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Month: July 2014

LEV: The Game – Play to Win Indefinite Life – Article by G. Stolyarov II

LEV: The Game – Play to Win Indefinite Life – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 20, 2014
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LEV: The Game is a work in progress, whose potential to spread the message of indefinite life extension to the general public encourages me greatly. Developed by a team from Belgium – consisting of Anthony Lamot, Mathieu Hinderyckx, and Maxime Devos – this Android mobile game is currently in its Alpha phase. The creators have initiated an Indiegogo fundraiser to raise 6000 Euros (approximately 8100 US dollars at July 2014 exchange rates) in order to greatly expand the game and add its most complex and engaging elements. You can watch their video introduction to the game and the fundraiser here.

The premise of LEV: The Game is the same as the aim of those of us who wish to extend our lives without end. One’s character is challenged with living for as long as possible and attaining longevity escape velocity by reversing the damage of senescence at a faster rate than it accumulates. Every year in the game, the character receives an allotment of energy points with which to purchase power-ups, such as stem-cell therapies, applications of nano-medicine, cybernetic enhancements, or simple increments of diet and exercise. Each power-up can either increase the remaining expected lifespan, increase the rate at which energy points accumulate (called “productivity” in the game), or reduce the character’s rate of bodily decay. The player needs to achieve a delicate balancing of these power-ups to avoid expiring before he/she accumulates enough energy points to purchase the next life-extending advance.

Becoming an Alpha tester of LEV: The Game is absolutely free, and I was pleased to be able to participate in mid-July 2014. After eight attempts, I succeeded in getting a character to reach the age of 200, which is the game’s current victory condition. If the developers can raise their desired funds, they anticipate extending the gameplay to enable one’s character to reach the age of 1000.

LEV_Maximus_VIII_ScreenshotTo become an Alpha tester, you will need to join the LEV: The Game (Alpha) Google Group, using a Google account that is also linked to a mobile phone or tablet that runs the Android operating system. After you join, you can download the game from the Google Play store here. Remember to click the “Become a Tester” button to enable the download to work. When testing the game in this early stage, make sure you un-pause it first using the speed settings in the top-left-hand portion of the screen, before navigating to any of the other available windows.

Why LEV: The Game is Immensely Important

Our ability to achieve indefinite life extension personally will depend on the amount of resources and support from the general public invested in the overcoming of age-related bodily damage. Most people, unfortunately, continue to either be resigned to the inevitability of death, or to argue against the desirability of indefinite longevity due to extremely basic misconceptions. Even apart from the absurdly false boredom argument, overpopulation argument, and “playing God” argument, there is a more basic fallacy – the Tithonus error, which posits that becoming chronologically older necessarily means becoming biologically more decrepit. Yet the only way indefinite longevity could be achieved would be for people to remain biologically young, so that their susceptibility to deadly diseases does not increase beyond that of people in their twenties today. How could longevity advocates get the general public to understand this? Convincing people through arguments alone may often fail, simply because the Dragon-Tyrant of death is so ubiquitous and so overwhelming that many people will grasp at any straw, no matter how flimsy, to avoid being confronted with the grave injustice of their current predicament.

But a game gives a fresh, different, and engaging way to see and experience what indefinite longevity would truly entail. Anyone playing LEV: The Game would quickly see that becoming increasingly frail is no way to increase life expectancy. Your character will die if he/she experiences sufficient biological decay. You will be able to see a graph of the character’s remaining life expectancy and the rate at which decay is expected to proceed during the years they have left. If you apply the most effective combinations of power-ups, you will also see the life-expectancy curve shift upward – sometimes slightly, at other times by massive jumps. The latter situation reflects what can happen once humans begin to undergo periodic rejuvenation therapies to remove age-related damage, as posited in Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s SENS approach.

Furthermore, LEV: The Game encourages its players to engage in paradigm-shifting thinking about their own future trajectories. Instead of planning for gradual debilitation and eventual death, as most people do today when projecting their careers, retirements, finances, and family lives, a strikingly different mindset can take hold – the quest for perpetual maintenance and a return to youthfulness that may be possible at any chronological age, with sufficient technological advances and vigilance regarding one’s health. I admire the integration in LEV: The Game of biomedical treatments, cybernetic enhancements, and simple prudent habits – such as a healthy diet, regular exercise, cognitive activity, and access to relevant health information (even “Quantified Self” is a power-up that one can purchase). We should all strive to live the most informed and healthy lives possible, given present technology, in order to maximize our chances of surviving to the next wave of breakthroughs on the way to longevity escape velocity.

Not a day passes when I do not think about innovative ways to reach the general public with the message of indefinite life extension. For years, I have advocated the gamification of this literally vital idea as one of the most powerful ways to catalyze cultural change on this issue. I am immensely pleased to now witness such an effort taking off, due to the excellent work of Messrs. Lamot, Hinderyckx, and Devos. I donated to the Indiegogo fundraiser to help propel LEV: The Game to its hopefully world-changing final version. I hope that all readers of this article will be able to do the same.

When Zero’s Too High: Time Preference versus Central Bankers – Article by Douglas French

When Zero’s Too High: Time Preference versus Central Bankers – Article by Douglas French

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The New Renaissance Hat
Douglas French
July 20, 2014
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Central banking has taken interest rate reduction to its absurd conclusion. If observers thought the European Central Bank (ECB) had run out of room by holding its deposit rate at zero, Mario Draghi proved he is creative, cutting the ECB’s deposit rate to minus 0.10 percent, making it the first major central bank to institute a negative rate.

Can a central-bank edict force present goods to no longer have a premium over future goods?

Armed with high-powered math and models dancing in their heads, modern central bankers believe they are only limited by their imaginations. In a 2009 article for The New York Times, Harvard economist and former adviser to President George W. Bush, N. Gregory Mankiw, wrote, “Early mathematicians thought that the idea of negative numbers was absurd. Today, these numbers are commonplace.”

While this sounds clever, Ludwig von Mises undid Mankiw’s analogy long ago. “If he were not to prefer satisfaction in a nearer period of the future to that in a remote period,” Mises wrote of the individual, “he would never consume and enjoy.”

Carl Menger explained that it is “deeply imbedded in human nature” to have present desires satisfied over future desires. And long before Menger, A. R. J. Turgot wrote of the premium of present money over future money, “Is not this difference well known, and is not the commonplace proverb, ‘a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush,’ a simple expression of this notoriety?”

Central bankers can set a certain interest rate, but human nature cannot be eased away, quantitatively or otherwise. But the godfather of all central bankers, John Maynard Keynes, ignored time preference and focused on liquidity preference. He believed it was investments that yielded returns, and wrote, “Why should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to use money as a store of wealth?”

If liquidity preference determined the rate of interest, rates would be lowest during a recovery, and at the peak of booms, with confidence high, everyone would be seeking to trade their liquidity for investments in things. “But it is precisely in a recovery and at the peak of a boom that short-term interest rates are highest,” Henry Hazlitt explained.

