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

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 Post

Albuquerque NM

www.postpubco.com/anticyclops.htm

Read: William R.Taylor's Comments

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.

YOUR RIGHTS ARE ONLY AN ILLUSION. YOU HAVE NONE.

Since the Federal Government won the war against the states 1865, we’ve known all the last century that a world community with power greater than any state's is not only necessary, it is inevitable, that is, if we are to survive without destroying us all. Hopefully, that will be a democratic community, in which all the states agree to accept and obey the collective decision. The alternative is a world techno-dictatorship, a global penal state armed against itself, in which half of us will wear the uniforms, to keep the other half of us in order. The United States Of America, one nation, is now globally in a position similar to that of Virginia and Pennsylvania back then. Whatever form the new structure takes in practice, or how it is disguised to be presented to a world of homicidal nationalists and religious fanatics, it appears it will not be based on granting to any of us the quaint and idealistic old US Constitution's Bill Of Rights. The USA, like Virginia, will continue to exist as an administrative jurisdiction, but the real power in the world will be directed to objectives broader than the limited interests of US capital owners and US military dominance of the world. Welcome to the 21st Century... our grandfathers' idealistic image of America the land of the brave, tolerant, neighborly, honest, armed, and responsible red-white-and-blue free and sovereign citizen is no longer representative of what is actually happening, in spite of the millions declaring they are ready to fight at home or abroad to preserve the illusion.

As for our "rights" -- as a Libertarian, I've been painfully aware for decades that we really don't have any of those that are not abridgable, and all of our actions and decisions are predicated upon the permission of persons in whom power is vested, that is, in the legislators, lawyers, judges, and politicians, who are given command of the use of force, from the cop's nightstick and shotgun to the atom bomb. The Drug War has always been a good "thermometer" for evaluating how far it's gone. When the system of government is able to examine your life, your home, your possessions, your movements, relationships, business transactions, your records, online activities, phone calls, the contents of your pockets or body cavities, and the molecules in your blood or urine, either secretly or on demand, such that it becomes impossible for you to obtain and consume a joint of marijuana... and then to forcibly seize, arrest, declare you a felon, imprison, dispossess, disarm, and disenfranchise you for having done so... well, the use of such words as "privacy" and "freedom" and "justice" and "rights" are simply fantasy. If they will do that to you over marijuana, just what might they feel entitled to do over issues that justify extreme measures?

James Nathan Post

Rights Taken Away? Awwww...

VA HOSPITALS FOR ALL OF US?

Veterans have always been a discomfort to the Kings. Soldiers are, after all, expected to be motivated by a spirit of sacrifice... not simply looking for reward like mercenary contractors. Veterans need things, but unlike repairing a damaged truck, money spent maintaining them does not increase their useful value to the King, that is, beyond the propaganda value of "honoring" them with medals and speeches. Kings love the dead. Words can be put into their mouths to rally the living, and their portraits hanged like unpaid bills only the blood of the King's enemies can pay. Kings erect grand monuments (close to the Castle, under the Flag) which they tout as honor to the fallen soldiers, but which actually glorify that for which those patriots are declared to have sacrificed themselves... that is, the reign of Kings.

It seems clear to me that separate hospitals for the veteran operated by the government comprise a form of "socialized medicine." Curiously, many of those calling most loudly for the state to provide care for veterans are the same ones objecting most to the idea of socialized medicine for the rest of the population. The situation offers two options: one would be to close the VA hospitals and provide Federal payment of insurance to guarantee the veteran, and everyone else, access to the AMA's private-sector protected-monopoly corporate medicine system, and the other would be to expand the VA hospitals to include everyone.

Such an expanded Federal hospital system would not replace the existing medical industry, but would operate in direct competition with it. The medical and insurance industries both seek to obtain the highest profits the traffic will bear for what they provide. Given a gung ho attitude about genuine service like our present military medical corps, the FedMed Corps could strive to obtain the most actual medical care at the lowest cost to the taxpayer. To be competitive, however, it must be set free of AMA licensing or union requirements, must be permitted to provide any medical procedure or prescription at the lowest cost, in accordance with its own standards, and to pay wages equivalent to military salaries. It has no investment managers, no stockholders, and pays no dividends or bonuses. The AMA’s private industry can continue exactly as they are, and people who can afford it may buy into the insurance industry to pay for their services. No government program, however, should pay a private hospital for services available at a FedMed hospital. That way it is not a matter of them choosing only one way or only the other, but instead, giving you the citizen your choice of the best service socialism can provide for you and the best service capitalism can offer you, if you can afford it.

