The New York Times is reporting that biodefense researcher Dr. Steven Hatfill will receive a 4.6 million dollar settlement from the United States government for deliberately destroying his reputation in the prolonged and ultimately fruitless investigation of him as a key suspect in the “Anthrax letters” case that killed and seriously harmed several people in 2001. According to Hatfill’s attorneys, the FBI leaked information to the press about Hatfill being a “person of interest” in the case, and even after it was clear he wasn’t the culprit, they failed to clear his name.

Mark Grannis, a lawyer for Dr. Hatfill, said his client was pleased with the settlement.

“This case has been about how the press behaves and how the government behaves,” Mr. Grannis said. “The good news is that we still live in a country where a guy who’s been horribly abused can go to a judge and say ‘I need your help,’ and maybe it takes a while, but he gets justice.”

I’m reminded of Richard Jewell, the man whose name was leaked by the FBI as the prime suspect in the 1996 bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta. His experience was very similar, but, while he filed several lawsuits against various media outlets, he never sought civil restitution from the government. It’s a shame that anyone should have to seek this kind of justice, but encouraging that such justice can sometimes be obtained.

From Ron Paul:

The Federal Reserve is killing our dollar, the war is killing our soldiers, police-state methods are killing our civil liberties, and the income tax and bureaucratic meddling are killing our economy.

If we’re not interested in stopping this, if we’re content to elect leaders only because we think they can “win", if we settle for what we’re told to do by the club we registered for the last time we renewed our driver’s license, then what is the point of voting at all? What is the point of “winning"? What will be left for us when the professional winners have taken what they want from us– the only things we have that they want– our vote and our money?

It seems that we give this great privilege of choice away too freely. It’s as if so many of us are like spoiled ex-virgin teenage prostitutes– happy to give away ourselves like candy. We’ve lost our innocence and we’ve stopped making informed decisions. Instead, we give it up to the first pimp with lots of dough and power to come along and demand it of us. We run with a crowd of disenchanted losers, doing what’s easiest, what requires the least conviction, what we can bite the inside of our cheeks, shut our eyes, and get through without crying.

I think it’s time we stop. I think it’s time we ask ourselves what’s really important to us. I think it’s time we re-examine those things we hold most dear and rediscover the deeply buried love of the principle of this country that I suspect lurks somewhere within all of us. In this age of torpor, we may be numb; but, we’ve never been more connected. We can glimpse the suffering that goes on outside the relative safety of our borders, and some part of us knows to what principles we owe our freedom– crumbling though it may be.

At any moment, we can stop this. We’re only victims of our own apathy. We can take back our independence and power by the simple act of rejecting defacto positions and spoonfed ideas. We can start thinking for ourselves. We’re individuals, and when we act like it, we become free and very powerful. Let’s do it, all of us. Who’s with me?

A recent chat about the plausibility of the Golden Rule has given me pause to consider the dynamics of a Utopian society whose participants would govern themselves solely by that paradigm. It was proposed that such a society could not possibly exist, for there would be certain people who would not care whether others were nice to them and who would use that rationale to be indifferent, or worse, downright mean to others. I find fault with that proposition on multiple levels:

Chiefly, while there might be some in such a society whose values are so obscure as to lead them to mistreat other people, it is unreasonable to suppose that this would be the condition of a majority of people in that society. First, the closer the number of people with obscure values approach to a majority, the less of a problem it would actually be, as their values would no longer be obscure. Second, that proposition cannot include the many rotten people in present society who simply don’t want to observe the Golden Rule. These people are prone to self-justify by saying they wouldn’t care if someone treated them the way they treat others. The premise of the Golden Rule is not whether or not you care about how you’re treated, but how you want to be treated. These rotten people may very well justify their rotten actions in order to avoid having to actually observe the Golden Rule, but it’s self-evident folly to mistake their self-justification for the truth of their values. These people, given a choice, would choose to be treated the same way as most other people in present society would choose. And, in any event, the premise of the society is that the participants do observe the Golden Rule.

Additionally, the society that would operate in such a way would not have to completely eliminate all injustice in order to exist. It could exist simply through socialization. Societies have bred contempt among their participants, as well as camaraderie, patriotism, racism, and laissez faire pacifism. It’s unreasonable to think that a society could not, then, socially accept the Golden Rule as the primary principle of human interaction.

Were it to occur in a free market society, where competition thrives, there would be achieved a level of peacefulness, equity, and fairness that would almost certainly be unlike anything present society has yet experienced.

I have no intention of turning this weblog into a Ron Paul advocacy platform, all recent evidence to the contrary. But I found this video from YouTube very moving, and I urge you to take the next couple of minutes to watch it from start to finish.

My discussion of Ron Paul’s ideas are relevant to a weblog that discusses Capitalism and Culture, because his ideas represent a very deeply rooted and growing sense of disenchantment within the zeitgeist by the present state and direction of our government. I’ll be talking about that a lot more in future posts, but, for now, just watch.