Keynes believed that those who held cash for the speculative motive were wicked and central bankers must stop this evil. However, as Hazlitt explained in The Failure of the “New Economics,” holding cash balances “is usually most indulged in after a boom has cracked. The best way to prevent it is not to have a Monetary Authority so manipulate things as to force the purchase of investments or of goods, but to prevent an inflationary boom in the first place.”

Keynesian central bankers leave time out of their calculus. While they think they are lending money, they are really lending time. Borrowers purchase the use of time. Hazlitt reminds us that the old word for interest was usury, “etymologically more descriptive than its modern substitute.”

And as Mises explained above, time can’t have a negative value, which is what a negative interest rate implies.

Borrowers pay interest in order to buy present assets. Most importantly, this ratio is outside the reach of the monetary authorities. It is determined subjectively by the actions of millions of market participants.

Deep down, Mankiw must recognize this, writing, “The problem with negative interest rates, however, is quickly apparent: nobody would lend on those terms. Rather than giving your money to a borrower who promises a negative return, it would be better to stick the cash in your mattress. Because holding money promises a return of exactly zero, lenders cannot offer less.”

But still, he approvingly cites German economist Silvio Gesell’s argument for a tax on holding money, an idea Keynes himself approved of.

Keynesian central bankers are now central planners maintaining the unshakable belief that low interest rates put people back to work and solve every economic woe. “But in reality,” writes Robert Murphy, “interest rates coordinate production and consumption decisions over time. They do a lot more than simply regulate how much people spend in the present.”

Murphy points out that low rates stimulate some sectors more than others. Lower rates generally boost housing and car sales, for instance, while not doing much for consumer goods.

More than half a decade of zero interest rates has not lifted anyone from poverty or created any jobs—it has simply caused more malinvestment. It is impossible for the monetary authorities to dictate the proper interest rate, because interest rates determined by command and control bear no relation to the collective time preference of economic actors. The result of central bank intervention can only be distortions and chaos.

Draghi and Mankiw don’t seem to understand what interest is or how the rate of interest is determined. While it’s bad when academics promote their thought experiments, the foolish turns tragic when policymakers use the power of government to act on these experiments.

Douglas E. French is senior editor of the Laissez Faire Club and the author of Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases in the Supply of Money, written under the direction of Murray Rothbard at UNLV, and The Failure of Common Knowledge, which takes on many common economic fallacies.

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.

How the Drug War Drives Child Migrants to the US Border – Article by Mark Thornton

How the Drug War Drives Child Migrants to the US Border – Article by Mark Thornton

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The New Renaissance Hat
Mark Thornton
July 20, 2014
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Most attentive parents today rarely allow their children to go unsupervised, particularly in public. It starts with the wireless baby monitor for the crib and ends with the ever-present cell phone at college graduation.

This is what makes reports from the US-Mexican border so perplexing to most Americans. It is hard to believe that parents would send their children, even young children, to travel many hundreds of miles, up to 1,600 miles without guardianship, or under the control of “mules” who guide the children with the hope of a safe voyage to the United States.

The journey is both harsh and dangerous. The northern regions of Central America (i.e., Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) and Mexico are some of the most dangerous areas of the world. The climate can be harsh, roads and travel conditions are mostly poor, and the children are subjected to robbers, kidnappers, rapists, government police and soldiers, drug cartel members, and bandits of all sorts.

As unbelievable as it seems, Central American parents are sending their children, or more often asking their children to join with them in the United States, in large numbers. In many cases the children flee on their own accord without any guardian.

A decade ago US Border Patrol agents apprehended only several hundred unaccompanied children per year. Over the last nine months they have caught nearly 50,000. Official estimates project the capture rate to reach 10,000 per month by this fall. Those numbers actually hide the enormity of the problem because historically the problem was largely restricted to Mexican children who could be immediately returned to Mexico. During the last couple of years, the majority of growth has come from children from Central American countries and these must be processed and turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (part of HHS).

One suggested reason for the explosion of child immigrants from Central America is the perception and rumors that children from Central America who cross the border will receive a “proviso” which might suggest a permit to stay in the US legally. However, it seems that the proviso is really just a notice to appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. Whether this gives the children more time in the US, or whether it increases the probability of them being allowed to stay in the US for humanitarian reasons is unclear. In one report, only 1 of 404 children specifically mentioned the possibility of benefiting from US immigration reform.[1]

Even if the proviso rumor was having an impact, it does not explain why the children and their parents would risk such a dangerous journey in the first place.

The Role of the Drug War

The underlying cause for this mass dangerous migration is the US’s war on drugs. Central American countries have become the conduit by which illegal drugs move from South America across the US border. Unlike conventional media sources, who will sometimes vaguely mention violence and instability in Central America as a cause, The Economist [2] quite correctly found the source of the problem in America’s war on drugs:

Demand for cocaine in the United States (which, unlike that in Europe, is fed through Central America), combined with the ultimately futile war on drugs, has led to the upsurge in violence. It is American consumers who are financing the drug gangs and, to a large extent, American gun merchants who are arming them. So failing American policies help beget failed states in the neighbourhood.

The result has been that the drug cartels have a great deal of control over much of northern Central America. The cartels control the governments, judges, police forces, and even some prisons and some of the military through a combination of bribery, threats, and outright force.

As a consequence of this control drug gangs and cartels can operate in the open or they can operate deep within the jungle beyond the reach of the law. In turn, the drug cartels can act above the law and as a result they have created a culture of violence, building on the civil wars of previous decades.

The countries in the northern Central American region, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, have the highest murder rate of any region in the world. The region’s murder rate is 7.5 times the murder rate of the North American region.

Globally, the top murder rate in any given year since the 1990s has been Honduras or El Salvador. In 2012, nearly 1 out of every 1,000 citizens in Honduras was murdered. In addition to murder, there are high rates of other types of violence, crime, and intimidation. A very large percentage of the entire Salvadoran-born population has migrated, mostly to the United States.

In addition to violence, the war on drugs has been a disruptive force for the Central American economies. After reading about the region, is anyone likely to make travel plans to go there, or to consider opening a business there? Obviously, the war on drugs has been highly disruptive for job creation, commerce, and international investment outside the drug cartels themselves. Therefore it would be more correct to say that it is not so much the attraction of opportunities in the US, but the lack of and reduction in opportunities in Central America that are spurring emigration, and that this is directly linked to the war on drugs.

When you try to make sense of parents sending their children on such a dangerous undertaking, just remember it is just another despicable result of the war on drugs with few solutions.

The Economist recommends the repeal of the war on drugs and the legalization of drugs globally as the solution. Its second best solution is for the United States to finance an effort to rebuild the institutions (i.e., police, courts, prisons, etc.) and infrastructure (i.e., military, transportation, and education systems) in the countries of Central America:

Such schemes will not, however, solve the fundamental problem: that as long as drugs that people want to consume are prohibited, and therefore provided by criminals, driving the trade out of one bloodstained area will only push it into some other godforsaken place. But unless and until drugs are legalised, that is the best Central America can hope to do.

