In a message dated 10/7/2010 6:57:50 A.M. Mountain Daylight Time, sheldonw72@ writes: "....politics. What a waste of thought time. It's the economy, dummie (said jokingly). Instead of passing laws, we need politicians who will repeal laws--starting with the Federal Reserve and the IRS."
Sure we do. Politicians cannot repeal the Fed, because the Treasury borrowed money by putting up the USA's gold as collateral, and the Fed long ago repossessed it all. The indebted slave does not just repeal the master who owns him. The USA is not so much a country as it is just an account in that bank. Since every line in the budget, and every politician's salary is paid by using the IRS to service that debt, that's one outfit even a Tea Party Congress couldn't repeal without losing the job that gives them the power to do anything.
Maybe we should just repeal the Constitution? The Tea Party could then incorporate, every citizen (except the sex offenders and Muslims) would be issued shares in the new USA, Inc, and we would be permitted to trade freely among ourselves with those. The Board could pray to elect a new Chairman, Blackwater would be renamed again and given the contract to employ the guards and judges of First National Security And Justice, and the free market would rule. In a couple of fiscal years, a few great entrepreneurs would own millions of shares, and most everybody else would be in debt to the company store, the nationalized former Wal-Mart. Nothing much would change.
Remember the USSR? Under communism, all the money from everyone's bank accounts was seized, and put into one account in the same bank (!) When that account went in the red trying to out-borrow Reagan, the country shut down. Then they had a real free market, and only one group of them knew how to conduct unregulated trade: the outlaws. As I have said for years about marijuana, the black market is the only free market there is, as government defines the terms of all legal trade. As the people closest to the reality of that, the ones who understand it best today are the gangstas. Under a pure free market, there are no banks, and the gold all soon belongs to the most ruthless employer of armed bagmen, uniformed or not. President Biggie-P would wear Sarah Payin on his ho-chain in a gold bikini. She would call him "Big Moose" on BET (nudge nudge) (wink wink).
Politically, you are no doubt aware that the Neopublican Tea Party movement is not really political. It is fundamentally religious, and motivated by the same mentality that gave us Jim Jones, Cotton Mather, and the Dark Ages. For me, whatever I think about things like finance law or state's rights etcetc, that fact is enough to take a stand against it, which today means against the Republican Party's candidates, all of them, however I might feel about the good principles of the classic fiscally-conservative GOP.
You do not vote "against the GOP" by voting for a third party, or a write in. Those votes do not count at all. You might as well stay home, or vote for Kermit The Frog. The ONLY number that matters is whether there are more who vote Democrat than Neopublican. Choose, and vote.
James Post THE ANTI-CYCLOPS PAPERS
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Qur'an et al.
I have just been watching a program I enjoy on our public access TV channel. It is readings from Qur'an, most of it sung in its own language, with beautiful scenery and the faces of people, filled with light. Though I don't understand a word, it is so elegant and so beautiful. When I was in Christ, I spoke in tongues sometimes. Though I am no longer of the Christian religion, sometimes I still do. People do not understand what it is. Like one willing to be hypnotized, you give yourself up to the spirit, and things sometimes well up from within you. You do not understand the words, but they speak to the soul, and the soul responds, and you may weep knowing you are saying something very real and very holy. My soul responds to the words of Qur'an that way and I very much enjoy just listening to it, like Bach or Brubeck.
Sometimes they read passages in English, and I always think if they were read to a group of spiritually conscious Christians or Jews without their knowing what they were, they would find themselves saying again and again, "Amen! That is wisdom, that is beauty, that is the God I know in my heart." It causes me grief therefore to see how badly some Christians and some Muslims misunderstand the message of the prophets, and miss the spirit, and find reason to hate and oppress and kill each other in the pages of the books they have made idols of, each only an image of God, graven in symbol on papyrus wrapped like mummies. We are awash in spleen, and unless we find a way to open our minds beyond those books, and open our hearts to that spirit and to each other, then we are soon awash in blood.
James
"Thank You Jesus, But No Thank You."
Sometimes they read passages in English, and I always think if they were read to a group of spiritually conscious Christians or Jews without their knowing what they were, they would find themselves saying again and again, "Amen! That is wisdom, that is beauty, that is the God I know in my heart." It causes me grief therefore to see how badly some Christians and some Muslims misunderstand the message of the prophets, and miss the spirit, and find reason to hate and oppress and kill each other in the pages of the books they have made idols of, each only an image of God, graven in symbol on papyrus wrapped like mummies. We are awash in spleen, and unless we find a way to open our minds beyond those books, and open our hearts to that spirit and to each other, then we are soon awash in blood.
James
"Thank You Jesus, But No Thank You."
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Is Every Outlaw A Criminal?
Is Every Law By Definition Just?
Neither the language nor the law make a distinction between the criminal and the outlaw, but there clearly is such a difference, and it is significant. I should hope I can always say that I have never done anything to anyone that I should call a criminal act, yet I have been an outlaw most of my life.
Should every law be enforced, just because it has been made a law, and the law is the law is the law? I say surely not. Does anyone who has ever read even a few pages of the history of the world not know that kings and legislatures across the world and across the ages have made and enforced laws that were not just, and which did more damage to persons and to societies than whatever they were written to suppress, or demand? Can any American really say he believes that every law on the books in our country is just, and virtuous, and wise?
Consider a simple case, with which I think most Americans agree (except perhaps the most frightened and tractable sheep). That is the possession of firearms for personal defense. It seems clear to me that if a person knows he must go into a situation in which his life is at risk, and he knows only a pistol will enable him to defend himself, and he goes into that situation unarmed because the pistol is forbidden to him by law, he is a suicidal fool. There is neither justice, nor wisdom, nor virtue in obeying that law. Yet the one who disobeys it, who makes of himself thereby an outlaw, is treated as a criminal.
It is well known in spite of some eighty years of draconian prohibition that if I grow and smoke a joint of marijuana, I have committed a crime against no one. The enforcement of that prohibition has caused more destruction to persons, to families, to communities, and to the very fabric of trust between citizens and state than anything the herb itself has done or could possibly do. Books have been written on the extent of that destruction, to its effect on agriculture and its many beneficial products, the rise of police state destruction of our civil rights, the perversion of our system of justice. There is neither reason, justice, wisdom, nor virtue in the enforcement of that prohibition.
How many other instances are there in which to have common freedom to perform acts of no harm to anyone, acts to which everyone should naturally and reasonably have a perfect right, you must become an outlaw? How many such instances are there in which the enforcement of the law as written causes great injustice to persons, and great damage to society? Surely the laws being made and enforced on our southern border today are such instances. Whatever might be said about the ideology of fundamental and absolute obedience to the law, the result is surely to be great destruction and the breakdown of peaceful relations between our nation and Mexico. To prevent the presence of undocumented persons who wished to work for the lowest wages, and the importation of marijuana, we have already created a new wave of persons who are here in anger to do what damage they can to us, and the importation of the most addictive and destructive drug yet created, methedrine. Those who insist the law is the law is the law and it must be enforced because it is the law are prepared to initiate a true military war against the people of what should be our closest friend as well as our closest neighbor. The result is simply and inescapably many times more destructive to America and to the people of our border states, as well as the people of Mexico, who are also human beings and deserving of common decency in treatment. Where in this picture are even simple pragmatics, much less reason, righteousness, justice, wisdom, and virtue?
The American who goes into the deep and deadly deserts of northern Mexico and places caches of water to save the lives of those attempting to illegally cross our border is by the letter of the law an outlaw. The border patrol officer who destroys that water cache in the name of law enforcement has condemned people to die a most horrible death for no greater offense than to lack the papers of permission to be here. That, lawful or not, is a truly criminal act, and that officer a cruel homicidal goon, no less so than the good, patriotic, and obedient guard who lawfully threw the Jews of Germany into the crematoria.
It is not how your acts are defined, or whose permission you have that make them moral, virtuous, wise, or just, but what they are. There are times when only the outlaw can rightly claim to be any of those.
James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm
Neither the language nor the law make a distinction between the criminal and the outlaw, but there clearly is such a difference, and it is significant. I should hope I can always say that I have never done anything to anyone that I should call a criminal act, yet I have been an outlaw most of my life.
Should every law be enforced, just because it has been made a law, and the law is the law is the law? I say surely not. Does anyone who has ever read even a few pages of the history of the world not know that kings and legislatures across the world and across the ages have made and enforced laws that were not just, and which did more damage to persons and to societies than whatever they were written to suppress, or demand? Can any American really say he believes that every law on the books in our country is just, and virtuous, and wise?
Consider a simple case, with which I think most Americans agree (except perhaps the most frightened and tractable sheep). That is the possession of firearms for personal defense. It seems clear to me that if a person knows he must go into a situation in which his life is at risk, and he knows only a pistol will enable him to defend himself, and he goes into that situation unarmed because the pistol is forbidden to him by law, he is a suicidal fool. There is neither justice, nor wisdom, nor virtue in obeying that law. Yet the one who disobeys it, who makes of himself thereby an outlaw, is treated as a criminal.
It is well known in spite of some eighty years of draconian prohibition that if I grow and smoke a joint of marijuana, I have committed a crime against no one. The enforcement of that prohibition has caused more destruction to persons, to families, to communities, and to the very fabric of trust between citizens and state than anything the herb itself has done or could possibly do. Books have been written on the extent of that destruction, to its effect on agriculture and its many beneficial products, the rise of police state destruction of our civil rights, the perversion of our system of justice. There is neither reason, justice, wisdom, nor virtue in the enforcement of that prohibition.
How many other instances are there in which to have common freedom to perform acts of no harm to anyone, acts to which everyone should naturally and reasonably have a perfect right, you must become an outlaw? How many such instances are there in which the enforcement of the law as written causes great injustice to persons, and great damage to society? Surely the laws being made and enforced on our southern border today are such instances. Whatever might be said about the ideology of fundamental and absolute obedience to the law, the result is surely to be great destruction and the breakdown of peaceful relations between our nation and Mexico. To prevent the presence of undocumented persons who wished to work for the lowest wages, and the importation of marijuana, we have already created a new wave of persons who are here in anger to do what damage they can to us, and the importation of the most addictive and destructive drug yet created, methedrine. Those who insist the law is the law is the law and it must be enforced because it is the law are prepared to initiate a true military war against the people of what should be our closest friend as well as our closest neighbor. The result is simply and inescapably many times more destructive to America and to the people of our border states, as well as the people of Mexico, who are also human beings and deserving of common decency in treatment. Where in this picture are even simple pragmatics, much less reason, righteousness, justice, wisdom, and virtue?
The American who goes into the deep and deadly deserts of northern Mexico and places caches of water to save the lives of those attempting to illegally cross our border is by the letter of the law an outlaw. The border patrol officer who destroys that water cache in the name of law enforcement has condemned people to die a most horrible death for no greater offense than to lack the papers of permission to be here. That, lawful or not, is a truly criminal act, and that officer a cruel homicidal goon, no less so than the good, patriotic, and obedient guard who lawfully threw the Jews of Germany into the crematoria.
It is not how your acts are defined, or whose permission you have that make them moral, virtuous, wise, or just, but what they are. There are times when only the outlaw can rightly claim to be any of those.
James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm
Sunday, July 25, 2010
End The War On Wetbacks Now!
END THE WAR ON WETBACKS NOW!
I have not read Arizona’s “border security” law, but I have every confidence that it does not specifically admit the “profiling” of Mexicans, but only calls for all who are there without The Papers to be recognized and treated as “criminals.” Even given such semantic technicality as a passcard, it is abundantly clear what it means in practice. The probability of anyone being stopped, subdued, interrogated, and searched in Tucson because they have a suspicious epicanthic fold or might be an illegal Norwegian is simply ZIP. We all know what the “War On Wetbacks” law is intended to do.
Here are two proposals which I believe could offer New Mexico the opportunity to be a positive force for solving the growing discord across our nation’s southern border. These are (1) Marijuana, and (2) the Mexicorps.
(1) Let us make an end run around California (as Albuquerque does with respect to Hollywood) and make Las Cruces our state’s competitive entry in the exploding new market in legal marijuana which is saving the economy of California. I have read that the famous Hatch valley chile production has seriously dropped off for various reasons. There is hardly a better place in this country for the production of high-grade marijuana. Instead of allowing Monsanto to create patented GM industrial pot seed to exclude the small farmer, we should ban such seizure of the market by growing only with clone cuttings as those underground agriculturalists do who have created the fine hybrids the medical industry would like to take credit for. There is no such thing as “medical marijuana.” Those beautiful and profitable seedless hybrids were created by outlaws hiding from the DEA’s gun-packing goons in cellars, caves, and canyons to serve the millions of Americans who recognize from personal experience the benefit in our lives of this natural relaxant, a true “anti-depressant” with no harmful side-effects whatsoever.
Let us therefore be the state that welcomes, certifies, and harbors those Mexicans who will come here, move into such new labor-residence communities as my friend Tres Stahmann’s family used to maintain on the great pecan plantations of Dona Ana County, and work to produce this beneficial and profitable crop. They will not be a burden to our state, but instead a true asset who not only carry their own weight, but will make us the most agriculturally affluent border state in our free land. If we go one “Liberal” step further, and offer such laborers classes in the English language and the history of our country, we could produce a new generation of bi-lingual citizens with a well-deserved sense of gratitude and patriotism.
(2) Within the structure of our very fine even if poorly funded New Mexico National Guard, let us create a Mexicorps, a corps which welcomes the immigrant (however he got here) willing to sign up for a four-year tour of duty in which he or she will receive basic military training, classes to become fully bilingual and biliterate, and a program of education leading to full naturalized citizenship, medical care for themselves and their resident families, and a GED or college entry as appropriate. There are today millions of men and women in Mexico and here among us who would eagerly leap at such an opportunity to be of true service to America, and who would re-energize our military forces which are struggling to find new recruits to relieve those now forced to serve three or four tours in our efforts to help the people of so many countries around the world. Again, this would make of these people not a burden on our social services, but instead a true asset to our nation, like the Irish, Polish, Chinese, Italian, and so many other immigrant groups who have contributed to the growth and success of this nation which once welcomed the “poor and hungry” of the world not as handout seekers or second-class outsiders, but as the very lifeblood of a growing land of the truly free.
Let Arizona and Texas make themselves into prison states and wargrounds, places where Mexicans are hunted with guns and driven into lives of crime and violence. Let them have the gangs and terrorists their cruel, unjust, and foolish “non-racist” pogroms make of people who only want a better life. Let them suffer the hell on earth their prideful heartless folly produces. We can be the place which recognizes that Mexicans make good Americans, and our Rio Grande valley from Mesilla to Bernalillo will blossom with righteous progress.
James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com
I have not read Arizona’s “border security” law, but I have every confidence that it does not specifically admit the “profiling” of Mexicans, but only calls for all who are there without The Papers to be recognized and treated as “criminals.” Even given such semantic technicality as a passcard, it is abundantly clear what it means in practice. The probability of anyone being stopped, subdued, interrogated, and searched in Tucson because they have a suspicious epicanthic fold or might be an illegal Norwegian is simply ZIP. We all know what the “War On Wetbacks” law is intended to do.
