Month: March 2013

Is there any difference between a terrorist who is plotting, we think, to blow up a bridge, and a bank robber who killed two people in a stick-up, and who is evading law enforcement?  Yes, the first is not yet a criminal, but the second is.

How many people did Osama Bin Laden kill?  As far as we know, none.  He was sitting in a cave somewhere.  The actual murderers, at least on the planes, all died.  Bin Laden was COMPLICIT in the murders, as was Ayman al Zawahiri (whose location we knew in the Bush era, as well as Bin Ladens), but he didn’t actually kill anyone we know of directly.

The people we call “terrorists” are not in most cases actual murderers.  They are aspiring murderers.

Yet, what has happened is that post-9/11 (which as I have shown clearly included as-yet-unidentified coconspirators) is that we have created this legally unique category “terrorist”.  And to pursue this legally unique category of person we have perverted our laws in all sorts of ways.

Obama would never have said he had the right to kill, say, a serial killer in a drone strike.  He would never have said he could kill a gangster in a drone strike; or a serial rapist, or bank robber, or wife beater, or pedophile.

But we have been CONDITIONED to view terrorists, and the threat of terrorism, as unique.  OF COURSE, nuclear terrorism, and biological and chemical terrorism are different than ordinary crimes.

But as Rand Paul has pointed out clearly, the question is not if we can act in the face of impending attack.  The question is if the President can kill someone upon whom the label “terrorist” has been hung, when no threat is imminent.

Consider the drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere.  Generally, we use them simply as ways of assassinating leaders who are otherwise rarely seen. It is not different in principle than the use of a sniper to take out an enemy commander in warfare.

What Obama has tacitly done, through what he has not said, is that he thinks that if he can plausibly call someone a terrorist, that person becomes a special sort of criminal, such that even if he or she is an American citizen, the laws of the United States do not apply to them.

Put another way, Obama is using the abuse of language that the “War on Terror” has facilitated to create room to take concrete steps to become a dictator with the power of life and death.

To be clear, a terrorist is not different IN ANY WAY–ANY WAY–from any other sort of criminal.  They are not different than the kid who shot up Sandy Hook Elementary, or Jeffrey Dahmer.  Yes, their desired body count may be higher, but this is not a difference in principle.

Particularly once you consider that SOMEBODY got away with their participation in 9/11 fully undetected, one has to see the logic of “terrorism” as logic intended to facilitate large land grabs.

In that spirit, I will resurrect an old ghost, the “Report from Iron Mountain “

The heavily footnoted report concluded that peace was not in the
interest of a stable society, that even if lasting peace “could be
achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of
society to achieve it.” War was a part of the economy. Therefore, it was
necessary to conceive a state of war for a stable economy. The
government, the group theorized, would not exist without war, and nation
states existed in order to wage war. War also served a vital function
of diverting collective aggression. They recommended that bodies be
created to emulate the economic functions of war. They also recommended
“blood games” and that the government create alternative foes that would
scare the people with reports of alien life-forms and out-of-control
pollution. Another proposal was the reinstitution of slavery.

Now, nobody wanted to claim this.  No surprise.  Someone who apparently was involved in the writing claimed it was satire.  My questions are these: 1) is it funny?  The answer would appear to be no.; 2) if Lewin was the author, why did he take five years to claim authorship when the book was a bestseller?

The claims of John Kenneth Galbraith are plausible, and if you pay attention, you will note the ideas with regard to government are not that different than those in Orwell’s 1984.

Consider in this spirit the “War on Terror”.  I supported it.  I supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I supported spooks helping out in Thailand,and the Phillipines, and Indonesia, and Malaysia and elsewhere.

But where are we?  We are at declaring American citizens can be killed and detained without trial or even a writ of habeas corpus.  We have had NO attacks of consequence on American soil in 11 years, and yet have spent TRILLIONS of dollars.

I’m done.  We need to downsize both the welfare state and the military, and live within our means.  We need further to generate bipartisan UNDERSTANDING of the fundamentally and horrifically inequitable role the Federal Reserve plays in siphoning the productive energies of Americans to the merely parasitic, both directlyh, and more importantly by propping up the foundationally unjust fractional reserve banking system.

“.