In other words, ending the war on drugs is the only solution.

Notes

[1] http://www.unhcrwashington.org/children/reports, p. 31.

[2] “The drug war hits Central America: Organised crime is moving south from Mexico into a bunch of small countries far too weak to deal with it,” The Economist, April 14, 2011.

Mark Thornton is a senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He is the author of The Economics of Prohibition, coauthor of Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War, and the editor of The Quotable Mises, The Bastiat Collection, and An Essay on Economic Theory. Send him mail. See Mark Thornton’s article archives.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 – Article by Ron Paul

What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
July 20, 2014
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Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held a press conference to claim – even before an investigation – that it was pro-Russian rebels in the region who were responsible. His ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, did the same at the UN Security Council – just one day after the crash!While Western media outlets rush to repeat US government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report.

They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Without US-sponsored “regime change,” it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.

The media has reported that the plane must have been shot down by Russian forces or Russian-backed separatists, because the missile that reportedly brought down the plane was Russian made. But they will not report that the Ukrainian government also uses the exact same Russian-made weapons.

They will not report that the post-coup government in Kiev has, according to OSCE monitors, killed 250 people in the breakaway Lugansk region since June, including 20 killed as government forces bombed the city center the day after the plane crash! Most of these are civilians and together they roughly equal the number killed in the plane crash. By contrast, Russia has killed no one in Ukraine, and the separatists have struck largely military, not civilian, targets.

They will not report that the US has strongly backed the Ukrainian government in these attacks on civilians, which a State Department spokeswoman called “measured and moderate.”

They will not report that neither Russia nor the separatists in eastern Ukraine have anything to gain but everything to lose by shooting down a passenger liner full of civilians.

They will not report that the Ukrainian government has much to gain by pinning the attack on Russia, and that the Ukrainian prime minister has already expressed his pleasure that Russia is being blamed for the attack.

They will not report that the missile that apparently shot down the plane was from a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system that requires a good deal of training that the separatists do not have.

They will not report that the separatists in eastern Ukraine have inflicted considerable losses on the Ukrainian government in the week before the plane was downed.

They will not report how similar this is to last summer’s US claim that the Assad government in Syria had used poison gas against civilians in Ghouta. Assad was also gaining the upper hand in his struggle with US-backed rebels and the US claimed that the attack came from Syrian government positions. Then, US claims led us to the brink of another war in the Middle East. At the last minute public opposition forced Obama to back down – and we have learned since then that US claims about the gas attack were false.

Of course it is entirely possible that the Obama administration and the US media have it right this time, and Russia or the separatists in eastern Ukraine either purposely or inadvertently shot down this aircraft. The real point is, it’s very difficult to get accurate information so everybody engages in propaganda. At this point it would be unwise to say the Russians did it, the Ukrainian government did it, or the rebels did it. Is it so hard to simply demand a real investigation?

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

The Constitution and Sectional Discord in the 1850s (2003) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

The Constitution and Sectional Discord in the 1850s (2003) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 20, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2003 and published in four parts on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 3,700 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  ***
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 20, 2014
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The 1850s were a time of intense escalation for a sectional conflict between the free-labor-based, industrial North and the slavery-based agrarian South. In this controversy, both sides claimed sanction for their point of view and vision of America’s political future from the country’s founding document, the Constitution. Thus, the nature of the highest law of the land turned it from a cohesive force into fuel for the coming clash between the North and South. The contents of and the omissions in the Constitution, as well as the greatly varying interpretations thereof, brought about this state of affairs.
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Multiple interpretations of the Constitution that fed into the crisis of the 1850s had existed since 1798, when Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions proclaimed that the Constitution and the Federal Government were the products of a compact amongst the states, and that the Federal Government’s legislation possessed no legitimate connection to the interests of the people unless verified by more direct representatives thereof (Norton 225).

This was the origin of the powerful new doctrine of States’ Rights, which Southern politicians would develop over the course of the next 63 years. During the Nullification Crisis of 1832, John Calhoun and other leading South Carolina politicians argued that a state had the right to overturn federal legislation, such as a deleterious tariff, which was passed without that state’s consent (Norton 383).

Following the immense territorial gains of the Mexican War, the issue of States’ Rights in the context of the status of slavery in the new territories gained even greater prominence. Lewis Cass, Democratic Presidential candidate in 1848, proposed the doctrine of popular sovereignty to enable the residents of a given territory to decide whether or not to institute slavery in the territory and in the state that it would become. Cass’s argument hinged on the notion that Congress did not have the Constitutional authority to legislate slavery in the territories (Norton 402).

Already this philosophy conflicted with a sentiment emerging in the North and expressed in the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, which sought Congressional action for the abolition of slavery from all territories gained from Mexico (Norton 400). By 1850, old political safeguards, such as the Missouri Compromise, which were designed to quell any discord in regard to the issue of slavery’s status in new territories, had begun to atrophy as the Compromise of 1850 legislated for California’s admission as a free state and the extension of slave status to territories such as Utah, which were North of the Missouri Compromise line (Norton 405).

During the 1850s, the safeguards to the relative stability of the Union during prior decades steadily began to crumble. The Compromise of 1850 sparked hostility from abolitionists, free blacks, and an increasing number of moderate Northerners via the enactment of a draconian Fugitive Slave Act. Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 dealt the death blow to the Missouri Compromise by outright annulling it and granting the residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories the ability to decide the status of slavery therein by popular vote.

What resulted was a state of quasi-war known as “Bleeding Kansas,” in which over 200 people were murdered on both sides and dishonest election practices were rampant (Norton 413). In 1857, the Supreme Court itself addressed the issue of the Constitution in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, ruling essentially that black Americans were not citizens of the United States and that Congress had no power to bar slavery from the territories (Norton 415). This ruling, along with the presence of a majority of Southern judges on the Court indicated that not even this ideally impartial body was exempt from the regional struggle.

The Constitution, indeed, was not a perfect a document, and some of the words and concepts therein left the political stage open to the enmity between the advocates of freedom and the slaveholders. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote that, although the Constitution did not contain explicit mention of the words “slave” or “slavery,” it did implicitly and deliberately seek to legitimize the institution. Euphemisms such as “other persons” were used in the text, and the three-fifths clause, which counted every slave as three-fifths of a state’s inhabitant, entrenched the status of the slave as an inferior and inherently different being in the eyes of the law.

In addition, via the promise to aid states in the event of “domestic violence,” the Constitution could be interpreted to mandate Congress to suppress slave revolts (Norton 203). Such facts permitted Garrison to chastise the Constitution as an instrument of an oppressive government that violated the liberties naturally attributable to every man.

Abolitionists grew increasingly enraged in regard to the Constitution’s treatment of a slave as three-fifths of a person and the South’s disproportionate representation in the House of Representatives as a result.

