H.L. Mencken and Thinking Independently

Mencken was a champion of the individual, of rationality, of the human mind in a century of collectivism of many sorts

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”

By Bill Bonner.

The writings of H.L. Mencken — the Sage of Baltimore — have been a constant companion for me since the start of my writing life. The brilliance, the language, the insight, the derring-do opinionating, the history, the astounding literacy — it’s all here, and it all flows seemingly without limit. All these features are combined in one mind and life, yet none of these features is the reason why it is important to read Mencken. The most important reason is that Mencken assists in the great struggle to free yourself from intellectual conventions and become a mature observer of the world.

To mature means to gradually let go of dependence on others and to depend on your own resources. It also means to accept responsibility for the judgments you make, and not slough them off on other people. It is the same with thinking. To mature means to break loose from canned forms of thought that you once accepted without question, and instead see the world for what it is. It is the essential step toward living a free life.

Modern American democracy seems to war against this kind of maturation. Take a look at the best-selling political and financial books on the conventional lists. Their goal is to play to your biases, to bring you the comfort of having something you already think reinforced. In politics, it means cheering for party X over party Y on grounds that you accept ideology X over ideology Y. There simply is no large market for people who accept some of each or reject both.

In finance, it means believing that the world is either progressively coming together or falling apart. The evidence to support this either/or proposition is assembled in order to confirm as true what you would otherwise think.

This is the easy path. But it is not obtaining maturity. It is not thinking for yourself. It is dependence. It consists in shaping your thinking to a model forged by others. People who read only this way imagine that they are educating themselves. Actually, they are only gorging themselves on settled conventions.

If we really want to think hard and maturely, we need to encounter ideas that cause some element of discomfort. We need to leave our comfort zones and imagine that perhaps the mob is not as smart as people say. Maybe we can only find the truth of a situation in an opinion that cuts against the grain, is not represented by political party, and departs radically from settled orthodoxies. When we realize this, we enter on the road to intellectual maturity.

The thinkers and writers who can assist in this process are few. When they do appear, they disappear just as quickly for lack of champions. I fear this might be the fate of H.L. Mencken. For decades, he was there to stir the pot and work against mob opinion. This is why he opposed U.S. entry into World War I. This is why he was a literary progressive in times when most people were stuck in the past. This is why he ridiculed Prohibition when the entire Northeast religious and government establishment thought it was a brilliant idea. This is why he never shrank from flailing orthodoxies that were accepted by nearly everyone.

The Character of Edward Snowden

It will take millions more like him to give freedom a fighting chance in an age of leviathan State control

by JEFFREY A. TUCKER

Edward Snowden, age 29 and now temporarily living in Hong Kong, is the overnight sensation who leaked details about the National Security Administration’s (NSA) practice of massive and sweeping surveillance of Americans’ browsing habits. He has also provided a model of what it means to live a principled life, even when it comes at personal expense. 

What his leak revealed is truly chilling and even infuriating. He demonstrated that websites and cell phone companies are sharing their databases with the U.S. government in real time—without so much as court orders—and thereby making every one of us a victim of snooping and possibly vulnerable to blackmail for so long as we shall live.

Much more important for any lover of freedom, however, is the manner in which he went about his defiance. He acted peacefully, openly, with total dedication to principle. He took responsibility for speaking the truth. He did it with a clean conscience. He has been willing to face the consequences for his actions. 

It will take millions more like him to give freedom a fighting chance in an age of leviathan State control.

Why Edward Snowden is a hero

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

BY JOHN CASSIDY

Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to behiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israel’s weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.

Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structure—President Obama included—and some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that “nothing good” was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowden’s leaks have done “huge, grave damage” to “our intelligence capabilities.”

You have to wonder: Will Obama see out his full term?

Edward Snowden has blown the whistle on this presidency

By Damian Thompson

"They could pay off the Triads," says Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower interviewed by the Guardian in his Hong Kong hideout. Meaning: the CIA could use a proxy to kill him for revealing that Barack Obama has presided over an unimaginable – to the ordinary citizen – expansion of the Federal government's powers of surveillance over anyone.

Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment. Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter:

Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden

Snowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:

NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible… Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and its stores them for periods of time … While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…

I do not see how Obama can talk his way out of this one. Snowden is not Bradley Manning: he's not a disturbed disco bunny but a highly articulate network security specialist who has left behind a $200,000 salary and girlfriend in Hawaii for a life on the run. He's not a sleazy opportunist like Julian Assange, either. As he says: "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

It will be very difficult for the Obama administration to portray Snowden as a traitor. For a start, I don't think US public opinion will allow it. Any explanations it offers will be drowned out by American citizens demanding to know: "So how much do you know about me and my family? How can I find out? How long have you been collecting this stuff? What are you going to do with it?"

Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn't seem overblown. And I do wonder: can a president who's presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term? 

'I Do Not Expect To See Home Again'

NSA Whistleblower on the run

By Marc Pitzke

He was once a cog in the US intelligence apparatus, but 29-year-old ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden has admitted to making one of the biggest intelligence leaks in history. He now faces severe consequences -- but President Obama also has a lot to answer for.

Edward Snowden sits in a hotel room in Hong Kong. He is pale and unshaven, his voice quiet but firm. For fear of spies, he has sealed off the door with cushions. He says he's only gone outside three times in the past three weeks. When the fire alarm went off, he suspected that someone was trying to lure him out of hiding.

Snowden is on the run. The scene, as depicted by London newspaper the Guardian , is the latest and most dramatic chapter of a spy thriller that in recent weeks has kept the United States and much of the world in suspense. Snowden is the highly sought-after man who notified the press about the infamous US surveillance program Prism -- probably one of the biggest leak scandals in the history of espionage.

Snowden didn't have to reveal the fact that he is the whistleblower behind the story. But he decided to out himself voluntarily in a 12-minute video interview that the Guardian posted on its website on Sunday night.

Snowden puts a moral spin on his protest against state data surveillance: "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things," says the 29-year-old former CIA technical assistant who was last employed by the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. "I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity," he continues.

But for that, it may already be too late. The debate that Snowden hoped to initiate has revealed that the US's virtual surveillance network is nearly all-encompassing -- and that citizens are powerless against it. "Welcome to the future," writes Ross Douthat in the New York Times. "Just make sure you don't have anything to hide."

A Historical Coup in Hawaii

Snowden, too, fears this future. The US government, he says, "are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them."

Yoani Sánchez: An effective voice against the Castro dictatorship

A just principle from the bottom of a cave is more powerful than an army

BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER

Yoani Sánchez visits Miami. It is the most difficult stop in her long tour. Everywhere, like a bullfighter hailed after a good afternoon, she has been carried on the shoulders of the crowd. She will also triumph in Miami, but her task will be a bit harder.

I get the impression that a huge majority of Cubans like her and respect her — I count myself among them — but there’s no shortage of those who oppose her for various reasons, often totally irrational.

Yoani has made dozens of appearances, granted hundreds of interviews and has successfully confronted the mobs of supporters sent by the Cuban dictatorship in every city where she has been invited to speak.

In more than half a century of tyranny, nobody has been more effective in the task of dismantling the regime’s myths and exposing Cubans’ miserable living conditions.

It is a paradox of life that, somehow, the rude and vociferous attitude toward Yoani shown by these aggressive bullies — though unpleasant during the incidents themselves— has served to feed the interest of the communications media and foster the support of notable political and social sectors.

These maniacs, accustomed to the Cuban environment, where no vestiges of freedom exist, don’t understand that trying to silence Yoani, insulting and slandering an independent journalist, a fragile young woman shielded only by her words and her valor, is counterproductive.

Lars Hedegaard Champion of Free Speech

The 'Racist' and the Unknown Man

By mark steyn

My friend Lars Hedegaard is a dapper, courtly publisher and editor just turned 70. Like many Scandinavians, he speaks very evenly modulated English, but, insofar as I can tell, his Danish is no more excitable. A cultured, civilized fellow, he was for most of his life a man of the left, as are the majority of his compatriots, alas. But, as an historian and a chap who takes the long view, he concluded that Islam posed a profound challenge to Scandinavian liberalism. And so at a stroke he was transformed into a "right-winger."

The other day in Copenhagen, he answered his doorbell and found a man in his early twenties who appeared to be "a typical Muslim immigrant" pointing a gun at him. He fired from a yard away, and, amazingly, missed. The bullet whistled past Lars's ear, and the septuagenarian scholar then slugged his assailant. The man fired again, but the gun jammed, and, after some further tussling, the would-be assassin escaped. He has yet to be found.