Last night I dreamed I was a drunk Indian, passed out on a train bound for I knew not where.  Imagine this feeling they must have felt: everything they knew, everything they loved, gone.  Families split, land gone.  What we did to them was not that different than what the Communists have done to the populations they have conquered the world over.  As an ideology, Communism is much worse than Christianity, but in terms of the practical effects, the reservations were not different in principle, at least for long stretches of time, than concentration camps.

This morning I was meditating, and it popped in to my head than many of us have a form of Stockholm Syndrome.  We KNOW, on some level, that the process of (purportedly) “rationalizing” everything has the effect of diminishing the quality of our lives.  We KNOW that the phrase “there’s a scientific explanation for that”, offered reflexively by the intellectually compulsive, acts to diminish the quality of our experience.

Now, as I have said often, I offer no objection to science and empiricism per se. I believe that the facts of non-local communication between consciousnesses, and the survival of physical death by consciousness can be empirically verified.  These hypotheses can be offered up to experimental test, and pass.

What I mean is that many people see no means of escape from the iron bars of materialism apparently linked to “rationalism”, so they willingly cooperate in their own intellectual and emotional enslavement to a fundamentally pessimistic and flawed creed.  They become apostles of scientism.

And this leads to emotional withering.  The aesthetic contemplation of scientific truth is in no way equal to, much less superior to, the notions that we are all intrinsically connected, that our lives have a purpose beyond simply living and dying, and that, importantly, the quality of our emotional experience is every bit as important as the quality of our rational thought, and scientific accuracy.  Call it Yin and Yang if you like: a WELL LIVED life includes both.

We have lost this sense of wonder rooted in the very soles of our feet, that goes far beyond mere pleasure to PARTICIPATION.  There is no room for it in modern Scientism.  It is “irrational”.

I was accused at one point of being a Romantic. In some ways this is true, but I am not attracted to the great and heroic, at least perhaps the way I once was.  I am attracted to the mundane and true.  I am attracted to belonging, and common culture, and peace.  I am attracted to sufficient wealth that life can be made an art form.

I am attracted to the effective use of reason as a TOOL within a broader world view, one which seeks to reach the level of myth in helpful and nourishing ways, but not the fetishization of “logic”.  [I will note, in that regard, that my model for philosophy is the geometric proof; this remains the case, but as I have said, philosophy is what you do on the way to something else.]

I was going to post this on Facebook, but it keeps growing.  Michael Yon shared a Spiegel article, in German, which I translated in part.  Here is the original: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bericht-von-amnesty-international-entlarvt-foltersystem-im-irak-a-887470.html

My German is not great, but the gist is this: “ten years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, countless men disappear in the jails of Iraq every year.  . .According to Amnesty International, they can be no talk of an improvement in human rights, even though the United States pushed that as a reason for the invasion.”  The abuses include torture of women as well as men.

It’s true: we did.  I did.  As I think about it now, two data points seem important: first, we cared about a nuclear armed Iraq–and plainly at some point Hussein was going to build nukes (he said so when arrested)–because it would destabilize the Middle East, and thus our supply of oil.  Virtually none of the people chanting “no blood for oil” were able to make this connection.  I know this, because I debated them.  They thought the “corporations” were going to take the oil.  Certainly, Halliburton and others did quite well, but at no point did I see any plausible reason to believe they were the CAUSE of the war, but rather simply in the right place at the right time.

The intelligent policy would have been to devote the same energy to the development of energy independence we devoted to this war.  I can see that now. Yes, green jackasses would have opposed this, but they oppose anything that smacks of anything but self destructiveness, which is why James Lovelock, arguably one of the god fathers of the Green Movement, now opposes them, by and large.

Secondly, once you realize that a larger conspiracy was clearly in play, which may well have included Americans, it throws the ENTIRE War on Terror into question.  I will post on this concept of “terrorist” in another post, but consider this: if you are anyone you know wanted to cause terror, and was willing to die or be jailed for it, how hard would it be?  You could just drive a truck into a crowd, pull out a gun and start shooting, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”.  It would not be hard.  Given this, why have there been so few attacks, if this is truly a large problem?  Is someone arguing that the drone strikes in YEMEN are somehow keeping American lives from being lost?

I don’t see it.  What I see is the amorphous threat of “terrorism”, which is so vague that it is portrayed as omnipresent, being used to justify the development of police state apparatus.  If terrorism is possibly everywhere, then Big Brother needs to be everywhere.  We are colluding in the murder of our freedoms as specifically outlined in the Constitution.

