E-mail Propaganda

You may have received the following e-mail in recent days. I have received it twice. I have reproduced it in full below. If you have already read it, skip to the end of the italicized text.


How Long Do We Have?

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.' A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.'

'From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.'

'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.' 'During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage'

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Number of States won by: Democrats: 19; Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: 'In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...' Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

If you are in favor of this, then by all means, delete this message. If you are not, then pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.


This message was debunked in 2006 by several people, and you can check their research about Alexander Tyler and Edinburgh University by using your own internet search tools. On Google, the entry "alexander tyler 8 steps" has 652,000 results. There are almost a million other results.

If you check out Alexander Tyler, you will find that he did not write anything resembling the words attributed to him. If you check out Hemline University, you will find that it is really Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Professor Joseph Olson is a member of the Hamline’s Law School faculty, but he denies ever having said the words in the e-mail: He wrote:

DISCLAIMER: There is an e-mail floating around the internet dealing with the 2008 Obama/McCain election and the 2000 Bush/Gore election, remarks of a Scottish philosopher named Alexander Tyler, etc. Part of it is attributed to me. It is entirely BOGUS as to my authorship. I've been trying to kill it since December 2000. For details see: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp.

This message and its continued voyage through our internet points toward the problem that I discussed in my blog posting, The March of Folly. The writer is a clever propagandist, who knows that many of us accept what we read without question. Particularly anything reputedly written by a professor or philosopher. He, or she, adds a few statistics to look scientific and academically sound and catches those who will repeat them to their like-minded friends.

However, if readers had been careful, they would not have had to double-check the assertions on the internet. There were pleanty of mistakes in the text to make it questionable:

"About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787…"
The thirteen states did not adopt the Constitution in 1787. The Constitutional Convention approved the document to be submitted to the various states’ legislatures for ratification. According to Article Seven of the US Constitution, it would be established and take effect when nine of the thirteen states ratified it. Virginia became the ninth state to approve ratification on June 25, 1788. George Washington was inaugurated President in 1789.

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years."
The civilizations of China, Greece, the Inca, the Ottomans, and Rome each lasted far longer than 200 years. We may not admire many aspects of their culture, but they were civilizations that added to the pool of technology, art, science and philosophy that we find ourselves immersed in.

Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000
This may be true, but is an inert fact. Neither party won "square miles of land." The parties won votes. Wyoming (3 electoral votes) is bigger in size than New York, but the population of New York is much greater (33 electoral votes). And does it have to be pointed out that many of the states that voted for Bush comprised the former Confederate States of America?

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
The author’s choice of words reminds me of the character Bill Cutting who railed against the Irish immigrants in Martin Scorcese’s’ film, The Gangs of New York. And all the righteous Americans like Father Coughlin who railed against Italians. Poles, and Jews in the twenties and thirties. And in the seventies all the righteous who railed against all the Vietnamese immigrants who were taking all the jobs and all the college scholarships from real Americans. The illegals are not criminal invaders like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, and by now, most of them have already returned to their home countries, because a depression has established itself in the USA. Also, a writer, whose background includes teaching grammar and composition, would have circled in red pencil the author’s use of the possessive case in the word illegal’s, instead of the plural illegals.

Some facts required a quick check at the national archives website:
Number of States won by: Democrats: 19; Republicans: 29
That count is missing 2 states. My count resulted in the following: George Bush and Richard Cheney won 271 electoral votes in 28 states. Albert Gore, Jr. and Joseph Lieberman won 266 electoral votes in 22 states and the District of Columbia. Bush and Cheney won 25 votes in Florida because the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the state’s vote recount, which was indicating that Gore would win. If Gore had received the Florida electoral vote, the count would have been Bush, 246 and Gore, 291.

A notable feature of this e-mail is the lack of authorship. Who wrote this mess?

At the bottom of the e-mail is the following:

To send e-mail faster without improving your typing skills . Get your Hotmail® account.
The writer uses Hotmail.

This communication is for use by the intended recipient and contains information that may be Privileged, confidential or copyrighted under applicable law. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby formally notified that any use, copying or distribution of this e-mail, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited. Please notify the sender by return e-mail and delete this e-mail from your system. Unless explicitly and conspicuously designated as "E-Contract Intended", this e-mail does not constitute a contract offer, a contract amendment, or an acceptance of a contract offer. This e-mail does not constitute a consent to the use of sender's contact information for direct marketing purposes or for transfers of data to third parties.
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http://www.DuPont.com/corp/email_disclaimer.html

The writer may work for DuPont, but nothing in this e-mail is privileged and it is designed to be sent to everyone who will read it and pass it on.