Here are two proposals which I believe could offer New Mexico the opportunity to be a positive force for solving the growing discord across our nation’s southern border. These are (1) Marijuana, and (2) the Mexicorps.
(1) Let us make an end run around California (as Albuquerque does with respect to Hollywood) and make Las Cruces our state’s competitive entry in the exploding new market in legal marijuana which is saving the economy of California. I have read that the famous Hatch valley chile production has seriously dropped off for various reasons. There is hardly a better place in this country for the production of high-grade marijuana. Instead of allowing Monsanto to create patented GM industrial pot seed to exclude the small farmer, we should ban such seizure of the market by growing only with clone cuttings as those underground agriculturalists do who have created the fine hybrids the medical industry would like to take credit for. There is no such thing as “medical marijuana.” Those beautiful and profitable seedless hybrids were created by outlaws hiding from the DEA’s gun-packing goons in cellars, caves, and canyons to serve the millions of Americans who recognize from personal experience the benefit in our lives of this natural relaxant, a true “anti-depressant” with no harmful side-effects whatsoever.
Let us therefore be the state that welcomes, certifies, and harbors those Mexicans who will come here, move into such new labor-residence communities as my friend Tres Stahmann’s family used to maintain on the great pecan plantations of Dona Ana County, and work to produce this beneficial and profitable crop. They will not be a burden to our state, but instead a true asset who not only carry their own weight, but will make us the most agriculturally affluent border state in our free land. If we go one “Liberal” step further, and offer such laborers classes in the English language and the history of our country, we could produce a new generation of bi-lingual citizens with a well-deserved sense of gratitude and patriotism.
(2) Within the structure of our very fine even if poorly funded New Mexico National Guard, let us create a Mexicorps, a corps which welcomes the immigrant (however he got here) willing to sign up for a four-year tour of duty in which he or she will receive basic military training, classes to become fully bilingual and biliterate, and a program of education leading to full naturalized citizenship, medical care for themselves and their resident families, and a GED or college entry as appropriate. There are today millions of men and women in Mexico and here among us who would eagerly leap at such an opportunity to be of true service to America, and who would re-energize our military forces which are struggling to find new recruits to relieve those now forced to serve three or four tours in our efforts to help the people of so many countries around the world. Again, this would make of these people not a burden on our social services, but instead a true asset to our nation, like the Irish, Polish, Chinese, Italian, and so many other immigrant groups who have contributed to the growth and success of this nation which once welcomed the “poor and hungry” of the world not as handout seekers or second-class outsiders, but as the very lifeblood of a growing land of the truly free.
Let Arizona and Texas make themselves into prison states and wargrounds, places where Mexicans are hunted with guns and driven into lives of crime and violence. Let them have the gangs and terrorists their cruel, unjust, and foolish “non-racist” pogroms make of people who only want a better life. Let them suffer the hell on earth their prideful heartless folly produces. We can be the place which recognizes that Mexicans make good Americans, and our Rio Grande valley from Mesilla to Bernalillo will blossom with righteous progress.
James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Our Second Stupidest Mistake
Our Second Stupidest Mistake
The criminalization of being Mexican and the making of war against them is the second stupidest mistake we have made in the last decade, the stupidest being the granting of unaccountable and unconstitutional power to the covert elements of our government by the deceitful initiation of the unjust wars of aggression against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
If that smirking Hermann-Goering-doppleganger Arizona Sheriff Arpaio were ever to be caught alone in Mexico within 100 miles of that border he is so ready to start shooting people over without his gang of club-packing “corrective” goons it is a crime to refuse to grovel before, his head would be on a stick in ten minutes and his body bloating in the sun like a rotting beached whale. Anyone with the most simple sense of the difference between justice and kneejerk law enforcement would have to agree that he deserved it. The same is true of that soulless walking mummy they call their Governor in that state.
The border to Mexico should be wide open, and Mexico a place as it once was, where any American could go with their families and be welcomed, and our country a place where any Mexican could come here and with no more fanfare than it takes to register to vote, sign up for the right to be here. Mexicans make good Americans, or at least they used to before the right-wing fascists of our Republican government made enemies of them. They should be made welcome here, and given the opportunity to do honest work, admitted to our schools and armies, instead of being driven into the criminal underground in order to survive as they try to help their families.
At some point, when we have built the DMZ (De-Mexicanized Zone) on our border, and battalions of armed peacekeepers crouch on that line in the sand with rifles pointed south, we will be violently shown that the enemy is then behind them, already here across the border, about fifty million of them, some citizens, some with papers, and some with nothing but their hunger and their rage. That, unfortunately, is exactly what the “patriots” of the police state are waiting for.
As everyone from Macchiavelli to Orwell has pointed out for centuries, the militant authoritarian security state needs two enemies to survive. One of those is an undefinable foreign enemy, preferably of a different race and religion, one not limited to a particular nation or even a particular activity or ideology. Those are the “terrorists” to be feared, and endless war made against. The other is internal, justifying the treatment of every person in the country as a potential enemy, and therefore subject to the law enforcement modalities of the penal society. Those are now the Mexicans, whose capital crime is simply to be here. The third most powerful factor in such control is a crime which almost everyone commits. Whether through the use of prohibited common herbs or of misused prescriptions to addictive pharmos, that crime is the drugs. When all of us are either suspects, convicts, or on probation, it no longer matters what “rights” the citizens have by law, because those categories of people no longer have citizens’ rights. Where those crimes are made felonies, a point is reached where only those working for law enforcement still have the right to vote. Eventually, as in such states as the historic tragedies of communist Russia, China, and North Korea, everyone is in prison, either in chains, or in uniform.
Whether or not it is still possible to stop it is hard to say, but none can say you were not warned it was coming. When even the Libertarians are howling that common human rights and simple dignity and compassion are only for “us” and not for “them,” then it becomes difficult to say we still ought to have hope.
James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm
The criminalization of being Mexican and the making of war against them is the second stupidest mistake we have made in the last decade, the stupidest being the granting of unaccountable and unconstitutional power to the covert elements of our government by the deceitful initiation of the unjust wars of aggression against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
If that smirking Hermann-Goering-doppleganger Arizona Sheriff Arpaio were ever to be caught alone in Mexico within 100 miles of that border he is so ready to start shooting people over without his gang of club-packing “corrective” goons it is a crime to refuse to grovel before, his head would be on a stick in ten minutes and his body bloating in the sun like a rotting beached whale. Anyone with the most simple sense of the difference between justice and kneejerk law enforcement would have to agree that he deserved it. The same is true of that soulless walking mummy they call their Governor in that state.
The border to Mexico should be wide open, and Mexico a place as it once was, where any American could go with their families and be welcomed, and our country a place where any Mexican could come here and with no more fanfare than it takes to register to vote, sign up for the right to be here. Mexicans make good Americans, or at least they used to before the right-wing fascists of our Republican government made enemies of them. They should be made welcome here, and given the opportunity to do honest work, admitted to our schools and armies, instead of being driven into the criminal underground in order to survive as they try to help their families.
At some point, when we have built the DMZ (De-Mexicanized Zone) on our border, and battalions of armed peacekeepers crouch on that line in the sand with rifles pointed south, we will be violently shown that the enemy is then behind them, already here across the border, about fifty million of them, some citizens, some with papers, and some with nothing but their hunger and their rage. That, unfortunately, is exactly what the “patriots” of the police state are waiting for.
As everyone from Macchiavelli to Orwell has pointed out for centuries, the militant authoritarian security state needs two enemies to survive. One of those is an undefinable foreign enemy, preferably of a different race and religion, one not limited to a particular nation or even a particular activity or ideology. Those are the “terrorists” to be feared, and endless war made against. The other is internal, justifying the treatment of every person in the country as a potential enemy, and therefore subject to the law enforcement modalities of the penal society. Those are now the Mexicans, whose capital crime is simply to be here. The third most powerful factor in such control is a crime which almost everyone commits. Whether through the use of prohibited common herbs or of misused prescriptions to addictive pharmos, that crime is the drugs. When all of us are either suspects, convicts, or on probation, it no longer matters what “rights” the citizens have by law, because those categories of people no longer have citizens’ rights. Where those crimes are made felonies, a point is reached where only those working for law enforcement still have the right to vote. Eventually, as in such states as the historic tragedies of communist Russia, China, and North Korea, everyone is in prison, either in chains, or in uniform.
Whether or not it is still possible to stop it is hard to say, but none can say you were not warned it was coming. When even the Libertarians are howling that common human rights and simple dignity and compassion are only for “us” and not for “them,” then it becomes difficult to say we still ought to have hope.
James Nathan Post
Albuquerque NM
www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Do You Defend The Constitution?
Do You Defend the Constitution? Even Against Christians?
About that Constitution some claim to love so fundamentally, and call on our leaders to respect and obey. America is NOT a Christian nation. It was very deliberately and wisely created as a secular nation, Newt notwithstanding. My copy of the First Amendment says, "...no law respecting an establishment of religion...." That is, the law may not be used to promote the dogma or doctrine of any establishment of religion, including any and all sects of Christianity. It also says, "....nor prohibiting the free practice thereof..." That is, even religions which Christians hate cannot be prohibited or persecuted by law, even if some individuals among them perform anti-American acts. There is no question about the Constitutionality of this, whether we like it or not. The right of Muslims to erect a Mosque near or on the WTC site is clearly protected, whether foolish or not.
If 9/11 had been perpetrated by a small group of fanatical renegade Zionist Jews, (like the Al Qaida Muslims) would it then be all right for the USA to carpet bomb Israel, or to deny the right to build synagogues in America, or to start identifying all the Jews and refusing them airline tickets?
The few Muslim Americans I know are exceptionally patriotic, though struggling today with being demonized and their children abused in public and in school. If the Bible-whacking Jingoists treat them badly enough to turn them against us, whose fault is that? After turning the 40 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are already in this country into our nation's angry enemies, do we really need another internal enemy who used to be our friend?
The basic error in the Holy Wars lies in the most fundamental principles which are at the root of all of the factions of the religions based on the occult idol known as The God Of Abraham. The three major factions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are each now nuclear armed and prepared to destroy the world to prove their version of the absurd soap-opera of Eden is more true than the others, and God will give what is left of the world to them alone. If you really care about God, the Earth, the United States Of America, or the human race, you might take a second look at that story.
James Post NO THANK YOU JESUS
About that Constitution some claim to love so fundamentally, and call on our leaders to respect and obey. America is NOT a Christian nation. It was very deliberately and wisely created as a secular nation, Newt notwithstanding. My copy of the First Amendment says, "...no law respecting an establishment of religion...." That is, the law may not be used to promote the dogma or doctrine of any establishment of religion, including any and all sects of Christianity. It also says, "....nor prohibiting the free practice thereof..." That is, even religions which Christians hate cannot be prohibited or persecuted by law, even if some individuals among them perform anti-American acts. There is no question about the Constitutionality of this, whether we like it or not. The right of Muslims to erect a Mosque near or on the WTC site is clearly protected, whether foolish or not.
If 9/11 had been perpetrated by a small group of fanatical renegade Zionist Jews, (like the Al Qaida Muslims) would it then be all right for the USA to carpet bomb Israel, or to deny the right to build synagogues in America, or to start identifying all the Jews and refusing them airline tickets?
The few Muslim Americans I know are exceptionally patriotic, though struggling today with being demonized and their children abused in public and in school. If the Bible-whacking Jingoists treat them badly enough to turn them against us, whose fault is that? After turning the 40 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are already in this country into our nation's angry enemies, do we really need another internal enemy who used to be our friend?
The basic error in the Holy Wars lies in the most fundamental principles which are at the root of all of the factions of the religions based on the occult idol known as The God Of Abraham. The three major factions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are each now nuclear armed and prepared to destroy the world to prove their version of the absurd soap-opera of Eden is more true than the others, and God will give what is left of the world to them alone. If you really care about God, the Earth, the United States Of America, or the human race, you might take a second look at that story.
James Post NO THANK YOU JESUS
Saturday, June 5, 2010
About The Medals.
About That Vietnam Campaign medal you say you've got...
My last three months in Vietnam I was Awards And Decorations Officer for a helicopter company. Almost daily I saw men who were the carefully selected and rigorously trained best our country had, our Kingsmen flight crews and support people, making heroic decisions and choices, and performing self-sacrificing acts of extreme risk to accomplish the mission or to protect the lives of others. These men all fulfilled the stated requirements for receiving many of the awards and medals, in Spades, like the Aces on the front of our ships. They did their part toward earning those decorations, not just on one rare heroic day in their tour, but every few days or so. It of course goes without saying that very few of them actually got the medals they deserved.
The admin process was the obstacle. First, somebody had to go through the steps of formally putting somebody in for something. Somebody then had to go find and interview others involved in the action, when they weren’t out getting shot at, and to get their statements documented. Next, there had to be a good writer in the loop, as the recommendations had to be very rigorously formatted, to include certain very specific language describing the action as prescribed in the regs for each different award. Without those specific words, it is rejected. To be selected by other admin people higher up the pile, people up at Division who read a stack of them every day, the description of the action had to read like a good adventure novel.
Then each page of each recommendation had to be duplicated in seven copies. Seven. (7!) The paper those who “support the troops” sold to the US Army those days was the crudest heavy acid-woodpulp stock made, not even newsprint grade, simply the worst paper in the world’s history. While paper made of papyrus or hemp (yes, that hemp) lasts thousands of years, the records of the Vietnam years are blackened and crumbling today. Our typewriters were huge ancient newsroom Royals, on which things were literally pounded out. Using carbon paper, it was possible to make one clear copy, and one barely legible fuzzy one. To make seven copies, every page had to be typed without error three times, or four if that last fuzzy one wasn’t legible.
I kept two clerks working full time just typing up recommendations for awards, and I wrote a lot of hyperbolic descriptions of the truly heroic things we Kingsmen were doing out there every day. I wish I’d had half of the super document processing tech we have today, and a lot more of that elite club of gray old vets now could say, “Yeah, I got the bones, with a V.”
I believe we who wear such things and hold them in high esteem as I do, are most likely to agree that having them is no big thing among ourselves, and they do not set those who have them apart from those who do not. Even so, the recognition by a grateful nation that you can show to your grandkids when it’s all just history to them is a meaningful thing, something to be held in honor for.
When so many who deserve that honor were not recognized, it is truly an indication of a very weak and not-so-clever character for a person to claim that honor to himself, when it is not deserved. Pretending to be a veteran to pick up girls at the country club bar is one thing. Girls know guys will lie about anything in the bar, so caveat emptora. Whether by innuendo or outright lie, however, saying it for the purpose of obtaining political power is a BIG RED FLAG. This guy wants to get elected for the wrong reason. Next he’ll be claiming the ghost of Ronald Reagan told him God wants him elected.
James Nathan Post
My last three months in Vietnam I was Awards And Decorations Officer for a helicopter company. Almost daily I saw men who were the carefully selected and rigorously trained best our country had, our Kingsmen flight crews and support people, making heroic decisions and choices, and performing self-sacrificing acts of extreme risk to accomplish the mission or to protect the lives of others. These men all fulfilled the stated requirements for receiving many of the awards and medals, in Spades, like the Aces on the front of our ships. They did their part toward earning those decorations, not just on one rare heroic day in their tour, but every few days or so. It of course goes without saying that very few of them actually got the medals they deserved.