The attempted murder of an "Islamophobe" is part of the scene in today's Europe. Among those targeted have been such obvious "right-wing extremists" as secular feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, gay hedonist Pim Fortuyn, and coke-snorting anti-monarchist Theo van Gogh. While I was in Copenhagen paying a visit to Lars's Danish Free Press Society, a young Chechen jihadist opposed to all this outrageous Islamophobia prematurely detonated while assembling his bomb in his hotel room, and we all had a good laugh. But sometimes, as on Lars's doorstep, the jihad wannabe is less incompetent and gets a little closer.

How does one report an assassination attempt on a writer for expressing his opinion? Most North American media didn't report it at all. The BBC announced, "Gunman Targets Islam Critic Hedegaard" — which is true, although one couldn't but notice that the Beeb and the Euro-press seemed far more interested in qualifying the victim's identity ("Islam critic") than in fleshing out the perp's. And then there were the Swedes. Across the water from Lars's home town, most prominent outlets picked up the story from the national news agency, TT, the local equivalent of the Associated Press. Here's how they began:

Sibel Edmonds’s Secrets

Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story

By PHILIP GIRALDI

Sibel Edmonds is no stranger to longtime TAC readers. I wrote an article exploring some of her claims back in January 2008, a blog item in August 2009, and Kara Hopkins and I did an interview with her for the November 2009 issue of the magazine. It was featured on the cover as “Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?”

Edmonds has recently written a book entitled Classified Woman detailing her journey from FBI translator to whistleblower, finally emerging as an outspoken advocate of free speech and transparency in government through her founding of the National Security Whistleblowers’ Coalition and her always informative Boiling Frogs Post website.

As Edmonds ruefully notes, her tale of high level mendacity has always found a better reception in the European and Asian media than in the United States, though her odyssey has included an appearance on “60 Minutes” in October 2002 and a feature article inVanity Fair called “An Inconvenient Patriot” in September 2005.

Malala versus Sandra

What a nation of plunderers we have become!

By Ross Kaminsky

Malala Yousafzai can't speak for herself, and it remains to be seen whether she ever will again. For the crime of going to school -- and blogging about it -- she was shot in the head by a Taliban assassin while in her school bus.

Yousafzai, now 14, knew the risk she was taking when at the age of 11 and under a pen name ("Gul Makai") she began posting an online diary which then appeared on the BBC's website under the banner "Diary of a Pakistani schoolgirl." This followed the Taliban's 2007 overrunning of the Swat Valley where she lives, including the destruction of hundreds of schools for girls.

On Monday, Malala was flown to England for care, perhaps as much to protect her from another near-certainassassination attempt as to get better medical treatment than is available in Pakistan.

Malala's closest friend, Shazia Ramzan, was also shot by the Taliban assassin. Fortunately, her wounds, in her shoulder and hand, were not life-threatening. Shazia is giving voice to the millions of girls like herself and Malala, taking on a similarly brave mantle. In a weekend interview with the UK's Daily Mail newspaper, Shazia said "[Malala] will recover and we will go back to school and study together again."

A wake-up call for Pakistan's broken society

The time to act is now

by Karamatullah K Ghori 

The barbaric attempt on the life of a 14-year-old schoolgirl last Tuesday by Taliban terrorists has spawned a state of trauma and national mourning in Pakistan. It's unlike other incidents that have hit the tragedy-prone country with a devastating frequency in recent years. 

Malala Yusafzai, the innocent victim of the Pakistani Taliban's bloodlust, rose to prominence three years ago when, as an 11-year-old from the picturesque Swat Valley, she challenged the Taliban edict that girls shouldn't get an education. The Taliban, with their archaic, stone-age mentality, were then in control of Swat, and the Pakistan Army had just mounted a major military offensive against them. The militants had torched scores of schools for girls and threatened to deface with acid burns any girl seen going to a school. 

The brave and indomitable Malala - whose father runs a private school for girls in Mingora, the administrative seat of Swat - had publicly defied the Taliban obscurantism by reminding their religious brigade that education was her birthright as both a Pakistani and a Muslim. She had the gumption to remind them that what they were demanding of her, and every other Pakistani girl, flew in the face of the Prophet Muhammad's categorical command that pursuit of knowledge was incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman. 

Malala's bravado made her a celebrity; she became an icon to those who abhorred the Taliban's anachronistic and wayward interpretation of their religion. Once the Taliban brigands had been driven out of Swat, Malala was showered with government recognition and accolades. She became a standard-bearer of the Pakistani secularists and religious moderates who loathed the Taliban's craving to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages and deny the benefits of education to half the country's population. 