We can’t keep people from sending out this kind of e-mail; nor do we want to. But if the e-mail contains another e-mail that is unsigned, then we should delete it after reading it, and not send it on.

The internet is there for everyone’s views. The next time we receive something like this, I hope we will read it to keep informed of others’ views. But let’s analyze it and add our agreements and disagreements to it before sending it on. Let’s stop circulating this kind of writing, unchallenged.

The March of Folly

Our culture is filled with stupid people, both fictional and actual. In fact, we have made a cult of The Stupid. They are cool because they are stupid and happy that they are. They are even sometimes funny. Homer Simpson is funny, for two reasons. One, we don’t have to live with the consequences of his stupidity. Two, we can empathize with many of the stupid things he has done.

Stupid people doing stupid things is the theme of films by the Coen brothers. Their characters amuse us because we don’t have to live with them, even though we know people just like them. They delude themselves that they will live happily ever after, if they obtain a lot of money by a single illegal act. Unfortunately for them, the single illegal act always turns into three or four. A car dealer steals a tan Sierra from his own dealership to pay kidnappers to snatch his own wife so he can extort a big ransom from his rich father-in-law. A hunter takes a suitcase of money from a dead drug dealer and tries to keep it from a professional killer. A fitness instructor tries to raise money for a fanny implant by extorting money from a former CIA analyst, whose physician wife is having lawyers follow him to get evidence for her secret divorce action. All these people believe in "one crime, just this once, and I’ll be okay." They are never okay, and their choices create disasters for themselves and others around them.

If the Coens hold a mirror up to the stupidity in our culture, television advertisements are its echo chamber. To promote its TV-internet services, AT&T repeatedly shows a stupid man running an abnormally long cable through his apartment window across the street to a sidewalk café. All this, so he can play with his lap top computer and drink coffee at the same time. In another repeated advertisement, the same stupid—now tiresome—man attempts to increase the speed of his internet connection by plugging his computer into a jerry-rigged generator, which burns his hair and drains the electricity from the rest of his apartment building. The man is clearly too dumb to understand the advantages of AT&T’s cable service.

Other companies sell their products by showing stupid people using them. Sonic sandwiches are the favorite of mentally challenged customers whose jokes would not amuse a third-grader. GEICO stupidly repeats commercials featuring the most irrelevant characters in all of American advertising: the cavemen who are tired of being called stupid. Of course no one wants to be considered stupid, even consumers. I wish GEICO would tell simply tell us why we should buy its services. (Full disclosure: My wife and I have automobile insurance with GEICO and are happy with them.)

However, stupidity is not limited to our entertainment; it is a large and dangerous part of our political culture. Political leaders are dangerous, because we choose them and have to live with the consequences of their stupidity. Historian Barbara Tuchman, her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Viet Nam (1984) wrote:

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

The following American political leaders showed their particular wooden-headedness and thereby revealed the wooden-headedness of American voters.

Bill Clinton got a blow job in the oval office and then lied about it. Kenneth Starr spent millions of dollars investigating it. Henry Hyde, who had fathered an illegitimate child, led the House of Representatives in a moral crusade to oust the sinner occupying the sacred White House. Trent Lott and his conservative supporters spent millions more trying William Jefferson Clinton. We Americans turned the solemn impeachment process into a silly sex comedy. The prosecutors thought it would help convince Senators to convict Clinton with evidence such as a semen-stained dress. Indeed, Americans slavered over every lurid detail of the sex scandal. So much so, that we ignored the reality behind the charges: William Jefferson Clinton had lied under oath.

He was acquitted, but politically damaged. During the impeachment, the Republican leadership in Congress refused to approve a finding by Clinton’s national security team. The finding revealed the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, but the Republicans claimed that Clinton was trying to distract the country away from the blow-job.. We were stupid because we believed the Republicans. The Republicans were stupid, because their obsession with the blow-job allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and plan the 9/11 attack. In sum, Americans are stupid about sex and politics.

In 2000, the Supreme Court—once the repository of wisdom of law, right and wrong—stupidly ruled that the United States of America would suffer harm if the recount of votes continued in Florida. This meant that George Walker Bush became President as the result of an incomplete count of votes. Immediately after he was inaugurated, the Republican-controlled Congress passed an enormous tax cut which reduced federal revenues and caused the depletion of a surplus that had accumulated during the previous administration.

