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
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
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
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