To be fair, however, an alternate interpretation of the Constitution’s mentions of slavery can be argued. It was precisely because the Founders recognized the incompatibility of slavery with individual rights and wished to see its eventual extinction that they omitted any explicit references to slaves and instead unequivocally acknowledged them to be “persons.” Furthermore, the three-fifths compromise can be seen as a political necessity during the Union’s formation – as without it, there would have been little chance of getting Southern states to consent to the Constitution.

During the 1850s, while the Abolitionists in the North condemned the U. S. Constitution for its alleged support of slavery, Southern planters employed the Constitution’s perceived implicit sanction of slavery in order to claim protected or at least inviolable status for the practice.

An anonymous Georgian wrote in “Plain Words for the North” that the Constitution had recognized slavery where it existed and, since men from such regions had been pivotal in assuring the expansion of the United States into new territories, they should possess a voice in determining slavery’s status. If slaves were indeed property, as the Georgian claimed the Constitution to acknowledge, then it would be a grave injustice for Congress to prevent their mobility into land partly gained by the efforts of the slaveholders.

In the meantime, the Constitution itself did not in fact conclusively and unequivocally recognize slavery’s right to exist, as even slavery proponents like President James Buchanan seemed to recognize. In a message to Congress, Buchanan proposed an “explanatory amendment” assuring the perpetuation of slavery and reinforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. The fact that a similar clause was not present within the original document, along with the absence of a contrary clause abolishing slavery, indicated that the Constitution was ambiguous on the subject and open to a range of conflicting interpretations.

These conflicting interpretations of the Constitution further exacerbated the situation. Confederate President Jefferson Davis developed the argument of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions to its extreme and proposed that because the Constitution was a “compact between independent states” and because the process of amendment ratification heavily emphasized state sovereignty, the individual states maintained the ultimate authority to secede from the Union when they no longer deemed the compact advantageous.

Abraham Lincoln, expressing a diametrically opposite view, declared that no state had ever existed as a sovereign entity outside of the Union and that only by virtue of the national Constitution, formed within the framework of a federal Union, could the states claim whatever rights they possessed. By Lincoln’s analysis of the Constitution, States’ Rights could not be but subordinate to the federal authority that engendered them.

Both Lincoln and Davis harbored a fundamental respect for the Constitution, but their irreconcilable interpretations thereof helped establish them as the leaders of the opposing sides in the upcoming war. Ultimately, the “proper” interpretation of the Constitution on this issue would be settled by force and by blood.

In the North during the 1850s, many Americans perceived slavery as an inherent violation of the individual liberties that the Constitution was supposed to represent. The cartoon “Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Free-Soiler” dramatized this sentiment by depicting Democratic politicians shoving a slave into the mouth of a resisting free man who cries “Murder!”

Forcing_SlaveryMany Northerners feared that integrating free citizens and slaveholders was another ploy by the Slave Power, a Southern oligarchy bent on extending its domain over the entirety of the United States, intending ultimately to send even the free men of the North into tyranny by unconstitutionally silencing criticism of their actions via such measures as the Gag Rule of 1836, which automatically tabled abolitionist petitions brought before Congress (Norton 400).

But no measure demonstrated the reality of the Slave Power’s existence more than the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which epitomized the Southern planters’ interpretation of the Constitution.

Chief Justice Roger Taney stated in a burst of historical ignorance that the Founding Fathers had never intended for black men to achieve equal status with the white population of the United States. Moreover, having won on the issue of popular sovereignty in the territories, the Southerners, with Taney as their spokesperson, were no longer content with the mere allowance of choice in the territories. Taney’s ruling amounted to an outright protection of slavery in the territories by barring Congress from limiting its spread (Norton 415).

If this were the true nature of the Constitution, then an increasing number of Northerners could not hope for it to preserve any semblance of liberty in the Union. Ruling on Dred Scott’s status as a slave, the Decision clothed the Fugitive Slave Act in Constitutional “justification” by affirming that presence in a free state did not free a slave.

Dred Scott also gave credence to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s association of Constitutional sanction with the Fugitive Slave Act when he denounced it in 1851. Emerson recognized the blatant immorality of legislation that would grant legal protection to the kidnapping of free black men and escaped slaves alike and would result in suicide for a country that deemed itself the home of freedom. Indeed, with laws and interpretations such as these, the conflict between the Northern and Southern ways of life was irreconcilable and could only erupt in blood.

South Carolina’s secession in December of 1860 set in motion the Southern interpretation of a Constitution dominated by States’ Rights, while the resulting Civil War and Lincoln’s use of 2.3 million federal troops to forcefully reunite the country demonstrated the Northern view which justified use of central authority on the grounds of national unity and individual liberty (Norton 461).

Ironically, the secession of the South permitted Northern Republicans to employ Congressional legislation (and the absence of Southern opposition) as a means to firmly establishing their own interpretation of the Constitution.

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, assuring that slavery would exist no more and ending the dispute over its status in the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 guaranteed that all men born or naturalized in the United States were citizens of their respective states and entitled to inalienable individual rights, thus overturning the Dred Scott Decision. Despite the fact that the contents, omissions, and possibilities for opposing interpretations within the Constitution greatly fueled the discord of the 1850s, the document was ultimately perfectible through the amendment process to the extent of assuring a just resolution to the ideological facet of the nation’s greatest inter-regional conflict.

Source

Norton, Katzman, et. al. A People and a Nation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

The Debate Regarding the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (2003) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

The Debate Regarding the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (2003) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 20, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2003 and published in four parts on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 14,000 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  ***
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 20, 2014
***

Mid-1798 was the culmination of a development of heated antagonisms which had entangled the United States on both the domestic and the foreign scenes. The passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in June and July of that year was met with a myriad of responses by various influential individuals and political movements within the country, thus adding fuel to a multifaceted dispute. Key areas of intense disagreement included relations with European powers, the nature of acceptable political dissent, and the distinction between loyalty to the Constitution and the present wielders of power.

This essay will examine the historical events and controversies central to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the debate regarding them.

American Diplomacy with Britain and France

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In 1793 France, engulfed by a bloody revolution, declared war on Holland, Spain, and its archrival, Great Britain. The United States encountered a dilemma; it maintained key ties with both France, its principal ally by the Treaty of Alliance of 1778, and Great Britain, its chief commercial partner and the source of much of its overseas revenue.

In April 1793, Citizen Edmond Genet, a representative of the French government, employed the alliance with the United States as the pretext for recruitment of Americans on American soil to fight the British in the Western hemisphere (Norton 219). Genet also sought to entangle America in the war with Great Britain, facing instead a neutrality proclamation by President Washington, who strove to retain friendly impartiality between the United States and each of the warring powers.

Meanwhile, in hopes of averting war with England and resolving matters such as the stationing of British troops in the American Northwest and the British seizure of American merchant ships with French wares from the West Indies, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to negotiate a treaty in 1794-95. The treaty satisfied a substantial portion of the United States’ requests and set its relations with Britain on a stable footing (Norton 221).

