February 20, 2012
Monday PM

In general terms, Mr. Bylund, you are correct.  It is considered bad form to compare anybody to Hitler.  But if someone is acting like a damned Hitlerian, I am not going to hesitate to point that out very succinctly.  About monsters I do not think one should be polite for even a nanosecond.  Depriving U.S. citizens of 1.5 billion man years of life I consider absolutely monstrous and insane.  Doing that by manipulating governmental policy is evil.  Congressman Paul Ryan wants to destroy the safety net completely, on the essential premise of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that those in need should perish out of hand as an inconvenience to the rest of us.  “Let parasites perish as they should.” 

That Congressman Paul Ryan is an ideologue of limited education who bases his mission in life on the writings of a dead Russian is a matter of fact and of historical record.  You cannot work for the man unless you are a sworn acolyte of this insane cult.  After reviewing his record on all points, I consider the man an exceedingly dim bulb who cannot begin to walk the walk he so loudly talks.  Indeed, in that regard, as a lifetime government employee who claims he wants to destroy the government I think he is an out and out fraud. 

The facts are as presented, Mr. Bylund, and the specifics of what he proposes will in fact contribute to the prompt reduction of the average life expectancies of U.S. citizens.  Nor would getting to five-years per head, even ten-years per head, be all that difficult.  To be sure Hitler’s antics were murderous, and grotesque, and he deprived his 50 million victims of approximately 1.5 billion man years of human life.

The fact that Paul Ryan can effect a similar reduction  of 1.5 billion man years of human life merely by reducing the average life expectancy of most Americans by five years is, nonetheless, equally monstrous in ultimate effect.  One method is clearly much gorier than the other, but the net effect is the same.  So I gather, Mr. Bylund, that in your view paring, culling, or otherwise managing the herd is acceptable governmental policy.  It is just a matter of style.  Killing 50 million to effect a 1.5 billion man year destruction is bad, but establishing social and monetary policies that will result in a 1.5 billion man year destruction by reducing individual life expectancies over a broader population base is OK.  You can have my five years, too, Mr. Bylund. 

But is Congressman Ryan’s intent really to reduce the average life expectancy of U.S. citizens by five years?  He will deny it until hell freezes over, and maybe from his perspective he isn’t lying.  He just wants to eliminate taxes, government, and everything that is real.  Only the strong are really entitled to survive in Mr. Ryan’s world, so any reduction in U.S. life expectancies is just something that happens while everything is being made right.  I think that makes him more evil, not less.

I do my best to get my facts down straight, Mr. Bylund, and then I tell you what I think in detail.  The big name caller is you.  There’s no one who is right but you, is there?  The problem with that is you slur both your words and your concepts.   A historian would say in the first instance you hero worship.  You acknowledge your fealty to the concepts of Hayek and Rand, yet you don’t even demonstrate any evidence that you know what those concepts are.  Have you read these people?  I doubt seriously you have.  You have picked these names up from your buddy, Rush Limbaugh, most likely. 

Friedrich Hayek was an Austrian economist who conveniently outlived his twentieth century contemporaries by a wide margin by making it almost to the century point.  And virtually all of his contemporaries hailed his economic models for their incessant brilliance, before universally noting that they modeled a world that did not exist.  Did you know, Mr. Bylund, that your economic guru, Professor Hayek was a ‘classic liberal’ scholar?  (Damn that ‘L’ word again.)  Today the whole subject is dismissed with the use of the term, “Austrian economics,” which perhaps some of you have seen in the trades and in the periodicals; and, yes, the term is derisive.

So after listing a series of dictionary definitions in your retort, a task that clearly does not require any particular wit, you inform us that your heroes are Professor Hayek and Ayn Rand; or, in other words Austrian economics combined with the monarchical megalomania of a mad Russian royalist.  

