America Needs Repair

 Allow me to preface by saying that America is the best nation on earth, warts and all; that it is my home, and that I love it. That said, America is broken and has been since day one. How, you may ask? It is so in that the American architecture for governance was, and remains half-baked. The Framers put together a set of feel-good ideas that are in themselves valid, but that are insufficient to the tasks to which they were set. The tasks in question were few, but very essential to the establishment and maintenance of a free land.

The question arises: what is the valid purpose of governance?  The answer is clear: to protect the natural rights of every individual.  There is no other valid purpose, however this single imperative leads us to the question of what, precisely, defines such defenses?  What are the metes and bounds? The answers are those that the Framers failed to incorporate into the Constitution, and a grave error it was, indeed.  Instead, they relied on the largely tacit assumption that the principles of English Common Law would sufficiently serve as the basis for judicial comportment, for example.  They assumed that a moral people would be capable of stemming tides of incompetence and corruption.  They assumed wrong.

For one thing, the establishment of America set a global precedent against tyranny that had not been known for millennia, and it pissed the Tyrant off something terrible.  People of the civilized world had had the Tyrant's boot on their necks for so long, they knew not in sufficient measure what it meant to be properly free, and subsequent tyrants went immediately to work to establish their comparatively petty tyrannical framework for the new land in the form of early precedents so that the people would have the least opportunity to get wise to the broader and deeper implications of what it meant to be a free human being living amid and among his fellows.  Early Americans simply didn't know, save that they were freer than they had been under the king.  It was all very new. and in typical human style, having secured victory over a tyrant, they then grabbed a beer and celebrated, unaware that a new set of tyrants were already hard at work to circumscribe the rights and valid prerogatives of free men to the greatest degree they felt the could get away with at the time.

It is oft quipped that fortune favors the bold.  And so it was with the First Congress who, desperate to raise revenues to pay off "national" debts to foreign holders, passed the so-called "whiskey tax", a legislative step that set a deep precedent that stands to this very day and has proven itself a cancer of the deepest and most deleterious sort.  And some of the people revolted against it, what we call the "whiskey rebellion", and in the end the federal "government" sent the US military against its own people to crush the valid and proper dissension that had arisen against this first and foremost outrage upon the very rights of humanity for which countless brave and good men gave their lives over the course of seven years fighting the rot and tyranny of the British crown.  It was already the beginning of the end for the ideals of the City on the Hill that was to become the beacon of hope for the rest of the world in spite of all the errors of intent and miscalculation.

But the absence of very explicitly specified and formalized foundational principles, in combination with the understandably incomplete knowledge of people naive to what it truly meant to be free, all but guaranteed our descent into tyranny in one form and degree, or another.  

This is all very curious in the face of the fact that the Framers were in no way naive to the nature of politics.  They well knew the propensities of human beings where political considerations were concerned.  This was well represented in the old story about Benjamin Franklin who, having emerged onto the streets of Philadelphia, was accosted by a woman who asked him what form of government had the people been given. "A republic madam... if you can keep it."  If, indeed.  I will give the Framers credit in assuming that none of their failures were concocted with ill intent.  

I would also note that the woman's purported question carries with it a clue as to the general mindset of the people.  She asked what form of government, rather than of governance.  The difference may seem subtle, irrelevant even, but I assure you that it is essential and that the differences it may make in terms of the qualities of life for a people are vast in every direction.  The mindset difference alone is huge.  For one thing, "government" as an entity in sé, does not exist.  It is merely a script that people follow, but it has no reality its own in the way that a building does, or a vehicle or bologna sandwich.

Governance, on the other hand, represents real action in the real world.  This is what the early American people either failed to grasp, or simple failed to pursue it with sufficiency in order to ensure that tyranny would not arise in their hard-won land.

Government, when seen incorrectly as a thing that exists in and of itself, causes the human mind to lend it qualities that are all lies.  The quality of substance, for instance.  It's the King's New Clothes on steroids and half tons of LSD and methamphetamine each, and a healthy dose of steroid rage in the deal.  It is literally nothing at all in which people have come to believe is actual material reality, and that it is large and powerful and dangerous as all get-out, and that it must be obeyed.  Just try to wrap your minds around the truth of this.  It is the belief in unicorns and the flat earth.  It is the very definition of what it means to be a raving, screaming psychotic, for the disconnection from reality in order to believe any of this lies at the very root of one's humanity.  The wild insanity of this cannot be overstated, nor can the dangers.

But if we take 1791 as the year of our actual beginning as a formalized nation-state, then we can say that as of this writing we have the benefit of 233 years of hindsight from which we can learn just where we as a people went wrong, where the holes and cracks reside, and how we may better endeavor to affect the necessary and hopefully complete, correct, and uncompromising repairs not only to the so-called "system", but to our ways of thinking, including our understandings and attitudes toward and about what it means to be a free human being.

Principles.  Without these, we are as a ship with neither rudder nor anchor.  We are a tall building with a rotten foundation which cannot hope to stand for long.  Without them we are lost.

Those principles must manifest the characteristics of clarity, correctness, and completeness.  Without correctitude, we go wrong.  Minus completeness, we may go right at times, wrong at others.  Sans clarity, our understanding of otherwise valid principle falters and once again we wander into error.  These qualities must be non-negotiable.  We must not compromise them away for any sake whatsoever, especially for mere convenience or expedience.  We must test the principles for error, holes, and other failures so that when all is said and done we have in our hot little hands a set of precepts by which we may judge the actions of those who take up the mantle of the Public Trust in service to their fellows, as well as ourselves.