The other alternative, the one that seems to be blown around The Castle these days, by the princes of both houses, is to socialize only the payment of insurance premiums, so as to give the less-affluent more affordable access to the AMA's hospitals at their own profitable rates. Nobody is talking about actually providing medical care to anyone. No, they are talking only about providing medical insurance, and getting the IRS to collect their profitable premiums from all of us. In the meanwhile, veterans, and many others, go without...

We lost. Again. Because we are wrong. Again.

I was asked by a dear friend, a patriotic American Muslim and lifetime activist for just causes, to write about how we might actually do some good in Afghanistan and Iraq. I find myself only able to express the horror of what we face, and how it is that is what we have caused. This is the America I stand against, not the socialists trying to rein in the robber barons and give beans and bandaids to the working poor. Though we have been there almost a decade, and will likely be there for many years to come, this is why we have lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, past tense, lost. If we had actually left Iraq when President Bush said the mission was accomplished, we might have won what we said we were there to do. Instead we occupied the country and attempted to set up (once again) one of them who would utter our orders in their language, a cacique. As in Vietnam, even having the most powerful military might on the planet, sooner or later we can only make some show of "victorious withdrawal" and slink out.

Osama Bin Laden, if he is still alive, is on his face five times every day thanking Allah for making his September 11 mission more successful than he could possibly have dreamed. His tiny mission team consisted of fewer men than a platoon of Marines. They were educated and traveled young men, most of them middle class or wealthy like Osama himself, and almost all were Saudi. None was Iraqi, and none was Afghani. Using only borrowed equipment without armament, they conducted a single mission against a country which is defended by the world’s most powerful Air Force and a warning system manned by thousands of Americans spending billions of dollars. The result of that successful mission was to motivate the hubris-driven leader of America, the provincial and ignorant privileged Sunday-school simpleton George Bush, to initiate a war against two countries his advisors had dreamed of for years, hoping to make great profits for themselves “supporting the troops.”

Acting upon that single mission, George Bush made aggressive ruthless unprovoked war on the innocent people of two nations which had nothing to do with that mission, other than sharing its planners’ religion, and harboring them where they had a right to be at the time. Osama’s tiny organization of a few fellow Saudis protesting Americas’ use of his country as a staging ground for aggression against their neighbors has now grown from twenty courageous, pious, and self-sacrificing heroes to a global network of tens of thousands, all committed to finding a way to bring us down. Nothing Bush could have done would have been better for Osama’s objective. America has bankrupted itself, squandered our military might, and smeared our reputation over the entire globe, confirming the resolve of our enemies, and making enemies of millions of people who were once our friends . That September attack may have been the single greatest tactical mission since that bold squad of footsoldiers smuggled themselves into the city of Troy in a wooden horse.

Though the capitalist warmongers of the Christian Right who made of that September mission their Reichstag Fire to motivate seizing power in America claim to be led by their ideology, it is not the ideology of statesmanship, but of wealthmanship they follow. Nor is this the first time we have done this. In Iran a few decades ago, an elected democratic government was covertly undermined by the CIA and replaced by a puppet monarch dictator who enriched himself at our trough by dealing with our corporations for his country’s oil reserves. Since the otherwise peaceful clergy of that country removed that cacique and took over the government, America’s right wing oil barons have struggled for decades to find a way to justify destroying Iran. To that objective, we elevated Saddam Hussein to dictatorial power, and financed his war against them. Likewise in Iraq and Afghanistan, the oil reserves have been the big chip which moves the capitalists of America. Though it has enriched a few corporations, that war has bankrupted America, reduced our personal freedoms enormously, created a vast Gestapo-like police state structure, and turned most of the world’s nations and people against us, or at least to distrust us, and rightly so. We American patriots have been reduced on one hand to a disappointed and mistrustful group who have seen the righteous principles we believe in violated at every turn, and on the other hand a horde of flag-waving jingoists, prideful bigoted fanatics and racists, who are ready to send all but their own image of “real Americans” to the worst hells they can conceive.