Like it or not my thinking is All American , Mr. Bylund.  I certainly don’t need a bunch of foreigners to tell me how to think.  And it’s all mine, too.  I didn’t borrow it from Rush Limbaugh, or anybody else.  And I read what I write about; every time.   

We all got it, Mr. Bylund, a long time ago.  You are an extreme right winger with libertarian inclinations.  Bully for you.  The problem is you think you are right, and everybody else is wrong.  The reactionaries you support are not in any sense American patriots, but rather anti-patriots; and, yes, Mr. Bylund, they have murderous, fascist tendencies.  To deny that is to deny fact.  The first problem with the extreme right is you actually think you have the “right to rule,” not the “privilege to govern if elected.”  It is very clear you people do not even want elections.  You just want to take over, jam everything down our throats, and kill anyone who is inconvenient to you.  You are already doing it; have been doing it for a long time.

Funny in a way that it all starts out with two groups of sexless old men who after reviewing exactly the same information come to exactly opposite conclusions.  The U.S. Supreme Court has elected to err on the side of legal caution, as is their purview, and since they are not prepared to state unequivocally that human life begins at the moment of conception, it is the right of the individual woman to make that determination based on her values and beliefs; hence abortion is legal.  The Catholic Church has elected to err on the side of caution, and since they are prepared to state unequivocally that human life begins at the moment of conception; abortion is sin.  One argument is legal, the other religious, and since in this country everything is based on freedom of religion abortion is legal because the law has no right to tell any individual what to believe. 

On that basis you get to believe that abortion is murder, Mr. Bylund, and on that basis some other American is free to believe it is not.  And I will grant you, that is one hell of a problem as it has turned out.  But either you believe in freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, or you don’t; either you tolerate someone else’s beliefs even if you have to choke on it, or you are an absolutist who does not believe in any part of the Constitution. 

Curious how the killing always starts in Kansas, isn’t it?  Some bug-eyed fanatic with a hatchet or a gun starts selectively killing those he disagrees with.  Financed by outsiders, the fanaticism evolves, in this instance into a series of “suicide bombers,” gunmen who kill and go to prison, tried and found guilty in courts of law; memorialized as martyrs by the religiously intolerant who have only one way, and that is not the way of freedom of religion, of speech, of thought, or of anything else.  So the “Boko Haram of Kansas” change behavior by killing those with whom they disagree, and in their madrasses, i.e. “home schools,” they breed the ignorant monsters who will continue and increase the killing; and over everything and everyone there is fear.  Do not piss off the “Boko Haram of Kansas.” 

Before long the “Boko Haram” owns everything, because fear owns everything.  Without freedom from fear there is nothing.

The right wing of the environmentalist movement thinks there will be 500 million people on this planet at the end of the century, no more; theories about optimal ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet.  The political right wing suddenly is espousing this old and long discredited “Randian” nonsense that only a select group of prime movers, i.e. “job creators,” including serial killers, has a right even to exist.   The rest of us are expected to perish as meaningless and worthless personages, basically cattle to be managed for the convenience of the “prime movers.”  That is the theoretical junk you are endorsing, Mr. Bylund; not me.  That is why I don’t think you have read what you claim to endorse.

Who Is going to do the picking and the pecking, Mr. Bylund? 

Right now you seem to be supporting the Koch Brothers conspiracy to destroy the U.S. government using the Republican Party and “Citizens United” as their means.  Our government is a totally screwed up “bought and paid for” piece of crap, but the interests cloying at each others’ throats and everyone else’s number in the tens to hundreds of thousands, not the dozen or so “super rich” the Koch Brothers have organized to buy and permanently take over the government.  (As bad a choice as Obama may or may not be, that in fact is the “brand x” alternative being offered.)  That strikes me as just a form of suicide bombing of yourself, but go for it if you want to. 

I understand what the extreme right wing wants in this country, Mr. Bylund.  Permanent power, and two-thirds to three-fourths of us dead because we are inconvenient.  You are making progress.

But with this old grunt you are making no progress at all.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, AK

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