There is nothing new here, save that we may have formalized what it means to be a free civilized man as part and parcel of a framework for governance for all.  In this, there is no "government" to which we lend all the false qualities and characteristics of an actual, extant entity.  There is only the function of governance, and that function comes into play only where the individual fails for some reason to properly govern himself.  National defense comes validly to the fore when people of other nations fail to govern themselves properly by threatening danger to those of America.

The ways in which we have failed ourselves as free human beings are manifold. For example, it has long been clear to me that our judiciary is largely broken, what with it being polluted and infested with so many rotten principles such as chevron deference, which were added in ad hoc fashion to address the cracks that arose in the course of our judicial evolution, the architects clearly unwilling to, or incapable of seeing beyond the immediacy of their concerns with an eye toward unintended consequences.

Humans being what they tend, fail to establish with sufficient rigor the basic principles by which a system shall operate. The American judiciary is a glaring and tragically dangerous example of this failure, as is much of the Constitution - a document written for saintly men, rather than real ones.

I am a computer scientist. When designing software, especially that of a decidedly non-trivial nature in terms of its functional complexity and size, one must be extremely circumspect in how he goes about formulating the designs lest severe consequences arise that could impact, say, a business from many standpoints including that of criminal liability. I am in the deep-seated habit of approaching problems in the ways of proper computer science, which is to say I always look to exhaustive consideration of the possible outcomes of given schemes with an eye for failure points. This is boilerplate, and we of a well seasoned caste do it well and we do it as a matter of second nature. It is a habit that is in vanishingly small evidence in all branches of "government". It is all but nonexistent in the legislature where the rot of incompetence and malicious intent in the formulation and passage of statute leaves a stench that adversely and unjustly impacts the lives of all, causing unjust harm and at times utter ruin in violation of the very rights one's oath promises to protect in good faith and competent service.

In the executive, the same may be said for the formulation and adoption of policy, and in the legislature, the functionally self-same problems exist that give rise to laws that are arbitrary, vague, broadly interpretable, and therefore fly in the face of the natural rights of men and result in gross and felonious violation.

All have failed to define the fundamental frameworks with sufficiency such that all these blatantly arbitrary and ill-considered, ad hoc policies became possible and arguably necessary to plug holes in the dike, so to speak. The essential principles were either not worked out at the beginning, were not included in foundational documents, or were simply ignored by those in whom the public trust had been and continues to be vested, the latter being perhaps the more disturbing head of the hydra.

As an example, in the case of legislative ambiguity, advantage and benefit should always be settled by the court in favor of individual liberty and the attendant prerogatives of freedom over the purported interests of the "state" or any other consideration that seeks to more tightly constrain a man. Decisions should without exception be made in favor of individual liberty such that if such a decision so deeply offends the Congress or the executive, let them then go back to the drawing board to do their jobs correctly such that legislative and/or policy-related ambiguity is erased in favor of semantic clarity, as well as propriety of principle and the proper respect for the rights of all men.

If ever a project were worthy of human endeavor, it would be the one where the principled foundations of all governing action were laid out and passed into Law and set beyond the reach of the corrupt, inept, and malicious. Without this, we will continue only to proceed in ad hoc fashion, willy nilly. This may occur with all good intentions, but I remind you that such intentions count for nothing. Where liberty is concerned, we must never compromise even on the most seemingly trivial point because there is no point relating to human rights that is so insignificant that we can bargain them away in the interest of any other expedient, regardless of how grand and centrally critical it may be. Once a door is opened in this way, the precedent has been set for further degradation and disparagement of our fundamental rights. Never ever allow this; not even once. Be well, be prosperous, be free, and as always please accept my best wishes.

They Keep Murdering Socrates

The ancient Greeks murdered Socrates because he refused to go along with the standard-issue version of truth, which was no truth at all, but only a set of convenient lies shared by the people of Greece to make themselves feel better in a world the cold realities of which are simply too much for the average human being whose soul has been sullied with the manifold corruptions so prevalent in the hairless apes. H. P. Lovecraft saw and expressed with clarity this habit of humans to lie to themselves about anything and everything that frightened or otherwise displeases them. He also saw the precipice toward which gross humanity was heading:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

And so we have developed a huge body of what the Butthole Surfers termed "cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies", all to deceive ourselves into believing that the world and our places in it are something that they are not.  They aren't even close.

The corruption of the mean human being cannot be measured, for it is a real-world manifestation of arithmetic infinity, having long preceded Socrates, and having survived him to this day, as healthy as ever it was. It has taken root in the clergy, the kings and emperors, in every despot and every slave, as well as the soul of the Mean Man who now embraces it as a lover. The human world reeks of its own corruption, in which it wallows with stubborn intransigence, refusing to so much as remove itself therefrom, much less to cleanse itself.

We have thousands of years and thousands, nay hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of examples of how we humans as a statistical gestalt degrade ourselves with such obscenity that even God has tossed his hands in the air, saying "I give up".

The twentieth century alone has, with the miracles of our technologies, provided an indisputable record of our utter barbarity toward ourselves; of the self-loathing we so conceitedly pass on to each successive generation. Then there are the material political manifestations such as the Ottoman Turks having murdered two million Armenians to start us off. The criminal scum of Europe, beginning with the British elite, along with the French, the Germans, the Austro-Hungarians, the Serbians, butchered millions more with a war that threatened to consume the continent. The ghastly Soviets with their false "revolution" that butchered on the order of one hundred million innocent souls beginning with the Romanovs at the hands of the likes of Lenin and Trotsky, graduating to Stalin and Yezhov. Hitler's Germany was good for another 20+ millions, thanks in large part to the Internationalists and the vile Polish "government" who schemed and plotted to steal East Prussia and tried for all they were worth to convince Britain, France, and Russia to go to war with Germany in the 1930s.

