Now that teaching is over for the summer, I can get back to reading, writing, and speaking. On the last note, here is what I will be up to for the next few weeks:
May 13: Private lecture to the Leadership Program of the Rockies, “The Defense of American Rights: Principles, not Pragmatism.” This talk advocates a principled foreign policy, rather that the pragmatic stew we now find ourselves simmering in.
Learn about the program at http://www.leadershipprogram.org/
May 14: Private to the Front Range Objectivist Supper Talks in Denver. This one is on health care reform–properly understood–which starts properly with a proper conception of life, and what is needed to maintain it in the company of others. Check them out on Facebook.
May 19-21: Private Conference, The Liberty Fund. This conference of invited academics and businessmen–which I initiated and first organized–will deal with the Treatise on Political Economy by Jean-Baptiste Say, and its meaning for liberty today. Check out the Liberty Fund. Most of all, go to their on-line “Library of Liberty,” for hundreds of books on liberty.
May 24: Lecture in Chicago for The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. The lecture will be live-streamed and available on the net; check out the ARC here for the lecture. Click her for the Ayn Rand Center.
June 1-2: An invited conference at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. Here I will speaking on health care reform and individual rights.
July 1-11: The OCon Conference, organized annually by the Ayn Rand Institute. This year I’ll do a general lecture on “Individual Rights and Health Care Reform: A Patient’s Perspective,” a hard-hitting discussion of why Government-run medicine is the deepest attack on life itself. I will also do a three-day course on Greece in the early fourth-century. In the decades after the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, what happened? How did Athens return to power and influence, while Sparta suffered her worst defeat ever.Check it out here–and sign up!
I read your recent book, Nothing Less than Victory. I’m one with your thesis (I consider it a fact) that, in war, you must destroy the enemy’s power center. I think you meant, PHYSICAL power center. That’s what must be destroyed. I see that destroying the enemy’s Willingness to make war and his perception of futility are unreliable things to go by short of rendering him physically UNABLE to make war. Even given that, if he’s not literally destroyed, you must, thereafter, watch him for any sign of new ability and desire to make new war, and respond accordingly, if he demonstrates such.
The legitimate function of any entity ruling, with physical power, over a country is the individual’s delegated self-defense which he exercises as one of his unalienable rights. This entails police, nat’l. def. & courts, and a legislature to give specifics of their authority, “authority” meaning the performance of the legitimate function. A Founding Document gives Basic specifics of authority to all of these, in summary, the legislative, executive and judicial. The most crucial Basic specific being that binding legislation be LAWS and only laws, meaning, they pursue only the one legitimate function, or they’re not laws and, so, not binding, and that all rules, regulations, directives, orders, etc. bear only upon the internal actions of the ruling entity and only in pursuance of its one legitimate function.
The foregoing indicates the formalities of Law & Government, the only legitimate ruling entity with physical power over a country, over any country. Any formal deviation is CRIME or criminal plan, not a law nor a basis of law. Of course, any factual deviation of actual physical actions of the ruling entity are crime, at least the equivalent of a parking violation, but a crime, even if the formalities are beyond reproach and the ruling entity is, thus, a government and steadfast in truth to its function. If such a ruling entity legislates something not a law, as defined above, but binding & positioned as law, with all the trappings of due process, etc., it is a government infested by crime & criminal plan and the “law”, or regulation, involved might be obeyed as a practical necessity, but never as a moral imperative.
Some countries are ruled by total, 100% deliberate, cold-blooded deviation, formally & in fact, from the legitimate function, with just enough sugar-coating of justice to pass muster with fools running things all over the world. Iran is one such country. The criminals running it (they’re crooks, just like domestic murderers and arsonists) wage a declared war on us. They live by crime at home & abroad. Terrorism & war are major ingredients. They “justify” themselves to fools everywhere, and to those looking for reason, by Sleight of MIND, the only way to make people buy their sleight of hand & their actual actions. U.S. culture, its citizens & leaders, are just so eagerly receptive to it; anybody who knows better are hostage to that receptiveness. People don’t seem to know or care, or don’t do either. I think our leadership knows better, & they do care. Their minds are infested with crime. They give themselves to it, as an easier, “nonviolent” way out, even if they don’t fully accept it. They’re a bunch of ’60’s hippies who know it and seek to make the most of it. Secy. of Def. Paneta has weighed in: No “strikes”. That’ll only rouse Iran’s & everybodies’ temper & delay the “inevitable”. Let’em have their nukes, then, everything else in the world they want, which is, guess what.
They take that as easier & nonviolent, and moral, as opposed to wiping them out. The notion of “strikes” and ignoring any possibility of the phenomenon of wiping them out is part of the whole sleight of mind. In the intellectual effort for reason, the talking must get tough & point-blank. It must move the government to take ACTION to rid itself of the criminal infestation of it. All power of physical force has to be limited to the confines of the authority of self-defense. That’s the reason and justice I see in your thesis of destroying the enemy’s power center