In the meantime, however, the Jay Treaty provoked a reaction by France, manifested by the Directory’s order to intercept American vessels that transported British goods. Upon the deployment of John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry, and C. C. Pinckney for the purpose of negotiating an end to these violations, the American envoys were met by three agents of Foreign Minister Talleyrand, who demanded a bribe, a loan, and an apology for President Adams’ anti-French remarks before the negotiations could even begin. Their extortionist approach was publicized in the “XYZ Affair,” which sparked a severe attitudinal backlash against France within the United States (Norton 224).

Federalists’ and Republicans’ Views of Britain and France

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As fighting between American and French navies in the Caribbean developed into an unofficial war, the ruling Federalist Party in the United States saw the volatile situation as a pretext for implementing domestic controls. Hence, the Alien and Sedition Acts, legislation that lengthened immigrants’ naturalization period (Naturalization Act), gave the President almost unlimited power to detain (Alien Enemies Act) or deport them (Alien Friends Act), and rendered any criticism of government policy a virtual crime (Sedition Act), came into being. The Federalists hoped thereby to kill two birds with one stone, to actively resist France and to crush their primary political rivals, the Democratic-Republicans.

The dispute over foreign affairs was one of the key issues which separated the advocates of the Alien and Sedition Acts from their opponents. The rampant Reign of Terror during the French Revolution horrified many Federalists, and the effrontery of Commissioners X, Y, and Z even further intensified their hostilities toward France.

James Madison wrote concerning President John Adams’s opinion of France that Adams considered the French and American revolutions to be diametrically opposite in principle. Alexander Hamilton added that it would be treason for an American to sympathize with France and thereby offend his own government, which had been so callously mistreated. Hamilton and the High Federalists especially constantly urged for an official declaration of war against France during 1798-99 (Norton 226).

The Republicans, on the contrary, sympathized with the French Revolution and viewed the XYZ affair as exploited out of proportion by the Federalists to advance the ulterior motives of the latter. Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Madison that the XYZ papers were revealed to the American public in a misconstrued format, for the purpose of creating an intentional “shock” and arousing animosity against France.

While the Federalists sought stable commercial and cultural relations with Britain, the Republicans sensed danger in all things British. Jefferson, writing to Phillip Mazzei, explicitly mentioned the Federalists’ association with England and English monarchy, and the purported desires of the Federalists to re-impose British-style government on the United States. While the Federalists perceived the integrity of America as threatened by French extortion, the Republicans saw a radically different menace in British-imitating aristocracy. Whereas the Federalists persecuted French sympathizers because of the alleged threat to national security that the latter caused, the Republicans saw the threat in the Federalists’ persecution itself.

Arguments About the Permissibility of Political Dissent

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Aside from issues of desirable American foreign policy toward Britain and France, the arguments over the Alien and Sedition Acts also encompassed issues of free speech and political dissent.

For the Federalists, the acts were an opportunity, explicitly acknowledged by Senate whip Theodore Sedgwick, to eliminate factionalism and opposition within the country. Fifteen indictments and ten convictions resulted from the Acts, the victims including outspoken Republican newspaper editors and Matthew Lyon, a Republican congressman (Norton 224).

The Federalists did not consider the silencing of critics to be in opposition to the First Amendment; John Allen, a Federalist congressman, expressed the generally prevailing view within his party that the freedom of the press did not imply the right to slanderous smearing or incitement toward subversion of lawful government. Allen’s statement assumed that the integrity of Federalist policies was beyond question, and anyone who doubted their validity was automatically a liar and an insurrectionist.

In short, the Federalists did not see a distinction between forceful revolution and peaceful denunciation of government policies. The Republicans, on the contrary, recognized the philosophy behind the Sedition Act to be a foundation for dictatorial oligarchy and the antithesis of a free society.

Representative Edward Livingston, for example, noted that the Acts invested in the President (and his Federalist-packed courts) the authority to determine what constituted a crime under them, whom to convict, and how to punish the convicted. Thus, the Acts violated the balance between the various branches of government and tipped the scales in extreme favor of the executive.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison undertook a campaign against the Acts on a state level, drafting the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which proclaimed the laws unconstitutional due to the fact that state approval of the measures had been bypassed. The Constitution and the Federal Government, it was argued, were the products of a compact amongst the states, and the Federal Government’s legislation possessed no legitimate connection to the interests of the people unless verified by more direct representatives thereof (Norton 225). Thus the Republicans, far from espousing any anti-American rhetoric, actively condemned Federalist policy using the principles of the American revolution and of a limited government that safeguards, not violates, the sacred liberties of man.

It is fortunate that the Republicans won the debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts, thereby setting a strong precedent against government suppression of criticism which has lasted to this day. Free political speech came under attack in the United States during the first decades of the country’s existence, and it thankfully withstood that attack.

Loyalty to the Constitution Versus Loyalty to the Government

***

In the political disputes over the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the distinction between loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to the established government further separated Federalists and Republicans in the controversy over the Acts.

Representative Albert Gallatin criticized the Federalists for equating the two loyalties and, in contraposition, the two disloyalties. The idea that an opposition to the temporary majority of the present day is an opposition to the Constitution was, according to Gallatin, “subversive of the principles of the Constitution itself.”

The Federalists, by rendering criticism of their measures illegal, would thereby institutionalize their regime into a force-backed behemoth that would no longer be susceptible to the interests and displeasures of the people. With the press silenced, both sides of an issue would not be able to be transferred to the public, who would thus be manipulated by the government into favoring the incumbency. How, then, would the First Amendment apply? This perversion of the public’s electoral right was, stated the Republicans, the gateway to dictatorship.

Both the Federalists and the Republicans viewed each other as traitors to the American essence. The former categorized treason as dislike of the political status quo, whereas the latter saw the status quo as a form of treason in itself.

On the foreign front, the Quasi-War with France was resolved during the Convention of 1800, canceling the Treaty of Alliance of 1778 and freeing America from all binding foreign obligations (Norton 226).

Domestically, the Alien and Sedition Acts proved to be the Federalists’ undoing. Matthew Lyon, arrested during the Federalist reign of censorship, would cast the deciding ballot in favor of Republican Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Jefferson would pardon all persons convicted under the Sedition Act.

The Acts themselves expired in 1801, and the newly empowered Republicans had no intention of renewing them. The controversies over foreign affairs, political dissent, and the nature of Constitutional adherence were ultimately resolved in the Republicans’ favor; war with France was averted, freedom of speech reinstated, and loyal opposition forces encouraged in American politics up to the present day. Since the death of the Alien and Sedition Acts, America has remained a haven for spirited and vibrant ideological dispute.

To this day, it is urgent for Americans to keep in mind that loyalty to the United States and to the Constitution does not necessarily imply loyalty to the government currently in power, which can and often does trample on America’s founding principles and neglect the proper nature and limits of its operation.

