environment and those of us who have to live with the real-world repercussions of their short-sighted, unenlightened self-interest pick up the tab.

When I read about Ms. Rand's concept of enlightened self-interest, I pictured something quite far-reaching, so it surprised me when I read AR quotes that seemed to contradict the central principle of that written philosophy. In the real world, though, the kind of people attracted to such a catch phrase largely tend to relish the sound of the self-interest part but have little or no interest in the enlightened segment, and within that circle I would include the one who evidently originated the phrase. While I have actually heard the story of one Wall Street banker who walked away from a lucrative career out of concern for the long-term implications of the financial shenanigans that had become routine in his workplace, most of the members of the Wall Street gang focus their tunnel vision on quarterly profit margins, with no second thought for how their selfish greed may reap havoc and destruction on the financial system that serves them so well. They know plenty about self-interest but nothing about enlightenment. In most cases, the selfish ones, be they bankers, oil barons or some other species of greed-head, simply boil it down to "If it's self-interest, it's enlightened" with no further thoughts, and evidently, that's about as deep as the original objectivist got into it herself when she first put it down on paper. Not long after I tired of her simplistic philosophy, I came around to thinking that the more enlightened you are, the more you recognize that your self-interest aligns with the best interests of your entire community, or, as Jim Hightower and a few others have mentioned, "We all do better when we all do better.

Ayn Randed Part 5: Justifying Theft and Genocide

I originally believed that I could crystallize and share my thoughts about the limits of Ayn Rand's philosophy in four brief segments, each one focused on one particular aspect of its shortcomings, but in doing some elementary fact-checking for those pieces, I discovered a few additional truths about Ms. Rand that I hadn't previously known, and thus, I felt the need for one more round. What did I learn that I didn't know before? It came as news to me that AR openly voiced her approval for the savage genocide executed against the native people of the American continents by the European immigrants and settlers.

To put it mildly, reading Ms. Rand's quotes regarding native Americans made me angry. I have not yet read any historic accounts of the so-called savages attacking a white settlement and killing all inhabitants, including women, babies, and young children, by splitting their heads open with axes, as a group of white settlers did to a native American village in northern CA territory not long after the Gold Rush era. Whatever disagreements my grandfather and I might have had over the course of our lives, we had a life-long agreement about how badly our ancestors had wronged the native American people. On a visit to a reservation in Wisconsin during the summer before my final year of high school, I well remember him saying, "It's shameful the way this country treated the Indians." Around that time, he read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I eventually got around to reading as well.

A little over a year after the visit to the reservation, during my first few days at Northwestern U., I watched a comedian performing the Firesign Theater bit about how the West (and more) was stolen, and it made me laugh, but I also understood the more serious deeper meanings behind that bit. Then, a couple of years later, on a visit to the Adirondacks with my parents, I ventured out alone one day on foot, and soon found myself stopping at a nearby drum shop. The drum maker welcomed me at the door, and he proceeded to fill me in on a number of details that I hadn't known, including the fact that every treaty between whites and native Americans was broken by whites. He challenged me to find a single instance to the contrary, and I've yet to do so, over 4 decades later. He also showed me a copy of one particular treaty, and reading it, my gut reaction was that the white people who crafted it obviously never meant to keep it.

Ms. Rand happily accepted Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans, and didn't care to look any deeper into the actual historical context. She blithely justified theft and genocide by asserting that the natives had no right to their land because they believed in collective ownership rather than individual rights. I would love to have gotten her answer regarding the Georgia Cherokees who had adopted individual rights and the European-based lifestyle of their white counterparts, even to the point of taking their case to the Supreme Court, but despite winning that case, still ended up on the Trail of Tears. That forced march to Oklahoma in some ways reminds me of a similar story I read about Poland and eastern Germany during the final months of WW2, and somehow I would guess that a woman born with the name Alisa Rosenbaum would not have been so forgiving to the Nazi regime as she seemingly would have been to the Andrew Jackson administration.

As a capper, I had concluded that someone who would reduce life's complexities into such a simplistic two-toned philosophy would not exactly qualify as a genius, but Ms. Rand wrote well, and expressed herself capably when conveying her ideas and principles. I did not expect to find in her biography a quote about how much she believed the darkest Hollywood stereotypes of native Americans -- I honestly didn't know she was that gullible. It makes me wonder if she believed that Tide really could make whites whiter. Even as a wide-eyed young elementary school kid, I figured out that you couldn't believe everything you saw on TV or in the movies. To begin with, two competing products couldn't possibly both be the best one -- that didn't make logical sense, even to a 5th grader. However, apparently AR believed those early TV cigarette ads that touted the health benefits of smoking, even though that also didn't make sense to my 5th grade self. Was Ayn Rand smarter than a 5th grader? Evidently not.