In the 1950’s, we sent our CIA into the newly-created nation of Laos, formerly five French colonies which had been forged together under Japanese occupation in the 1940’s. They had just created a modern democracy in their country, and had a working government consisting of many political parties and ethnic groups. That government was called Pathet Lao, which means Free Laos. It would seem to be exactly what we claimed we were trying to create all over the world. That was, unfortunately, a lie. We declared since they admitted a Communist Party to that broad coalition, they were a Communist country. We used our covert forces to install a former monarch from one of those colonies as the “rightful” leader of the entire new country. We armed his palace guard, called them the country’s defense force, and permitted them to drive the Pathet Lao into the jungles. Unable to legally finance that new dictatorship through our Congress, we let them take over the lucrative opium market which China had conducted peacefully there for hundreds of years. That opium trade was conducted through the “French connection” we had built dealing with the Sicilian syndicate we call the Mafia in order to control the commies in the longshoremen unions of Marseilles during World War II. The money came from the streets of our cities, where prohibition of the drug keeps the prices up, and was used to buy black-market Russian weapons…so it wouldn’t look like we were behind them. When we lost the war in Vietnam, we bombed the fields of Laos with land mines to prevent them from growing the opium...or anything else. The Pathet Lao deposed the cacique we had installed, and they control the country today.

In Afghanistan today, we send airplanes costing fifty million dollars each, which burn enough gas on each mission to supply an automobile for fifty years, to drop million dollar bombs more powerful than Tim McVeigh’s truck on a handful of ragged illiterate mountain men with rifles who are guarding fields of opium. We do this in the name of protecting Americans from that natural pain reliever, while the corporations that fund our warmongering leaders’ campaigns have addicted millions of us to patented synthetic versions of that same drug. We are killing the Afghanis to protect their market from the superior natural product. This hypocrisy has killed thousands of them, and also has killed thousands of us, truly making ghouls of those corporations’ executives, men who have grown obscenely rich gorging themselves on the death and suffering of others.

Those who take their religion seriously are also aware that the arrogant goons of our mercenary security forces, and the bigoted fanatic religious cult within our government are attempting to create Christian cabals within the new states, and are spreading their heretical form of god-man idolatry among their children with smuggled-in Bibles, and obsequious evangels promising them heaven if they will just kneel and swear to obey Jesus Christ and Pat Robertson. Not satisfied to destroy their homes, their cities’ infrastructure, their economy, their culture, and their government, we are determined to kill their God as well. In return, we offer them women’s suffrage, and the BigMac.

Whatever comes of our attempt at occupation and economic exploitation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or how many of them are able to enrich themselves taking advantage of the money we pump into their countries, no Iraqi alive will ever forget that in the name of freeing them from a single despot, we reduced their ancient and beautiful land to a rubble pile in the desert laced with deadly depleted uranium, and we have killed a million of them in the process, and we kill more of them every day. Like the children of our SWAT-patrolled inner cities, every little kid growing up in either of those countries dreams of the day he might someday be able to kill just one of those grinning armored goofs who are passing out candy one minute, and kicking down their doors and killing their fathers the next.

Today in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, after a trillion dollars and almost a decade of futile mayhem, there is not a single square meter of land where a common American citizen could safely stand, without being protected by a guard of armed men. Unless we are able to somehow suddenly change ourselves from the ravenous worm to the butterfly, I think it is not unfair to say as long as there is one man left in either of those countries who still has a free mind, a heart, a soul, and a pair of balls, there will be no such place.

TOTAL SEPARATION OF MEDICINE AND GOVERNMENT?

The Libertarians inform me that Obamacare is wrong, and the correct fix for our abysmal public health system is total separation of medicine and government. I believe they might be on the right track here, if by TOTAL separation they mean to end the laws which make it illegal for anyone to provide to anyone else any kind of ameliorative care without the certifications of the AMA. Open up medicine to true free market competition, and the cost would plummet. End government enforcement of the medical industry’s monopoly on the right to sell medical products and services, and more important, their right to define what is and what is not medicine such that they should have a market monopoly on it, and the price of common health care would go down like a pompom boy in the shower. You'd still pay a ton for a robot heart, or a transplant, but you could get a couple of stitches or a tooth pulled for the cost of an oil change in your car.