The forgotten man

There are still Hans Littens around the world today

by Hans Nilssen
In the Berlin courtroom, Adolf Hitler's face burned a deep, furious red.

The future dictator was not accustomed to this kind of scrutiny.

But here he was, being interrogated about the violence of his paramilitary thugs by a young man who represented everything he despised - a radical, principled, fiercely intelligent Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten.

The Nazi leader was floundering in the witness stand. And when Litten asked why his party published an incitement to overthrow the state, Hitler lost his composure altogether.

"That is a statement that can be proved by nothing!" he shouted.

Litten's demolition of Hitler's argument that the Nazis were a peaceful, democratic movement earned the lawyer years of brutal persecution.

Secrecy and corruption in Washington DC

Sibel Edmonds Finally Wins

by David Swanson

Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

Backing the Wrong Horse

Third World Poor Turn to Private Education

By James Tooley 

 Last fall the High-Level Plenary Meet­ing of the UN General Assembly brought together more than 170 heads of state—“the largest gathering of world leaders in his­tory”—to review progress toward the Millennium Devel­opment Goals. It was, we were told, “a once-in-a-gen­eration opportunity to take bold decisions,” a “defining moment in history” when “we must be ambitious.”

One of the internation­ally agreed-on development goals the heads of state reviewed was the achieve­ment of universal primary education by 2015. The UN was not happy with progress. There are still officially more than 115 million children out of school, it reported, of which 80 percent are in sub‑Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. But even for those lucky enough to be in school, things are not good: “Most poor children who attend primary school in the developing world learn shockingly little,” the UN reported.

Letters from Cuba

They don’t know everything, my love, they don’t know…

By Yoani Sánchez

Will there be microphones here? You ask me while poking your head into every corner of the room. Don’t worry, I say, my life goes on with my guts on display, letting it all hang out. There is no place dark, closed, private… because I live as if walking through a gigantic X-ray machine. Here is the clavicle I broke as a child, the fight we had yesterday over a domestic trifle, the yellowing letter I keep in the back of a drawer. Nothing saves us from scrutiny, my love, nothing saves us. But today — at least for a few hours — don’t think about the police on the other end of the phone, nor the rounded eye of the camera that captures us. Tonight we are going to believe that only we are curious about each other. Turn off the light and for a moment send them to the devil, disarm their eavesdropping strategies.

With so many resources spent on watching us, we have conjured away from them the primordial facet of our lives. They don’t know, for example, even a single word of that language made for twenty years together, that we can use without parting our lips. They would score a zero on any test to decipher the complex code with which we say the trivial or urgent, the everyday or the extraordinary. Surely none of the psychological profiles they’ve done on us tell how you comb my eyebrows and jokingly warn that I’m going to end up looking like Brezhnev. Our watchers, poor guys, have never read the first song you sang me, much less that poem where you said one day we would go to Sydney or Baghdad. Nor will they forgive us every time we escape from them — without a trace — on the diastole of a spasm.

Like Agent Wiesler in the film The Lives of Others, someone will listen to us now, and not understand us. Not understand why, after arguing for an hour, we come together and share a kiss. The astonished police who follow our steps can’t classify our embraces, and they wonder how dangerous to “national security” are those phrases you say only in my ear. So I propose, my love, that tonight we scandalize them or convert them. Let’s take the ear off the wall and in its place oblige them to scribble on a sheet: “1:30 am, the subjects are making love.”

The murder of Wilmar Villar Mendoza

A brief moment of clarity

By Alberto de la Cruz

When I found out the Castro regime had accomplished their mission of ending the life of Wilmar Villar Mendoza, I was once again unprepared for the nausea and the painful knot in the pit of my stomach. It is a sensation that I have never been able to get used to no matter how many times I endure the painful experience. It is the same severe and unpleasant reaction I experienced when I learned of Orlando Zapata Tamayo's horrid assassination, and that caustic malaise returned upon hearing the news of the violent murder of Juan Wilfredo Soto and again when the Castro regime finally silenced Laura Pollan. Nevertheless, I cannot get used to it. Each and every time, it hits me like a ton of bricks. Another Cuban life extinguished, another Cuban family destroyed, another Cuban voice in chains crying out for freedom violently silenced.