Mao was good for at least 100 million of his own people, murdered most foully in his "cultural revolution". The North Vietnamese communists whose rage was vented on the people of the South; the Khmer Rouge and their killing fields, good for another two millions murdered and how many millions more whose lives they set to rack and ruin, all the while those jokers vomiting forth the hollow slogans of their false equality and justice.
If we conservatively cap the totality of political murders of the twentieth century at 220 millions, and it is likely considerably higher than that, an astonishing and ghastly truth emerges.  If every one of those bodies were laid next to each other in New York City, the average body occupying only five square feet of surface area, they would cover the entire 35.5 square miles of Manhattan and would eat into an additional 4.5 square miles of one of the other four boroughs for a total just over forty square miles.  That is an awful lot of murder.

All the while these scurrilous vermin sardonically laugh in our faces and even make films that tell us what suckers and scum we are... and we are, because we go right along with it all instead of hunting them and eliminating them and their entire families, stamping out their genetic lines from the book of life. A fine example of such a film is "Meet John Doe" with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, 1941. The ending is idiotically naive, but the scary bits about how fickle is the mob and how ruthless the elite, are on the money.

Humanity is its own worst enemy because we choose rot and decay and perdition and filth over our professed ideals. We talk the talk, yet far too few of us walk it, and most often only when it is convenient to us. We do it for no better reason than because the bad is easy and the right is not, and we so bitterly hate that which is not easy. We deserve every outrage heaped upon us because we tolerate it, and we shall deserve nothing better until and if the day ever comes that we arrive to some least shred of self-respect and bring to their ends those who use us as their pack animals and other chattel. We bring shame to the notion of the "free man", may God forgive us... assuming he even gives the least damn about the human plight at this point, which I question.

Industrialized killing and control technologies along with the abandonment of all morals is a formula for extinction.

Welcome to the twenty-first century. I'd close with the usual "please accept my best wishes", but this time I think it would ring just a little hollow.

Why Revolution Won't Help Much

In these turbulent times, I am finding it quipped with increasing frequency that revolution becomes more inevitable with each passing day.

While that may be so, it won't help... At least not much. In fact, "revolution" won't be a revolution at all, but merely a momentary, albeit violent, vent of what I'm willing to assume shall be righteous rage against the trespasses of "leaders" against those whom they claim to serve, but over whom they actually reign as dictators and despots of varying degrees and shallow-made flavors.

Revolution will not help because men's hearts are rotten with corruptions vast and manifold. The proof of my claim lies in the history of humanity itself. Note how every "revolution" of our recorded past ended up producing results little different than those they replaced. Also note that the replacements were not even always better than that which they replaced, people often going from frying pan to fire. The various communist revolutions of the twentieth century come immediately to mind, as does that of the French from 1789.

The British rock and roll band, "The Who", expressed it quite perfectly with the lyric:

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

One set of corrupt apes, spewing their lines of putatively noble sounding words, of which they walk very little, replaces the old set of corrupt apes who spewed their own lines of presumably noble sounding words of which they, too, walked very little.

Basically the same at their cores, the differences between them lay only in the superficialities of the notions they choose to peddle. We can afford to be generous enough to assume that they meant the words when they first vomited them forth into the world's lap, for of that there may be little doubt. But when it came time to live those words, to walk their talk, that was of course, "different". Once those in actual, material power (hereinafter "Theye" or "Themme") came to realize that they really didn't have to live by their own slogans, but could get a free ride on the backs of the suckers whom they were able to force into the molds that Theye themselves refused in all but the words, the descent into blatant despotism was set. Theye prove themselves materially no different than the ones they replace, every time.

The cycle thus repeats itself.

In political terms, human beings are as rotten as the days are long at the poles. It is as plain and as simple as that. Nothing more need be known on the matter, save to accept the unavoidable conclusion that humans cannot be trusted at any time, in any way, or in any measure where political considerations are concerned. There is no such consideration so innocuous, such that an intelligent and morally intact human being can honestly and rationally trust another with what we refer to as "political power". To do so even once is to tempt fate by setting the floodgates to disaster ajar.

If ever a critical mass of humanity were to come to this realization, accept it in their bosoms as utter truth, and choose to adopt the attitude of utter, absolute, and the most grim intolerance for violations of a man's rights by another, regardless of the justifications made for such felonious invasions, that is when the race of men will see a sea-change in terms of respect for those rights. It is only by such an improvement of the general attitude toward the ideals of proper human relations that a quantum improvement in the security of all men, and an equally measured increase in their general condition may be realized.

Until then, there shall exist no chance for the betterment of the mean human reality. Nay, our state of affairs stands but to decay ever further as the Apex Apes march their armies of eager, gun-toting stooges ever more deeply into the rightful territories of Freemen. The ultimate conclusion of this habit can only be the universal destruction of humanity, Apex Apes included, though Theye apparently see it not.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Indeed. Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Free Culture Is Warrior Culture

"When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil" 

-Thomas Jefferson 

For better than thirty years I have been telling this to people, at times with nodding heads in response, at others with glazed stares.  On far more occasions than I care to recall, people of a certain bent would launch into a diatribe at me about how violence is never the solution, even though I never mention the dreaded "v-word".  That's not to say I feel that violence is a universal evil as some do, because I don't.  As with all things, violence has its place.  However, it must also be noted that as with hatred, a little goes a very long way, but let me not digress so early on.