I'm all for private business, large and small. I know it’s not what they teach you to get that MBA, which I don’t have, but it seems to me there has to be a point at which something is more important to anyone selling a product or a service than the money he can make doing it. I could be wrong about that.

Don't whine to me about how we have to have the government in there with their law enforcement pistoleros to "protect us" from quacks, or from our own vices. A real free market would quickly weed out the medical quacks. Like being able to tell whether a line of cars is fine engineering, or painted up lemons, we are able to tell the good healers from the quacks without even a lot of education. The healers will clean you up, sew you up, get your body running correctly, and teach you how to take care of it. The quacks will sell you a lifetime prescription for symptom-treating pharmaceuticals that are poisonous and addictive as junk, so you can't quit taking them.... QUACK QUACK QUACK!

What about the good doctors? There are certainly many of them. But… when it costs half a million bucks and more just to get that MD, and half of that every year to buy insurance to protect themselves from predatory suit, and they must charge the patient for superfluous tests made to protect the doctor from the potential plaintiff’s lawyer, the system does not favor the individual who would like to be a genuine health care provider to the commonly-paid citizen.

The political solution to the health care problem? Fuggittaboutit! You could elect the ghost of Lincoln, or Roosevelt, either of them, hell, you could bring back Ronald Reagan, and as long as the discussion is not about providing actual health CARE to people, but only about using the IRS or the Courts and Police to provide mandatory health INSURANCE premiums, we aren't going to succeed, and we'll continue to drop dead addicted to phony opiates and tranquilizers, or go bankrupt for a week’s stay in the Healin’ Hilton. As long as so-called "free market conservatives" think if the CEOs and stockholders are making money our health care system is working, we people won't have real health care, employed or not. Don't forget that for the medical industry, providing health care benefits is not the profit part, it is the expense part, and they will do their best to minimize it. Ever scratch your car? You find your insurance company has a staff of "adjustors" whose job is to find a way to justify paying you less, while raising your premiums. What makes you think medical insurance is different? As with the salaried people who work for the corporations: paying “workers” is not the company's objective, it is just another of its expenses, which they want to minimize. The objective is Conservatively clear: enable the few who hold the papers of ownership of the corporations to make money, and the more the better, ad absurdum. It is basic trickle-down theory, whether under feudal lords, gangsters, CEOs, Popes, or kings, that as long as the rich are getting richer, the rest of us will grow fat on the crumbs falling from their table. Even good shepherds do not build folds because they love the sheep, but because they know the price of mutton and wool. Don't look now, Little Bo Peep, but what is on that table is lamb chops. Baaaaa! Baaaaa!

WHY DO WE PAY FOR THE VA?

Veterans benefits are a form of socialism. No other employer besides the state is either obligated or able to pay lifetime pensions, subsistence, and health care benefits to all of its present and former employees, much less entitled to tax everyone to pay whatever it costs. A system of hospitals on the Federal budget which offer free medical care only to a group of present or former employees of the US Government in certain capacity is a form of socialism. I'm not saying that as an indictment, but just a fact. The active Socialists in America want exactly that... a system of hospitals exactly like the VA, but where any citizen can go. The loss of profit to our medical industry and insurance industry would destroy the free-market economy!

So why should paying Veterans benefits be tolerated? Why are Veterans selected for what are after all socialist entitlements? What is there about being a "Veteran" which should justify a person's being placed for life in a certain category of beneficiary of Federal funds? Whether drafted or volunteered, with some benefits dependent upon having been in combat, this is presumably a reward for placing life at risk for the State, whether willingly or not, notwithstanding the fact that many veterans' jobs did not place them at risk at all. Likewise not withstanding the fact that many in other State and private jobs must risk life every day, and are not being given those benefits. What makes being a Veteran so special? Is it merely a propaganda gesture, a show of "honor" so as to motivate the next generation of sacrifices?

