Maurice Sweeney is a Democratic candidate for the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Jim Bunning, (R-Villa Hills). He was interviewed by JOU 499 students at the Citizen Kentucky candidates forum at University of Kentucky on Nov. 4, 2009.

        

Whenever doubt assails me, I turn to The Tragic Sense of Life and my faith is quickly restored. Faith, reason, the man of flesh and bone, and immortality of body and soul, are themes that Unamuno discusses with the ardent –fanatical I’d say– hunger for God.

After such shoddy fiction as the DaVinci Code, and fake TV Documentaries (The Tomb of Jesus), I find solace, wisdom, respect for God, and much joy as I read pages upon pages of this beloved book–The Tragic Sense of Life.

Such heavy thinkers such as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, and Descartes, Unamuno views with distrust. Little value does he place in knowledge –gnosis, rationality– going on the attack against Descartes’ arrogance as well as Spinoza’s atheism.

Wither knowledge? He asks: “The end of man is to create science, to catalogue the Universe, so that it may be handed back to God in order….” he answers himself by quoting a thought from one of his novels. Concluding that the thinking man of reason and wisdom isn’t the true creature that God created but a shadow (or simulacra); instead, he posits that the man that agonizes on a daily basis and craves for immortality is God’s creation.

Undisturbed by what scholars may think, he lavishes praise to man-agon whose lot is to suffer the dread of having been cast into an alien universe.

Dostoevsky’s irrational, irreverent, disdainful Underground Man says, “After all suffering is the sole cause of consciousness.” Unamuno, like Dostoevsky and other Christian existentialists see the futility of this real world as unreal –exalting passion and suffering over reason, truth, and beauty-as only a prelude to the ideal world of eternity where one returns to God.

Lesser thinkers such as Lucretius, John Stuart Mill, Freud, Marx, Sartre, and other atheists never felt the meaning of the word ‘suffering.’ Freud came close to understanding it when he said that religion comes about because of the human desire to escape death (The Future of an Illusion). That is partially correct. The ultimate truth is that men are the only beings that go through life knowing that death is a certainty–hence his lifetime suffering.

Those who are wise accept the certainty of death and find consolation in the return to God. Those who are knowledgeable seek more knowledge instead of acceptance and live to die alone; and what can be sadder than the utter desolation of a godless man or woman? Take Ayn Rand -a woman of deep intellect– who died husbandless, friendless, childless, and thankless, for giving thanks (to her) was a sign of weakness. And also godless until her bitter end. Unamuno would have seen her life as futile.

Unamuno even rejects St. Paul’s ideas that we all return to God where one is absorbed into peace and quiet for eternity. No, Unamuno says, the hunger we feel for immortality is for us to go on living in this life and in the other with full consciousness, the very same consciousness we own now. This is a daring request. This is the Unamunian never-ending longing for “a life in which each one of us may feel his consciousness and feel that it is united without being confounded, with all other consciousnesses in the Supreme Consciousness–in God.”

Who are the suffering ones?

“Among the men of flesh and bone –the suffering ones– there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau . . . Kierkegaard??men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge.”

There are some fine translations of this book, but I prefer J. E. Crawford Flitch’s who has taken the trouble to add his own Endnotes. Believers as well as unbelievers could well profit from Unamuno’s book.

        

Gov. Steve Beshear warned Tuesday that the state’s budget outlook is even worse than expected — with projected revenues falling at least $1.4 billion short of meeting obligations during the 2010-12 period.Citing “a challenge much greater than many have anticipated,” the governor said at a news conference that he will have to consider cuts even to his top priority — school funding — and laying off state workers.

He said the state must find a way to raise revenue, though he ruled out proposing any “broad-based tax increase.”

He made clear he’s still interested in raising revenue through a bill to legalize video lottery terminals at race tracks, with revenue going both to the state and to help the horse industry.

“We’re still working on it,” he said when asked if he has the votes in the General Assembly to pass a slots bill. “… If folks really want to help the horse industry and to give us money to solve this budget problem, then they ought to vote for the VLT legislation.”

Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville, said at a news conference later in the day that Beshear was exaggerating the problem to gain support for the gambling bill.

