New Fiction short story

I have recently made the crossover transition from published academic writer to published fiction short story writer. My short story "Night of the Madness" was recently published online at Twilight Times Ezine. It will also be included in the FICTION page of my own website when I completely overhaul it in 2015.

My Senior Thesis

      I have just posted my Senior Thesis research paper on my website. Here is a short cut link to it. Property As Commodity and Derivative

      I was one of 7 delegates representing SSU at a CSU statewide research presentation competition at CSU Long Beach in May 2012. Here are the photos from that trip to Southern California. CSULB

Social Networking

Greetings fellow philosophers. Today I feel slightly vindicated by, ironically enough, Forbes, the magazine of capitalism. You probably remember my rant a few months ago against Facebook. The latest issue of Forbes Magazine has an article by Kym McNicholas: "Ten Reasons Not to Invest in Facebook."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kymmcnicholas/2012/02/01/ten-reasons-not-to-invest-in-facebook/2/

Many of them are the same reasons I had for criticizing Facebook. Ok, most of Forbes' reasons are about why you might not make any money off of it, but at least one reason they gave is that Facebook is useless, it really doesn't do anything new and good, and in fact makes you do bad, stupid things. I already said that, and I also pointed out that you can do better social networking by creating your own blogs and websites, have complete control of your own content and make it look the way you want it to look and do what you want it to do. Also, if you want advertising on your own blog or website, you get paid for your own content. On Facebook, they get paid for your content but you don't see a dime of that.

Ok, 'nuff negativity, here's the positive side of social networking. Two of my talented siblings, Christopher K. Moon, photographer, and Carol Louise Moon, poet, have posted their work on the net. Check it out, friends.

Moonerisms

The Worst Election Year in US History???

I watched Newt on TV talking about his ex wife's charges against him. I was so ashamed of the American people for standing up and clapping and cheering this evil freak who has a chance at becoming President of the United States. If any one out there cannot see the threat that Newt and his constituents pose for America's reputation as a clear thinking, civilized nation, then read this website posting by Jeremy Sherman, one of the contemporary epistemologists whom I admire. http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/what-should-i-do/fighting-fire-with-fire-strategy-lessons-from-newt/

Note that in the article there is a link to the video of Newt, for those of you who missed it, and another link to a previous article by Dr. Sherman about psychopaths,written long before Newt displayed this particular example of anti-social personality disorder.

Winning the war on war?

Last week I was at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco to hear Dr. Joshua Goldstein speak about his new book Winning the war on War: the Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide. He autographed my copy of the book, which I have not read yet, but in his talk about the decline of armed conflict I did not get a sense that he recognized the different kinds of wars that are being waged. To me, it doesn't do any good that the NeoCons can scale down their wars to a level that is palpable to the American public. The point is that they are getting us into perpetual war, exactly according to Mussolini's playbook. Dr. Goldstein is also the co-author of a college-level textbook International Relations
--Buck Moon

The phoney "deficit" problem

       I guess you all have been reading and/or watching the news about how the Demos have caved in to the Republicans in Congress over the so called debt crisis. And yet the G.O.P. still won't be satisfied until, as Grover Norquist has stated, they "shrink the government down to the size that you can drown it in a bathtub." They want to get rid of all "social" services and privatize all other services, so that we have to buy our country back from the Mega-corporations who only work by the profit motive. Oh, yes and they say those corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes either.
       Isn't anyone out there reading Paul Krugman's excellent NYT columns?(Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning Economist.) If you haven't already figured it out from the statistics, the so-called "trickle down effect" has not worked. Letting the Corporations have their tax breaks and loopholes has only encouraged them to give their CEOs fantastic bonuses. They still outsource their jobs overseas and they still spend all their surplus profits on lobbying the Republicans to break the unions. By the way, those unions are the reason we had a healthy middle-class during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. But no more; the middle-class has been whittled down to where you can drown it in a bathtub, and those same middle-class people (Tea Party types)have been encouraged by the Republican propaganda to vote against their own economic interests.
       As Krugman has pointed out many times, the deficit is not the problem. If it were, the Republicans would be in favor of taxing the rich and ceasing all military actions that waste money, waste lives, and give American a bad rep in the international diplomatic world. But nooooo. (Refer back to Grover Norquist and his Republican agenda battle cry.)The real problem is unemployment, and neither the Demos nor the Republicans are addressing it.
       Social programs create jobs, and provide a safety net for society as a whole. When you destroy those, you basically destroy what has made America great in the first place. Milton Friedman was a jerk, and Keynes has been proven right time and time again. So much for my rant. For those of you who are not intellectually lazy here are some excellent books you could be reading.
Supercapitalism by Robert Reich
How Democratic is the American Constitution by Robert A. Dahl
The Political Mind by George Lakoff
Winner Take All Politics by Hacker and Pierson

Put your mind to work, that's what it is for.

I hate Facebook

(This is the whole, uncut content of my last posting on my facebook page. I don't even want to go into all the hassles that I had to do to break it up into modules of the character size that facebook allows. Or speculate how long it will last once facebook realizes that it was an anti-facebook posting.)

Hi to all my facebook friends who jumped over here after reading my last posting. You really are my friends and I really do like you, but I HATE FACEBOOK! so do not take it personal. (That incredibly stupid question party game thing really topped it for me.)
I encourage all of you to communicate with me through my blog, my website, and email.
http://worldpeacealgorithm.blogspot.com and
My website
buck@matterofmail.doc
moono@seawolf.sonoma.edu
buck @peacemoon.org
Also I highly recommend two good books for your edification,
"You Are Not a Gadget" by Jaron Lanier and
"Program or be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff.
Plus watch this very enlightening video about facebook and google's hidden agenda:
Watch this great TED.com interview with Eli Praiser
These are NOT Luddite, anti-cyberspace books. They are written by guys in the high-tech field who are explaining why the promise of the global internet revolution has been betrayed by the dumbing down of content by these stupider-than-thou (my expletive) social networks that make you do things you wouldn't do if you were using your own blog or designed your own website.
READ AND WATCH ALL THE ABOVE NOW BEFORE FACEBOOK MAKES IT ALL DISAPPEAR.
--BUCK