Imagine if George Bush has said he thought he had the right to murder Americans in America.  My God, what would have been the reaction from the Left?  Now, I see we need to oppose ANYONE, from any Party, who says he or she has the right to do ANYTHING not granted them by law.

With regard to Iraq, I am not quite willing to say we made a mistake, but certainly that that war distracted us from much more important issues, and that it was likely not the BEST strategy to have pursued.  Imagine if we now were free from the need for foreign oil.  Would that not free up many resources for other productive purposes?

As I see it, we have no good way of preventing Iran from getting a nuke.  The military logistics of anything short of a full scale invasion are, I suspect, insuperable.  We could at best delay them.  Given this, as I said some time ago, we need to grant them the right to have a nuke, and make is crystal clear that if they use, or even credibly signal the use of, nukes, we will fry them, and their civilization will fall back into the Stone Age.  No Mahdi will save them.  In their hearts, they know this, not least because this idiotic belief is not even contained in THEIR OWN TEXTS.  It is a modern invention.

Let us frame the 2nd Amendment as “The right to effective self defense”.  Is it not reasonable that all honest citizens have access to the weapons they might be expected to face in a crime?

I will add that, as I think about it, the 2nd Amendment really means: we the Federal Government grant that you the States have the right to defend yourselves any you want, so we are not going to regulate anything.

An interesting corollary to this is that I think one could argue that the Constitution does NOT prevent STATES from making laws against guns.  All it says is that the Federal Government can’t. 

I have not made this case, but I think one could plausibly argue that the exact nature of gun laws was intended to reside in the same moral domain as laws about slavery, drugs, euthanasia, gay marriage, prostitution, gambling, alcohol and the like.

What this line of thought would lead to is the cessation of ALL Federal gun laws, and the elimination of the F from the ATF.  It would allow Illinois to ban all guns, and Kentucky to make fully automatic machine guns available without a license.

I have put this many ways.  Here is another: Socialism is a creed which can rationalize an unequal power structure within the context of opposing difference in principle.

Here is the principle intellectual difficulty of egalitarianism: given that not all people are created equal in capacity, and that not all cultural forms work equally to facilitate and foster both happiness and economic productivity, even the BEST ideas, and BEST people cannot be valued, in principle, differently.

Meaning formation is at root the development of difference, of valuing this over that, this idea over that idea, this type of behavior over that type of behavior.  As one obvious example, hard work is preferable to sloth, if the goal is economic advancement.  But they can’t value ANYTHING, including an obviously beneficial, eudaptive (opposite of maladaptive; I may be mixing Greek and Latin, but fuck it) habit like hard work and self reliance.

On the contrary, they RESENT people who show greater resilience, greater organizational capacity, greater SUCCESS on an on-going basis, because it forces them to confront the emptiness of their creed.  This is why the Left hates Jews (and even though it contains many Jews).  This is why black people who preach hard work, honesty and family are so roundly condemned using what we might term the “Usual Pretexts”.

You can see this process at work everywhere.  I was in an Urban Outfitters today, which is obvious geared to the hipsters and urban trendies.  Everywhere one sees this sense of insouciance and flippancy with respect to serious matters.  They had a CCCP t-shirt (red, of course).  They had many books which failed to take anything seriously.

Jon Stewart speaks to this crowd.  They don’t have the emotional capacity to deal on a sustained bases in an HONEST way with serious problems.  They learn the talking points, learn to demonize the Right, but they are not actually in the room if and when they engage in what they term “debate”.  They have turned those controls over to stereotypes, and propaganda. 

Yes, of course I am myself generalizing.  But I feel the right to do so, having spent literally thousands of hours engaging with these people on their own turf.  What general pictures I use in performing logical or perceptual operations, I have won through a LOT of work and data gathering.

Here is the crux of the thing: in the process of meaning formation, you must VALUE something absolutely; you must have a code; yet codes that are immutable are rejected at the HEART of their cultural ethos.

This breeds madness.  This breeds the countless distractions, the colors, the odd books, the quantitative diversity of fashion and food.  It breeds emotional superficiality, and ultimately self hate, and a feeling of being lost.  Their nascent meaning formations invariably cannibalize themselves, since they can’t be “justified”.

Only to the extent that one is willing to suspend rational thought based on egalitarianism–in effect, to say fuck it with respect to these beliefs–or reject the creed outright and consciously, can meaning be found which does not reside in the abandonment of personal identity in a mass and mutable horde.