The admin process was the obstacle. First, somebody had to go through the steps of formally putting somebody in for something. Somebody then had to go find and interview others involved in the action, when they weren’t out getting shot at, and to get their statements documented. Next, there had to be a good writer in the loop, as the recommendations had to be very rigorously formatted, to include certain very specific language describing the action as prescribed in the regs for each different award. Without those specific words, it is rejected. To be selected by other admin people higher up the pile, people up at Division who read a stack of them every day, the description of the action had to read like a good adventure novel.
Then each page of each recommendation had to be duplicated in seven copies. Seven. (7!) The paper those who “support the troops” sold to the US Army those days was the crudest heavy acid-woodpulp stock made, not even newsprint grade, simply the worst paper in the world’s history. While paper made of papyrus or hemp (yes, that hemp) lasts thousands of years, the records of the Vietnam years are blackened and crumbling today. Our typewriters were huge ancient newsroom Royals, on which things were literally pounded out. Using carbon paper, it was possible to make one clear copy, and one barely legible fuzzy one. To make seven copies, every page had to be typed without error three times, or four if that last fuzzy one wasn’t legible.
I kept two clerks working full time just typing up recommendations for awards, and I wrote a lot of hyperbolic descriptions of the truly heroic things we Kingsmen were doing out there every day. I wish I’d had half of the super document processing tech we have today, and a lot more of that elite club of gray old vets now could say, “Yeah, I got the bones, with a V.”
I believe we who wear such things and hold them in high esteem as I do, are most likely to agree that having them is no big thing among ourselves, and they do not set those who have them apart from those who do not. Even so, the recognition by a grateful nation that you can show to your grandkids when it’s all just history to them is a meaningful thing, something to be held in honor for.
When so many who deserve that honor were not recognized, it is truly an indication of a very weak and not-so-clever character for a person to claim that honor to himself, when it is not deserved. Pretending to be a veteran to pick up girls at the country club bar is one thing. Girls know guys will lie about anything in the bar, so caveat emptora. Whether by innuendo or outright lie, however, saying it for the purpose of obtaining political power is a BIG RED FLAG. This guy wants to get elected for the wrong reason. Next he’ll be claiming the ghost of Ronald Reagan told him God wants him elected.
James Nathan Post
Friday, June 4, 2010
Off Post On The Oil Slick.
Off Post On The Oil Slick.
We see a lot on TV involving the executives of the companies involved, various political figures from The President down, and boards of investigators and lawyers to determine such things as criminal negligence, and who has to pay what to whom. These are all worthwhile activities, but neither the business management guys nor the politicians are the ones I would expect to have the serious advantage in deciding how to deal with the oil leak. That is the real and foremost problem, even more than the horror of trying to clean up Pensacola before the tourists get there. To solve that problem, my background among working class engineers leads me to believe the people who know best how to fix that machine are the guys who built it, and who are out there every day working it. That would be not the CEO of BP, nor some Federal suit sent down there by a Senatorial committee, but the guys who live there and know every bolt and tube of that huge and terribly dangerous machine, like the crew of a submarine.
The GOP’s obstructionists-as-usual who last year were accusing President Obama of acting like a Fascist taking command of errant businesses are now yelling that he is a weakling because he has not taken Fascist command of the international corporations involved in this dreadful mishap. It appears to me he has arrived at the same street-smart conclusion that I did, and with his usual serene class, is letting the company’s engineers do it, while the pundits and the polits babble on about who is to blame, and how to vote next fall. It is quite likely that the first people he called a month ago included Robert Ballard, the deep-water expert who found Titanic, and a couple of nuclear subs working with US Navy dark ops. He would know the what and where of every piece of deep-water research and engineering equipment in both civilian science and military operations, anywhere in the world. If anybody had retrodesigned USO alien underwater technology, he would know about it. The next call was likely his CNO, the Chief Of Naval Operations, of whom he would ask the same question, “What do we have, secret or not, that has the capacity to work down there?” He would immediately inform the BP operations commander on the job at the site that certain resources were available, and would be brought in if they wanted them.
If I were President, when I heard that the reasonable-sounding idea of putting a big funnel over the pipe and sucking the oil right up it and into a tanker ship was not working because ice was forming inside it, I would have called that CNO and told him to immediately, like in 24 hours, inform me of which nuclear powered US Navy ship could be sent fastest to that accident site. That ship, whether a submarine or an aircraft carrier, would proceed there immediately, and get with that BP operations chief and work out the fastest way to use the ship’s nuclear power plant to create the largest amount of the hottest water possible, and to get it piped down to that capture chamber. It would be best if it was an aircraft carrier, where the jet jock students at Pensacola could fly out to conduct their carrier landing qualifications, and where The President could fly out there in Marine One and declare “Mission Accomplished” when it worked.
As for cleaning up the mess, I believe the answer lies in the power of American entrepreneurism. Last I heard, somebody was paying somebody about $75 a barrel for the stuff coming out of that hole, which is also known as crude oil we measure our lives in barrels of. How about if BP agreed to set up collection stations, and would pay anybody $75 a barrel for all of it they can bring in? I think the way to clean up the oil is not to tax us and pay somebody to treat it as toxic waste and get rid of it somewhere. The way to clean it up is to let Americans harvest it. Let the Junkyard Wars guys, and Adam and Jamie the Mythbusters, and the bayou boys who build those wonderful mud racers get ahold of the problem.
Here’s an answer I figure might be worth trying: you make a ten thousand gallon tank that sits in the hold of your little boat, which is basically just a hull for the tank, made like a fiberglass swimming pool. That would be a tank only about as big as an RV, really private-enterprise small boat stuff. On the front of the boat is a big suction scoop, which lies on the surface like a wide and flat vacuum cleaner, hooked up to a pump. You move through the oil slick and suck up the top surface of oil and water. That mixture is pumped into your tank. The tank is closed on the top, but has an opening at the bottom. As the oil and water separate, the tank is filled with oil from the top down. When it is full of oil, you close the vent on the bottom and proceed to the BP receiving station. 10,000 gallons is about 200 barrels, which at $75 a barrel is $15,000. Even if BP paid only $1 a gallon for the stuff, that would still be $10,000 a trip, which is enough to motivate unemployed guys who used to go out for shrimp. With floating oil and underwater plumes to be harvested only a few miles offshore, a boat that size could likely make four trips a day, working in four-man crews round the clock in shifts. It would be hard and dirty work, but they could make a pretty good working-class nickel. That is a policy that would really create jobs, lots of them, especially among those who have lost their fishing jobs. No government program I know of could possibly equal the ability to actually go pick up and recycle that spilled oil faster than just paying Americans to go get it. Even the entire Coast Guard does not have the ability to clean up as much of it as a couple hundred of such little boats… or a couple thousand.
James Nathan Post
Here is a song I wrote 30 years ago about working on the Texas Tower. Performed by “Sarah’n’Dippity.”
We see a lot on TV involving the executives of the companies involved, various political figures from The President down, and boards of investigators and lawyers to determine such things as criminal negligence, and who has to pay what to whom. These are all worthwhile activities, but neither the business management guys nor the politicians are the ones I would expect to have the serious advantage in deciding how to deal with the oil leak. That is the real and foremost problem, even more than the horror of trying to clean up Pensacola before the tourists get there. To solve that problem, my background among working class engineers leads me to believe the people who know best how to fix that machine are the guys who built it, and who are out there every day working it. That would be not the CEO of BP, nor some Federal suit sent down there by a Senatorial committee, but the guys who live there and know every bolt and tube of that huge and terribly dangerous machine, like the crew of a submarine.
The GOP’s obstructionists-as-usual who last year were accusing President Obama of acting like a Fascist taking command of errant businesses are now yelling that he is a weakling because he has not taken Fascist command of the international corporations involved in this dreadful mishap. It appears to me he has arrived at the same street-smart conclusion that I did, and with his usual serene class, is letting the company’s engineers do it, while the pundits and the polits babble on about who is to blame, and how to vote next fall. It is quite likely that the first people he called a month ago included Robert Ballard, the deep-water expert who found Titanic, and a couple of nuclear subs working with US Navy dark ops. He would know the what and where of every piece of deep-water research and engineering equipment in both civilian science and military operations, anywhere in the world. If anybody had retrodesigned USO alien underwater technology, he would know about it. The next call was likely his CNO, the Chief Of Naval Operations, of whom he would ask the same question, “What do we have, secret or not, that has the capacity to work down there?” He would immediately inform the BP operations commander on the job at the site that certain resources were available, and would be brought in if they wanted them.
If I were President, when I heard that the reasonable-sounding idea of putting a big funnel over the pipe and sucking the oil right up it and into a tanker ship was not working because ice was forming inside it, I would have called that CNO and told him to immediately, like in 24 hours, inform me of which nuclear powered US Navy ship could be sent fastest to that accident site. That ship, whether a submarine or an aircraft carrier, would proceed there immediately, and get with that BP operations chief and work out the fastest way to use the ship’s nuclear power plant to create the largest amount of the hottest water possible, and to get it piped down to that capture chamber. It would be best if it was an aircraft carrier, where the jet jock students at Pensacola could fly out to conduct their carrier landing qualifications, and where The President could fly out there in Marine One and declare “Mission Accomplished” when it worked.
As for cleaning up the mess, I believe the answer lies in the power of American entrepreneurism. Last I heard, somebody was paying somebody about $75 a barrel for the stuff coming out of that hole, which is also known as crude oil we measure our lives in barrels of. How about if BP agreed to set up collection stations, and would pay anybody $75 a barrel for all of it they can bring in? I think the way to clean up the oil is not to tax us and pay somebody to treat it as toxic waste and get rid of it somewhere. The way to clean it up is to let Americans harvest it. Let the Junkyard Wars guys, and Adam and Jamie the Mythbusters, and the bayou boys who build those wonderful mud racers get ahold of the problem.
Here’s an answer I figure might be worth trying: you make a ten thousand gallon tank that sits in the hold of your little boat, which is basically just a hull for the tank, made like a fiberglass swimming pool. That would be a tank only about as big as an RV, really private-enterprise small boat stuff. On the front of the boat is a big suction scoop, which lies on the surface like a wide and flat vacuum cleaner, hooked up to a pump. You move through the oil slick and suck up the top surface of oil and water. That mixture is pumped into your tank. The tank is closed on the top, but has an opening at the bottom. As the oil and water separate, the tank is filled with oil from the top down. When it is full of oil, you close the vent on the bottom and proceed to the BP receiving station. 10,000 gallons is about 200 barrels, which at $75 a barrel is $15,000. Even if BP paid only $1 a gallon for the stuff, that would still be $10,000 a trip, which is enough to motivate unemployed guys who used to go out for shrimp. With floating oil and underwater plumes to be harvested only a few miles offshore, a boat that size could likely make four trips a day, working in four-man crews round the clock in shifts. It would be hard and dirty work, but they could make a pretty good working-class nickel. That is a policy that would really create jobs, lots of them, especially among those who have lost their fishing jobs. No government program I know of could possibly equal the ability to actually go pick up and recycle that spilled oil faster than just paying Americans to go get it. Even the entire Coast Guard does not have the ability to clean up as much of it as a couple hundred of such little boats… or a couple thousand.
James Nathan Post
Here is a song I wrote 30 years ago about working on the Texas Tower. Performed by “Sarah’n’Dippity.”
Thursday, June 3, 2010
A Crime To Burn The Flag?
Is Burning The Flag A Crime?
(Note: this is one of the column essays of the first volume of The Anti-Cyclops Papers, written in 2000.)
The movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit burning the flag as a political statement is well-intentioned, but a terrible mistake. Our flag is a symbol of a special relationship between citizen and state: the voluntary loyalty of free private individuals. I was taught in Army officer training that obedience can be demanded, but respect must be earned. If a citizen may be prosecuted for disrespect toward a sacred symbol of freedom -- or any other symbol -- then his right to any dissent is eroded, and the flag is thus truly tarnished. How sad when the right to make public statements against the government is being newly granted in Russia to see that right attacked in America.
When a person wraps himself in the flag, then calls for a law against flag-burning, what is he really trying to protect, and where does it end? Would a flag-burning amendment also prohibit shredding the flag as a statement against covert government? How about throwing acid on the flag to protest toxic pollution, or staining the flag pink as a statement against pro-communist sentiment in America, or pro-gay? How about such similar disrespectful acts as burning the President in effigy, or peeing on The Wall many veterans hold so sacred? Surely these are deplorable acts, and some of them must rankle us pretty badly, but where the rights protecting such public declarations of political opinion are absent in the world, it is there we declare oppressive government exists. It is where we see the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights to be absent that we feel most justified in sending our soldiers as defenders of democracy. If in the name of defending the flag we abandon those rights, we shall have lost the battle for freedom without even facing an enemy.
The enslaved may be compelled to obey; the free must be inspired. So let the dogs bark at the flag, and if they tear it down and destroy it, raise high another. Let us stand firm as champions of personal liberty throughout the world to defend others’ right to yell insults and cast dung at any icon of power, and when those who see this are moved to revulsion for the desecrators of symbols and respect for the defenders of rights, then our purpose will have truly prevailed.
I am a combat veteran, and I fly the Stars and Stripes on my car and in my home, but I certainly did not, nor would I ever fight for "The Flag." I fought, and would fight again against any enemy, to preserve those principles of responsible freedom for which I was taught the Flag stands, that is, is a symbol of, a statement, a word. Whether flown, folded, or set on fire, it is not of itself a sacred thing, such that it should not be subject to the First Amendment's definition of free speech.
As a libertarian refinement of a democratic constitution, the Bill Of Rights is a pinnacle of achievement in applied social philosophy. It is unique in that it is intended not to impose limitations on the citizen, but instead to guarantee limitations shall not be imposed. For me, the Flag is a sacred symbol of that statutory guarantee of the freedom of the private citizen.
Those who promote the No-Burn Amendment wish to add to the Constitution not another guarantee of liberty, but a punitive restriction of political expression. That is, they would make of the Flag a symbol not of civil freedom, but of enforced display of civil obedience. The movement is an attempt to rally the unthinkingly obedient around the Flag as a symbol of patriotic loyalty, where they lack committment to an issue that might mobilize an informed and politically active citizenry -- a practice sometimes called jingoism. As such, the Jingo Amendment is the antithesis of those principles for which the Flag stands.
If the freedom for which the Flag stands is sacrificed to prevent destruction of that symbol as a statement of political dissent, then is the Flag truly desecrated. If the libertarian spirit of the Bill of Rights is not kept alive in the United States of America, then that great document becomes only the hemp linen shroud in which the greatest political experiment in the history of mankind is mummified for the historians -- and perhaps the hopeful idealists -- of another day. This is our day. Let us not lose it.
James Nathan Post
(Note: this is one of the column essays of the first volume of The Anti-Cyclops Papers, written in 2000.)
The movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit burning the flag as a political statement is well-intentioned, but a terrible mistake. Our flag is a symbol of a special relationship between citizen and state: the voluntary loyalty of free private individuals. I was taught in Army officer training that obedience can be demanded, but respect must be earned. If a citizen may be prosecuted for disrespect toward a sacred symbol of freedom -- or any other symbol -- then his right to any dissent is eroded, and the flag is thus truly tarnished. How sad when the right to make public statements against the government is being newly granted in Russia to see that right attacked in America.
When a person wraps himself in the flag, then calls for a law against flag-burning, what is he really trying to protect, and where does it end? Would a flag-burning amendment also prohibit shredding the flag as a statement against covert government? How about throwing acid on the flag to protest toxic pollution, or staining the flag pink as a statement against pro-communist sentiment in America, or pro-gay? How about such similar disrespectful acts as burning the President in effigy, or peeing on The Wall many veterans hold so sacred? Surely these are deplorable acts, and some of them must rankle us pretty badly, but where the rights protecting such public declarations of political opinion are absent in the world, it is there we declare oppressive government exists. It is where we see the freedoms guaranteed by our Bill of Rights to be absent that we feel most justified in sending our soldiers as defenders of democracy. If in the name of defending the flag we abandon those rights, we shall have lost the battle for freedom without even facing an enemy.
The enslaved may be compelled to obey; the free must be inspired. So let the dogs bark at the flag, and if they tear it down and destroy it, raise high another. Let us stand firm as champions of personal liberty throughout the world to defend others’ right to yell insults and cast dung at any icon of power, and when those who see this are moved to revulsion for the desecrators of symbols and respect for the defenders of rights, then our purpose will have truly prevailed.
I am a combat veteran, and I fly the Stars and Stripes on my car and in my home, but I certainly did not, nor would I ever fight for "The Flag." I fought, and would fight again against any enemy, to preserve those principles of responsible freedom for which I was taught the Flag stands, that is, is a symbol of, a statement, a word. Whether flown, folded, or set on fire, it is not of itself a sacred thing, such that it should not be subject to the First Amendment's definition of free speech.
As a libertarian refinement of a democratic constitution, the Bill Of Rights is a pinnacle of achievement in applied social philosophy. It is unique in that it is intended not to impose limitations on the citizen, but instead to guarantee limitations shall not be imposed. For me, the Flag is a sacred symbol of that statutory guarantee of the freedom of the private citizen.
Those who promote the No-Burn Amendment wish to add to the Constitution not another guarantee of liberty, but a punitive restriction of political expression. That is, they would make of the Flag a symbol not of civil freedom, but of enforced display of civil obedience. The movement is an attempt to rally the unthinkingly obedient around the Flag as a symbol of patriotic loyalty, where they lack committment to an issue that might mobilize an informed and politically active citizenry -- a practice sometimes called jingoism. As such, the Jingo Amendment is the antithesis of those principles for which the Flag stands.
If the freedom for which the Flag stands is sacrificed to prevent destruction of that symbol as a statement of political dissent, then is the Flag truly desecrated. If the libertarian spirit of the Bill of Rights is not kept alive in the United States of America, then that great document becomes only the hemp linen shroud in which the greatest political experiment in the history of mankind is mummified for the historians -- and perhaps the hopeful idealists -- of another day. This is our day. Let us not lose it.
James Nathan Post
Monday, May 31, 2010
Mexican Drug War Progress?
Mexican Drug War Progress?
It wasn’t but just a few years ago that Mexicans coming up here were mostly two groups, the marijuanos and the braceros. The braceros were honest people who came to this country, the country of their dreams, to work hard for less money than the poorest American workers are paid. They appreciated the opportunity. They were not murderers, rapists, or thieves, but people with the family values to suffer risk and hardship. Because of them, the agriculture of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was made profitable, and our economy flourished. It was pretty hard on the Mexicans, but they could still earn enough to send home more money than they could make back in Mexico. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.
What the marijuanos brought into this country is a highly desired commodity, highly desired by tens of millions of Americans. Though it is not addictive, and nothing is stopping anyone from quitting it, those millions all agree that it is such a benefit in their lives that they say it is forbidden to them unrighteously, and they are willing to become outlaws to exercise what they believe should be their right to do, and they buy it and smoke it. It was about the only thing a Mexican could carry on his body and smuggle up here which he could be certain he could get a good price for. The Mexicans who grew the marijuana lived out in the country, and they had a good protective relationship going with their local authorities, and because they were growing the only possible money crop on the land, they could afford to send their children away to college, perhaps even to travel like American tourists do. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.
At some point somebody in American politics started getting up steam among working voters complaining about seeing Mexicans with jobs and food stamps, when they were paying the taxes, and how somebody should stop the Mexicans from coming across the border. The politicians didn’t want to let on they knew the farms would fail if they had to pay legal wages, so they had two solutions to the problem. One was the California system. When you find Mexicans without papers, you put the women with American-born children into state housing, and you put the men in jail as dope smugglers and deadbeat dads. You’ve also got the Texas solution. You put up a keep-out sign and make the river run red with the ones that don’t. That seems to be the Arizona solution too. They are down there making themselves a Taco Curtain, two fences with the ground cleared out in the middle, a DMZ. That’s a De-Mexicanized Zone. I was in Vietnam, on the DMZ, where we had the First Cav Division, my division the One-O-Worst (yes, we were the baddest), the US Marines, a fleet of Navy jets, and Air Force bombers that flew five hours to get there and dropped more bombs on each mission than a whole squadron of B-17s, and we still couldn’t keep people from getting across that strip of enforced border. Do we really want that in Nogales, and Laredo?
A few years ago the American drug companies who keep marijuana illegal because it can compete with their products put the pressure on the Congressmen they own to give money to the Mexican government to arm their DEA and send them out to make a real shooting War On Drugs against the people growing and smuggling marijuana. One way or another, that was pretty much everybody. To a good old Texas boy like George Bush, getting the Mexicans to solve his smuggling problem for him by shooting each other on the other side of the border was not just the most effective thing possible, it was funny as hell. Twenty thousand wetbacks and Mexican dope dealers have died down there, and we haven’t fired a shot. Then they blame the murders on the marijuana. Them good old boys are laughing their asses off. If that ain’t Drug War victory, I’ll kiss a pig.
The entire local economy of the northern states of Mexico is built on the smuggling and labor markets, legal and illegal. From highly placed officials to local estate dons, to the soldiers and the campesinos, there was a structure which peacefully and successfully conducted trade in a market which everybody must pretend they know nothing about, but everybody is making money doing. Suddenly there’s an invasion, with the trucks and the helicopters, and men with sharp new uniforms and machine guns, and people are shot, and arrested. People are betrayed, and imprisoned, and they become vengeful enemies of other people, and where before they were peaceful and loyal citizens, even if technically outlaws, they become truly the enemies of the state, filled with hatred for their own country’s government, and especially for ours. There is chaos, and they are at war.
The structure of connections which grew, marketed, and distributed the marijuana was suddenly disrupted, but the most fundamental truth is still true. Marijuana is still the only crop the common people can grow there for which they can make more money than doing brute labor.
Suddenly the dons, the estate holders, are gone, and the commissioners and deputies who maintained the protected order are gone too, killed or arrested. Crops are destroyed, and the growers must go farther underground, farther out in the country. There is a market which still must be served, however, if the economy is to survive with or without the gringos’ war. Suddenly there is hard competition for the seats of power, for the protection of product, and the protection of place in the market. The enemy of them all is the terrible killing machine the Americans sold their government, with its helicopters and black-armored robo-soldiers. They are also the enemies of each other. Each of them has been taken into the dark rooms and made to betray the other. Each of them has lost someone, betrayed by the other. Now they are truly at war, a war among themselves, and against an invincible high-tech overlord that comes in like from outer space and punishes them by killing the survivors, and destroying their fields and homes.
In such an environment, there is only one structure of organization that can survive such odds, and that is what is called Gangism. When I was a boy, the first thing we learned in the Cub Scouts was The Law Of The Pack. There were rules you did not break, nor fail to obey. You advanced by accomplishment in defined goals. As in a close family church, or a military unit with esprit de corps, the others are like brothers to you, but closer than brothers. Their fate is your fate, their fight your fight, and their respect your only desire. Akela is the leader, the top wolf in the pack, and when he speaks, all the other wolves stand up straight and listen. It is about loyalty and obedience, and being true to the values and goals of the order. The gangs are like that, but more so. They are truly wolves, and not packs of donkeys or babbling geese, or even good dogs. Wolves. The real wolf leader is not a discussion moderator. He could kick all the other wolves’ asses, and if you don’t want to take him on, you roll over and wag your tail. The price of disloyalty is to be torn apart by the other wolves, or at least, banished from the pack. When the pack hunts, you eat. When the pack fights, you kill or die.
Only the gangs are disciplined enough, and ruthlessly violent enough, to survive against the power of an armed DEA. Therefore, the new organizations that succeed the old ones will be gangs, instead of the post-feudal estates of yesterday. In America’s jails, new gang members are recruited by pointing out that those without their protection are prey to the black gangs, and the skinheads with the swastikas on their faces. Their families are identified and placed under pressure by agents on the outside, and they are made to understand the law of the pack is neither voluntary nor democratic. To be admitted, they must accept the demands of blood-in, blood-out loyalty. They must commit crimes that bind them for life, and they know if they try to leave, they will be hunted down and killed by their former brothers, and their families will be killed. This produces an organization of great power and implacable will. There is nothing surprising about this idea. It is the foundation of the Catholic Church. You must agree to take part in the murder by ritual sacrifice of the innocent Jesus to get in, and if you commit heresy or disobedience, you are burned at the stake. Blood in; blood out.
Certain big changes were done to the market by making war in Mexico. Marijuana is not easy to smuggle. It requires lots of land to produce, it is large in volume, it smells strong, and for its weight, is very low profit. It is favored by a clientele that are generally peaceful and easygoing, and likewise is grown by people who just want to be peaceful farmers. Its use does not lend itself to the gang system of social structure or marketing. The Mexican marijuana market has dropped off to almost nothing, and the quality of what gets through is very low due to the processing needs for smuggling. That is not grounds for congratulation, however, as it has been replaced by something which is truly dangerous, terribly and unquestionably lethal. Even heroin is not a drug that lends itself as well to the gang system as this new horror. Most people who use heroin are not desperate criminals, and only the weakest few actually destroy themselves with it. When a heroin user has a good supply, and he is in control of his addiction, he is at peace, and able to conduct a regular life. He is a threat to nobody. It is only when his supply is cut off that he becomes desperate, and dangerous.
However, there is a drug which is perfect for the life of the gang, and that is methedrine. It does not require a large agricultural base, and so it does not profit the common growers in Mexico, nor suffer their vulnerability to interdiction by the DEA. Great amounts of it can be made quickly in small movable laboratories, from products that can be bought on the open market (from American pharmo and chemical companies). It has almost no smell when finished, can be compacted into a very small space, and is easy to smuggle. Even a small amount is worth a lot of money. It is the most addictive substance ever created, and its users are most dangerous when they have it, as they are driven to action by a feeling more powerful than adrenaline. Like the extreme use of cocaine, it is an ego expander, and its users come to feel themselves invincible, and their thinking unchallengable as revelation. They feel no pain, suffer no fear, and they have great delusions which drive them to fight and to kill ruthlessly, for the thrill, and for the right to tattoo another merit badge on their chests. When they are suffering from withdrawal, they will do anything, literally anything, to get it. So, of course, will their clientele. An organized gang of angry Mexicans which traffic in methedrine to an American clientele they hate is a calculating predatory monster with which there is no reasoning, no compromise.
A few years ago we had a Mexican problem, we thought, because we had basically good people coming up here selling marijuana and working for the lowest wages in a country they hoped someday to live in. Now we have Americans dropping dead by the thousands from the cruel addiction to the methedrine, and we have prisons full of Mexicans who are being forged into cadres of highly organized extreme homicidal death squads who hate America and Americans, and from any reasonable point of view, justly. Instead of the open border and peaceful relationship with our nearest and should-be-best neighbor which I enjoyed growing up in New Mexico, we now are arming our border with robot airplanes and soldiers with guns, fanning the flames of racism on both sides, and making another nation of people our hated opponents.
We have made enemies not only of those Mexicans who are trying to get across the border, but of those who are already here. There are about fifty million of them, some born with citizenship, some with papers, some with millions of dollars and powerful positions, and some who have nothing but their hunger and their rage. I like to say Mexicans make good Americans. I know them to be good family-oriented hard-working people who make the best of friends. They are also a people with the cultural heritage of the Mayans, for whom the celebration of death was the very fabric of their society. The people of Aztlan accepted the idolatry of the Catholic Church precisely because it is a cult of human sacrifice. As the toreador in the arena demonstrates so gracefully and so cruelly, Mexicans are a people who dance with Death.
Like our Muslim problem, today’s Mexican problem is our own Frankenstein. What the anti-Mexican right-wing Drug War proponents and the left-wing social-services client-group-creators in and out of government have given us is already ten, a hundred times worse than the pot mules and chile pickers against whom we started this blood bath, and it is just beginning. Al Qaida was once just a small club of effete religious intellectuals who conceived and executed a single elegant tactical plan. As a result of the reaction of the same American leaders to that mission, there are now thousands of them, enemies we created who were once our friends. Take a lesson, for likewise, I warn you, to arouse the spirit of Mexico against us is to awaken the Jaguar.
James Nathan Post
If you happen to love the Mexican and Hispanic culture as I do from growing up in Billy The Kid's rugged and rowdy old Mexican border hometown of Mesilla, you might enjoy this book of humorous and heartwarming stories from the days of old New Mexico.
Three Tales In Lastima
It wasn’t but just a few years ago that Mexicans coming up here were mostly two groups, the marijuanos and the braceros. The braceros were honest people who came to this country, the country of their dreams, to work hard for less money than the poorest American workers are paid. They appreciated the opportunity. They were not murderers, rapists, or thieves, but people with the family values to suffer risk and hardship. Because of them, the agriculture of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was made profitable, and our economy flourished. It was pretty hard on the Mexicans, but they could still earn enough to send home more money than they could make back in Mexico. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.
What the marijuanos brought into this country is a highly desired commodity, highly desired by tens of millions of Americans. Though it is not addictive, and nothing is stopping anyone from quitting it, those millions all agree that it is such a benefit in their lives that they say it is forbidden to them unrighteously, and they are willing to become outlaws to exercise what they believe should be their right to do, and they buy it and smoke it. It was about the only thing a Mexican could carry on his body and smuggle up here which he could be certain he could get a good price for. The Mexicans who grew the marijuana lived out in the country, and they had a good protective relationship going with their local authorities, and because they were growing the only possible money crop on the land, they could afford to send their children away to college, perhaps even to travel like American tourists do. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.