Source

Norton, Katzman, et. al. A People and a Nation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

History of the Minoan Civilization of Ancient Crete (2002) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

History of the Minoan Civilization of Ancient Crete (2002) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 20, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2002 and published in four parts on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 32,200 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  ***
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 20, 2014
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The Minoan civilization of ancient Crete has long fascinated historians and students of history. As early as about 4000 years ago, the Minoans already had a thriving culture with major commercial, esthetic, and technological accomplishments, unparalleled virtually anywhere else in the world of their time. Some have even speculated that the Greek legend of the ultra-advanced ancient city of Atlantis was based on knowledge, passed down through the ages, of the accomplishments of Minoan Crete.

This essay will examine key aspects of Minoan life and culture. We begin by looking at this civilization’s emergence and the kind of geographical environment in which it came to be. We then continue the examination of the Minoan civilization of ancient Crete by discussing the Minoan economy and government – both of which were remarkably advanced for their time and allowed the Minoans a then unparalleled degree of liberty and prosperity. We proceed to discuss this culture’s religious, esthetic, and technological aspects, the athletic activities common in Minoan Crete, and the manner in which this remarkable ancient civilization met its end.

Beginnings of the Minoan Culture

The site of Knossos, the capital of ancient Crete, possessed discernible human influences from as early as 7000 BC. The beginning of intense development can be detected at about 3000 BC.

The Minoans originated in Asia Minor and spoke a language not related to the Indo-European group. The interpretation of their scripts and any manner of their phonetics are lost to us, although Myceneans and later Greeks may have borrowed certain Minoan aspects of speech.

Centralization of government was gradually instituted with the construction of the first Palace in Knossos at about 2000 BC.

When population reached levels exceeding the available food supplies, migrations to neighboring islands were required to extend the accessible arable territory. Need of a navy also arose for purposes of transportation as well as commerce with other Mediterranean cultures for the acquisition of food and other raw goods.

Geography of Crete

Crete, a large island in the Mediterranean, lies halfway between Asia Minor and Greece, granting it a central spot in numerous ancient trade routes on the sea.

During the earliest days of its development, Crete was free from invasions, since no civilization had yet developed a sufficiently massive and functional navy to mount an expedition. This permitted relatively calm development, where resources could be employed for technological advancement and the arts rather than frequent warfare, subsistence, and repairs. The Minoans as a result created few defensive structures and no standing army, since the necessity for these was not present.

Crete possesses a temperate climate and highly productive soil. Large families were common, as demonstrated by houses of four to six rooms for even the poorest dwellers within the realm. Evidently, the frequent agricultural surpluses resulted in rapid population growth and hence the need for expansion and trade.

Economy

The primary vehicles of the Minoan economy were mercantile ships also equipped with armaments. They conducted journeys to mainland Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. From there they imported basic resources such as additional food to maintain a constantly increasing population.

Minoans exported refined goods, such as jewelry, wine, oil, and artwork, for Crete was home to numerous skilled craftsmen and specialists.

Present hypotheses concerning the identity of numerous Minoan documents hint at a purpose of recording commercial transactions. It is known that accuracy and calculation were valued in conducting economic deals.

Trade was centralized and commissioned by the King, whose extensive network of bureaucrats would implement detailed designs and analyze the results. Because of Crete’s small size and relatively small population, it was possible for the monarch to govern the country in a similar way to the management of a modern corporation. Nevertheless, the government did not neglect the people, and there is evidence of even the lower classes enjoying imported goods. The distribution may not have been even, yet the differences between wealth and poverty were substantially smaller than in any other contemporary culture.

Government

Crete was ruled by a monarch from the central palace of Knossos. The first ruler (and the only one whose name is known) was the legendary King Minos, described by later Greeks as being the son of Zeus and appointed by the chief deity to reign over the island.

The monarchy, however, was far from a totalitarian regime. Historian Richard Hooker describes the role of the King as a “chief entrepreneur or CEO” rather than a dictator. Numerous administrative decisions were shared by a priesthood (which was mainly female) and an immense network of bureaucrats and scribes. This semi-meritocracy was one of the most civil regimes of its time, remarkable for its lack of rigid caste structures and barriers to individual socioeconomic advancement.

Evidence suggests that the people of Crete were permitted a large degree of liberty, and no gender inequalities existed. Cretans are anomalous in that respect, having avoided the negative impacts of late Neolithic societies upon women and the poor. Perhaps this is due to the fact that their relative tranquility placed a smaller need on a strong military and a subservient workforce. Thus patriarchy and a rule of warlords never developed.

Religion

The Minoans had a matriarchal religion in which no male gods were detectable.

Cretan religion orients itself around animals, and numerous deities seem to possess a central emphasis on them. For example, “The Huntress” represents human attempts for mastery over other creatures, while “The Mountain Mother”, a diametric opposite, attempts to preserve a natural setting for animals. A popular household goddess was portrayed as entangled in snakes throughout her organism. Other goddesses possessed exteriors of birds, most notably doves.

The Minoans worshipped trees, rocks, and springs in a semi-Animist manner.

Evil figures in Minoan religion are represented as human demons with the limbs of lions and other carnivores.

Art, Architecture, and Technology

The most renowned of the palaces in Knossos was the four-story Labyrinth, the chief palace of the King in existence from 2000 to 1350 BC. Its extraordinary abundance of rooms served as a basis for legends of foreigners, such as mainland Greeks, who perceived it as a maze in which it would be humanly impossible to remember one’s way. In reality, however, it was not the crude dwelling of the Minotaur that myths describe it to be. It possessed numerous places of worship, workshops, lavish banquet halls, and a grand courtyard in the center, surrounded by four sections. This palace was destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, in 1700 BC, and later by an earthquake in 1600 BC. The eruption of the Santorini volcano in 1450 BC was its greatest catastrophe, although it was restored once more by conquering Greeks. However, it fell into neglect and disrepair as Crete lost its political value around 1380 BC. This monumental work is thought to have been designed by the legendary architect and scientist Daidalus, the father of Icarus.

Minoan art seems to have been separated from mundane tasks and duties and oriented toward a purely aesthetic purpose. Numerous wall murals in palatial complexes within Knossos illustrate scenes from the animal world and everyday life, common in depiction but detached from practicality. The objects portrayed were often trivial and superficial, and there is no moral or political aim discernible in the works. Art was instead developed “for art’s sake”.

Minoan cities possessed plumbing and sanitation systems reaching into the confines of every home. The exact means by which they realized this was, unfortunately, lost following their decline and not recovered until 17th century Europeans had again attained this skill.

Sports

The renowned sport of ancient Crete, open to both genders and subjecting all to the same standards, was bull leaping. This was a dangerous pastime, but harmless and humane to the athlete and the animal if performed with skill. A bull would be released to charge toward the jumper. Once it was in sufficient proximity, the performer would attach his hands to the bull’s horns and vault onto the creature’s back. Another common objective was to somersault from such a position to a state of standing on a spot of land directly behind the bull.