Ayn Randed Part 4: Substance Abuse

During the short space in my early 20s when I took Ayn Rand's philosophy seriously, it occurred to me more than once that perhaps I found it appealing because I could understand it. Kant? No, I can't, and never could. Maybe I could handle Martin Buber, but with Objectivism, I could grasp the whole thing quite easily, without feeling like any of it had slipped through my fingers. This appealing simplicity, however, soon enough unraveled in the face of life experiences and the company of people who didn't fit into the floor plan.

As my own particular philosophy expanded, I made room for the weaknesses and failings common to our species. I myself never developed any bad habits of substance abuse, I never smoked and I never consumed excessive amounts of alcohol, but once I got beyond my youthful flirtation with Objectivism and other similar nonsense, I didn't judge smokers and heavy drinkers that harshly either -- I didn't exactly know why they did what they did, but I also didn't care to dwell on it. I didn't feel like I had to have a nice, neatly-folded, simple little answer to explain what, in reality, may have been complex, multi-faceted personal issues. 

Having understood the Rand philosophy, I couldn't miss the obvious hypocrisy of the two Randians that I met in quick succession around the turn of the '90s, who both needed to regularly escape from the harsh objective realities of their own lives by finding refuge in large quantities of alcohol. I also later noted that same contradiction in the author herself, who fell under the constant pull of a drug stronger than alcohol that would end up giving her lung cancer. However, I would not have judged any of them as harshly as the Objectivist philosophy would have, despite whatever annoyance I might have endured during my personal interactions with the two drunks. Ms. Rand's psychopathic social Darwinism would condemn the weak -- including herself, apparently -- to a merciless and swift reckoning, but once I emerged from her orbit, I felt more inclined towards an attitude of mercy, and an open, helping hand, whenever I could reasonably offer it. I might not know how someone ended up as an addict, but I considered the possibility that rather than being superior, I had simply been luckier. Eventually, not so long ago, I finally saw a clear image of my own good fortune.

Around the time I met the two obnoxious Objectivists, I began spending more time with my original family circle. Step by step, circumstances forced me to confront my mother's schizophrenia, and also my older brother's mental issues. I struggled to make sense of it all, and along that road, I had other experiences dealing with people who had significant mental difficulties, so that slowly the puzzle pieces came together, and I began to see the whole picture much better, even before I had all of the pieces in place. After it all came together, I knew that I had drawn the lucky genetic hand, and my older brother had gotten the bad one. Smoking and an unhealthy diet, plus a lack of exercise, put him into an early grave, but the seeds of those bad behaviors came largely from his genetics, and not from some dark quality in his character. There but for the grace of fortunate genetics go I, and probably some obnoxious Objectivists as well.

In fact, with my newly-focused mental health telescope, I can look back and see quite distinctly that one of those Objectivist drunks was bipolar. Someone with bipolar disorder, when they've got that extra shot of dopamine running through the circuits, can certainly feel superior to all the rest of us, and on some level justifiably so, but that bipolar person will also inevitably crash into a deep depression somewhere along the line. I imagine the Objectivist bipolar guy in self-condemnation mode on that down side, and I can hear him pledging, once on the upper half of the sine curve, to never fall again, but severe mental conditions generally circle beyond the grasp of the sufferer. Ms. Rand's philosophy assumes that the circumstances of people's lives lie in their direct control, but the majority of people with mental difficulties do not even have control over their own mental processes. The need for self-medication drives addiction in most, if not all, cases, whether the substance is heroin, alcohol, nicotine or anything else. From a distance, I cannot analyze AR's mental state or her addiction, but I can tell that her own philosophy didn't make room for it. In the foreground of my own life, as it turned out, I didn't have to look any further than the immediate family circle that I grew up in, just to find people who didn't fit into Ayn Rand's simplistic, two-toned reduction of the world's complex realities. 

Ayn Randed Part 3: The Hypocrites

Just as you don't have to look too hard to find, or come in contact with, religious hypocrites (and I don't say this as any kind of comment on religion), you also don't have to spend much time searching for Objectivist hypocrites, if you understand the basic philosophy well enough. In my case, the Objectivist hypocrites came to me. How did I get so lucky? Perhaps it was just the karma I accrued from having accepted the philosophy for a brief time in my younger years.