At some point somebody in American politics started getting up steam among working voters complaining about seeing Mexicans with jobs and food stamps, when they were paying the taxes, and how somebody should stop the Mexicans from coming across the border. The politicians didn’t want to let on they knew the farms would fail if they had to pay legal wages, so they had two solutions to the problem. One was the California system. When you find Mexicans without papers, you put the women with American-born children into state housing, and you put the men in jail as dope smugglers and deadbeat dads. You’ve also got the Texas solution. You put up a keep-out sign and make the river run red with the ones that don’t. That seems to be the Arizona solution too. They are down there making themselves a Taco Curtain, two fences with the ground cleared out in the middle, a DMZ. That’s a De-Mexicanized Zone. I was in Vietnam, on the DMZ, where we had the First Cav Division, my division the One-O-Worst (yes, we were the baddest), the US Marines, a fleet of Navy jets, and Air Force bombers that flew five hours to get there and dropped more bombs on each mission than a whole squadron of B-17s, and we still couldn’t keep people from getting across that strip of enforced border. Do we really want that in Nogales, and Laredo?
A few years ago the American drug companies who keep marijuana illegal because it can compete with their products put the pressure on the Congressmen they own to give money to the Mexican government to arm their DEA and send them out to make a real shooting War On Drugs against the people growing and smuggling marijuana. One way or another, that was pretty much everybody. To a good old Texas boy like George Bush, getting the Mexicans to solve his smuggling problem for him by shooting each other on the other side of the border was not just the most effective thing possible, it was funny as hell. Twenty thousand wetbacks and Mexican dope dealers have died down there, and we haven’t fired a shot. Then they blame the murders on the marijuana. Them good old boys are laughing their asses off. If that ain’t Drug War victory, I’ll kiss a pig.
The entire local economy of the northern states of Mexico is built on the smuggling and labor markets, legal and illegal. From highly placed officials to local estate dons, to the soldiers and the campesinos, there was a structure which peacefully and successfully conducted trade in a market which everybody must pretend they know nothing about, but everybody is making money doing. Suddenly there’s an invasion, with the trucks and the helicopters, and men with sharp new uniforms and machine guns, and people are shot, and arrested. People are betrayed, and imprisoned, and they become vengeful enemies of other people, and where before they were peaceful and loyal citizens, even if technically outlaws, they become truly the enemies of the state, filled with hatred for their own country’s government, and especially for ours. There is chaos, and they are at war.
The structure of connections which grew, marketed, and distributed the marijuana was suddenly disrupted, but the most fundamental truth is still true. Marijuana is still the only crop the common people can grow there for which they can make more money than doing brute labor.
Suddenly the dons, the estate holders, are gone, and the commissioners and deputies who maintained the protected order are gone too, killed or arrested. Crops are destroyed, and the growers must go farther underground, farther out in the country. There is a market which still must be served, however, if the economy is to survive with or without the gringos’ war. Suddenly there is hard competition for the seats of power, for the protection of product, and the protection of place in the market. The enemy of them all is the terrible killing machine the Americans sold their government, with its helicopters and black-armored robo-soldiers. They are also the enemies of each other. Each of them has been taken into the dark rooms and made to betray the other. Each of them has lost someone, betrayed by the other. Now they are truly at war, a war among themselves, and against an invincible high-tech overlord that comes in like from outer space and punishes them by killing the survivors, and destroying their fields and homes.
In such an environment, there is only one structure of organization that can survive such odds, and that is what is called Gangism. When I was a boy, the first thing we learned in the Cub Scouts was The Law Of The Pack. There were rules you did not break, nor fail to obey. You advanced by accomplishment in defined goals. As in a close family church, or a military unit with esprit de corps, the others are like brothers to you, but closer than brothers. Their fate is your fate, their fight your fight, and their respect your only desire. Akela is the leader, the top wolf in the pack, and when he speaks, all the other wolves stand up straight and listen. It is about loyalty and obedience, and being true to the values and goals of the order. The gangs are like that, but more so. They are truly wolves, and not packs of donkeys or babbling geese, or even good dogs. Wolves. The real wolf leader is not a discussion moderator. He could kick all the other wolves’ asses, and if you don’t want to take him on, you roll over and wag your tail. The price of disloyalty is to be torn apart by the other wolves, or at least, banished from the pack. When the pack hunts, you eat. When the pack fights, you kill or die.
Only the gangs are disciplined enough, and ruthlessly violent enough, to survive against the power of an armed DEA. Therefore, the new organizations that succeed the old ones will be gangs, instead of the post-feudal estates of yesterday. In America’s jails, new gang members are recruited by pointing out that those without their protection are prey to the black gangs, and the skinheads with the swastikas on their faces. Their families are identified and placed under pressure by agents on the outside, and they are made to understand the law of the pack is neither voluntary nor democratic. To be admitted, they must accept the demands of blood-in, blood-out loyalty. They must commit crimes that bind them for life, and they know if they try to leave, they will be hunted down and killed by their former brothers, and their families will be killed. This produces an organization of great power and implacable will. There is nothing surprising about this idea. It is the foundation of the Catholic Church. You must agree to take part in the murder by ritual sacrifice of the innocent Jesus to get in, and if you commit heresy or disobedience, you are burned at the stake. Blood in; blood out.
Certain big changes were done to the market by making war in Mexico. Marijuana is not easy to smuggle. It requires lots of land to produce, it is large in volume, it smells strong, and for its weight, is very low profit. It is favored by a clientele that are generally peaceful and easygoing, and likewise is grown by people who just want to be peaceful farmers. Its use does not lend itself to the gang system of social structure or marketing. The Mexican marijuana market has dropped off to almost nothing, and the quality of what gets through is very low due to the processing needs for smuggling. That is not grounds for congratulation, however, as it has been replaced by something which is truly dangerous, terribly and unquestionably lethal. Even heroin is not a drug that lends itself as well to the gang system as this new horror. Most people who use heroin are not desperate criminals, and only the weakest few actually destroy themselves with it. When a heroin user has a good supply, and he is in control of his addiction, he is at peace, and able to conduct a regular life. He is a threat to nobody. It is only when his supply is cut off that he becomes desperate, and dangerous.
However, there is a drug which is perfect for the life of the gang, and that is methedrine. It does not require a large agricultural base, and so it does not profit the common growers in Mexico, nor suffer their vulnerability to interdiction by the DEA. Great amounts of it can be made quickly in small movable laboratories, from products that can be bought on the open market (from American pharmo and chemical companies). It has almost no smell when finished, can be compacted into a very small space, and is easy to smuggle. Even a small amount is worth a lot of money. It is the most addictive substance ever created, and its users are most dangerous when they have it, as they are driven to action by a feeling more powerful than adrenaline. Like the extreme use of cocaine, it is an ego expander, and its users come to feel themselves invincible, and their thinking unchallengable as revelation. They feel no pain, suffer no fear, and they have great delusions which drive them to fight and to kill ruthlessly, for the thrill, and for the right to tattoo another merit badge on their chests. When they are suffering from withdrawal, they will do anything, literally anything, to get it. So, of course, will their clientele. An organized gang of angry Mexicans which traffic in methedrine to an American clientele they hate is a calculating predatory monster with which there is no reasoning, no compromise.
A few years ago we had a Mexican problem, we thought, because we had basically good people coming up here selling marijuana and working for the lowest wages in a country they hoped someday to live in. Now we have Americans dropping dead by the thousands from the cruel addiction to the methedrine, and we have prisons full of Mexicans who are being forged into cadres of highly organized extreme homicidal death squads who hate America and Americans, and from any reasonable point of view, justly. Instead of the open border and peaceful relationship with our nearest and should-be-best neighbor which I enjoyed growing up in New Mexico, we now are arming our border with robot airplanes and soldiers with guns, fanning the flames of racism on both sides, and making another nation of people our hated opponents.
We have made enemies not only of those Mexicans who are trying to get across the border, but of those who are already here. There are about fifty million of them, some born with citizenship, some with papers, some with millions of dollars and powerful positions, and some who have nothing but their hunger and their rage. I like to say Mexicans make good Americans. I know them to be good family-oriented hard-working people who make the best of friends. They are also a people with the cultural heritage of the Mayans, for whom the celebration of death was the very fabric of their society. The people of Aztlan accepted the idolatry of the Catholic Church precisely because it is a cult of human sacrifice. As the toreador in the arena demonstrates so gracefully and so cruelly, Mexicans are a people who dance with Death.
Like our Muslim problem, today’s Mexican problem is our own Frankenstein. What the anti-Mexican right-wing Drug War proponents and the left-wing social-services client-group-creators in and out of government have given us is already ten, a hundred times worse than the pot mules and chile pickers against whom we started this blood bath, and it is just beginning. Al Qaida was once just a small club of effete religious intellectuals who conceived and executed a single elegant tactical plan. As a result of the reaction of the same American leaders to that mission, there are now thousands of them, enemies we created who were once our friends. Take a lesson, for likewise, I warn you, to arouse the spirit of Mexico against us is to awaken the Jaguar.
James Nathan Post
If you happen to love the Mexican and Hispanic culture as I do from growing up in Billy The Kid's rugged and rowdy old Mexican border hometown of Mesilla, you might enjoy this book of humorous and heartwarming stories from the days of old New Mexico.
Three Tales In Lastima
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Do Violent Games Damage Minds?
Do Violent Games Damage Minds?
Do football, boxing, and computer killer games damage our children’s minds, or prepare them to be good soldiers in the reality of a world always at war?
We hear a lot about the damage being done to the minds of children by their super-violent computer games and TV cartoon shows. If such damage is actually possible, then what should be done about a TV channel for adults that glorifies killing alien people with strange cult beliefs, promotes hatred and fear of things they invent to frighten the viewers, considers people who make terms for peace to be weak, and leads viewers to believe that their actions are led by powerful ancient supernatural beings who can take over your mind and make you do bad things, decide who wins the ball game, and make hurricanes happen… FOX NEWS? THE 700 CLUB?
It is not new. It is the same old game, training our children to become soldiers. Today’s cutting-edge soldier is a fat kid who grew up on X-Box games, sitting in a bunker in Nevada with a soda and a bag of chips, using his computerized robo-bomber to locate and zap the drug-terrorist devil-worshipping bug-heads in the caves of Saddam Engamorra. It starts with ball games at recess in kindergarten to football, in which boys are taught to sublimate their dawning sexuality to the violence of the game (by showing them their sexiest classmates’ panties with the unspoken promise that she goes to the winner). They learn to become organized, submit their will to the group, and to regard all who are not members of the group to be thereby a little less than themselves, and to put all of their physical and emotional resources into proving Bulldogs can kick the Wildcats’ asses. It is only a short step to taking up the sword, or the ICBM, and sparing no life to prove the Yanks can beat the Gooks any day of the week.
This is not done secretly, but proudly, calling it “discipline” and “esprit de corps.” It does not surprise me to see American men in uniform swaggering the streets of foreign places talking down their enemies as “gomers, faggots, pussies,” like they did their high school ballgame rivals. The program works very well, and I am first to agree that the best of my contemporaries driving the 101st’s gunships, my section leader Cpt Charlie Rake and Lancer 6 Maj Ken Fitch, were both Oklahoma football players of distinction. I’m not saying it is a bad idea, just that is what violent games are for, and if we intend to keep producing generations of warriors, then we should keep celebrating the games. Likewise, we must recognize that as long as we keep using the games to teach our culture to our children, and to select its heroes, then we make warriors of them, and we make wars for them to fight, for our team’s colors. That now goes for the computer games as well.
In the 1970’s I wrote some science fiction stories dealing with this mental programming for war by use of games, computer games. That was when a geeky kid named Bill Gates was locked in a garage in Albuquerque with a pre-computer gadget he could write programs for, one byte at a time. I wrote about the use of computer virtual worlds to teach a generation of robot pilots how to get into their roles, and to really be there, fighting for their lives and for whatever abstract notion of loyalty their game calls for. It is still very prophetic and timely stuff, now available as a complete Sci-Fi Anthology: KING’S KNIGHT.
Do football, boxing, and computer killer games damage our children’s minds, or prepare them to be good soldiers in the reality of a world always at war?
We hear a lot about the damage being done to the minds of children by their super-violent computer games and TV cartoon shows. If such damage is actually possible, then what should be done about a TV channel for adults that glorifies killing alien people with strange cult beliefs, promotes hatred and fear of things they invent to frighten the viewers, considers people who make terms for peace to be weak, and leads viewers to believe that their actions are led by powerful ancient supernatural beings who can take over your mind and make you do bad things, decide who wins the ball game, and make hurricanes happen… FOX NEWS? THE 700 CLUB?
It is not new. It is the same old game, training our children to become soldiers. Today’s cutting-edge soldier is a fat kid who grew up on X-Box games, sitting in a bunker in Nevada with a soda and a bag of chips, using his computerized robo-bomber to locate and zap the drug-terrorist devil-worshipping bug-heads in the caves of Saddam Engamorra. It starts with ball games at recess in kindergarten to football, in which boys are taught to sublimate their dawning sexuality to the violence of the game (by showing them their sexiest classmates’ panties with the unspoken promise that she goes to the winner). They learn to become organized, submit their will to the group, and to regard all who are not members of the group to be thereby a little less than themselves, and to put all of their physical and emotional resources into proving Bulldogs can kick the Wildcats’ asses. It is only a short step to taking up the sword, or the ICBM, and sparing no life to prove the Yanks can beat the Gooks any day of the week.
This is not done secretly, but proudly, calling it “discipline” and “esprit de corps.” It does not surprise me to see American men in uniform swaggering the streets of foreign places talking down their enemies as “gomers, faggots, pussies,” like they did their high school ballgame rivals. The program works very well, and I am first to agree that the best of my contemporaries driving the 101st’s gunships, my section leader Cpt Charlie Rake and Lancer 6 Maj Ken Fitch, were both Oklahoma football players of distinction. I’m not saying it is a bad idea, just that is what violent games are for, and if we intend to keep producing generations of warriors, then we should keep celebrating the games. Likewise, we must recognize that as long as we keep using the games to teach our culture to our children, and to select its heroes, then we make warriors of them, and we make wars for them to fight, for our team’s colors. That now goes for the computer games as well.
In the 1970’s I wrote some science fiction stories dealing with this mental programming for war by use of games, computer games. That was when a geeky kid named Bill Gates was locked in a garage in Albuquerque with a pre-computer gadget he could write programs for, one byte at a time. I wrote about the use of computer virtual worlds to teach a generation of robot pilots how to get into their roles, and to really be there, fighting for their lives and for whatever abstract notion of loyalty their game calls for. It is still very prophetic and timely stuff, now available as a complete Sci-Fi Anthology: KING’S KNIGHT.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Why Not Annex Mexico?
The part of Mexico we annexed in 1846 is doing better than the part we left behind. Wouldn't it be better for Mexico if we just annexed all the rest of it?
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Governor Palin, What About Your Borders?
This was recorded back before Mt. Palin erupted, but it seems to be still very much appropriate and timely today. How would you answer that question for her?
Thursday, May 6, 2010
What Are We Doing Here?
WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?
The critical and most difficult question: what do we think we are actually doing here? There is the fact it is self-gratifying to publicly express views we hold dear, our patriotism, our desire to see things promoted in our society like justice, honesty, and compassion. If that were all we wanted from this, there would be nothing wrong with that. If, however, we are out to have some kind of social impact, then just what do we think we can do, and what are we trying to do?