Boxing was also a favorite activity, as portrayed in numerous wall murals. The precise regulations are unknown, but this is perhaps a source of inspiration for later Greeks, who adapted the sport to the Olympic Games.

Fate of the Civilization

The Minoans’ isolation from foreign threats caused them to maintain feeble frontiers, and gradually mainland powers such as Mycenae developed, with the fleet and army to overcome them.

The task of conquest was perhaps lightened for the Myceneans by the explosion of the Santorini volcano, four or five times more massive than the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatoa in 1888. This, along with a similar catastrophe on a nearby island from the volcano Thera, inflicted devastating blows upon Crete’s population and economy, crippling it and rendering it susceptible to invasion.

Under Achaean occupation, Knossos gradually withered away into an insignificant village, the cultural level of the Myceneans being too primitive to maintain the complexities of the civilization which they had conquered.

Nevertheless, evidence suggests that Cretan script was somewhat adopted by the occupants. Elements of Linear A, the original (and yet un-decoded) alphabet of the Minoans, have been spotted in Linear B, the early writing of the Myceneans.

Myths maintained a memory of this civilization in such fascinating works as the tale of Theseus and his struggle against the Minotaur for over 3000 years. Only between 1900 and 1931, during the extensive excavations conducted by archaeologist Arthur Evans, did details begin to surface about the true identity of this culture. Archaeologists and historians discovered a humane and prosperous society that existed during a relatively savage time, a society that provided many of the early foundations of Western civilization.

Sources

“Knossos.” http://www.culture.gr/2/21/211/21123a/e211wa03.html

Hooker, Richard. “The Palace Civilizations of the Aegean.” http://richard-hooker.com/sites/worldcultures/MINOA/MINOANS.HTM

Iraklion Museum. “City of Knossos: The Palace of King Minos.” http://www.dilos.com/region/crete/kn_01.html.

How to Fail a Class of Any Kind (2007) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

How to Fail a Class of Any Kind (2007) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 20, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This satirical article was originally published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  I seek to preserve it as an entertaining but didactic resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this article is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 20, 2014
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Results Guaranteed, or Your Money Back!

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Numerous online articles exist to help people who seek to pass a class or even get an exceptionally good grade in it. But, in the course of my research, I have found few reliable, comprehensive guides to failing a course. So, in the interest of those who might be seeking to learn how, I provide some assistance here. Now, granted, I have never personally failed a course, but I have seen enough people accomplish such a feat that I consider myself qualified to write about it. So here it is: a guide to failing a class in any kind of subject and any type of educational institution.
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The first thing to understand about failing a class is that it is extremely difficult to do. You must really work at it in order to accomplish this goal! After all, rarely do teachers in the public schools or universities give F grades anymore. Simple lack of knowledge of the content will no longer suffice to earn you a failing grade; it might get you a C or a D, if you are lucky. This traditional approach to failing a course is even less reliable these days because numerous instructors grade on a curve. If it so happens that most of your classmates are more ignorant on the subject than you are, then you might even end up with a B or A-, in which case your efforts to fail the course will probably be irreversibly frustrated.

But fear not! Failing a class can still be done, if you work hard enough at it. Here are some tips about how you, too, can lead the glorious life of an academic underdog.

1. Cheat, and cheat often! Most educational institutions these days have a zero tolerance policy for academic dishonesty. This is the route to go for quick, efficient results if you seek to fail a class. You might even be suspended from the school, which translates into some wonderful free time! The best ways to cheat are blatant and obvious ones. When there is a test, stand up out of your seat, walk to the student next to you, and wait until he puts down his pen and takes a moment’s pause from writing. Then grab his test, walk back to your desk, and copy every word of it, all in front of the teacher and the other students. In most cases, other students will not let you cheat off of them, since they will be conscious of the fact that the school’s academic dishonesty policy will also hold them liable in that case. But if you follow this advice, the other student will have no choice but to let you commit the infraction; he will have been coerced into it.

Extreme plagiarism is another possible route to cheating, especially for those who are shy about making a public scene. Whenever you are assigned a paper on any subject, Google that subject and copy the first search result, word for word. You will be virtually guaranteed that the teacher will be able to look up the same page you found within minutes and discover your plagiarism. Alternatively, you can simply choose to omit standard punctuation in your bibliography, or use MLA style when APA style is called for, or vice versa. These days in academic institutions, using the wrong format for your Works Cited page is almost as severely punished as plagiarism.

If you have ethical scruples about committing academic dishonesty, just give yourself a little inspirational talk in front of the mirror every morning. Repeat three times, “I, too, can be a cheater!” Remember that an early start into the field of immorality is virtually required to have a successful career as a professional gangster, pop idol, pyramid-scheme advertiser, or politician.

2. Never attend class. You cannot be aware of material discussed in class if you never go there; furthermore, you will have the advantage of not knowing what homework was assigned and what reading material you ought to study. This is a failure-proof method of failing the class, unless your school or college automatically withdraws you from it for lack of attendance. Resist the temptation of asking your friends about the proceedings in class or doing independent research into areas related to the subject matter. Remember that it is difficult to fail a class these days while retaining the slightest bit of moral reservation about your goal.

3. Go to raucous parties every night. At the parties, drink vast quantities of alcohol. When you come to class next day, you will be intoxicated out of your mind, which will safeguard you against any relapses of conscientious listening and class participation. Even if you really want to answer a question, you will be unable to. As an added bonus, you might be suspended from the educational institution for being under the influence of alcohol.

4. When taking multiple choice tests, pick a letter and stick to it! Always circle that letter as your answer of choice for every question. If there are four possible choices for each question, then your expected percentage of correct answers is 25% – well into the F range. If there are five possible choices, you can do even better with an expected grade of 20%. For more advanced multiple choice tests, where there might be more than one correct answer per question, you might even get away with grades in the single digits!

5. Sleep in class. If you cannot overcome your conscience and absolutely must attend class, at least try not to be awake for it. If you are, you might just learn something against your best attempts. Consider staying up the entire previous night in order to fall asleep with less difficulty when class is in session. Remember to choose the remotest corner of the class to sit in, possibly behind tall people who obstruct the teacher’s view of you. Otherwise, you run the risk of being awakened and, once again, learning something.

6. Always procrastinate. As a matter of fact, never turn in those assignments at all! Wait until the grade penalties for late work accumulate to the point where you get a zero grade on all your work; then, you will have failed the class without even needing to exert any effort! Once you fail your first course, you will be well on your way to a bright future. Remember that your personal merit, hard work, and knowledge do not matter at all in the real world; success is based purely on luck, or on exploiting those people who do work diligently and honestly. Just sit back, engage in your share of parasitism off the accomplishments of others, and wait for genuine success and happiness to come to you! It’s that simple, though most people are far too bound by conventional Western meritocratic prejudices to understand or implement it. If you become an outstanding failure, perhaps I will write your biography someday.