Drafted or volunteered, it is presumed you are there to the death. You have agreed to offer your life in service to the Flag, and to the Republic for which it stands. It is not just a job, something you do for the benefits like a common profiteering corporation mercenary, it is a sacrifice, for God and Country. So if you were willing to die for your country then, shouldn’t that same spirit of sacrifice rule your relationship to the Flag now? So you don't sleep well; take it to the Chaplain. So you lost a couple of parts; be a hero, and hand out Buddy Poppies to inspire your replacements. You were willing to die for freedom's sake then, so why are you complaining about a little suffering now? "Freedom Is Not Free" -- you remember that? Somebody has to make the sacrifices. Veterans should not be the ones whining for benefits, but the first as always to step up to the plate... and pitch in a little silver or a little blood. Right?

You who would like to put an ***end to socialism*** in America, and an end to the practice of exclusive medical entitlements given only to certain government employees, should begin by demanding that the term "veteran" should be discontinued, and that no Federal funds or other benefits or advantages should be given to any person merely because of that qualification. Wearing any government uniform is a job, risky or not, and as in the private sector, no employer should be obligated (much less entitled) to pay anything to any of its ex-employees. You should insist that the VA hospitals in America are a form of socialized medicine, which give favor exclusively to certain employees and ex-employees of the government, at the expense of the private sector businessman and taxpaying employee, and the program should immediately be discontinued, and the assets sold to the private sector, for honest competition in the free market.

REALLY END SOCIALISM IN AMERICA? END THE VA HOSPITAL SYSTEM

Bubba Goes To The Doctor

Like the classic joke of the two Jewish ladies at the restaurant who agreed the food was inedible, but the portions too small, it is sometimes difficult these days to tell if we are getting too little medical care, or too much.

Bubba was delivering a truckload of shingles to the doctor to fix his roof. He walked into the doctor's office and the receptionist asked him what he had. Bubba said, “I got the shingles.” She wrote down his name, and medical insurance number and told him to have a seat.

Fifteen minutes later a nurse's aide came out and asked Bubba what he had. Bubba said, “I got the shingles.” So she handed him a twelve-page form starting with his height, weight, and a complete medical and credit history and told Bubba to fill out all the pages, and then to go wait in the examining room.

Half an hour later a nurse came in and asked Bubba what he had. Bubba said, “I got the shingles.” So the nurse gave Bubba a blood test, a blood pressure test, an allergy screen, and an electrocardiogram, and told Bubba to take off all his clothes and wait for the doctor.

An hour later the doctor came in and found Bubba sitting patiently in the nude and asked Bubba what he had. Bubba said, “I got the shingles.”

The doctor asked, “How long have you had these shingles?”

Bubba said, “I got into this shingle thing back when I was nineteen.”

Doc said, “OK, here’s a prescription for some stuff you can put on your shingles. If you’ve still got shingles in two weeks, come back again.”

“OK,” said Bubba. “Do you want to look at these shingles now?”

Doc said, “Naw, I know what shingles look like. You say you got shingles, I believe you.”

“Can I get the shingles off my truck now?” Bubba asked.

“I never heard of anybody getting shingles off a truck,” the Doc said with a laugh, “but when you do, you let me know.”

Bubba got his clothes back on, and he went and got the shingles off the truck, and he took them up and laid them on the roof.

Two weeks later, Bubba got a bill for $640 for the entry processing, the tests, and the examination. His insurance denied the claim because he had admitted that he already had the shingles since he was nineteen. He objected that he had only gone there to give the shingles to the doctor, and he didn’t understand why he had to take off his clothes. Bubba couldn’t figure why they seemed to be so confused and offended by that.

“How did you plan to give shingles to the doctor?” the insurance guys asked.

“I’m supposed to see they get laid up on the roof,” Bubba replied.

They were shocked. “You say you got naked and gave the doctor shingles getting laid up on the roof? That could be a considered a sex crime, attempted blackmail, or biological assault, all of which abrogate your policy.” Bubba had to pay.

Bubba found out soon that he had picked up a virus sitting in the lobby with all those wheezing sick people and their snot-gurgling kids, and he picked up a super-staph infection sitting naked on the doctor's bench. Soon he had a wretching cough, and boils on his asshole nothing would cure. He was prescribed antihistamines, antibiotics, antitussants, antidepressants to keep from feeling low, and antipsychotics to deal with the side-effects of the other “medicines”.