In 2004, after learning that the Bush administration had lied about weapons of mass destruction, American voters re-elected the man responsible for the war and the increasing federal debt. They stupidly believed the lie that John Kerry had not deserved the Silver Star and Purple Heart awarded by President Richard M. Nixon, another American who stupidly believed that whatever he did as President was legal.

Voters loved President Bush. They didn’t care that he had graduated from Yale and Harvard, and was a member of the most exclusive college fraternity in America. He wore cowboy boots and drove a pickup around his ranch. He was a guy they could have a beer with. He talked regular, and they loved him for his inability to pronounce "nuclear." They loved his swagger on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Americans also believed that Saddam Hussein had helped Al Qaeda attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. They ignored Hussein’s highly publicized whiskey swilling, cigar smoking and womanizing, and they forgot all the reports that Al Qaeda, which hated Hussein almost as much as it did America, was an organization that forbade its members to drink alcohol, to smoke, and to be sexually promiscuous. Above all else, they brushed aside the information that Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian, not Iraqi.

It is unfortunate, but true, that Americans’ greatest stupidity is their readiness to accept guilt by ethnic group. Americans cannot—or refuse to—differentiate individuals from groups. They should have known that ethnic Arabs were not just Islamic, but were also Christian and Jewish. That Islam was not a monolithic religion, but, like Christianity and Judaism, a conglomeration of denominations, practices, and beliefs. Their culture has been riddled with religious wars, just as ours has. But our stupidity, born from a willful ignorance, made us ready to accept the lies and distortions of the Bush administration.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that he knew where they were. He told us that our army would be welcomed as liberators. He ignored advice from his Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, about how many soldiers would be needed to invade and occupy Iraq. He fired Secretary of the Army Thomas White because White refused to reprimand or muzzle the Shinseki. His stupidity brought about over 4,200 American deaths (and still counting), not to mention the waste of over $615 billion (and still counting).

Americans will have to pay for that stupidity. Our national debt, which will have to be paid by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, continues to grow. And the expense of the Iraqi war has not yet been accounted for, because it has yet to be made a part of the national budget.

Some of us are paying for it now. Unemployment is rising, and economists, no longer afraid of the word recession, are even facing the possibility of dusting off depression. We can find plenty of stupid people to blame. Some say that OPEC’s stupidity raised oil prices so high that manufacturers could no longer afford to buy fuel. Which led to lay-offs and high unemployment, which led to the decline in consumer spending, which led to more unemployment, etc.

Then Americans stopped driving their cars to the drugstore two blocks from their home, and put their SUVs in mothballs. As the price of oil and gasoline dropped, OPEC ministers planned to cut oil production. They hold the stupid belief that the price of oil will rise when the supply declines. However, reducing the supply of petroleum will not put the end-user, also known as the American driver, back to work very soon. The end-user will remain unemployed for the foreseeable future, and inventories of oil and gas will likely continue to accumulate.

We can only hope that our pundits are correct in their assessment of President-elect Barak Obama. They tell us he is intelligent, and that his policies will be implemented by intelligent appointees. For myself, I am skeptical. I voted for Obama, but I will wait and see if he changes anything for the better. I hope that he and his appointees read Barbara Tuchman’s book. I hope that they do not join the march of folly. I also hope that we voters don't either.

Job Performance Review of George Walker Bush, President of the United States

When Charles Gibson of ABC News interviewed President George Bush, he said that he would leave office with his head held high. Let us compare his actual job performance with his neoconservative self image.

In 2000, Presidential-candidate George W. Bush paradoxically sought our votes so that he could become a part of the very problem that he ran against. Many of us remember his smirk as he assured us that government was not the solution. "Government," he said, "is the problem."

After his inauguration, he approved a tax cut that benefited the upper one-percent of American income earners. About the tax cut, Vice President Cheney said, "It is our due." The tax cut also reduced government revenues. Since he had to be careful about government expenditures, President Bush virtually eliminated such problems as regulating the stock market, the real estate industry, and American banks. He saw to it that food producers and drug manufacturers were no longer burdened by questions about sanitation and safety.

President Bush thought all government regulation obstructed the free market. So, for the next six years a hands-off government was in partnership with business, and the free market became a profitable bazaar of E-coli-ridden vegetables, ineffective and harmful drugs and vaccines, as well as poisonous baby bottles and tainted baby food. Hucksters in the free market bundled mortgages together and peddled them as securities based on formulae so complex that few mathematicians could decipher them. Free enterprise flourished, and the stock market averages soared to record highs. Corporate executives made huge bonuses. The neoconservative ideology appeared to be working.