How to Study for a Test: Principles from a Successful Test-Taker (2007) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

How to Study for a Test: Principles from a Successful Test-Taker (2007) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 19, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This essay was originally published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 19, 2014
***
Perhaps you are looking to ace a standardized test. Or you want to get an A in an Advanced Placement (AP) high-school course or a challenging upper-level college course. Getting a high score on any test can be considered a skill in itself – apart from knowledge of the subject matter being tested. In fact, many people who are otherwise great learners and know a subject in detail tend not to score as well on tests as they could. If you are one of those people, here are some helpful suggestions as to how to improve your performance. These principles have helped me – among other things – to obtain an SAT score of 1580 (under the old system), an ACT score of 35, straight A grades throughout Advanced Placement courses and other classes in high school, as well as straight A grades in undergraduate college courses. I do not mention this to boast of my talents, as I do not consider myself to possess any exceptional abilities inaccessible to anyone reading this article. You can do what I did – honestly and genuinely – if you follow the proper techniques.
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First, remember that every instructor and testing organization has certain patterns or modes of functioning that you can expect and anticipate. Sometimes the teacher or organization might not even be aware of these modes of functioning. They are just the ways of doing things that seem natural to the teacher or the people in the organization: ways that fall in line with their habits, general personality, expectations of students, and evaluation of what is important in the subject matter. Nonetheless, these modes of functioning manifest themselves quite systematically, and they affect the tests designed by that instructor or organization.

There is no a prior way to know what these tendencies are; you will simply have to watch the teacher or organization for patterns. If you are dealing with a large institution that puts out standardized tests, you will have a substantial body of prior exams to analyze for patterns. Ask yourself: what kinds of questions tend to occur most often? What is the prevalent format of the questions? What are the skills that tend to be tested most frequently? Unless large departures from prior procedure are explicitly announced and publicized by the testing organization, you can be sure that future tests will be extremely similar to past tests. Having examined past tests sufficiently, you can be sure to have a vast pool of data at your fingertips, hinting to you what you should concentrate on most in your preparation.

If you are studying for a test from an instructor you know, you have other helpful indicators to guide you along in your studying. If the instructor emphasized certain topics in class repeatedly, you can be sure that they will be tested. If the instructor states that the test will be over a certain section of a book-but he did not cover all the material in that section – focus on the material that he did cover; he likely considers that material to be more relevant than the material he omitted. If in doubt, ask the instructor for additional clarification; you might not always get an answer, but you will be surprised at how receptive most teachers and professors are to clarifying what you will need to study.

Take detailed notes during the class lectures; do not rely on your memory alone to understand the class material. You can be following the instructor perfectly in class and forget everything he said a few days later. Having notes on everything he said will give you a reliable study aid for the exam-one of the most important aids you can get. The notes will help you recall anything you forget later; they are also an excellent way of figuring out what is likely to be tested. The night before the exam, review all the notes so that the material is fresh in your mind. In the meantime, try to develop a technique for taking notes more efficiently, so that you can record all the essential things an instructor says and writes on the board, at the rate at which he says and writes them. Learning a system of shorthand or developing your own will assist you greatly in obtaining accurate transcripts of classroom lectures.

Use your time efficiently; remember that it is possible for you to work really hard at learning interesting material that has little relevance to the exam. If you enjoy learning for learning’s sake, more power to you. I, too, like to accumulate knowledge for pleasure. However, do not consider time spent in this fashion as studying for the exam in question. The primary purpose of studying for a test is not to expand your knowledge base – though that may be a secondary consequence. It is, rather, to give you the highly limited and specific ability of answering the fairly narrow range of questions a given test might contain. If approached properly, this can be a far narrower task than the accumulation of general knowledge about anything; thus, it can be a task that can be accomplished in several hours as opposed to several months. Becoming more knowledgeable is not something you can effectively do the night before an exam; you should have been doing it since the beginning of the course or several months in advance of a standardized test. The purpose of intensive studying is much more immediate; it is to get you ready to face the specific challenges with which the test presents you. You probably already know a lot more about the subject being tested than you imagine. The key to success on the test is to be able to express your knowledge in the proper format.

In general, you will be well on your way to success if you approach at studying for the test not as a body of knowledge to be learned, but as a task to be completed. To understand this better, consider an analogy. Learning all you can about tables and actually making a table are two quite distinct endeavors. Studying for a test is more like making a table. If you do it right, you can not only be sure that you are spending your study time in a manner that will actually help you; you will eventually be able to accurately determine when you have studied enough and are prepared to take the exam – just like if you were making at table, you would know it if you were finished. Then you will be able to approach the exam confidently and rationally, knowing that you are well equipped to earn some of the highest grades possible.

Celebrations of the Creator-Individual in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (2007) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Celebrations of the Creator-Individual in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (2007) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 19, 2014

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Note from the Author: This essay was originally published on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 19, 2014
***

Few books offer as resounding a manifesto of the individual’s value and potential as The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The image of Howard Roark, the serene architect who refuses to build anything that does not meet his criteria of esthetic excellence, who takes on the culturally prevailing attitudes of collectivism, compromise, and mediocrity, and wins, is a tribute to one man’s determination in resisting the gargantuan pressures exerted by his society to render him just like everyone else.

The Fountainhead presents a masterful philosophical exposition of the mind of the creator-individual as the root of all human accomplishments, and as a treasure that one must not allow to become tarnished by the impulse to conform. It additionally provides a model for how rational men can interact with one another, as value-traders who seek from each other, rather than blandness and conventionality, the profoundest and most impeccable work their minds can produce.

The Fountainhead teaches that the source of man’s productivity lies within himself, and Roark’s struggles have demonstrated that adhering with integrity to the desire to be productive and independent often involves overcoming great obstacles. Nevertheless, with the proper fortitude, consistency, and resolve, the creator-individual will have his way.

The journey of the creator-individual from struggle to ecstatic accomplishment is, too, reflected in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven’s monumental, dynamic, and logically intricate passages are capable of conveying both struggle and tension in the first three movements and an outpouring of joy, benevolence, and triumph in the fourth.

The symphony is a tribute both to Beethoven in particular, as he had written this ultimate of compositions a time when he was wrestling against crippling cases of deafness and disease, and to Man in general, for man’s proper occupation, in his life and in his work, is to struggle and to prevail. The vigor of man’s resistance against gloom, chaos, and decay will bring about a directly proportional result of glory, happiness, and accomplishment.

The works of Ayn Rand and Ludwig van Beethoven celebrate those creators and creations which affirm the highest possibilities open to man, and provide the intellectual fuel for audiences to pursue them. What Roark built with steel and concrete, what Ayn Rand captured in words, is also what Beethoven expressed through music. Using his or her medium of choice, the creator-individual strives to transform the world in an ennobling, enlightening, life-affirming manner – inspiring other creators to further heights of accomplishment.