So what makes an Objectivist a hypocrite? 

As I outlined in Part 2 from last week, Ayn Rand's core philosophical principle is that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created by weak-minded people in order to avoid the harsh objective reality of seeing their own mortality too clearly. Therefore, the number one sin under Objectivism is choosing to avoid reality. So, as I found out soon enough, the two Objectivists that I met in quick succession from different social circles, back around the turn of the '90s, had one thing in common -- they both got drunk a lot. They didn't readily admit this to me, but I picked it up from casual conversation with mutual friends at moments when they weren't around.

I had concluded, many years before meeting these two, that any time someone felt a strong need to share their philosophy or religious beliefs with me, I could take it as a sign of their own insecurity in that belief system. Knowing this, I expected to encounter some form of hypocrisy not long after I met them and I recognized the Rand bait. Familiar with the lures, I managed to avoid the hook with one of them. With the other one, though, the logical contradictions of his arguments twice annoyed me to such an extent that I had to point them out, and both conversations ended exactly as I knew they would, with him angry at me for doing so. I didn't change his mind in either case, even though we both knew he had no logical answers to my questions, and so on those two occasions he left the room clinging to his nonsense, without giving my assertions any serious thought.

While Randians may try to pose as intellectuals, I've generally found them to be the type naturally drawn to a concept like The Virtue of Selfishness but uninterested in actually studying and understanding the foundations of that concept. In other words, they latch onto a belief system that tells them their selfishness is a good thing, and they just want to get the basics of the system. Neither of these two AR disciples cared to see the obvious contradiction between their stated beliefs and their constant need to find comfort in alcohol. As a peek into what might lurk beneath the cloak of an Objectivist's intellectual pretensions, I'll just mention that one of these two told me, flat out, without hesitation, and totally unrelated to anything else, that he thought the story about the hole in the ozone layer was a myth -- he wanted me to know that he didn't believe it.

To make one final note about seeking comfort in substances, can you name a common one that's as addictive as heroin, and that can be found in any convenience store in the U.S.? Next, can you guess the pen name of a certain female author, named Alisa Rosenbaum at birth, who indulged heavily in that drug over decades, and contracted lung cancer as a result? If you can answer these two simple questions, then you may have concluded, just as I have, that when a philosopher can't live up to her own ideals, you don't need to give her philosophy much serious consideration, as it doesn't actually make sense for real human beings living in the real world.

Ayn Randed, Part 2: Subjective Objectivism

So Ayn Rand built a whole philosophy, and a literary career, around the cold-heartedness that comes naturally to a sociopath/psychopath, redefining this lack of feeling as a character strength worthy of praise and emulation. She called her philosophy Objectivism -- why?

AR based her Objectivist philosophy on her assertion that all human subjectivity is an artificial construct created out of each individual's desperate need to avoid facing the objective reality of their own mortality. When I say all human subjectivity, I mean all. You might think, if you only know Ms. Rand's work tangentially, that I've chosen to simplify her concept for the sake of brevity and blog necessity, but not so -- her entire philosophy flows from this very simple fountainhead.

Along her philosophic journey, AR asserts that the enemy of every belief system is the true believer, because only a true believer will actually care enough to uncover and reveal the flaws of that system, and I agree with her on that --  in the few months when I circled her star, I began to feel more and more the pull of the gravity of reality, as the complexities of life moved me beyond her simplistic orbit. If a few short months I concluded that life was actually about 90% objective and 90% subjective, by which, I explained in answer to the quizzical looks, I meant that each quality occupies a 10% area at opposite ends of the spectrum and shares an 80% zone in the middle.

Take, for example, the matter of room temperature, and the difference between how I feel it and how a certain female acquaintance feels it: I tolerate warm temperatures quite well, and she does not. Certainly, as the Objectivist in the room will tell you, there is an objective reality to the temperature, and that reality is knowable, but so what? Knowing the Fahrenheit number will probably not make me more uncomfortable, and it certainly won't make her less uncomfortable. So, according to the Objectivist idea, has one of us created a purely-subjective reality out of the need to do so? Is the woman's sensitivity to the heat actually a sign of weakness of character, and my lack of it an objective sign of my superior personal character?

