by Robert P. Abele These immortal words of boxing ring announcer Michael Buffer will arguably be apropos to the situation in which the United States finds itself today. With unemployment high and wage reduction continuing, with cuts to social spending and education ongoing, with the looting of the U.S. Treasury of the taxpayers by the [...]

The title of this essay may seem a bit presumptuous. After all, since when did the left-wing come to any “power” in American society? In fact, they have not ascended to any level of power, except in regard to their own internal left-wing communities. That is the intended examination here: to see how some of [...]

Reflective citizens need to ask what the celebration of Veterans Day is really about. If we are no longer celebrating the cause of peace, and instead are celebrating the military, what exactly are we celebrating?

The news from Obama’s speech at the U.N. this morning (September 25, 2009) was accusatory and grim: Iran is hiding a nuclear processing plant from the international community, to which the U.S. would not hesitate to respond militarily. And so the drumbeat to war begins anew.

Imagine a UFO or another planet observing us with their extra high-tech audio and visual telescopes and other such devices (in other words, imagine they are our own U.S. government, only with slightly more powerful eavesdropping devices). If they compared our actions to our stated values and principles, they would no doubt be alarmed as well, and would almost certainly be loath to meet us.

In my last posting on The Daily Censored, I argued that it was not only possible but necessary to engage in a larger, conceptual ethical analysis of the breakdown of America we are seeing today. This argument finds good company in the ethical pronouncements of the Founders themselves, who tended to be much more rationalist than empiricist in their moral pronouncements that lie at the foundation of our democracy.

Many, if not most liberal commentators are sharply critical of capitalism these days, for obvious reasons. But one must be a bit nuanced in this critique. It is very easy, but very simplistic, to point to capitalism per se as the single or even primary cause of the downfall of America we are beginning to live through.

Philosophers have known for quite some time that when a political philosophy is inadequate, it will show itself conceptually inadequate first, and then ultimately collapse its concrete instantiation. We saw this in Leninist Russia in 1989, and we are now seeing it here in America. The point of this reflection is to underscore the failed philosophy that is now resulting in the failing of the American republic.

Since those who support Israel’s attack on Gaza cannot appeal to international law, they have to rely on arguments from analogy. We demonstrated two weeks ago the deeply dubious and shallow nature of those analogies. But we can create our own analogy to add to the international law arguments we made last week condemning both what Israel is doing and how they are doing it.

Last week we began to examine the immorality of the Israeli attack on Gaza. As a way of concluding the moral discussion, we must state what Israel simply refuses to recognize is that with more firepower comes more responsibility for its use and the consequences of its use, intended or otherwise. But responsibility is a moral category, and Israel seems to lack a conscience. Thus, the world must now be that conscience for Israel. If we have the courage to speak as the voice of conscience would, the best way to sound our conscience is to appeal to international law.