But within all this pain of loss, amongst the injustice and brutality of a vile dictatorship and its indiscriminate and unforgivable taking of yet another life, a brief moment of clarity emerges. As it happened upon the murders of Zapata Tamayo, Soto, and Pollan, for a brief moment, the assassination of Wilmar Villar Mendoza tore down the facade and the lies of the Castro dictatorship that has as acted as their shield for so many decades. For that brief moment, as the light of life in Wilmar extinguished and his soul slipped out of his body, the Castro regime was exposed to the world for what it is: A brutal, merciless, and murderous dictatorship.

It may not last long -- perhaps hours, maybe days -- but for the moment, the Castro dictatorship is exposed. This brief moment of clarity brought about by the murder of Villar Mendoza has ripped away the shroud they hide behind and the light of truth has pierced the lies that have kept the entire island of Cuba in a diabolical darkness for more than a half-century. For a brief moment, the murderous Castro dictatorship finds itself with no crevice to crawl into and no place to hide. Today, hours after the death of Wilmar, the decades of Castro lies and propaganda have no power to defend  Fidel and Raul. For a brief moment, there is sufficient clarity to expose them for the brutal and murderous dictators that they are.

But alas, it is only for a brief moment.

Perhaps as early as tomorrow, this moment of clarity will dissolve and the lies will return to subjugate the truth. Not because this clarity is too weak or a fleeting moment, but because the world will close its eyes and turn away from the unpleasant truth. Unfortunately, there are too many people in this world who strive for the same darkness the Castro regime strives for, albeit for different reasons. The Castro brothers seek darkness in Cuba to cover and hide their crimes and murders, while the world seeks darkness in Cuba to cover their indifference and apathy towards the enslaved Cuban people.

Nevertheless, for now, Wilmar Villar Mendoza's death is not in vain: for a brief moment, there is clarity in Cuba.

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax RIP

Champion of the Light

By Dr Zero

By now, you’ve probably watched the death of Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax on YouTube.

In the early morning hours, on a sidewalk in Queens, he stepped forward to save a woman from a mugger.

The mugger had a knife. 

Multiple stab wounds to the torso didn’t stop Tale-Yax from trying to chase his killer down. 

His blood ran out before his spirit did.

Twenty people walked past Tale-Yax as he lay dying on the street. One of them used his cell phone to snap a photo, then continued on his way without calling for an ambulance.

ABC News found a psychologist to offer the insight that:

 “we love violence in this culture.”

What a shallow and stupid analysis.

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax didn’t die because those pedestrians loved violence. He died because they didn’t love life enough. 

They saw it broken and fading before them, but their instinct to protect and nourish it at all costs – which ran so strongly in Tale-Yax – was hopelessly diluted. 

The dying man was homeless, and had nothing to bring to the endless war against evil except his heart, and the fragile body surrounding it. The callous bystanders carried marvels of communications technology in their pockets, and could think of no use for them except snapping a couple of digital photos as souvenirs.

There is nothing more to say about those people, and the anemic culture that led them to treat life and death as problems for someone else to solve. We gain nothing by studying the flocking behavior of sheep. Let us remember, and honor, the sheepdog who died in their midst.

The shadow of murder has crawled through every human generation. Sometimes it rears high above us, spreading dragon wings and roaring promises of conquest, holy war, and final solutions. Other times it becomes small and dull, living in the static of a petty criminal’s thoughts, or burning as dark flames of rage within those who offer their souls as kindling.

Killing is easy. People break easily. A bit of sharp metal makes the task almost effortless.

In the moments before murder, Heaven sounds its horns, and calls good men and women to battle. Those horns are not always easy to hear. Their music rolls around caves filled with beasts who worship death as a god, through streets dotted with improvised explosive devices, and past locked doors that serve as uncertain shields between decent families and barbarian gangsters. 

Last week, it swirled through the early morning air of a street in Queens, and a man with nothing to lose sacrificed everything to answer the call.

He was not the first, and will not be the last, to die in the defense of the innocent. Whatever mistakes and misfortunes led him to spend his last days on the streets of New York, his final deeds earn him membership in a great company of soldiers, rescuers, protectors, and saints. He lived a broken life, but he carried a priceless treasure of courage. Let us all pray that if, someday, the horns that called him to destiny sound in our presence, our ears are as sharp as his, and the same spirit fills us. 

The world has too many hollow men.

God bless and keep Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, champion of the light.