A reader with the novel numerical but carceral name of New Number Two, makes the following remarks:

Modern advertising is designed to make you want a product regardless of whether the product has any merit or not, as such, it often will not even attempt to explain the merit of a product anymore (old advertisements did). I will give an example. The advertisement showed a supermodel, dressed in a gauzy white dress, with a backdrop of a garden full of flowers, swinging on a swing. That went on for a while, then presented the name of the product, three musketeers candy bar. Not once did they show the candy bar or talk about it’s merits or why you would want one.

He concludes:

If your “news” article starts out with graphic and emotional description, an emotional little story, you are being lied to, expect the whole thrust of the article to be selling you a lie.

To which all, I say, bravo, and hear, hear.

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In my youth, it was a point of pride for modern atheists to portray their skeptical scheme of a godless universe, stripped of all supernatural elements, to be the one pure and icy-hearted reasoning reached, reason without trace of sentiment or mysticism, dealing strictly and with scientific rigor with such conclusions as permitted no room for doubt.

We were the sole heralds and harbingers who followed the science, as it were, toward the soaring future made possible once the last vestiges of theocracy, papism, sectarian violence and superstition was stripped away.

Ours was the promised utopia of Houyhnhnmland, which was no doubt a bountiful island in the southern seas of planet Vulcan.

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For more years than I care to count, I have been baffled by the inability to name the nameless philosophy which even now lolls in careless triumph across all the institutions of the West: for they have corrupted cathedral and town hall, the theater, the pressroom, the salons of the intellectuals, the academy, and the marketplace.

Press and theater are the subversive strongholds, the means to indoctrinate the multitude. Town Hall represents coercive power, intermingled in incestuous union with the monopolists of the marketplace to form a fascism in all but name. Persuasive power is used, not to win debates, but to silence them, and is paramount in the Academy, in the salon, and, sadly, in the Church.

The equality of all the children of God was marred by a creeping egalitarianism, which, in the modern day, has become a gnostic form of totalitarian anarchy combined with plutocratic socialism.

I am frankly not sure what to call this new form of formless governmental philosophy.

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