I go in these places, and my stomach sinks.  I see the darkness.  I see the inability to find a meaning in life, then I see the T-shirts that say “Obey”, the Communist shirts, the pornographic t-shirts.  I saw 50 Shades of Grey t-shirts today, one of which said “Looking for Mr. Right, Mr. Grey”.  Imagine that: a woman advertising that she wants to be sexually (and thus emotionally) dominated.  Actually, I look in Amazon, and see a lot more, including “Property of 50 Christian Grey”.

The problem is that YOU CANNOT FIND PERSONAL MEANING within an egalitarian creed.  We all must find our own way.  We are all different.  There are countless answers to the question of why to live, but none will work IF YOU REJECT THEM.  That is the root problem of our age.  It is related, in my view, to atheism, which tends in principle to make all matter–which is to say all people–equal.

It was the signal contributions of Nietzche and Ayn Rand (who admired him) to try and retain qualitative distinction in the face of materialistic quantitative analysis.

Empirically, the best evidence is that something like God exists, even if not fully in a sense recognized at least by Christianity, and quite possibly in ways not captured by ANY religion fully correctly.  It should be the role of science to figure out how the universe actually works, but most people are unwilling to do it, if it requires the balls and INCONVENIENCE of reworking paradigms, of tired paths long trodden.

I run a small business, and am doing my taxes.

There is no question in my mind that the more complicated the rules, the thicker the nest of regulations, the greater the relative advantage of large corporations.  They can afford to hire specialists.  They can implement uniform rules that become efficient across large numbers of people.  Small business has a hard time doing this.  They can’t get an economy of scale.  The owners wind up wearing all sorts of hats trying in vain to keep up with the whirlwinds created by amoral two-bit despots.

This is why Democrats, and leftists generally, tend to promote more or less directly the well being of large corporations at the expense of small business; and why so many large corporations reward them with campaign donations. 

Obamacare is just one obvious example.  It will hurt Main Street, to the benefit of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and all the large banks and multinationals. 

As usual, the usual idiots who vote for Democrats are generating the OPPOSITE of the outcome they think they are voting for.  When they are in character, Republicans are for Main Street, and opposed to special interests of all sorts.

The extent and scale of lies out there is simply staggering.

Since the issue of dealing with disasters–and Obama’s possible use of them to grab power–is real world for you, I thought I might pass along a
scenario and some ideas. First, I think many of you share my basic
understanding of Obama as someone who is a political radical.

What you
may not know is that the evidence is very good both that his real father
was Frank Marshall Davis–who was a card carrying Communist Party member through
the Fifties and Sixties, and who on Obama’s own account was an important
mentor; and that his association with Bill Ayers–and Ayers radical
father–likely goes back into the 1980’s, and that Ayers is the most likely
author of both of Obama’s books.

These are my best guesses, based on
the evidence available. It is a fact that a William Ayers has dined at the White
House. Keep in mind, too, that Bill Ayers was featured standing on an
American flag in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, and that back in the 1970’s he dreamed of building a network of concentration camps in the Southwest, and figured in the end he would “have” to murder some 10 million Americans unwilling to submit to brainwashing.

That picture may not
have been coincidence. I deal with the overwhelming probability that there was a larger conspiracy on 9/11 here.  I have since become much more convinced that Americans HAD to
have been involved, even though I still see no reason to implicate Bush
or even the government.  Keep in mind that the Rockefellers, among others, have long term ties to political radicals, and are among the beneficiaries of the Federal Reserve’s largesse.  People forget, but the Fed is currently creating and distributing some $50 billion a month.  We have no idea who they are giving it to.  There are neither laws constraining them, nor effective means of generating public disclosure.  This situation is ludicrous, but I don’t want to digress.

Given the foregoing, let’s say
someone–false flag, or through successful attack by an actual foreign hostile power like Iran–detonates an EMP in New York, causing large regional
blackouts, food shortages, and general chaos. Who does Obama call out?
Not the National Guard: they don’t report to him. He calls out FEMA,
and the Dept. of Homeland Security it reports to. They show up in their
armored personnel carriers, and they tell all the regional Guard units
that they now work for them. He tells regular military and law enforcement that he is now in charge by issuing an
Executive Order,and puts all military, all Guard units, and all local law enforcement under the operational
command of the DHS–which he has been seasoning for this day both through selective recruiting a la Parallax View, and through indoctrination–which most or all Governors choose to honor.