Because of the boils, he lost his job driving the delivery truck for the roofing company. Without the job, he lost his insurance. He would take a second mortgage on his house to pay for the addictive prescription medicines he must now take, but he lost all his equity in the collapse of 2008 (oops, sorry, I mean the Obamalapse of 2009).

To keep from losing the house over his medical bills, he divorced his wife and let her have it in the settlement. Bubba now lives on a homeless care program, where he gets free medications, pain-killers, tranquilizers, and a winter coat. He survives by visiting his ex's kitchen door every evening after she gets home from work. She feeds him, but won't let him in because of the smell, and the restraining order her mortgage assistance program demands. If he got a job, he would lose his meds, and he can’t get through a day without them.

The doctor is suing Bubba’s old boss because the roof still leaks.

SOCIALIZED FUNERALS?

I would like to see a public option for funeral service. I'd say the disposal of bodies is a pretty reasonable thing to have your government do, like building highways and running the Coast Guard. You call the agency, and they pick up the corpse, with which they may dispose any way they want, starting with harvesting all the usable parts, and making them available at cost to everybody in our public option hospitals, or just grinding it to meat paste for livestock feed.

You want churchy stuff, or "honorable treatment" or any of that, YOU PAY FOR IT, from any business which will give you what you want, from a platinum sarcophagus to a Viking pyre, or just getting laid out in a hole. Would such “natural burial” be irresponsibly dangerous to the environment or to public safety? No. We bury horses that way don't we? It is God’s way of naturally dealing with the matter, isn’t it? That mandatory embalming and canning business to protect us from the dead is just the usual fear tactic used to grant power and privilege to certain "service providers" whose business we are obligated to patronize.

Personally, I would like to be freeze dried, and so mummified, stood up in a corner somewhere the kids can put silly hats on me.

WHAT ABOUT CENTURION’S MOVEMENT?

I grew up on America’s first rocket base in New Mexico, watching my Dad and his pals shoot off the last of Von Braun’s V-2s. I was a patriotic young Republican, a CAP Cadet, and a science fair winner. I always sang in the choir in church growing up, and again on the bases where I served in uniform. I have close family today in the space business, and also in uniform on active duty. Good American roots.

After my tour in Vietnam in ’68, I was ready to go back, up for promotion, highly decorated and gung ho. I was apprehended on the beach smoking the local Panama Red with the daughter of the High School principal. To avoid embarrassment to the Army, I was declared by the unit psychiatrist to be morally unfit to lead troops into combat, and offered resignation of my Warrant if I would waive trial, accept Article 15, and quietly go away. I did, and instead of getting my new Cobra gunship and going back to the DMZ, I found myself at Woodstock.

I’ve said going from Khe Sanh in 1968 to Woodstock in 1969 was like pushing the hyperjump button on a computer game and finding yourself in a different universe. Having been thrown out, I dropped out, and over the next decade learned to live a personally free lifestyle that few people who are integrated into the structures of our society are able to comprehend, much less defend the rights which make it possible. These two widely separated viewpoints produce a heightened sense of perspective, just like having two eyes gives you a sense of depth you cannot get from either one by itself.

Whether we are watching Fox or MSN, most Americans these days pick one or the other, and see things only one way. If you use your Right eye, you get one set of “news” stories, and if you use your Left eye, you get the opposite. Both images are being sold to you by the same corporations, down the same tube, like 3D movies with two-color glasses. Each will tell you what is wrong with the other, and the Libertarians will tell you what is wrong with both. They are all correct, which makes them all believable. As long as you are wearing a Red State shirt or a Blue State shirt, and buying tickets to their elections, they win. We will fight over which of them gets to wear the Big Hat this year, and what new powers and privileges they will give to each other, but it will be one of them who gets elected, incumbent or new young lion.

On all sides of the political spectrum, Americans are more and more disturbed and dissatisfied with our system of government. One-eyed, we point fingers of accusation at whatever we perceive ourselves to oppose. “It’s the Liberals!” we shout, or “It’s the Christians!” Some of us shout, “Throw out the Incumbents!” and some even suggest we should go for the root, and cry, “Throw out the Congress!” Whatever we think we want to throw out, we often as not end up taking our justification from some line we quote from The Constitution, or The Bible, insisting there are things we have now that we don’t want to lose. We’re unhappy with what is going on, but we really don’t have much idea about how things might be different.