The American republic has problems.  Some will say our troubles root in the faults of our architecture.  This is certainly a valid point, for our Constitution carries with it the DNA for the death of the republic for which it stands as blueprint.  The power to tax is perhaps the greatest of these faults of design, but such flaws cannot bear the full measure of blame for the ways in which we have devolved as a people over the past two hundred years.  By far the great proportion of culpability lies with we, the glorious people.

I have given endless consideration and deep thought regarding the path that America has trod for at least forty five years since I became a young adult.  Long ago I could see that things were not progressing in a direction in which I could place my confidence and esteem.  Quite the contrary, we have descended the path leading into a hole from which a sulfuric stench issues and the horizons of which lie dark and menacing.

For a while I wondered whether I was just being some sort of genetic pessimist in my perceptions, but as the "dotcom" era began blossoming, an endeavor in which I found myself up to my eyeballs as an R&D computer scientist, I began realizing that my sixth-sense notions regarding humanity's general direction were not mistaken.  Indeed, by whatever grace or freak of chance, those recognitions were on the money.  The odd thing about it, at least for me, was that no matter how deeply into the grim went my prognostications, the realities that followed have always been equal to, or worse than what I'd dare declare as probable.

Back in 1992 when USENET was the "social media" of the day, I once made the prediction that one day the pedophiles would come out of their closets and demand the right to rape children.  In recent years NAMBLA† has come forward, effectively demanding their right to rape little boys with their declaration that being adults sexually attracted to small boys was nothing other than a "lifestyle choice."  In 1992 my suggestion was considered utterly outrageous, even by myself, and yet my inner voice said "sit back and wait.  Time will tell."  Thirty two years later...

How is is possible for a once sound people to have degenerated to such a degree?  The answer is simple: the absence of a warrior culture.  It is no more complicated than that.  America was wrong from Day One in this respect. Although much closer to the ideal in 1776, Americans were even then cut of a cloth that was not quite up to snuff for the liberties that the brave and gallant men of the Great Revolt, as I like to call it (the American Revolution, "revolution" being a term I dislike for the vast baggage it carries) had gifted them.  The truth of this becomes apparent when one considers the response far too many Americans gave when the first Congress passed the so-called "whiskey tax", which was signed into effect by the turncoat to liberty, George Washington.  The Whisky Rebellion lasted four years, between 1791 and 1794, and in my opinion was a mishmash of poor decisions on both sides of the disagreement, the greatest error being the enactment of the vile tax statute in the first place.

This brings us right back to the notion of "warrior culture".  But what exactly is such a culture?  The concise answer is this: warrior culture is one where intelligent, well-educated, and morally sound people who understand the ins and outs of proper human freedom, hold closely and with stern grip an attitude of utter and unremitting intolerance of the intolerable.  This definition, of course, begs the questions of what constitutes "proper human freedom" and that which is "intolerable".  Those may be discussions for another day, though I have essentially covered all this in previous writings.

As Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey on 6 January, 1816, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."  Free people living under the circumstances of civilization, which is now nearly universal on planet earth, cannot remain at liberty for long if they allow succeeding generations to slip into ignorance.  We in America, over the past 100 or so years, have borne witness to the searing and unequivocal truth of Jefferson's words.  Our general descent into the maelstrom of ignorance has accelerated at an alarming rate over the past twenty years, and even more greatly so in the last decade.

Humans by their nature are predatory beings.  In states of civilization, their natural hunting proclivities are given little to no avenue for expression.  Our ideals of peaceable coexistence chafes against our hard-wired drive to go out a kill stuff.  Part of humanity's remedy for this clear problem has been the institution of artificial competitions of all sorts.  Football, basketball, soccer, baseball, boxing, and the rest of the manifold means of sublimating the human killer instinct and allowing it to be vented in a more or less safe manner, have proven not quite sufficient to the task.  Not all people are content to live vicariously through the experiences of 300-pound fullbacks slamming into each other at full-throttle.  There are those for whom the first-hand experience of prevailing over their fellow men is absolutely essential.  Most eschew serial murder, partly because it is frowned upon most grimly by the Law, and perhaps also because it is a step too far for those who fancy themselves apex predators, yet for whom actual apex predation proves too scary for risk.  In other words, they are big-yakking blowhards who want the thrill without the downside of raw chance whereby they might meet a sticky end.  And so they often find themselves in the political arena, busying themselves with new and creative ways of trespassing upon the sovereign rights of their fellow human beings in the effort to make themselves feel important and as if they were the true alpha dwellers of the social apex, which they can never really be for a lack of courage and commitment.  But making believe, at the grave expense of those around them, is just the sweet spot in which they find their greatest comfort and cheap thrill while others suffer outrage upon insult.  They are the ultimate wannabes.

This saddest of all qualities in some humans is precisely that which has reduced all humanity to the dregs to which we now find ourselves relegated in terms of real status.  But equally pathetic and far more dangerous are those who tolerate these gross and unpardonable intrusions upon the valid prerogatives of Freemen.  This is where we Americans have failed to utterly, shamefully, and embarrassingly.  The reason we have failed so boldly, is the absence of the warrior mentality which knows right from wrong and is willing and indeed eager to thrash with great violence those who unjustly trample upon their fellows.

Know that which may be tolerated and that which may not.  It is actually quite simple, though I am the first to point out that it is not easy.  Learning what to bear and what to reject is supremely difficult because it bumps against our innermost desires, whatever those may be.  If I choose to be intolerant of the intolerable in others, I must also reject it for myself, lest I plunge headlong into hypocrisy, a status which leaves me half a notch below that of a child molester.  I say with confidence that there exists no lower creature upon the earth than the hypocrite.