“He’s been a one-issue governor up until this juncture,” he said. “That’s all he’s had on his mind: establish one crisis after another that was unmanageable if you didn’t have gambling revenue.”

Two weeks ago the Legislative Research Commission’s Office of Budget Review released more conservative figures for the estimated budget needs over the next two fiscal years, starting July 1, 2010.

When those numbers are compared to the official revenue estimates for the next biennium, the state falls about $888 million short.

Williams said his budget staff came up with similar numbers.

“We are going to have to work together on this particular situation,” he said. “I just don’t accept the (governor’s) figures.”
Assumptions questioned

Rep. Rick Rand, the Bedford Democrat who is chairman of the House budget committee, said the administration’s estimates include “more detailed assumptions” than the LRC’s.“They are saying there’s more needed for debt service than we thought might be needed, and they’re assuming much more will be needed for Medicaid,” he said.Beshear said the same at his news conference, noting that the more conservative estimates fail “to take into account an array of rising costs such as debt service and Medicaid obligations — obligations we cannot avoid.”

Adding payments on bonds already authorized and projected Medicaid needs to current spending levels, Beshear estimated the size of the budget shortfall at $556.2 million in 2010-11 and $890.2 million in 2011-12.

That puts the total shortage at $1.446 billion over two years.

Williams, however, said the administration could avoid the added debt service by not issuing bonds on projects that the legislature has authorized.

“The governor is going to have to look at those sorts of things” he said.

Beshear said his own estimate is conservative because it does not include any increase in state retirement system contributions or funding to help the Teachers Retirement System pay for health insurance.

Nor, he said, does it cover increased health insurance costs for state workers and teachers, money to open new courthouses scheduled to be completed in the next two years, or increases in the prison population.

Beyond that, it does not provide money to increase education funding or pay for raises for teachers and state workers, Beshear said.

The governor warned that cuts to balance the budget could be far more painful than those that he and the legislature have made five times since the beginning of 2008. The cuts so far, he said, have preserved basic school funding, vital health programs and public safety.

But preserving those priority areas has meant that just 15 percent of the budget has endured nearly all of the spending cuts made this year. Beshear stressed how hard it will be to cut those lower-priority agencies again.

“Many of these agencies are to the point where any additional significant cuts will cause the elimination of vital services and personnel,” he said.

        

To Dick Eastman in USA – a response from Sri Lanka on community

 

Wendell W Solomons

 

From: Dick Eastman <dickeastman@gmail.com>

Date: 4 Jan 2010 06:55

Subject: Captain Eric H. May: [frame-up] FBI/DoD: Christmas Bomber is an Israeli Agent — while you were shopping: the passage and signing of the $666 billion military budget and renewal of the Patriot Act

 

 (1) The staged, failed airliner bombing was a phony pretext for aggression against Yemen.  If you let them get away with it, then you aren’t real fit for self-government are you, you are not responsible to the great trust the Founding Fathers (the good ones) placed in our hands.  I think we let each other down because the enemy has conditioned us not to trust or count on each other — so we don’t and thus give up all effort.

 

 *  *  * 

Colombo,

Sri Lanka,

January 18th, 2010

 

Dear Dick:

 

 

Ayn Rand’s selfishness project … seduces with the promise of “Limitless I.” The honey trap’s motive is to open the way for limitless obligation of populations to financial magnates… 

This behavioral tweaking to “Limitless I” causes me agree with your words, Dick: “I think we let each other down because the enemy has conditioned us not to trust or count on each other…”

 

 

Travelling out of England, the Pilgrim Fathers carried with them a spirit of community. 

Through several vicissitudes – including war waged against American settlers by the British Crown and the later Civil War – this spirit of community prevailed. It saw the US economy enter the 20th Century with industrial output not second to Britain though the latter was equipped with a far-flung empire of colonies beginning with India and of semi-colonies beginning with China. 

To this powerful economy London sent in Paul Warburg in 1907 to put up the Federal Reserve System. In 1913 a Congressional Bill gave a monopoly on the issue of banknotes to the private USFed cartel. 