With respect to ARM’s activity in this regard, two big questions come to my mind. First, how do you make a movement happen, and second, besides voting for individuals without the power to draw mainstream voters, what do we expect to accomplish?

Making movements happen is what the big political marketers are best at. It takes a lot of money, a lot of media expertise, technical and editorial, and the vast resources of man-hours of thousands of organized people. It is practically impossible to organize a political movement without that movement taking place among the present-day politically powerful. If an idea isn’t already a contention among the existing leaders, it isn’t likely to generate much real power to move large numbers of people, as a “movement” implies.

I have long been fascinated by the “chain-letter” or “geometric” forms of marketing and propagating ideas. Like today’s “viral” videos on the internet, these things will take off and spread themselves, without anyone having to force-feed them with money or structured organization. This is clearly our best shot at creating an American Reform Movement. How do we get people to spread it? Obvious: the content. Content, and comment on content, an active controversy. It has to be about what we are saying, and that has to be what people wish they could say for themselves, so they will send it to their friends… or their enemies, as appropriate. Also obvious: the flag-bearer. Politics is a game of celebrity, and as commercially-made celebrities from Lady GaGa to Sarah Palin make clear, you’ve got to get out there like Billy Mays and sell yourself to accomplish that. I did not say you have to sell out, but you’ve got to have somebody out front pitching the product and yelling, “Follow me.” In that regard, our ARM man on the ground is Bill Taylor, aka The Centurion, whose name we hope shows up on many ballots here and there.

As for our objectives, that’s pretty tough to get a real grip on. It is clear to me that as long as we have the same system of elections and the same government structures as defined by our Constitution, then the same kind of guys are going to keep getting elected. Oh, there will be an endless line of new pinheads ready to put on the peaked hats, but it will be the same hats they keep putting on. Worse, there is no changing the fact that the big celebrity campaigns require hundreds of millions of dollars, and both the incumbents and the challengers know the only place to get enough money to do that is by selling influence to the big lobbying industries. No matter who gets elected, they get to office beholden to somebody for the necessary money. It is an unavoidable prostitution that eventually every candidate must accede to, no matter how sincerely, and it is a vice which lends itself most to the most willing. Those who love the pay-to-play way have a real advantage at winning office, again and again.

If all we are doing is influencing voters to vote for candidates with no reasonable chance of winning (Libertarians and Independents are each less than 2% of the vote), and our candidates if they won would still have to face the Old Boys and entrenched powers of the huge industries, and the huge agencies, then what might we think we are accomplishing? If we are to create a movement, clearly it first of all must be a movement in the way Americans think, and not just a kneejerk reaction to rally the confused and angry to throw stones at the castle and drag Senators to the guillotine, whether they be villains and whores or merely hopelessly hopeful idealists trying to do some good in a crooked game.

The best I can do is try to make sense of it from my cross-the-spectrum perspective, to keep yelling into the wind from my tower in the wilderness, to defuse unnecessary conflicts among Americans if I can, to protect the rights and liberties of every individual, to support things that promote the common good, and to try to remind everyone that we are not here to tear down The United States Of America, we are here to make it work.

Right-Or-Left politics is not enough. It has to be Right-And-Left, led by a clear head with both eyes open. So open your other eye. You’ll see what horrors the One-Eye merchants of chaos are peddling to us, on both sides. It could be mind opening, and illusion banishing. It could change the way you look at elections. What then? Tell us how it looks from where you are. Given enough such viewpoints, our collective perspective brings about a new focus, and new movement. We won't have to tell you what to do. You will see what to do.

James N. Post "Lancer 17" 101st ABN '67-'68

WHY AM I HERE ON A.R.M?

WHY AM I HERE ON A.R.M?

LT Bobby Ross and I go back a long way. I was once a Huey gunship pilot for the 101st Airborne Division, and one of a group that like to be given the hottest missions, that is, flying Long Range Recon Patrols (LRRPs). You’ve seen the movies. Half a dozen extremos in cammo paint, and a couple of ARVN Rangers, get dropped deep in bad guy country. The enemy are very good, very brave, and they are savvy. When they spot the team, they don’t just shoot them up. They put a ring of machine guns and AAA around them, and dare somebody to come get them. A bunch of crazy guys in helicopters come over the hill shooting rockets and miniguns, and they pick up the LRRP team and shoot their way out. As that guy shooting the rockets, I figured there was only one group of troops in the whole war who hung it out farther than we did. Those were the guys we were taking in there, and then going back to pull out. Bobby was one of them, often as not the team leader, the one who had to call the shots men lived or died by, and the last one to get on the helicopter out of there. We never met, but as LRRP guys were a pretty small club, chances are very high we were on some of the same missions.