The key to doing anything is, in a word, exposure. Success could only result from getting masses of people finding what we offer as free reading online interesting enough that they will invest their time and their money in supporting whatever ARM is promoting, and perhaps even buying and reading what we write for sale. As I see it, there are three ways to make this happen, presuming our content is exciting enough to begin with. One, to pay for advertising to promote the site, two, to inspire people to propagate the site like a chain letter, and three, to do something else which gets enough attention that people will seek us out – like painting graffiti halfway up the Washington Monument, or kidnapping Barack’s dog Bo.
Hopefully, our primary objective should be to have a political effect. That, in a word, means votes. Next to selling artificial opium, pimping for Jesus, and bombing ragheads, the marketing of political candidates is one of America’s top industries. The key words here are again, masses and money. Millions of people, and millions of dollars. A dozen chatline fans and a few $10 donations just ain’t gonna cut it, much as we might enjoy having them. The American electoral system is 100% marketing. It all takes place on TV, or in media-generating mass gatherings. As has been clearly articulated by such brilliant even if amoral strategists as Karl Rove, we Americans do not vote what we are for, so much as what we are against. Karl observes that talking about yourself and your issues is political suicide, merely giving the other side grist for objection. You talk about your opponent, not yourself, and what is wrong with him, and you persuade the voter to find a reason not to vote for your opponent. It is not possible in our system to vote “against” anyone; you must vote for someone. If the voters can be made to hate or fear your opponent, then you get their vote by default, no matter who you are or what you believe. This is the basis of the “vote out the incumbent” idea, whereby it doesn’t matter what a candidate is, only that you vote for somebody other than the presumably crooked guy in office now. I think lots of this low-grade thinking is unfortunately motivating the so-called Tea Party.
Though it is very important that the positions and issues of minor third or fourth or tenth parties of the less-than-2% variety be publicly presented and debated, as election “leverage” they are actually powerless. Votes for them are simply meaningless, like voting for your Granny’s goat. Though the fringe parties' self-sacrificing statement-making votes might have some influence on which R-Ds are chosen by their parties to run next time, in most elections even very regional, the only votes that make a difference in who actually gets elected are those cast for the Repo or the Demo. Closest anybody ever got to pulling off a real independent win was Ross Perot, who did it by investing about $30 million of his own money, made by building super-computers for the CIA and IRS, and appealing to those who hate both the Repos and the Demos.
Suppose we actually succeed in getting somebody elected by arousing a sufficient vote. What can we then expect that person to do in office? There is only one thing they can do, and that is to vote for or against new laws, according to the rules and their job descriptions, and as Scott Brown quickly learned, knuckle under to the power. When the GOP openly declares it will simply vote as a bloc against the Demo, no matter what the issue or the law proposed, it clearly just doesn’t matter what any individual Republican believes in or stands for. They have reduced themselves to rubber-stamp automatons, each a lock-step vote without will or reason. The likelihood of them backing the ideas of an independent is incalculably small. The Democrats are more democratic, and likely to have diverse views, but they recognize they are forced to vote together, or fall victim to the GOP’s relentlessly united resistance. As long as we continue to use the same system of election, based on media power which must be bought, on voters who are propagandized by the calculated and sophisticated marketing techniques of the modern campaign, and we continue to fill the same offices and enact the same policies in accordance with the same premises, then no substantive changes are going to be made in the way life and law are conducted in America by changing the people behind the desks.
Though clearly there is nothing to be gained from organizing bands of armed angry men ready to blow up something and kill Americans, what can we realistically do in the face of the implacable and irresistible power of a highly evolved and interdependent infrastructure of government and industry? Is there really no option except trying to influence the way people vote? There is a point at which that begins to look like pissing in the wind.
What motivates people these days to vote? There is taxes. We all want less taxation, but the simple fact is that short of just printing the stuff up, taxation is the only way the government can obtain money to do anything. We all claim we want less government spending, but the fact is we all have things we believe the government should do, from buying bombers to saving the little brown babies of Katrina. The working class are motivated by fear the corporations that employ them will be taxed out of existence, and by the idea they will have to pay more taxes themselves. The lower classes are motivated by hope the government will give them a few of the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. The rich want the workers taxed, and the workers want the welfare to the unemployed cut off. The sad truth is that we all wish the government would cut off the other guy’s benefits and fund our program. The other sad truth is if we taxed everybody 99%, including the rich, it would still take two generations to pay for what has been borrowed in our names in the last 20 years. And if we did pay it, who gets the money? The same banks to which we are indebted now, who can only do one thing with it, and that is to lend it back to us. The people who run things now are aware of this. They know we have reached a point where the amount of the debt is meaningless, and the value of everything is abstract. Everything is done on borrowed money, and all the IOUs are backed up only by the promise of keeping the labor forces working and taxing them. This fact is global, whether we ideologically agree with “globalism” or not.
There is freedom. Though we use the word, and dare anyone to deny it is sufficient justification for anything, it is only a platitude. Though many of us have called for decades for the personal freedom to use our own bodies as we choose, for our habits, sex life, use of our property, trade for our labor, etc etc, Americans seem much more likely to vote for someone who will act to prohibit things they don’t do themselves, and would prefer other people be forbidden to do. Such freedom they decry as license to sin, and condemn it, calling for “freedom from sin.” The control-freak patriots call for “freedom from crime.” The so-called Right Wing uses the word to justify invading and destroying other people’s countries, for economic and religious reasons, calling it “freedom from tyranny.” I think the organized pro-hemp and pro-homo and the civil rights folks will all find common ground with us on most things, and could be encouraged to vote for a candidate with our views on those issues, of either party.
There is religion. Though it is nominally excluded from our electoral process and our government, the fact is that a huge and well-organized cabal exists in US government today striving to use the power of lawmaking to enforce the taboos and prejudices of the most extreme Christian mystic factions, the authoritarian and puritan fundamentalist charismatics and Pentecostals, the born again and called by God to office. These are people who are not moved by reason or even by the hard facts of reality, but only by their “faith” in the idols of their sect. They are willing to make demigods of preachers who claim, for example, that God creates hurricanes to punish homosexuals, and will make them happy and rich if they will bow down to the altar of Jesus, and leave a little gift. They command an enormous number of voters, and no election in America today is free of their influence. I think it fair to say that none of us here on ARM today, whatever our view of the truth about God, is willing to pander to their occult superstitions, prejudices, and beliefs (as the major party candidates do) to get their votes. They will not likely be swayed from their beliefs by rational discourse, so for anyone who stands for the free exercise of our Constitutional personal liberties and the rule of reason, they are the enemy, lovely people though they may be. It is they whom our candidates must defeat, though they have Jesus leading their parades.
Should we then be attempting to establish some kind of reasonable platform that people of both the Left and the Right would leave their own parties to support, and those who take their God to be more reasonable and tolerant might appreciate? What kind of platform might that be? Having such a platform, do we then attempt to locate or create a candidate who can motivate enough public attention that the media will pick him up, shower him with millions of dollars so he can put on a big enough show to get people watching their commercials, as they have done with the manufactured celebrity Palindoll? Should we be promoting just the ideology, and hoping we can find existing candidates that will leave their party to stand for it as independents? Should we be organizing public meetings, making speeches, and chartering jets to fly from one city to another, passing out fliers and living on pizza and Jack? Should we be seeking corporate sponsorship to pay for the PSAs and the jets? Ok, I’m not expecting to be doing anything that big, but as a matter of visualizing what direction we are going, and what the terrain looks like, you see what I’m saying. Are we bringing a mule to a Nascar race?
I do love expressing what I think, and reporting honestly and literally as I can how things look to me, hoping somebody will read it and feel elucidated by it. I would certainly love to see the effect of it in our society, but I confess I do not see a clear path to accomplishing a particular end here. What we need now is to arrive at as clear, comprehensive, and direct MISSION STATEMENT here at ARM as we can. Like I asked at the beginning: “What the hell do we think we are doing here?” We are here to motivate a movement, not to recruit a corps, so it is a meaningful question, not a rhetorical opening to a policy briefing.
James “Lancer 17” \:--]
The critical and most difficult question: what do we think we are actually doing here? There is the fact it is self-gratifying to publicly express views we hold dear, our patriotism, our desire to see things promoted in our society like justice, honesty, and compassion. If that were all we wanted from this, there would be nothing wrong with that. If, however, we are out to have some kind of social impact, then just what do we think we can do, and what are we trying to do?
The key to doing anything is, in a word, exposure. Success could only result from getting masses of people finding what we offer as free reading online interesting enough that they will invest their time and their money in supporting whatever ARM is promoting, and perhaps even buying and reading what we write for sale. As I see it, there are three ways to make this happen, presuming our content is exciting enough to begin with. One, to pay for advertising to promote the site, two, to inspire people to propagate the site like a chain letter, and three, to do something else which gets enough attention that people will seek us out – like painting graffiti halfway up the Washington Monument, or kidnapping Barack’s dog Bo.
Hopefully, our primary objective should be to have a political effect. That, in a word, means votes. Next to selling artificial opium, pimping for Jesus, and bombing ragheads, the marketing of political candidates is one of America’s top industries. The key words here are again, masses and money. Millions of people, and millions of dollars. A dozen chatline fans and a few $10 donations just ain’t gonna cut it, much as we might enjoy having them. The American electoral system is 100% marketing. It all takes place on TV, or in media-generating mass gatherings. As has been clearly articulated by such brilliant even if amoral strategists as Karl Rove, we Americans do not vote what we are for, so much as what we are against. Karl observes that talking about yourself and your issues is political suicide, merely giving the other side grist for objection. You talk about your opponent, not yourself, and what is wrong with him, and you persuade the voter to find a reason not to vote for your opponent. It is not possible in our system to vote “against” anyone; you must vote for someone. If the voters can be made to hate or fear your opponent, then you get their vote by default, no matter who you are or what you believe. This is the basis of the “vote out the incumbent” idea, whereby it doesn’t matter what a candidate is, only that you vote for somebody other than the presumably crooked guy in office now. I think lots of this low-grade thinking is unfortunately motivating the so-called Tea Party.
Though it is very important that the positions and issues of minor third or fourth or tenth parties of the less-than-2% variety be publicly presented and debated, as election “leverage” they are actually powerless. Votes for them are simply meaningless, like voting for your Granny’s goat. Though the fringe parties' self-sacrificing statement-making votes might have some influence on which R-Ds are chosen by their parties to run next time, in most elections even very regional, the only votes that make a difference in who actually gets elected are those cast for the Repo or the Demo. Closest anybody ever got to pulling off a real independent win was Ross Perot, who did it by investing about $30 million of his own money, made by building super-computers for the CIA and IRS, and appealing to those who hate both the Repos and the Demos.
Suppose we actually succeed in getting somebody elected by arousing a sufficient vote. What can we then expect that person to do in office? There is only one thing they can do, and that is to vote for or against new laws, according to the rules and their job descriptions, and as Scott Brown quickly learned, knuckle under to the power. When the GOP openly declares it will simply vote as a bloc against the Demo, no matter what the issue or the law proposed, it clearly just doesn’t matter what any individual Republican believes in or stands for. They have reduced themselves to rubber-stamp automatons, each a lock-step vote without will or reason. The likelihood of them backing the ideas of an independent is incalculably small. The Democrats are more democratic, and likely to have diverse views, but they recognize they are forced to vote together, or fall victim to the GOP’s relentlessly united resistance. As long as we continue to use the same system of election, based on media power which must be bought, on voters who are propagandized by the calculated and sophisticated marketing techniques of the modern campaign, and we continue to fill the same offices and enact the same policies in accordance with the same premises, then no substantive changes are going to be made in the way life and law are conducted in America by changing the people behind the desks.
Though clearly there is nothing to be gained from organizing bands of armed angry men ready to blow up something and kill Americans, what can we realistically do in the face of the implacable and irresistible power of a highly evolved and interdependent infrastructure of government and industry? Is there really no option except trying to influence the way people vote? There is a point at which that begins to look like pissing in the wind.
What motivates people these days to vote? There is taxes. We all want less taxation, but the simple fact is that short of just printing the stuff up, taxation is the only way the government can obtain money to do anything. We all claim we want less government spending, but the fact is we all have things we believe the government should do, from buying bombers to saving the little brown babies of Katrina. The working class are motivated by fear the corporations that employ them will be taxed out of existence, and by the idea they will have to pay more taxes themselves. The lower classes are motivated by hope the government will give them a few of the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. The rich want the workers taxed, and the workers want the welfare to the unemployed cut off. The sad truth is that we all wish the government would cut off the other guy’s benefits and fund our program. The other sad truth is if we taxed everybody 99%, including the rich, it would still take two generations to pay for what has been borrowed in our names in the last 20 years. And if we did pay it, who gets the money? The same banks to which we are indebted now, who can only do one thing with it, and that is to lend it back to us. The people who run things now are aware of this. They know we have reached a point where the amount of the debt is meaningless, and the value of everything is abstract. Everything is done on borrowed money, and all the IOUs are backed up only by the promise of keeping the labor forces working and taxing them. This fact is global, whether we ideologically agree with “globalism” or not.
There is freedom. Though we use the word, and dare anyone to deny it is sufficient justification for anything, it is only a platitude. Though many of us have called for decades for the personal freedom to use our own bodies as we choose, for our habits, sex life, use of our property, trade for our labor, etc etc, Americans seem much more likely to vote for someone who will act to prohibit things they don’t do themselves, and would prefer other people be forbidden to do. Such freedom they decry as license to sin, and condemn it, calling for “freedom from sin.” The control-freak patriots call for “freedom from crime.” The so-called Right Wing uses the word to justify invading and destroying other people’s countries, for economic and religious reasons, calling it “freedom from tyranny.” I think the organized pro-hemp and pro-homo and the civil rights folks will all find common ground with us on most things, and could be encouraged to vote for a candidate with our views on those issues, of either party.
There is religion. Though it is nominally excluded from our electoral process and our government, the fact is that a huge and well-organized cabal exists in US government today striving to use the power of lawmaking to enforce the taboos and prejudices of the most extreme Christian mystic factions, the authoritarian and puritan fundamentalist charismatics and Pentecostals, the born again and called by God to office. These are people who are not moved by reason or even by the hard facts of reality, but only by their “faith” in the idols of their sect. They are willing to make demigods of preachers who claim, for example, that God creates hurricanes to punish homosexuals, and will make them happy and rich if they will bow down to the altar of Jesus, and leave a little gift. They command an enormous number of voters, and no election in America today is free of their influence. I think it fair to say that none of us here on ARM today, whatever our view of the truth about God, is willing to pander to their occult superstitions, prejudices, and beliefs (as the major party candidates do) to get their votes. They will not likely be swayed from their beliefs by rational discourse, so for anyone who stands for the free exercise of our Constitutional personal liberties and the rule of reason, they are the enemy, lovely people though they may be. It is they whom our candidates must defeat, though they have Jesus leading their parades.