National martial law is 
implemented. Gun confiscations go on in force, of the sort we have
already seen in New Orleans (I’ll post a video). At some point, the
government says it can’t care for everyone, and tells them they have to
relocate to camps built by FEMA and the US Army. The camp selections
are not random. Specific people are put in specific places they never
get out of. 

In this situation, how is order reestablished
consistent with the Constitution? How does Obama NOT become a dictator,
if all units involved follow orders that appear legal? For all service
personnel, following orders is the default, unless something is
FLAGRANTLY wrong, which it would not appear to be in this scenario.

What
I would submit is that the military, law enforcement, and Guard units represent perhaps our best defense
against tyranny, and that policies should be put in place making it
absolutely, categorically clear that  you will refuse to obey
unConstitutional orders, which would include forcible relocations, and
disarming the public.  There are not enough America-haters out there to build tyranny, unless there are enough  people unwilling to think through the consequences of what they are being told to do to make it happen on autopilot.

Look at this video on actual forcible relocations, and gun confiscations in New
Orleans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-taU9d26wT4.  Would this be you?  Do the actions of these men make you proud?  Can you justify them, from the distance of cold, cool, calculation of the nature of your job protecting the public and freedom? Imagine this across the country, led by DHS agents:

If this can happen in America, and it plainly DID happen in America, what did our forefathers fight for?  What did you enlist for?  What did YOU fight for?

Here is a video on camps apparently being built by the Army which are
described as intended to hold civilians. They are being built,
apparently, in the United States, and are surrounded by barbed wire.
Why the Army? Why civilians?  What NEED is there for these camps?  We already have prisons.  We already have Gitmo.  Disaster recovery does not need guard towers and barbed wire and snipers.

Please think through your role in protecting the freedom of Americans in general, and the freedom of those in the State or community you are tasked with protecting.  Please ponder carefully what you are willing and not willing to do, and make your principled policies known in advance to all concerned.

I read this asshole died worth $2 billion.  I think I can say without risk of contradiction that one of the surest means of amassing wealth is gaining power by rhetorically opposing it. Leftists do not oppose wealth.  They do not oppose privilege.  They do not oppose multi tiered class systems, and pervasive economic inequity.  They simply oppose all systems of government they do not control utterly. 

Leftism is power mongering.  Period.  There is in my view no other way to look at it.  Yes, they bring along some stupid people, but the people driving the bus want power.

I read from time to time Jesus was a socialist.  What I would say is that He understood the shortcomings of wealth, and therefore voluntarily chose to live in poverty, and encouraged others to do the same.  The same cannot be said of anyone I have seen use this argument. Michael Moore, as one I have seen use this line of argument more than once, does not live in poverty (or with apparently any form of self restraint becoming any adult, much less one seeing fit to lecture the rest of us on how to live; he literally disgusts me to look at).  On the contrary, he is quite wealthy, and lives a corresponding lifestyle.  The “Socialist” head of France is also a billionaire.  If wealth is bad, why does he keep it?  And how did he amass it, if not through productive economic activity of the sort he now wants to punish?

The statement that leftism is a mental illness is in my view clinically true.  The extent of the self delusion–normally accompanied by a sense of grandeur–necessary is incompatible with intact reality testing.  It is a malady brought on by cultural alienation–one often provoked by their attacks on our history–and normally atheism and a following loss of the capacity for meaning formation outside of groups.

Alex Jones was in the main right.  So was Glenn Beck.  Our fucking government under Obama has created concentration camps of PRECISELY the Communist variety, even including interrogation chambers.  The leaked document discussing the concrete details is here: http://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-InternmentResettlement.pdf

As I calm down slightly, it occurs to me this could be a forgery.  But that is the ONLY way in which we the American people were not just given concrete evidence that Obama is an aspiring dictator, and that if he has his way, our freedom will be over soon.

The video discussing the highlights is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FfkZ1yri26s

Now, add together this, 2 billion bullets, gun targets of pregnant women, and 2,700 tanks.   It’s not a fucking pretty picture.  NOW WHERE THE HELL WILL CONGRESS BE ON THIS?  DO THEY WANT TYRANNY?  ARE THEY IN ON IT? 

Some patriot leaked this.  One hopes there are enough left to prevent this plan from being executed.  In my view all National Guard commands need to have contingencies in place to fight the DHS,  and even conceivably regular military units.  This shit is real.