Free men living in a civilized state must manifest the following qualities:

1. Strong intellect
2. Smarts
3. Integrity that manifests in part as stern intolerance of the intolerable
4. Honor
5. Responsibility
6. Generosity
7. Courage

 

Without these qualities in sufficient levels and ubiquity, a putatively free people is doomed to the same results we now enjoy in America.  We have chosen, as matters of will, the unsavory in the false belief that it makes us "different" and therefore "edgy*".  We as a people, and here I speak statistically, have sold our souls for a grand pack of lies which falsely proclaims what it means to be a proper American, the central requirement there being to turn one's back to everything once regarded as right and proper between men, in favor of the wretched, vile, and ineffectual.  This is not to say that all things new are bad.  I consider the sexual liberation of humanity to be one of the few bright results that have issued from those whose other offerings have lead men down the garden path.  Sadly though, even that once good direction has been perverted by certain interests, resulting in said liberation being derailed in a way that now turns what is certainly one of the divine elements of human relations into something cheap and soulless.

Enlightened self-interest may be the term that best nutshells the central necessity for all men who love freedom and wish to remain at liberty.

As for the seven qualities, lets give a Cliff Notes gloss.

Strong Intellect

I believe this speaks for itself, prima facie.  Without good intellectual power, how will people find themselves able to become smart in a broad and effective manner?

Smarts

It is not enough to have a good mind, which is more or less a matter of inborn talent.  Talent without development leads to having no skill of which to speak. Smarts is a certain sort of skill, which is the cultivation of one's God-given talents such that he becomes capable.  Capability is an ultimate quality in a human being.  Few things are as pitiful as the sight of a man who has no real capacity to get things done, for it means he has no real and meaningful power.  He is as an empty shell.

Integrity

Trust is perhaps the single most important thing that two human beings can have between themselves.  I see no other quality that so much as equals the critical importance of trust, much less surpasses it.  Without trust, men have no basis for relationships, save that they avoid each other at every possible turn, and when it is not possible, they are reduced to murdering one another.  The momentousness of trust cannot be overstated.

The integrity of a man is central to his trustworthiness.  If you are not seen as so worthy, nobody with a lick of sense will want to have anything to do with you.

Honor

Honorable is an element of integrity that narrows the sense of it.  A man may have integrity, yet may not be honorable.  Integrity speaks to a certain, let us say minimal, degree of predictability in a man, which in turn speaks to his trustworthiness; but not all trustworthiness is good.  Scoundrels and felons may be trustworthy in that you know they are going to consistently act against your interests.  This is a good thing, in a backhanded manner, because at least you know that with which you are dealing.

Honor brings a certain quality of desirability to the idea of integrity.  The honorable man is not only one of integrity, but whose constitution carries qualities that others not only trust, but value in a positive way.  The honorable man may be trusted to watch you children outside while they run into the store for tonight's dinner ingredients.

Responsibility

Responsibility speaks to the ownership of one's words and deeds.  Responsibility is one's duty toward certain things, which may include but is not limited to not trespassing upon the equal rights of his fellows, for example.  We carry responsibility for our actions.  If I am shooting a firearm under "normal" conditions such as while deer hunting, I am responsible for the safety of others such that I not mistakenly or carelessly injure them by my gunshot.  Under exigent circumstances such as in defense of one's life, the specific requirements of responsibility may be relaxed, depending on the particulars of a given case.

Responsibility, along with the other elements of this list, carries the element of enlightened self-interest.  Extending my sense of responsibility beyond my own immediate and obvious self-interest can indeed prove to be conducive and protective of those interests, if often in indirect and seemingly oblique ways.  For instance, my choosing to assume some manner and degree of responsibility for the rights of my fellow men may result in the better guarantees of my own rights.  When I see a woman being assaulted by a brute, I have before me a choice: get involved or walk on by.  Granted, I may not be in full or even sufficient knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the apparent assault, but I am nonetheless faced with the choice of whether to render help.  But if my assumptions of unjust assault, based on appearances, proves correct, then by rendering aid to the apparent victim, I am helping protect her rights.  If enough men so choose to safeguard the rights of their fellows, then the security of all rights it by that quantum enhanced and better guaranteed.  Enlightened self-interest, indeed.

I will note that vast numbers of people recoil at the notion of being responsible.  That is why proper freedom is so utterly unpopular.

Generosity

When we speak of generosity in this context, we are not referring to the opening of the purse or the giving of material items to those whom we deem as "in need" or "less fortunate".   The relevant sense of "generosity" here is that which says we respect the equal and just rights of our fellows just as we expect them to respect ours.  Once again, a strong aversion to hypocrisy is an absolute requirement for being a free human being.  Hypocrisy is criminal at its core and criminality has no rightful place in a free land.

I give you your life, you give me mine.  It is a simple as that, and yet this has proven monumentally evasive for vast legions of humanity, whether actively so, or passively.  After all, without the (at least) tacit approval, the tolerance of "the people", would the blood soaked tyrannies of the Soviet Union and communist China have been possible?  Methinks not likely.

If you want life, give life.  If you want love, give it.  If you want respect, be respectful.  If you want your ways to be tolerated (all else equal), then be tolerant of those of others (again, all else equal).

The Golden Rule is the basis of this sense of generosity.  Without it, we reduce ourselves to carping, grasping, and ultimately warring.

Courage

Free men must be courageous, but what does that mean?  I can paraphrase by stating that courage is the quality of quaking in one's boots with fear, yet pressing on to the object of your terror and reticence in spite of it all.