As though that weren’t enough coincidence, a few years later Bobby was in Nashville making a name in country music, playing guitar and singing songs about being a veteran, and about the things we thought were important enough to put our lives on the line for. I was on the west coast in the wine country, playing my guitar and singing metaphysical hippie love songs, about what I thought was eternally true, and hopefully virtuous. We connected on the internet, and I’ve been on Bobby’s LRRP boards for many years since. Now once again, we find ourselves on the same ground, this time politically. These days America is more and more polarized by the two-product-market techniques of the Right and the Left. Bobby and I are once again on the same page, but it ain’t the right page or the left page. There is more to it than the guns-and-Bibles guys on the right, and the safe-nursery-rules and free-cheese guys on the left, and it is increasingly important that more Americans recognize that. It is going to take some very open-minded and adult thinking to deal effectively with what is real in our complex and troubled world today, and the extremists on both sides are contributing to the problem, not the solution.

These days I like saying, “It takes both the right wing and the left wing to make the Eagle fly.” The system of government our forefathers created is a dialectic, a coordinated and respectful conversation between opposing points of view, exactly like the wings of an Eagle, hopefully led by a clear head with both eyes open to give him a sense of perspective. There are things on both sides of the aisle that a good, honest, and well-funded government can do for a democratically involved public better than we can do independently. These include things like a national highway and power system, the Navy and the Coast Guard, and the VA system of medical care. There are things on both sides of the aisle that the government should keep out of, and let a well-informed and free market of independent citizens take care of ourselves. The trick is to find the wisdom to know which is which, and to progress beyond the left/right paradigm to make the good things work, to quit doing things that don’t, and to serve both the people and the country.

There has never been a more important time for American citizens to become informed, to become involved, and to be heard. Nobody on ARM is asking you to kill anybody or die for us, nor to shell out your money. Just decide where you stand, take a step forward, and sound off like you have a pair

James Nathan Post “Lancer 17” 101st Abn. ’67-’68

Here's one I sent to the Kingsmen (we old rotorheads of the 101st) APR 4, 2010.

I know I like to run my face pretty long and hard, and sometimes I think I would have been smarter to have quit years ago and learned to do something Americans respect and reward, play golf, sell insurance or basketball shoes, but I just can't let our country keep going to the f*ckheads and feather merchants without at least yelling about it. I know we here at what's left of Camp Eagle hold many opinions about how best to help, but I believe we are all singing in the same key. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do believe those who read this stuff here are intelligent and caring Americans who would still put our lives on the line every day if that were called for. I may be a fringe loony, and our country about half nuts, but I still consider it an honor to be an American and a Kingsman. Best advice I've got is to stay off the credit cards and the stupid-pills Doctor wants to sell you, work hard to take care of your families and your community, respect God in whatever form you know Him, learn what you can about the people who run for office, pick the honest ones (I believe there are some), and vote. Also keep your powder dry and pray we don't have to start shooting each other to keep what our forefathers gave us, and good men like our brothers Cpt. Olson and Smitty Link died for.

La Mantilla De Maria

I once lived in Costa Rica, where they have names for different kinds of rain. I particularly liked the Pelo de Gato, that is, cat fur, which is so fine it was hard to tell if it was really rain, or just falling fog. I am not Catholic, but I also liked Baño de Maria, Mary’s bath, which means rain falling on you while the sun is shining. Today here in Albuquerque, something wonderful happened. First it began to snow, in great big fluffy flakes without a breath of wind to disturb their fall. It snowed just enough to drape everything with a layer of perfect white. Then in minutes, the clouds broke open like curtains to reveal a clear blue sky, a balmy afternoon that quickly flashed the snow away, leaving all the new spring colors wet and bright and alive. I hereby declare that to have been Mantilla de Maria, Mary’s mantle of lace.

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