With that achieved London set its mind on the matter of getting hold of money and banking in the largest independent nation in Europe, the Russia that promised London an all-European war should it send in troops to combat Abraham Lincoln’s action to keep the USA undivided. 

So for the October 1917 revolution, through Max Warburg in Germany (Paul’s brother) London sponsored the arrival of Lenin in Russia and through Jacob Schiff of NY – sponsored the arrival of Trotsky in Russia. Yet, events went sour in Russia when Lenin and Stalin decided to go in for nationalization. They decide to keep the cake. 

London reacted in several ways. One of its moves was to go beyond the formal or de jure hold of the Federal Reserve cartel on banking to practical, broad-daylight fact. To that end London squashed the USFed’s promise of a stable monetary system and triggering crises to take over independent banks in the USA that held out against the cartel. The USFed was now performing as a Trojan Horse of the 1 sq.mile financial city of London that wanted to take over the US economy. The financial crises were squeezing out the gold reserves or holdings of independent banks, traders and citizens to London. That led up to the Great Crash (to which other factors and motives also contributed.) 

Besides financial skullduggery, London went in for socio-cultural tweaking. Its brains-trusts took up for promotion the work of an alien to the Magna Carta tradition, Ayn Rand, a traumatized émigré from the 1917 revolution of St Petersburg, Russia. 

In the USA of 1926 Ayn Rand discovered the spirit of community of the Pilgrim Fathers. She attempted to demonise it by called it socialism. She began to do this by hitching a ride for her notion on the then flowing US media wave that attacked socialization of industrial assets and one form of collectivization, that of the Bolsheviks (the kibbutz is another form but much larger cooperatives than the kibbutz operate in the USA). 

She had scripted her cult of selfishness and although that attacked the church community and the synagogue (they were collectivist in her notion.) big money found publishers to distribute her work on college campus USA. She began to wear a dollar sign as a brooch. 

Her turgid and opaque texts that celebrated self over community were to remain somewhere backstage until Milton Friedman hit on the idea of draping it in the clothes of economic science. He had already delivered a book to claim the Great Crash arose because the USFed had not adjusted its rate adequately. This covered up the Trojan Horse essence of the still private USFed (his win of a Nobel award for his book has been rendered obsolete by the USFed’s inability to use bank rate to keep off the recession.) 

After the book project Milton Friedman took Ayn Rand’s selfishness project and draped it in the robes of economics. Ayn Rand was no longer backstage. It could be peddled to number-crunchers in economics faculty as Monetarism and as neoliberalism in other faculties of the humanities. The popular press called it Reaganomics and Voodoo Economics at the time of its introduction. 

In all its forms it seduces with the promise of “Limitless I.”  The honey trap’s motive is to open the way for limitless obligation of populations to financial magnates… 

This behavioral tweaking to “Limitless I” causes me to agree with your words, Dick: “I think we let each other down because the enemy has conditioned us not to trust or count on each other…” 

Without community, the seduction transforms me into a god but one with feet of clay. As is said, “The lone soldier is soon taken.” 

In the final account Friedman and his followers have ill served finance capital too. Act in haste, repent at leisure. Friedman accentuates Midas touch. The US military attacks on Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan accompanied today by the destabilization of US ally Pakistan suggest how Anglo-American society functions as a bony ring that encloses a Black Hole for world civilization.

It amazes me to think of how the dilution of the spirit of the Founding Fathers’ has blocked out caring for one’s neighbour, as you point out “so we don’t and thus give up all effort.” Yet, more: the demonizing of community (tarred “socialism”) spills over to demonizing one’s neighbour. That has become part and parcel of the trap. Therefore as I think and write I must avoid hating my neighbor across the street. This is not easy because at the click of a switch, magnate TV serves me up its demi-gods to mingle with every evening among smoke and mirrors. TV demi-gods replace my real-life neighborhood.

 We need solutions and the Internet provides us with some courses of action. However, it is worth remembering in this connection the witticism of ad copy writer, star and movie director Mae West: “I’m a woman of few words but lots of action.”

We must find ways to rebuild in populations conditioned to short sound bites, photo-ops and brief attention spans.

 

Yours sincerely,

–Wendell