Without courage, knowing what must be done is likely to leave a man timidly demurring from doing the right things.  When "governments" overstep, one must not just have the knowledge of right and wrong such that they recognize the evil that is being perpetrated, for that is only half of the equation.  The other side of the equal sign is the resolute decision to act with authority to make an end of the wrong, and most often that means taking on the great Goliath we call "government".  If that does not frighten you, then somewhere along the line you have lost your most basic sense of self-preservation.  But if you have retained your healthy fear of that which poses grave danger, and you are willing to face it nonetheless, then you are indeed courageous and worthy of every man's esteem.

For a moment let us park ourselves in Albert Einstein's backyard and engage in a thought experiment of sorts.

Imagine if you will a land where the people are free and there exists a body of hard men who walk the walls for the sake of their fellows' liberties.  These men we may call "warriors".  They brook no defilement of the rights of their fellow men.  They walk the wall in defiance of all comers who might fancy a swing at such people.  Now imagine that as time passes and the concerns for liberty of the people inside the walls fade as is inevitable with nearly all humans.  In time they forget their basics of what it means to be a free people.  After all, they have the men on the walls who protect them, so why should they busy themselves with such matters?  Those men are even paid, so we're entitled to ignore those things with which the hired help must consume themselves.

Given enough time, this separation becomes so broad and the people so far removed from their own roots, they begin to degenerate into softness and all manned of decadences. As life becomes ever easier for the common man, they tend to get bored and by that impulse strike out for new amusements.  We in America and the "west" in general have borne first-hand witness to the results of such conditions.  Sexual liberation becomes perversion.  Tolerance becomes tantamount to suicidal apathy, and so on down the dreary list of degenerative symptoms of a people in decline, falling from the status of Freeman to that of willing slave, thinking himself still free just because the Whipmaster has deigned to afford him an expansive and gilt cage, replete with all manner of amusing diversions.

Meanwhile, the men on the wall remain, if luck also remain with the protected.  But the moment those hard men begin falling to the degradations of the broader culture, all stand to face doom before too much longer, for decay is like the most aggressive of malignancies.

This dolorous and most pitiable and shameful inevitability can be prevented by only one means: warrior culture which pervades the minds and souls of the average man.  To separate the warriors from the rest, as the sheep are separated from the dogs, is to all but guarantee the eventual demise of a people.  Because human beings by their nature prey upon other human beings, the best guarantee for the liberties of all is to ensure that very nearly all be trained up as warriors, intolerant of trespass and ready and eager to bring to wrack, ruin, and obliteration all who fail to live up to the minimal standards of interpersonal comport.

Without the mean man's ability and uncompromising will to see to his rights with a vicious and venomous single mindedness, he dooms not only himself, but his fellows as well to decay into something that is not free.  And so the question really turns on whether one is an actual and true lover of freedom, willing to become a monster when circumstance demands it.  I have found that most are not; they talk the big talk, but walk but a few steps pursuant, wanting all the benefits of liberty without having to bear the stresses, strains, and other burdens of becoming free, and then of holding onto liberty. There is always another human being ready and eager to take from others that to which he is not entitled.  The human world is rotten with criminals of all stripes, not all of them rapists, robbers, or murderers.  Defend your rights as a warrior, or you have no rights.  A right exists only if it is asserted, and once declared, must be defended, or it becomes as if it never existed in the first place.

Warrior culture is that of the man who knows who he is, what is right, what is wrong, and tolerates no trespass of his sovereign rights by anyone, at any time, for any reason, though he reserves his authority to make such determinations as to exceptions to this general maxim.  However, such exceptions are a tricky fish upon which to keep hold.  They should be few and given only in the most wisely chosen cases, lest people then eventually end up giving away the farm that is their liberty to the barbarians who would have your hide drying on the barn door, given the chance to make it so.

Warrior culture is the only one suitable to free men.  All others lead to inevitable destruction by cultural suicide, and even that of the warrior can end in the same result when the people relax their vigilance in the absence of clear and apparent threats.  As the old saying goes, easy times make weak men.  Weak men make hard times.  Hard times make strong men.  Strong men make easy times.  Perhaps this cycle cannot be avoided, but does it not behoove us to at least try?

It's an all or nothing deal.  In for a penny, in for a pound.  Otherwise, do not even bother starting.

Once again I bid you adieu, and please accept my best wishes.

†North American Man Boy Love Association, advocates of the rape of little boys.

*The notion of "edginess" revolts me to no end.  It is the goal of low-rent wannabes for whom image without substance is the grand virtue of their miserable existences.

^††

More On Ratios (Moron Ratios???)

Today we speak briefly and in broad strokes for the sake of something upon which to cognitively chew.

The quality of out lives is largely about ratios. This is especially so in all things economic, where affordability is a key factor. The ability of someone to purchase a given product or service rests primarily with his ability to afford, all else equal. The ability to afford is primarily a question of the ratio of one's disposable reserves to price.

In recent decades, that ratio has fallen, at times sharply as a consequence of economic "events" of a decidedly non-organic nature, the latest having been the disruption of economic supply chains caused by the nearly universal global responses of "governments" to the so-called "pandemic". By the way, I view such unwavering uniformity with deep suspicion. Few things human take on this character.

As the ratio of reserves to price falls, the ability to afford even basics for daily life becomes ever more deeply strained. Many people do not see this simple relationship, largely due to a dangerous lack of education in basic economics†, and also in part to the vast oceans of noise with which the average man is now bombarded on a minute-by-minute basis. The signal to noise RATIO (<-- there's that word again) is now dangerously low. People on the average are now so beset with problems, most of each of which may be low in intensity, but with numbers of them legion, that they are overwhelmed such that basic living has become an overbearing burden with stresses in every nook and cranny of their daily lives.