But reality kept infringing on his neoconservative ideology. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans while President Bush was chopping cedar on his ranch. His choice for FEMA director, Michael Brown, had been a lawyer with little or no experience handling emergencies. In spite of three days’ notice about Hurricane Katrina’s severity, Brown ordered no staging areas for relief supplies and manpower, contacted no state or local officials from the endangered area. The total lack of coordination among government agencies led to chaos. City, state and federal officials worked against each other’s best interests. Food and medical supplies were delivered to the wrong locations, if delivered at all. In fact, some supplies were not allowed to enter the disaster zone. Corpses floated in flooded streets or were wrapped in plastic garbage bags with notes pleading the finder to dispose of the remains with tenderness and efficiency. The survivors got neither. The final tally of the dead and missing was over 2,500.

Another reality that infringed on President Bush’s ideology is the Iraq war. Bush, who called himself "The Decider," created his own solution to the attack on the World Trade Center. He decided to make war on Saddam Hussein, a ruthless dictator who had helped the Al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on September 11, 2001. He also decided to destroy Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and free oppressed Iraqis who would welcome Americans as liberators.

However, while President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Rice were planning the invasion, US government intelligence contradicted not only Hussein’s complicity in 9/11, but also the presence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But that information wasn’t what President Bush wanted. He wanted an enemy, and the government intelligence services could not show that Hussein was part of the axis of evil.

So, once again, President Bush decided that government was the problem and rejected the intelligence. He then told pliant and dependable political appointees what he needed to make a case for an invasion. They fabricated evidence to support Bush’s desire for war. Secretary of State Powell characterized that evidence as "bullshit," but National Security Advisor Rice told her fellow Americans that she did not want the smoking gun of Hussein’s guilt to be a mushroom-shaped cloud.

To protect themselves from more problems, Bush and his subordinates fired intelligence agents and generals who did not agree with them. Vice President Cheney told his countrymen that if we did not agree with the Bush administration, we did not love our country. So, we invaded with an army lacking body armor, adequate water supplies, and transportation equipment that was vulnerable to improvised explosive devices.

Since then, over 4,200 American troops have died, and almost 31,000 have been wounded. These patriots have been poorly cared for in understaffed, poorly equipped hospitals. Despite their sacrifices, the armed forces have found no weapons of mass destruction. They found no welcoming Iraqis. Despite our capture of Saddam Hussein and his execution by Iraqis, Americans have alienated not only most of the population of Iraq but also most of our allies.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney believe government is the problem, and the law of the land doesn’t apply to neoconservatives.. So they ignored the Geneva Convention, a treaty approved by Congress, which states, "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." So they approved the torture of many prisoners of war and innocent civilians. Although President Bush and Vice President claim that they have gained valuable information from tortured prisoners, they are no closer to finding Osama bin Laden than we were in 2001 when his operatives successfully leveled the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Our troops’ presence in Iraq will end in 2010. By that time we will have spent almost a trillion un-budgeted dollars on the conflict, which was supposed to be paid for by the sale of Iraqi oil, much of which went up in smoke as the result of the war and sabotage. Another large part of it disappeared into the thriving black market. We also lost shrink-wrapped bundles of 100-dollar bills worth $12 billion which were shipped to Iraq in C-130 transports. That cash simply vanished with no record of who got it or what it was spent on.

None of the above speaks well for the Harvard Business School that granted President Bush an MBA in 1975. Five years before that, graduates of HBS were taken to task by Robert Townsend in his best-selling book Up the Organization.

Don’t hire Harvard Business School graduates. This worthy enterprise confesses that it trains its students for only three positions—executive vice president, president, and board chairman. The faculty does not blush when HBS is called the West Point of capitalism.

By design, the "B-School" trains a senior officer class, the non-playing Captains of Industry. People, who, upon graduation, are given a whirlwind tour of their chosen company and then an office and a secretary and some work to do while they wait for one of the top three slots to open up.

This elite, in my opinion, is missing some pretty fundamental requirements for success: humility, respect for people on the firing line; deep understanding of the business and the kind of people who can enjoy themselves making it prosper; respect from way down the line; a demonstrated record of guts, industry, loyalty, judgement, fairness, and honesty under pressure.

Townsend’s ideas apply equally to George W. Bush and the citizens of the United States that hired him. To Bush who misses the very requirements for success listed in the last paragraph. To us, his employers who did not look for those requirements in George W. Bush. As a result, Bush may leave office with his head held high, but we will have the task of healing the wounded, sheltering the homeless, feeding the poor, and clothing the naked that his neoconservative delusions left behind.