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America's Fascist Past

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As the major news networks declared an Obama victory the night of Nov. 6, 2012, the notorious billionaire and now White House mob boss took to Twitter to register his outrage over the result. “We should have a revolution in this country!” Trump thundered. “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty!” he tweeted moments later. While the outbursts were roundly mocked in the days following the vote, Trump isn’t the only American one-percenter to have advocated the overthrow of a democratically-elected president. In the early 1930s, a coalition of America’s wealthiest industrial magnates allegedly hatched a scheme to topple the  Roosevelt Administration  and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. The plan, dubbed “The Business Plot” in the modern day, was dreamed up by a cabal of rich tycoons and Wall Street big shots from several of the largest corporations including Chase Bank, Maxwell House, General Motors, Goodyear, Standard Oil, DuPont,
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The Constitution is Showing Its Age

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The world around us changes every day. Thus, understanding facts like this, Thomas Jefferson himself was quoted as saying; “I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when he was a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” The primary issue with the US system is that it is showing its age. The US Constitution has had staggeringly few amendments since its inception, with fully 1/3rd of them being ones passed effectively as part of the constitution itself, while many of the others are there for relatively minor procedural issues (l
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Why Voter Turn out is a Thing of the Past

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A brief history on what made this country vote less In November, new senate elections will take place and it seems like my home state of Texas has rarely been so buzzed about it. All around town, I see “Vote for Beto” signs in lawns, windows, and on walls. In a state where the evangelical,  possible-Zodiac-killer  Ted Cruz has reigned supreme, it does make one wonder if there might be a changing of the guard soon. However, for something even remotely like this to take place, Texas would have to see a massive resurgence in voter turn out, especially with young voters. This fascination brought up an interesting question to me; why has voter turn it died over the history of this country? If you look at  this chart  you can see that while 1876 was the highpoint, it wasn’t exactly an anomaly, and voter turnout was consistently high in the elections preceding it. It sticks out because, although the drop wasn’t  immediately  afterwards, it certainly preceded the continuing decline in
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Battling the Gods

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Atheism in Ancient Greece The first thing to say is that there are a number of really good reasons that no one has really done a full scale study on irreligion since A. B. Drachmann’s  Atheism in Pagan Antiquity , which was published about a century ago. To break them down: All evidence is relevant, just as it is for religion, but no evidence seems to directly confront this issue. Along with this, the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard also recognized this in practice: “Religious beliefs must always be treated with the greatest caution, for we are then dealing with what neither European nor native can directly observe.” (1965: 7) Of course, Evans-Pritchard could observe and survey his subjects but no surveys of belief exist from the ancient world. Then there is the normative destructive influences of survival of source material. As we’ll see, atheism isn’t seen as a positive thing. It’s a sign of madness, or a signal of moral degeneracy, etc. That means that the materia
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