And of course, none of this is natural. Nearly every shred of it is artificially imposed upon us by those in power. The currently prevailing conditions of stress serve to keep vast proportions (another reference to ratios) of people off-balance as they struggle to move from one moment to the next in even the simplest of life's endeavors. Keeping people's eyes focused on the ground between their feet keeps those eyes off the so-called "elite" enough to allow the latter to continue their ultimately destructive machinations. To all appearances, these endeavors of power are intended to enrich those in power in one manner or another at the expense of the rest. It is so because political class want it all for themselves, and therefore choose to see the circumstance of humanity on the whole as a zero-sum game. For Themme (those in material power), there is no other way to view things, and the attitude and decision to take the world as a zero-sum affair arises generally not of naive ignorance, but of informed (though perhaps tacit) awareness and the deliberate will to make things so, often under their purposeful subscription to delusional notions of the "greater good" to which they attach themselves, that they may proceed under the psychotic belief that they are doing good for all. It is further instructive to note the damning nature of the fact that such people never include themselves on the list of those to get the short shrift. Somehow, and however tacitly, they always find themselves on the beneficiary side of the dividing line.

This is the greatest evil on planet earth, the next greatest receding to vanishing with respect to it, for a grat majority of the others are driven by this root motive.

If we the so-called "people" don't put an and to this, it will put an end to us, and the window of opportunity appears to be closing with increasing acceleration. That's it for now. Be well and please accept my best wishes.

†I strongly recommend everyone take classes in Austrian economics. You need not get your MBA, though it, too, helps.

The Root Of The Problem

In forums far lung, today someone quipped that America's current state of woe began with Obama, an assertion that carries considerable emotional force and appeal.
As much as I wish to agree from the standpoint of pure emotion, logic tells me otherwise. The Obama phenomenon is but a mere, if vile and disgusting, symptom of a far deeper and older cancer in the American people that took root in our souls almost from the very first day of the Republic. That disorder is one of a moral nature, very often seasoned with liberal sprinklings of ignorance. Rarely is it based in some inherent state of stupidity that cannot be corrected with proper education and a will to learn, making the truth of our political reality all the more horrible and, to my way of seeing it, unforgivable and perhaps even criminal. The rot of the mean American is a long standing condition, I am sad to remind you.

When the First Congress passed the Whiskey tax, Americans having just shed great blood and suffered long miseries and losses to throw off the English tyrant, should have quietly apprehended every member who had voted in favor of that abomination against Free Men, as well as the president who signed it into false law, and hung them all at once for the world to see, the message to be scrawled on the withered and cancerous souls of all would-be tyrants to come being "this awaits all who trespass upon Free Men, now and forever". Some tried to fight it, the effort now known as the "Whiskey Rebellion", but in point of fact most Americans were hopelessly corrupt even then. After all, only 3% fought for the sake of freedom, the rest content to sit with fence pickets in the place God never intended them to go. Perhaps the brave should have sent the other 97% back whence they came and cleansed the land of their accursed and cowardly presences. But what, then, prevents the good from becoming that which it seeks to abolish?

This illustrates one of the great and tragic ironies of humanity: the rotted majority seems always to ride the coattails of that tiny minority of true and gallant men who would have a better world for all. As I age, I better understand the points of view of some of the great tyrants of our history who, rightly despising the dregs of their own kind, endeavor to rid themselves of the burden of parasitic, corrupt humans. Sadly, and as I just mentioned, those correct intentions resulted in the good becoming the evil it sought to eliminate.

What decent man supports the rape of children; their physical mutilation through chemical and surgical means? Which one supports the self destructive behaviors of addicts, the abuse of the innocent, and the destruction of beauty? By definition, not a one. And yet, here we are, a people so abominably and utterly rotted with corruption, we tolerate nearly every outrage against human rights and dignity, the trend racing toward a no-holds-barred world of depthless filth and felonious violation that reeks of the stench of nothing better than the random and capricious rule of the strong over the weak, the chaos of self-imposed entropy over order such that nobody is safe or free, not even the tyrants, most ironically of all. Chaos is a prison nobody escapes, yet the so-called "elite" seem to believe otherwise, that they stand outside of it all as the rest of us marinate in the horrors of servitude and moral degradation. But in truth, the walls of this world built at Theire command encompass them as well.

The true bottom line here is precisely what some of the Founders stated most explicitly: freedom is in no way and to no degree compatible with ignorant or morally decayed people. They cannot occupy the same spaces just as two atoms cannot occupy the space for only one.

Free men must be intelligent, smart in the right ways, and morally intact to those ways. Far too many Americans, a vast majority I would speculate, are too rotted with the manifold cancers that leave them as Weakmen who possess neither the correct understanding of liberty, nor the desire - much less the will - to be free. Instead, they prefer the lie that is pretty slavery, which tells them they can have all the benefits of liberty without having to bear so much as the least of the burdens of becoming and remaining so. The apparent paradox here is that only by virtue of certain restrictions can men be truly free. A circumstance of absolute anything-goes is not freedom, but rather the most repressive slavery imaginable.

In other words, we are screwed to the barn door by our own hands and show no inclination to unscrew ourselves from it.

A greater human tragedy I cannot begin to imagine. When America ends, and we now stand at the precipice of a great and black abyss, all value and hope for humanity shall be turned away from the earth, possibly for all time to come.
At this pass, I know not what to tell anyone in terms of practical measures for returning men to a state of mind more in keeping with the state of the Free Man.  While things seem nearly hopeless, I stubbornly refuse to give up hope that we may one day choose better for ourselves.  How terrible is it that we have foisted this dolorous condition upon ourselves.

Be well, keep the faith no matter what, and please accept my best wishes.

Make Mine the Ninth, Thankyouverymuch.