Well, before I get too comfortable in my objective superiority, we need to have tea together on a cooler afternoon. I might tolerate the slight chill a bit better than my female friend, but when the hot tea arrives, she can drink it down right away, and it gives her some welcome relief from the cold. I, however, have to let that cup sit still in front of me for a good ten minutes or more before I dare to sip it, or else it'll burn my tongue. So, once again, there is an objective reality to the temperature of the hot tea, and the woman seems to objectively tolerate it pretty well, but have I constructed a subjective tea reality out of my need to avoid seeing my own mortality too clearly?

Contrary to Ms. Rand's philosophy, what about the possibility of two different people naturally experiencing the same objective reality in subjectively very different ways? I have noticed the woman's father also showing signs of discomfort in the heat, and I well remember my mother having a sensitivity to hot and cold foods very much like my own, so those observations tell me that our subjective responses to room and food temperatures come as a result of our different genetics, rather than from some murky, primal fear of death. These subjective temperature realities have provided me with a concise example of how Objectivism quickly falls apart in the face of life's complexities, if you study it and try to apply it to the world that turns us all around every day. Not that long after I had dropped into Atlas Shrugged, I crawled out, concluding, in a vaguely-Shakespearean way, that there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Ayn Randed, Part 1

"I've been Ayn Randed and nearly branded a Communist because I'm left-handed" -Paul Simon. I learned that lyric very well as a teenager, listening to Simon and Garfunkel's A Simple Desultory Philippic, but I didn't know how it really felt until nearly a decade later, when, in my early 20s, I swallowed all of Atlas Shrugged, along with a few other Ayn Rand appetizers. At first I felt quite full, but not long after, I started noticing a bitter taste in my mouth that didn't quite fit with my own personal attraction to kisses and other sweets.

Over a few months, conversations with friends began to reveal some flawed logic and loose ends, and when I learned from The Valachi Papers that Cosa Nostra members would refer to law-abiding citizens as the weak, the implications of that phrase sounded oddly similar, in a troubling way, to Ms. Rand's basic ethic that interprets empathy and concern for fellow human beings as a sign of weakness. In fairness to AR, she advocates indifference to others rather than criminality, and indeed, she also focuses on the importance of essential honesty to oneself and others as the foundation of self-respect, recognizing the importance of this concept as a necessary element of a healthy human psychology. Criminals hunger for self-respect, as she pointed out, with a hunger that can never find satisfaction, and on reading that, I soon confirmed it with observed reality.

Ultimately, for me, the objectivist philosophy fell apart due to its simplistic construction. For a few months, I could believe that it offered a reasonable outlook on life, but soon enough, experience taught me otherwise. Ms. Rand would have everyone believe, as she clearly did, that the drowning man got into the water as a result of his own actions, and therefore no one needs to feel any obligation to throw him a rope, or to try to swim out to him and bring him to shore.

Some of us, when we see someone in trouble, instinctively feel the urge to want to offer help, if we can. Others, such as the objectivists, and the Cosa Nostra bunch, don't feel anything at all (or, with the Costra Nostra gang, might even feel pleasure). Ayn Rand turned that emotional vacuum into a complete philosophy which assumes, among other things, that those of us who have altruistic urges don't actually feel something genuine for our fellow human beings -- we're just pretending, and/or fooling ourselves and others. Her philosophy tells us that we're acting out of societal expectations that have trained us to work against our own best self-interests, but the Randians don't know me and what I feel -- what I hear from the objectivists tells me more about them than it does about me.

I had learned the phrase Do unto others as you would have them do unto you at an early age, and while I moved away from the religious context in young adulthood, after a few years, I came back around to that same moral compass. I may or may not know how the drowning man got there, but if I can reasonably do something to help him, I will. When I feel the urge to help someone in need, I recognize that feeling as being genuine, no matter what objectivism might try to tell me.

Witness to Injustice

A few weeks ago I spent some hours in a courtroom as a witness to injustice. On one side, an eye witness acted as the sole accuser but offered no physical evidence to back the accusation. On the other side, the accused denied the allegation, and supplied an eye witness to corroborate her denial. Theoretically, the judge sat in the middle, although soon enough, he made his leanings abundantly clear.

The case involved a woman accused by a company of violating the judge's injunction concerning her proximity to that company's operations. The company's only evidence of the alleged violation came from eye-witness testimony given by a man who works for a subcontracting outfit employed by the company, which basically makes him a second-hand employee of the company. The woman denied the allegation, and offered as evidence corroborating eye-witness testimony from a man who had been there with her. Another witness appeared on behalf of the accused, but that witness did not have complete knowledge of all that occurred during the time in question. 

