A Leftwingnut Comment

By William Hanna

The subjects I have covered all attribute "tribe-like" subdivision of our political society and range from an anthropological-DNA view of our species' current behavior, to college commencement rants, thoughtful views on the origins of, and return to, cooperative survival strategies characterized by focus on each tribes dominance strategy to the detriment of competing tribes.
The sense of the collection is that our species is devolving into an earlier survival mode without regard for the welfare of individuals in and out of each tribe, but most especially the deliberate suppression of all groups and individuals not selected for inclusion in the dominant tribe.
Exaggeration, maybe, but perhaps with a frightening modicum of truth.
The election season of 2014-2016 may provide ample evidence of a real degeneration of Homo sapiens into a more primitive state. I fervently hope to be proven otherwise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Hanna
• Release date: Apr 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476387352

William Hanna

A London-based freelance writer on democracy and human rights and author of several books including the The Grim Reaper (Goodreads Reviews: https://bit.ly/3cw8OHO. Further information including book reviews, articles, sample chapters, videos, and contact details at:https://www.williamhannaauthor.com

Book preview

A Leftwingnut Comment

A Collection of Political Commentary and Essays

By William C. Hanna

Copyright © 2014 by William C. Hanna

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Smashword Edition License Notes

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work

***~~~**

To the many colleagues who have tolerated my harangues and an ever patient wife, Sylvia

About this Book

This collection of my personal views on the current political environment, together with a sampling of publications of other interested individuals, reflects a decidedly left-wing view of the state of politics in our nation. The individual contents are attributed to the authors. The subjects range from an anthropological-DNA view of our species current behavior, to college commencement rants, to thoughtful views on the origins of, and return to, cooperative survival strategies characterized by focus on each tribe’s dominance strategy to the detriment of competing tribes.

The sense of the collection is that our species is devolving into an earlier survival mode without regard for the welfare of individuals in and out of each tribe, but most especially the deliberate suppression of all groups and individuals not selected for inclusion in the dominant tribe.

Exaggeration, maybe, but perhaps with a frightening modicum of truth.

The election season of 2014-2016 may provide ample evidence of a real degeneration of HOMO sapiens into a more primitive state.

Preamble to Political Essays & Commentaries

I was born in 1924 of a Canadian father, a US Steel executive, and an American mother. I grew up in Detroit and Chicago’s North Shore (Wilmette). Growing up in an old fashioned Republican environment, I was, nonetheless apparently a dormant Democrat from high school on as I remember arguing with my father’s management role in the Republic Steel South Chicago mills Memorial Day Massacre in 1937 and, going back a generation I was aware that Lawyer Grandfather Clark wrote a regular Republican political polemic (or what passed for one in those days) for the Detroit News. He was politically active in other ways too, having the habit of parking out-of-work politicians in his Detroit law firm until their political fortunes reversed.

By age 19, though not yet eligible to vote, I was dependably a Democratic fellow traveler, however despite my radical views I cast my first vote in a presidential election for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 but soon abrogated my nominal republicanism and re-registered as an independent. After a 4-year stint in the Army Air corps and, later while an engineering student at Stanford I became both an atheist and a closet activist liberal. My postgraduate employment in the Aerospace industry lead me to a fellow activist (also an aerospace industry employee), subsequent sharing of views and living quarters and eventually marriage to Sylvia McKinney, which union has endured for some 57 years so far.

My engineering work lead to a Directorship and Vice Presidency in a Santa Barbara Corporation principally engaged in high-energy physics research under contract to DARPA. My role took the company in a new direction in applying appropriate technology to a more immediately demanding application in managing large-scale domestic emergencies (principally wildland fires) via a seven-year federally funded project. Our work has endured and now forms the foundation for related programs worldwide.

Writing many technical publications over the years and increasingly numerous letters-to-the-editors on local political matters whetted an interest in writing per se, which I have been able to indulge since retirement. I have an enovel in publication and have been accumulating this series of highly partisan political essays and an separate assortment of memory-driven short stories that I now hope to publish.

So herewith the collection of my personal essays and some pertinent commentaries by a few of my fellow travelers:

Table of Contents

An Anthropological Parable 8

On the recent evolution of our species

Attention Governor Parry 11

Dawkins on acceptance of proven theory

Republicans v. Democrats 13

Good Soldiers vs. Free Thinkers

Social Darwinism 15

Evolutionary concepts applied to social structures from Spencer on

The Cold, Cold Wind of Reality 17

A hard right view the future of Democracy

On Behavior of Governments 24

The significance of the hard right view

On the Evolution of HOMO publicus 27

Greed

Whither, Withers America 29

The decline and fall of democracy

The Reptile Brain 32

Ideology vs. primitive brain function

Email to Barrack Obama 35

On self-serving behavior

State of the Nation 35

In 2010 and 2012

Why I Became an Atheist 39

A personal triumph of logical introspection

Afterword 43

On a fictional 2012 presidential election

Socialism 45

Why the US is a Socialist nation

Tribalism 47

We are still fundamentally governed by our primitive instincts

Current Thoughts (Summer 2014)……………………………………………………………..49

Our Congress is virtually useless

Foreword

Since the 2008 election of Barrack Obama it has seemed clear to me that the Republicans could not believe they had lost control of the US government. Given unexpected defeat, the seemingly irrational conservative fringe of the population united under the Tea party rubric with a rock-bound determination to defeat the Black Man in the White House even if doing so could demonstrably cause a collapse of the American Democracy and the disenfranchisement of the great majority of American Citizens.

To ensure this outcome, the great international corporations and the super wealthy individuals banded together to lobby into defeat any and all efforts on the part of Democrats to unite congress in a bipartisan program to restore the nation to a government for the People that had degenerated into a third-world entity in the apparently incompetent hands of the Nixon, Reagan and George Bush regimes.

The essays which follow comment on this behavior syndrome with some digressions into some genetic heritance issues and a rational for barring religious issues from political deliberations.

The author’s own bias is quite clear, but is, hopefully, rationally understandable even to those who hold other views except perhaps evangelical views of evolution, climate change, racial equality and the reluctant necessity to endure the female of the species.

An Anthropological Parable

November 2011

The creationists and the intelligent designers on the one hand and the paleoanthropologists and most of the