Should we then be attempting to establish some kind of reasonable platform that people of both the Left and the Right would leave their own parties to support, and those who take their God to be more reasonable and tolerant might appreciate? What kind of platform might that be? Having such a platform, do we then attempt to locate or create a candidate who can motivate enough public attention that the media will pick him up, shower him with millions of dollars so he can put on a big enough show to get people watching their commercials, as they have done with the manufactured celebrity Palindoll? Should we be promoting just the ideology, and hoping we can find existing candidates that will leave their party to stand for it as independents? Should we be organizing public meetings, making speeches, and chartering jets to fly from one city to another, passing out fliers and living on pizza and Jack? Should we be seeking corporate sponsorship to pay for the PSAs and the jets? Ok, I’m not expecting to be doing anything that big, but as a matter of visualizing what direction we are going, and what the terrain looks like, you see what I’m saying. Are we bringing a mule to a Nascar race?
I do love expressing what I think, and reporting honestly and literally as I can how things look to me, hoping somebody will read it and feel elucidated by it. I would certainly love to see the effect of it in our society, but I confess I do not see a clear path to accomplishing a particular end here. What we need now is to arrive at as clear, comprehensive, and direct MISSION STATEMENT here at ARM as we can. Like I asked at the beginning: “What the hell do we think we are doing here?” We are here to motivate a movement, not to recruit a corps, so it is a meaningful question, not a rhetorical opening to a policy briefing.
James “Lancer 17” \:--]
Thursday, April 29, 2010
What's Right, Not What's Wrong.
I’m Asking What’s Right, Not What’s Wrong.
I said it in my first post to this blog: “It takes both the Right Wing and the Left Wing to make the Eagle fly.” For a long time, I’ve held the Libertarian position that both the Republicans and the Democrats are wrong on very fundamental issues, and both have been guilty of as much authoritarianism as they can get away with. The LP complains that both parties are in constant violation of the clearly-stated letter of the Constitution, and they are experts in pointing out what is wrong about both the Left and the Right. Today’s Tea Partyers appear to be taking the same position, and I’d say they are probably correct in both cases.
I conclude though such thinking has been very valuable in arousing an otherwise catatonic public, what is needed now is a clear articulation of what is being done right by both the Left and the Right. When we are confronted with the absurdity of the GOP making its national and international policy decisions by saying, “Whatever you liberals propose, we are against it,” we must get people to start looking for what we agree upon, and looking for what any of our institutions or the people who staff them are doing right, and to make it clear we support them, and approve of their service.
I believe for all its faults, and theirs, our government is not a monstrous bureaucratic beast staffed by the incompetent at the lower levels, and predators at the top. It is not true that simply becoming a Senator proves you’re a crook or a fool. We call for anti-incumbent voters to “vote the bums out,” and then we will install someone who presumably is not a crook, who will thereafter perform the duties of the office honestly and well. We would do well to identify such candidates, but even more important, to identify such people who are already in office. From President to Town Council, we should be looking for people holding office who are doing things we believe are right, both Demos and Repos. I will not believe there are none.
Everybody has a rap going about what they are against. Everybody is quick to point out what is wrong with the other guy’s rap. It makes for shtick on the comic shows, grist on the pundit shows, and sells a lot of books. It is used as negative campaigning, that is, not giving the voter a reason to vote for you, but giving him a reason to vote against your opponent. In the long run, I think it is an unhealthy practice. I’m thinking like Affirmative Action, the “both sides are wrong” viewpoint may have outlived its usefulness, Tea Party notwithstanding, and we had better start identifying and salvaging what is working aboard the Ship Of State. Everybody has a reason why stuff isn’t working, and knows just whom to blame. That is mousiedung, little tiny bullshit. The job is to make it work, not come up with a profile for why you can’t be blamed. “No excuse, Sir! However it got broke, I will make it run, Sir.”
This is particularly true about how The People are thinking. To influence how power is used, and votes are cast, we must influence how people think about things. What can we here at ARM do or say to turn people’s thinking toward supporting the activities of any of our elected, appointed, or employed public servants who are doing a good job, and doing it well? What can we do to restore a true sense of patriotic community to our country, which is increasingly factioned by politics and media marketing? We all know “no government” is an absurdity, and destroying bad government is not the same thing as repairing it. The problem is creating good government, which begins by acknowledging there can be such a thing. What fundamental ideas about what it is to be America do we all agree upon, Left and Right? What kind of patriotism, what kind of humanitarianism, what kind of personal freedom and social responsibility, what kind of leader or government would draw the support of both the Left and the Right, Libertarian or Authoritarian? Whom do we trust to hold the offices, and how do we elect them?
We need to lead people to get onboard the Ship Of State we call America, and get it running and the flags flying, and people cheering her name again, not to jump ship or mutiny. Like they said in the Old Corps, “Don’t get pissed; re-enlist.”
James Nathan Post
I said it in my first post to this blog: “It takes both the Right Wing and the Left Wing to make the Eagle fly.” For a long time, I’ve held the Libertarian position that both the Republicans and the Democrats are wrong on very fundamental issues, and both have been guilty of as much authoritarianism as they can get away with. The LP complains that both parties are in constant violation of the clearly-stated letter of the Constitution, and they are experts in pointing out what is wrong about both the Left and the Right. Today’s Tea Partyers appear to be taking the same position, and I’d say they are probably correct in both cases.
I conclude though such thinking has been very valuable in arousing an otherwise catatonic public, what is needed now is a clear articulation of what is being done right by both the Left and the Right. When we are confronted with the absurdity of the GOP making its national and international policy decisions by saying, “Whatever you liberals propose, we are against it,” we must get people to start looking for what we agree upon, and looking for what any of our institutions or the people who staff them are doing right, and to make it clear we support them, and approve of their service.
I believe for all its faults, and theirs, our government is not a monstrous bureaucratic beast staffed by the incompetent at the lower levels, and predators at the top. It is not true that simply becoming a Senator proves you’re a crook or a fool. We call for anti-incumbent voters to “vote the bums out,” and then we will install someone who presumably is not a crook, who will thereafter perform the duties of the office honestly and well. We would do well to identify such candidates, but even more important, to identify such people who are already in office. From President to Town Council, we should be looking for people holding office who are doing things we believe are right, both Demos and Repos. I will not believe there are none.
Everybody has a rap going about what they are against. Everybody is quick to point out what is wrong with the other guy’s rap. It makes for shtick on the comic shows, grist on the pundit shows, and sells a lot of books. It is used as negative campaigning, that is, not giving the voter a reason to vote for you, but giving him a reason to vote against your opponent. In the long run, I think it is an unhealthy practice. I’m thinking like Affirmative Action, the “both sides are wrong” viewpoint may have outlived its usefulness, Tea Party notwithstanding, and we had better start identifying and salvaging what is working aboard the Ship Of State. Everybody has a reason why stuff isn’t working, and knows just whom to blame. That is mousiedung, little tiny bullshit. The job is to make it work, not come up with a profile for why you can’t be blamed. “No excuse, Sir! However it got broke, I will make it run, Sir.”
This is particularly true about how The People are thinking. To influence how power is used, and votes are cast, we must influence how people think about things. What can we here at ARM do or say to turn people’s thinking toward supporting the activities of any of our elected, appointed, or employed public servants who are doing a good job, and doing it well? What can we do to restore a true sense of patriotic community to our country, which is increasingly factioned by politics and media marketing? We all know “no government” is an absurdity, and destroying bad government is not the same thing as repairing it. The problem is creating good government, which begins by acknowledging there can be such a thing. What fundamental ideas about what it is to be America do we all agree upon, Left and Right? What kind of patriotism, what kind of humanitarianism, what kind of personal freedom and social responsibility, what kind of leader or government would draw the support of both the Left and the Right, Libertarian or Authoritarian? Whom do we trust to hold the offices, and how do we elect them?
We need to lead people to get onboard the Ship Of State we call America, and get it running and the flags flying, and people cheering her name again, not to jump ship or mutiny. Like they said in the Old Corps, “Don’t get pissed; re-enlist.”
James Nathan Post
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
WHY NOT “BILL OF RIGHTS” GLOBALISM?
Might it be time for the tea-soaked Libertarian-minded Real American to re-examine the horror or advantage of Globalism? The 1770’s-wishitwas reactionaries resist the functional reality that today the states are only another redundant layer of the national bureaucracy. Fretting about states rights and secession when we have national and world problems is very provincial and backward thinking, honorable and rootintootin as it may be.
Globalism, like global warming, is a fact, not a theory or an option. Every day our media shows us that the world is a single inter-related place, and the globe has no borders across it. Our live-time knowledge of the world gives us common individuals the ability to communicate personally with almost anyone, anywhere, instantly. You can buy a car, order a BigMac, anywhere on earth. Certain things become clear.All countries trade in the same marketplace, friends and enemies alike. The world’s money is already global, and the securities of all are traded alike. With the advent of digital money, a central system of accounting for banks and markets worldwide is now possible. That fact alone makes it inevitable that a centralization of banking power will occur, and with it the ability to establish a centralized body of political control. There will be a centralized One World Order of some kind, simply because it is possible. Hopefully, that will be the kind of free and civilized society we Libertarians champion for our own country.
To take the fundamental position that the US must not take part in any such democratic global state is hardly different from the boys in Georgia and Texas fighting for their states’ rights in the One Nation Indivisible. Whatever issues they might be arguing, or how deeply they take their local pride, it is backward looking, and a simple denial of the realities of 21st Century life. It is provincial, deliberately making oneself a hick in a time of explosive world sophistication.The One World Order, in some shape or other, is quite certain to happen. If making the United States into one America was a good thing, and the laws by which we established it are good laws, then what is wrong with trying to make that new world alliance a regime based on our Constitution, and subject to our ability to police anywhere with our UAVs? What is wrong with the US taking control of that New World Order, and making it happen, rather than resisting it?
If some kind of central power is inevitable, then is not the correct position to insure that it will be based on the Constitution of the United States, which we hold to be the best possible way to organize a just and free state? I would miss the sovereign golden age of 20th Century America, grand time that it was, but I can see that already slipping into history. In the long run, I wouldn’t have a problem with all nations including the USA agreeing to be subject to an elected Congress, and all nations participating in a combined military force no single nation could defeat, even if it was unquestioningly dominated by the US. I would happily support, even fight for a World Order that promised to respect and enforce The Bill Of Rights, making it the law of all the lands. Wouldn’t you?Perhaps the correct move is to quit limiting our desire to see the Libertarian principles we treasure made available only to Americans, and to start thinking about how to propagate that ideology globally to a world coming to recognize itself as above the abstract limitations of national identities and borders. If the question is not whether we will have a New World Order, but only how it shall be defined, what is wrong with an American-led World Libertarian Revolution, using the power of our military machine, liberating all the peoples of the world from their present leaders and laws, issuing a new world dollar, and establishing absolute control of newly freed populations until they are ready to assume their full liberties as defined in the Bill Of Rights? What would be wrong with The United States Of Earth, one world indivisible, with freedom and justice for all?
James Nathan PostAlbuquerque NM
WHO YA GONNA SHOOT FIRST, BUBBA?
I made the point to some of my 2nd Amendmentist friends that as a deterrent to Federal tyranny, a group of local boys with assault rifles would be no use at all against the invincible technical superiority of American military and law enforcement power. A reader replied, “If that were true, there would be no need for infantry soldiers in the modern army.”
Perhaps he is correct. Saddam's modern army infantry -- about 100,000 of them -- lasted about eight days, and as Mr. Bush said, the military mission was accomplished. Eight years and $800B later, however, we have not defeated the local malcontents armed with hidden illegal rifles and homemade booby traps (when we made them, they were booby traps; now we are the boobs, they are IEDs). Clearly, only what we call terrorism could possibly be effective against the US government's boots, badges, and UAVs. The result of taking such action is not newfound Libertarian freedom, however, but a brutal police state in which the job of our country's heroes in uniform is kicking down the doors of civilians and sustaining collateral damage... that would be your family, right? Do you really think turning Burque into Basra is better than having a niberaligger for President, and public health care for the minimum wage class as good as Cuba's? I've asked before, and of course neither the militia guys nor the hermits with the flintlocks can say. Ok, you have your rifle. Just whom do you expect to have to shoot first? A Senator? A cop, Iraq vet, mother of three, come to take possession of your Pappy's old M-1? (Easy to boast you would, but really?) National Guard troop? IRS employee's lounge? Do you start shooting first, or just wave your piece and yell rebellion until somebody shoots at you first? Are you going to make a grand show of suicidal standoff and go down for the cause a martyr, or become a guerrilla insurgent, call yourself Al Kading and join the snipers shooting US Marines?Lets say there are a pretty good sized group of you, and you are well enough organized to actually take over the government and security of the State of New Mexico with your rifles. What are you going to do? First you stop all those socialist welfare parasite entitlement programs, cut off the benefit checks and fatcat pensions, and shut down the propaganda day camps called public schools, right? You'll establish a flat tax, that is, whatever you flat demand, just like the IRS, because you know without the power to tax there is no state. You established de facto martial law to get in control with your infantry, so you start rounding up the Mexicans and checking their papers, and fully arming for the War On Gangism, which is gonna be no quinceanaria, ese, la puta madre. As most of you are vets to begin with, and the revolution was not without bloodshed, the hospitals' first mission will be to support the troops, and then they can conduct free trade with the liberated citizens of your New Old America for access to their surplus medical services. You'll show us the Spirit of '76 for sure, right? We'll all be glad you restored our freedom and ready to vote for you in the next election you hold, right?
All that said, I personally believe we should be able to take the Constitutional word "arms" in its most complete and effective sense, that is, as any kind of equipment specifically intended for lethal combat with other human beings. To limit that definition to what arms meant in 1776 is ludicrous. To further limit that to "sports" rifles is a humiliating show of obeisance. The citizen should be able to possess the actual modern means to oppose potential tyranny, at least including any personal weapon being utilized in the armed services, and to pack them on their person anywhere in the land. Armed. Really armed. For misusing that power the price should be very high, but the right to possess it in a land of the free should be absolute. Good luck with that, nu?James Nathan Post “Lancer 17”
DO I HATE AMERICA?
I recently received a note from one who called himself a True Patriot accusing me of hating America because of uncomplimentary things I said about what is happening in our country today, and my words of praise for our President, who he said was not even American at all. This is my reply.
Do I hate America? No, you hate America. What you love is a provincial fantasy, an image of an 18th Century paradise in which you and your neighbors each live on forty acres in the wilderness with wild apples and a trout stream, you all are the same color (except your field hands), all speak only English, all drive a car made by the corporation you work for, and all know what sacrifice to bring to the altar of the idol you worship at your church, where you pray in your prideful arrogance that the rest will leave “your” America and go back to where they came from, to Africa, Ireland, Italy, Poland, China, Vietnam, Mexico, or other places you don’t even know the names of. I love America, for all its many failings, and in spite of the fact so many millions in the world hate me for my race and nationality because of you. I am reminded that someone in the Bible wisely observed, “He who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.” Just what part of America do you not consider to be your house, such that you would bring strife that troubleth the nation?ARE WE GOOD NEIGHBORS?