The only physical evidence presented at this hearing in relation to the charge was a picture taken by the company man. This picture showed the woman, not in the place where the company man claimed to have seen her, but rather, in exactly the place she had claimed to be -- in other words, the picture proved nothing.

So basically, I was looking at a case where a judge had to make a decision based solely on conflicting eye-witness testimony, with a complete lack of physical evidence. Eye-witness testimony, by itself, means nothing, and any judge worthy of the title should know that. Presumably, the judge did not know which witness was lying and which was telling the truth, so how should he have decided? If the woman in question was truly innocent until proven guilty, and the best the company could offer as proof of an accusation was the testimony of a single eye witness, in conflict with the testimony of the accused and her corroborating eye witness, then I don't know how a judge could decide that the company had proven that accusation beyond a reasonable doubt, but of course, that is what the judge decided.

Welcome to the latest episode in the ongoing campaign by Cabot Oil and Gas to keep Vera Scroggins from showing the world what they and other frackers are actually doing in her slice of northern PA. Even if I didn't know Vera personally, I know who I would be inclined to believe in this case, but honestly, I wasn't in Susquehanna County on that cold January day, so I don't actually know what happened there. I do know what innocent until proven guilty actually means, though, and what happened on the morning of February 25th in that courtroom in Montrose, PA, did not even remotely resemble that phrase.

Absent from the proceedings, as I recall, was any discussion of motive. As Perry Mason reminded us a few decades ago, motive, or lack of one, does not constitute evidence in a trial, but it can fill in a lot of the blanks, if properly understood. In this case, the company man had a much stronger reason to lie (keeping his job) than Vera's friendly witness could have had (friendship). Or, as that friendly witness put it to me shortly after the hearing, he knew that no matter what he said on the stand, he would still have a job the next day, and the same could not realistically have been said about the company man.

Anyone familiar with this case also could have asked what motive Vera could possibly have for violating the judge's injunction. What gain could she possibly receive from doing so? She certainly could have a lot to lose, in her current legal environment, if an incriminating picture popped up, showing her in open defiance of the court order, but, interestingly enough, no such picture has emerged, despite all of the tours she leads. From all I know about her interactions with the frackers, she has evidently done her best to stay within the boundaries set for her by this corporate-friendly court, and I can think of no logical reason why she would have chosen, in this one instance, to not do so.

I have no trouble, though, thinking of a logical reason why a fracking company would take her to court, falsely accusing her of something she didn't do -- the frackers have made no secret of their desire to silence Vera, by whatever means available.

One might also wonder about the judge's motives in this case. Could a gas lease on his property have predisposed him to lean in favor of the company? Does he have friends from the gas company who will happily buy him lunch when he issues a finding in their favor? Is this what passes for justice in Susquehanna County, PA, these days? Maybe it's time to start asking these questions, and perhaps a few more?

What To Do With $5 B?

If you live in New York State, I'd like to ask for your help on this one. As it happens, Albany has a one-time $5 Billion windfall landing in its 2015 budgetary lap, as a result of big bank settlements and fines.

What to do with that $5 B? Personally, I'd like to see NYS

•  create jobs in all sections of the state 

•  reduce peak demand on our overloaded electrical grid 

•  increase renewable energy production

•  lower water/sewer rates around the state

•  reduce waste volume to landfills

•  lower landfill methane emissions

•  upgrade waste-water treatment facilities

•  give farmers access to better quality and more environmentally-friendly fertilizer 

•  give food suppliers access to more convenient waste processing 

Does that sound like a lot? Actually, Albany could do all that and more simply by using the windfall to modernize the anaerobic digesters of waste-water treatment plants throughout the state. For this reason, I started this petition to let Governor Cuomo know about a good way to distribute that $5 Billion around the state. If this sounds good to you, please sign my petition, and share it as widely as you can.

To sign the petition,

click here
or go to:
https://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/use-the-2015-windfall-to-modernize-new-york-s-wastewater-digesters?

Thank you for whatever help you can give me on this, and may it be one more step towards that renewable energy future that we need to create for ourselves as soon as we possibly can.

Also, if you'd like to know more about the biogas process, which could and should become a major component of the long-term renewable energy strategy, the website for the American Biogas Council has a wealth of information, at www.americanbiogascouncil.org.