 I prefer the Ninth Amendment to the Tenth, generally, the latter containing an element that leaves doors open for mischief.

The 9A states:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

 

The Amendment states in clear language that the rights of free men exist well beyond the metes and specifications of the Constitution and that those rights may not be in any way validly disparaged.  The Framers should have stopped there, but sadly failed to.  Perhaps they wanted a nice round number and could think of nothing better than the following:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

 

The bolded text is the problem. For one thing, it logically separates "states" from "people. Here's a newsflash: the people ARE the "states". Were you and I to climb to yon dizzying height upon the mountaintop and wave the magic wand to cause every human being on the planet to disappear, save you and myself, I would then ask "where is the 'state'? Show it to me!" You would be hard pressed to demonstrate its existence. Without people - ALL the people - there is no "state", and even then reference to the "state" is naught other than a linguistic convention of practical convenience. It never refers to anything real, except perhaps the set of a given human population, such as those of Texas, for example.

In addition, the use of "or" leaves a logically valid pretext for excluding "the people" from the powers in question. From the standpoint of propositional logic (zeroth-order logic), there is an OR-relationship between the "state" and people. This relationship is used daily to deny the rights of free Americans. The National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA34) is a prime example. NFA34 formally and systematically denies or infringes upon the right of most people to keep and bear certain types of arms, which are reserved only for the "state", which of course is just another set of people, fundamentally no different from the rest, save by the false claims made by themselves against all the others. Nuclear materials are similarly restricted in equal violation. The list of such violations is drearily long. From the standpoint of logic, the semantics of the Tenth tell us that so long as at least one of the two entities ("state" or people) reserve a particular power, all is well with the world. This, of course, is nonsense, and yet here we are. The Framers, knowingly or not, foisted a tiny but vicious disaster upon the people they claimed to have been best guaranteeing freedom.

The semantic bottom-line of "the states, or the people" reduces to "the people, or the people". From the standpoint of set logic, we can say that the expression would be "one set of people" or "the other set of people". The only way to render this valid in terms of its truth value would be to demonstrate a fundamental (radical) difference between the members of the two sets. This cannot be done, and so there is no valid basis in logic or in truth for setting one set above the other in terms of its authority to reserve for itself and wield the powers in question. It is redundant and in that redundancy resides no practically valid meaning. In other words, that particular portion of the Amendment is pure nonsensical gibberish, devoid of meaning the moment you reject the notion of "state" as an extant, objectively real entity separate and distinct from "the people". "The people" are the only reality that "state" can ever claim as its own. As you can see, we are awash in bullshit; very dangerous bullshit, I may add, for it has been the root of endless evils.

HOWEVER, there is a tiny jewel in the 10A: "nor prohibited by [the Constitution] to the states". It is the clear and explicit indicator that the states MUST abide by the restrictions placed upon them by the Constitution just as must the fedgov comply. These tight limitations upon "state" governing powers and actions are the conditions a territory's people must accept as a requirement for being accepted as a member of the American union. It by all means sets to rest some of the foolish debate as to whether the states are so bound by the so-called "equal protection" clause of the 14A. They are indeed so bound insofar as the Constitution limits the reach of "government" power.

The Constitution is the contract by which signatories thereto are to be held in compliance. This does not lend any super power of the fedgov to enforce upon states their usually idiotic and felonious requirements they have so often foisted upon the people of the so-called "states". It only means that those operating as agents of "state governments" are hamstrung in the same ways are is the fedgov with respect to the rights of the people whom they are sworn to serve in good faith and competence. If the 14A applied only to the fedgov as some have posited, then the circumscriptions of the Constitution upon that body would have little to no practical meaning because the member states would remain free to disparage and deny rights as they saw fit. This is idiocy of the first order.
A proper, if nonetheless still redundant wording of the 10A would go something like this:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it, are reserved to the People."

 

There are no "states".  "State", as commonly used today, is perhaps the grandest of all lies.  It is a gigantic nothing to which all manner of false properties, powers, rights, and interests have been attributed by those who are either unforgivably ignorant of the relevancies, or who are peddling things that no sane, intelligent,  and decent man would ever buy from another human being, yet who will obediently open his wallet upon command of the almighty "state".  This is a cancer of mind and morals.  Obedience to the "state" represents the renunciation of all individual responsibility for one's own life, choices, and actions.  It is the Freeman become the Weakman by will for the sake of mere convenience; of accepting lies that absolve one of the responsibility to act in countervail of evil.  It is the reduction of the free human being to a sniveling coward, at best, and to an avaricious beast in the worse case, content to see men with guns do his bidding, no matter who gets hurt.

We are currently lost as a people. Freemen must perforce be moral men, for the one cannot exist without the other. The good news, however, is we are not yet so far gone that we cannot recover ourselves from the clutches of the devils who now so blatantly, casually, and with such sardonic contempt and dismissal run roughshod ever more deeply upon the territory of our sovereign rights as free human beings. But time is not on our side, it would seem to me. With each passing day the tyrant worms his way ever more deeply into his quest to cultivate his power to the point that dislodging him becomes ever more unlikely. We should have been hanging the scoundrels from lamp posts and tree branches since at least 200 years ago, but we failed. It is not too late, though, but we cannot prevail if we do not act, and we cannot act if we do not get our heads straight on the matters that count. Defy Themme at every turn. Refuse to comply. Exercise your rights, even if seemingly gratuitously, for failure to do so gives Themme every phony baloney pretext for eventual denial. Be courageous and make Themme sweat and toil and curse and spit for every crumb they take from you. Give up nothing without a fight and leave Themme doubting themselves, yet doubting not your resolve as a Freeman. Be well, God bless you all, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.