Americans are nobody's good neighbors. I have said in several of my books, articles, and videos, "Our rights in practice are not what the government's laws say, but how we treat each other. Where neighbros do not respect each other's property rights, soon nobody has anything. Where neighbors protect each other's rights, soon everybody has everything." When, as in every inner-city neighborhood I know of (ok, that's not many, but what I see on the news) you cannot walk to the store for a six-pack of beer without your neighbors stealing your DVD player while you are gone, or mugging you in an alley on the way home, then whatever the law says about your rights is simply moot. It doesn't matter for whom you vote, nor how many war-vet cops you have prowling the streets and checking your body cavities for an Uzi.
Our law enforcement's principal tool is the coerced informant, who is told for the smoking-spinach in his pocket he will get six years in jail, or be out on the street by six o'clock tonight if he will rat out the potheads in his neighborhood...or his family. Our youth are not educated in science or history, but are subject to jingoist propaganda to wage war on anyone who would resist the regime of Jesus, Citibank, and the Big Mac. We are ready to wave the flags and grant our leaders a blank check to spend anything to kill people in other countries, but we howl like we were being bled objecting to spending ten bucks to keep people alive in this country. Our "neighbors" are only those who share our ethnicity, work for the corporations, and attend our church.
Internationally, we respect no nation as an equal, and we have no friends; we have "strategic allies" which ain't the same. In WWII we stood with England not for hatred of Hitler's militant regime (which many admired) nor for love of the Jews (which many hated), but because the Federal Reserve was largely an account in the Bank Of England. France would like to be our friend, but because they opposed the trumped-up Cheney/Rumsfeld war of economic exploitation in Iraq, and provide their citizens real medical care (not just "insurance") we declare them cowards and socialists. We spend billions bombing the fields of Afghanistan to keep them from growing opium (or food) to protect the US pharmo industry from competition by the superior natural produce. We claim our "right" to do that because of a small club of less than fifty wealthy religious fanatics from another country, who accomplished a single mission of terror against us. Now there are tens of thousands of them, and one-third of the people of the world hate us for religious persecution. Good neighbors.
Israel, like us, is nobody's friend. As Christians are self-declared adopted Jews, we are now declaring them adopted Christians, because they are our military foothold in Islam, the land of oil and market opportunity. We think ourselves thereby the sole and deserving beneficiaries of the "Divine promise" made to them in a bigoted ancient occult book of xenophobia and spiritual blackmail. Good neighbors.
Consider our nearest neighbors, Canada and Mexico. We pretend we don't see Canada, because they are a free country with a neighborly attitude, good health care for everyone, and they once harbored those "cowards" who stood on moral ground against the industrial war we initiated in Vietnam, and who today prefer not to shoot their neighbors for growing marijuana, which is still illegal here because it competes successfully with petrochemicals and synthetic pharmos. Mexico was once our friend and neighbor, but today we have armed their DEA and paid them to make active war on their citizens who wanted to import that same highly-desired product, and to work hard in our sweatshops for less than we pay our own poorest citizens. That war has killed about 20,000 of them so far, and we blame it on the pot. Now instead of those who were willing to work and become good Americans, we have organized gangs of highly-motivated violent criminals who hate us and our country, and rightly so. Because marijuana is difficult to import, and leads people to peaceful lifestyles, they are not importing it any longer, and have switched to methedrine, the deadliest chemical motivator of violence known to man. In Texas and Arizona, we are arming ourselves and calling for the right to shoot Mexicans on sight. Good neighbors.
We whine that our jobs are being "given away" to Mexicans and other foreigners we hate. Not true. Once the American way of success was to make the best product and sell it at a profit at the lowest price. Today we do neither. We have lost the jobs because we are glutted on consuming the world and cannot compete with our international neighbors in productivity, and we hate them for it. Our employers move to other countries because they can successfully exploit their people with lower rewards for the same work.
Our youth vote? Why should they? What's in it for them? Our President, whose race could not even share our urinals when he was born here, rose from the commonest roots to graduate with highest honors from what is arguably the most prestigious school of law in the world, and he became Professor of Constitutional Law there. He rose by laboring in the neighborhoods for the cause of our least advantaged. His Secretary Of State was an academic super-achiever from childhood, and is arguably the most highly educated and experienced woman politician in America... and their opposition in the polls is a vacuous beauty-queen wannabe with the attitude of a multi-level lipstick-sales flack who calls for us to rise in arms against our government, drops the names of Jesus and John Wayne, and is declared to be more qualified than the homely Hillary because she is "hot". We are where we are today because this is who we are. Being good neighbors to each other and to the world is likely our only hope, but good luck. For all of our declared good intentions, we are today a nation of gluttons, predators, and prideful fools.
BUBBA LOVED GUNS
By James Nathan Post
Bubba always loved guns. Gramps gave him his first .22 when he was nine years old, a Remington pump. That was one of the many reasons Bubba joined the Marine Corps, back in The Nam, in the time of the M-14. Bubba is pretty gray these days, but he still gets kind of weepy when they play the band and raise the flag, and he can still tell you the names of the guys in his platoon, and whether they are still alive or not.Few years ago, Bubba was at a yard sale, and he saw the guy was selling a nice old M-14. Sure, it was de-selectorized and only semi-automatic, legal as home-brew beer, but it looked good to Bubba, and he gave the guy five hundred bucks for it. Nothing he liked better than just taking that big old gook-shooter out for a walk in the boonies back of town and snapping in and snapping off a few rounds, just to hear her bark.
As Bubba and his pals had a lot of guns off and on, and they traded them around quite a bit, he often as not just didn’t go volunteer to register them. Not that he was an outlaw, but just that there were things he figured even a patriotic American like himself should prefer to be none of the government’s business. Guns was one of those things. So he just never got around to registering his M-14.Recently he got introduced to the light and snappy little Mini-14, and he liked it and thought it was fun for plinking, and he went to the local gun dealer and bought himself one. The dealer pointed out to him that the purchasing process these days involves registering the gun, which meant filling out a stack of information identification papers, and prompting a law enforcement background check to make sure no guns were falling into the wrong hands. Bubba was still a Marine at heart, and used to putting up with that kind of bullshit paperwork and procedure, so he just filled in the papers, and jawed with the guy at the dealership, a nice kid whose dad had been in Vietnam too.
One day recently he was sitting at home, and the doorbell rang, and there were two uniformed troopers at his door. One of them was a guy he had seen down at the VFW bar, wearing the brown of the Sheriff’s department, nice enough guy, kind of a big-mouth jock type, ex-Army, Iraq. The other was a young woman in a uniform he didn’t quite recognize, tight with a lot of leather belts and Velcro patches. She smiled and asked him if he was who he was, and when he said he was, she told him, “I’m your new Firearm Statute Conformance Assistance Officer, and I have come to report that according to our records, you are in possession of a firearm that has been placed on the list of Category 264-A weapons. Those are now forbidden.”Bubba said, “I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Haven’t you read The Patriot Act?” she asked.“Hell, Officer, uh…Garcia, that thing is bigger than two Harry Potters and the Book of Urantia,” Bubba said. “Nobody has read The Patriot Act.”
“Ignorance of the law does not excuse you from obeying it,” she said. “We have come to accept your voluntary surrender of the illegal weapon.”Bubba shrugged, bewildered.
“The Mini-14,” the Deputy explained.“You got to be kidding,” Bubba protested. “I bought it legal and registered it. It’s not a machine gun, and I don’t have a record. You can’t just come and take it. Duuh, Second Amendment.”
She sighed patiently, and recited, “According to Category 264-A, and in conformance with Presidential Executive Bowel Movement 264, as confirmed by the Department of Homegrown Severity, the Mini-14 semi-automatic sports rifle registered to you, serial number ending in O4Q2, is now a prohibited weapon. You’ve got to give it to us.”“What if I don’t?” Bubba asked. “What if I stand on my rights under the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and I refuse to voluntarily surrender my rifle?”
“Hell, you know the answer to that, Bubba,” the Deputy said. “If you refuse to surrender your semi-automatic sports rifle, then according to 264-A, it then becomes defined as a prohibited likely-terrorist para-military assault rifle you are concealing. If you resist arrest and are known to be in possession of such a weapon, you will be dealt with using appropriate defense against such weapons. Hell fire, Bubba, you know all of us down at the bar. You know how it is. If you got crazy enough to put up a fight, we could call in the B-52’s, and I don’t mean Fred Schneider’s band.”“All right,” said Bubba. “I don’t think it’s right, but the law is the law, and I am a patriotic and law-abiding citizen.” So he gave them the Mini-14, and signed the papers. They stood there watching him, waiting.
Finally the Deputy said, “Well?”Bubba said, “What?”
“Goddammit,” Deputy said, slapping his thigh. “I was afraid you were going to do it, Bubba. Breaks my heart to see a good man go bad.” He pulled a paper out of his pocket. “This here’s a warrant. We’re here to search this premises for one contraband 7.62 millimeter military assault rifle, M-14, serial number unknown, registration unknown, and now on the list of Category 264-A-1 suspected terrorist weapons, which you are now herewith accused of attempting to conceal from law enforcement, that is, us.”“Where’d you get a warrant saying I’ve got an M-14?” Bubba asked.
“Aw, fer Christ sake, Bubba, we’ve got an informant. We’ve always got an informant, you know that.” He shook his head, reached for his hand cuffs.“You mean like one of my friends reported I’ve got an M-14? One of my neighbors? One of my brothers down at the bar, maybe? Or somebody in, what was your agency, uh, Garcia?”
“Firearm Statute Conformance Administration, HSD, INC,” she said. “You are under arrest. You know your Mirandas, now gimme your handas.” She circled her finger to tell him to turn around.“Just a second,” Deputy said. “Where is the M-14.”
Bubba put up both of his hands. “I keep it right here above the door,” he said, and he took it down from the rack, looking them right square in the eyeballs. Deputy leaped up like the linebacker he used to be, and he had his .44 Magnum right in Bubba’s face, but Garcia stopped him. She whipped out a little Star Trek zap gun thing and zapped Bubba with it. By the time he stopped twitching, they had him cuffed in a chair with the light in his face.“Why didn’t you let me shoot him?” Deputy whined.
“I’m with Conformance Assistance,” she reminded him. “I’m here to help him.” She turned to Bubba. “Are you a skinhead?” she asked him. “Are you still a member of the Timothy McVeigh Unit of the Neo-Nazi war underground?”“No!” Bubba said.
“Are you prepared to give us the names of the other members of your sleeper group?” she asked.“No, what do you mean, give you names? What the hell is this? What sleeper group?” he asked.
“Oh, you no-good turncoat son of a bitch,” Deputy snarled. “Now you’re covering up for the others.”“What others?”
“The others who like yourself are hoarding prohibited weapons,” said Garcia, “perhaps to gather together on a moment’s notice to conduct acts of terrorism.”“Why the hell would I do that?” Bubba spluttered.
“That is what we are asking you,” she said, “and what we would like to ask the others.”“What others? I don’t know any others.”
“Of course you do,” she said patiently. “One of them gave us your name.”“And you had the nerve to show your sorry face down at the VFW, you being a closet terrorist supporter all along,” Deputy said, his righteous rage raising his veins to pulse on his forehead.
“This is Federal,” Garcia warned him, “and if you refuse to cooperate, you can be prosecuted, or just detained. Let me explain something. The Constitution guarantees the right to own arms, but that does not mean all arms. It is a felony to possess some firearms. It is also a felony to know about a felony and fail to report it. That is called misprision in the courtroom, and it will be prosecuted. If you know that anyone is in felonious possession of a firearm, and you do not tell us about it, then you are guilty of that felony, and you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, do you understand that?”“Hell, yes, he understands it,” said the Deputy. “Let me make this easy for you, Bubba, you might as well cooperate. You know crazy old Buddy down at the VFW? You know he is always bragging about his guns, shooting his face off. Now you tell me, what kind of guns do you know from listening to him does he have? And you know exactly what guns I’m talking about.”
Bubba did know. He had even seen them. “All right,” he said, “everybody has heard him say he’s got a Thompson…and a BAR. Does that make me an informant now?”Garcia turned and spoke to her lapel. “Let the record report that the subject has admitted knowing defendant #U81 was in possession of an illegal firearm,” she said.
“It had better,” Deputy said. “You have two choices. One is to be arrested and processed as a potential terrorist and armed insurgent combatant against the United States of America, and transported to Nicaragua to be questioned. If you survive that, you could get a hearing in about five years. The other alternative is to try to redeem yourself as a decent American citizen by active cooperation with law enforcement as an agent informant. If you choose to do that, you will be booked, processed, and back on the street about five this afternoon.”“What do you want me to do?” Bubba asked.
“Friday night, you and I will both be at the VFW bar, just like always, just guys that know each other there, friends, just like we used to be,” the Deputy explained. “What you are going to do is get guys talking about their guns, and get them to admit they’ve got hidden guns, so that I am able to overhear them. Your testimony plus my testimony ain’t hearsay, it’s a warrant and a bust. That’s it.”“You can come in weekly for your depositions,” Garcia informed him. “We will ask you questions about people you know, and whether they own firearms or other things. You will tell us everything we need to know to help bring them into proper Statute Conformance.”
Bubba just shook his head in amazement. “So we’ll all be down at the bar together, and some of us are wearing a wire trying to get the others to talk about their guns so you guys can take them away and put them on a wire too, right? So how will I know if somebody I’m talking to is also wearing a wire, or if he’s somebody I’m trying to catch?”“You won’t,” said the Deputy, “but they’ll be trying to get you to admit to owning firearms we don’t know about yet. We don’t know what you might have, and you can’t prove what you don’t have, but sooner or later, we are going to hound-dog out every one of you.”
“Well, fer Christ sake,” Bubba said, “sooner or later that means all of us will be on one end of a wire or the other.”“I always suspected there was something funny about you,” the Deputy sneered, “ever since you got in that guy’s face trying to defend that Chief Warrant they threw out for being a fag. Holy shit, twenty five years in the Army, two Silver Stars, and queer as a pickled octopus. That is a damned insult to every soldier he ever served with.”
“He was a Medevac pilot,” Bubba said. “He hung his ass out farther than anybody else to save other guys. He happened to have saved my ass.”“Oh, I wonder why?” the Deputy mused, ironically, sardonically.
Bubba sighed, nodded in resignation. “This is a terrible surprise to me. You know I’m always a strong supporter of law enforcement, or I thought I was. It amazes me you guys can believe in this being the land of freedom and rights, and still behave like this, and you seem to think it’s just all in a day’s work.”“Are you kidding?” Garcia asked. “We both grew up in law enforcement, with parents in the DEA. This is the way we have been treating people in the Drug War the last forty years. We cut our teeth on coercing informants to bust potheads, and we got our bones bagging baby-buggy bombers in the backstreets of Baghdad. We are here to bring firearm safety, statute conformance, and freedom from terror to this sinful outlaw country America become today, and we’re the best at the job that’s ever been.”
“Ok, let’s get some work done here,” the Deputy said. “What about Bobby? To the best of your knowledge, Bubba, does Bobby have any bullets in his bunker? Don’t get caught lying, now, because you don’t know what we already know, and we’re checking on you with every question. Does Bobby own a bazooka? Is he one of your sleeper cell?”Some people wonder why that crazy old Namvet Bubba hangs out down at the VFW bar, and why he drinks so much, and drives that funky old motorcycle of his so fast so late at night.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
