Ending The "Deep State"?

The Deep State, or DS from here on in, is loosely defined as the body of entrenched governmental officials whose tenures at duty span the comings and goings of multiple administrations. As such, the potential for long-term, concerted, rational, coherent corruption not only exists, but has in fact become commonplace. With time the rot, once established, can grow as the entrenched few gain internal clout and recruit and emplace those of their feather, growing their ranks and advancing their agendas. By this means has power been usurped and cultivated, affecting the brands of change desired, which invariably runs toward tyranny.

In 2016, Donald J. Trump became the forty-fifth president of the United States, at least in part upon his promise of "drain[ing] the swamp", which was his way of referring to the DS.

Given the definition, it would seem clear that if we value freedom, purging the DS would be one of the things to do, and I assert that indeed it is. But such a cleansing is not sufficient to the longer term prospects for freedom. As things stand, what is there to prevent a new DS from arising in the future? The answer, I am sad to say, is "nothing". There is nothing to prevent a new legion of tyrants from coming into power, which means that something needs to change.

Purges may be all well and good, though historically they tend to become bloodbath disasters for reasons we will not discuss here, but when the division of labor that serves us so well in some respects is allowed to remain in the realm of politics, tyranny becomes virtually guaranteed. Division of labor in the political arena is what leads to the rise of a Deep State, pretty much guaranteeing it. When applied to political offices, a division of labor results in specialization in the machinations of the so-called "government".

With governmental specialization comes the notion of expertise along comparatively narrow lines of skill and, presumably, duty. In the case of political establishments, there attaches to the notion of expertise the often tacit idea of exclusivity of authority precisely because we speak of political office. The logic is a bit more complicated than just this, but even this comparatively superficial description reveals the tortured nature of the reasoning behind these often unstated positions. It is, in fact, absurd and wholly unsustainable, save for the fact that these "rules" are kept deeply tacit such that explicit expressions are avoided in order to keep people in the dark, that they not come to understand how it is they are being subjugated as functional slaves under the boot-heal of those who presume themselves the masters.

Unlike with any other organization, the stations of the various political offices claim exclusive authority to command the behavior of the rest. This is a subtle form of evil that is more dangerous than all the armies of the world, combined. The most frightening and sad fact in all of this is that for the most part, the wad of governed humanity meekly accepts this exclusivity with no effective opposition, like sheep obediently trudging along the chute to be slaughtered.

Let nobody occupy any governmental station long enough to become an entrenched "expert". Some may claim that this will lead to having unqualified people in positions of governance. To this I say "GREAT!!". Let there be no experts. Let there be nobody holding the brands of exclusivity of authority that is commonplace today. Let all power be questioned and challenged daily. Let the conditions be such that deep expertise is no longer required because governance is conducted along the simple lines of the basic principles of proper human relations, rather than the chicanery of special interests the leads to unnatural complication, which in turn is used as the justification for entrenched experts whose words cannot be questioned.

It is all well and good to remove the corruption, but unless we restructure our attitudes and our roles to best ensure it never rises again, we all but guarantee that it will. This means that not only must the division of labor in government be eliminated and disallowed into the deep future, but the void created there must be filled by "ordinary" men - generalists who, while not as expert in the various offices, don't need it and, in fact, recoil from the idea of it. All men must become governors, primarily of themselves, but also willing and able to assume an office.

Until we become a race of political generalists, we doom ourselves to ongoing tyranny, subjugation, oppression, and to suffer all the degradations of health, happiness, fortune, and liberty that tyranny universally brings at the hands of the specialists who claim sole authority to tell us what we may do, cannot do, and are compelled to do.

We do not need leaders if we are all leaders of our own lives. Stop trusting and depending upon others for your basic needs, your political needs, your liberty, your choices. Be your own president, as it were. Lead yourself. Govern yourself. Learn the principles of proper human relations and render them your second nature. Become the Superior Man and, rather than shrink from the responsibilities and obligations that carry therewith, revel in them, in the power that it confers. It can be done, if you really want it.

Do you?

As always, please accept my best wishes.

Structural Rights

The term "natural rights" appears to give a great many people, most of whom appear to my eyes to be something of cynics, great heartburn. Though the world needs more jargon about as much as we all need additional holes in our heads, I would like to offer a term in the spirit of easing the violent rejection experienced by so many who rebel against notion of "natural rights".

The term I would like to introduce is "structural rights", a designation synonymous with "natural rights". Why, then, offer up yet another term for the same concept? Just as many people turn off at any mention of religion that is not cursing or damning it, so it has been with talk of natural rights, which I suspect is often intimately associated with "God-given rights", which brings us right back to the religion issue and the related aversions.

Whatever the true reason, a great number of people reject the concept of natural rights, often with protestations that run along the lines of the belief that there are no such things, replete with the notable absence of anything even vaguely resembling a valid argument in support of the assertion. That, of course, is quite untrue, but if one wishes to enter into discourse of the nature of our fundamental rights as human beings, one must first be able to get others to listen.

Therefore, if the exchange of ideas is the intermediate objective in order to bring others to a better understanding of what rights actually are, perhaps with a goal of persuasion, we have to be able to get the ideas on the table before people turn off or, ever more commonly today, go on a war footing.

For many, "natural rights", appears to have an air of some tacit and invalid bias about it, whereas "structural rights" is more neutral sounding, rather than something that's escaped the inner sanctum of the great temple at Hokum. When presented in this seemingly neutral cast, I have found in many cases that people remain off their guard and actually listen to what it is you have to say thereafter.

What can we say of our structure as beings? The short logic chain might look something like this:

1. We all live 
2. That which lives appears to universally wish to remain so, all else equal 
3. Wishing to remain alive, it follows that we claim our lives as our own; what I have termed our "First Property". 
4. Our claim to life is precisely our right to life because a right is defined as a "just claim". 
5. Therefore, by virtue of being alive and wishing to remain so, we assert our claims to our First Property, that is, our very structure as beings. 
6. By extension, we further stake our claims to that which sustains our structures as living beings. 
7. Our structure as living beings, part of which is the drive to remain alive, leads to our claims to life and all that which is necessary to not only survive, but preferably to thrive. 
8. 
   

The foregoing is by no means a perfect argument, but it is on the right path and is offered that one might get the basic gist of the argument that explains the nature of rights.

Our very structure as beings drives us to the claims we call our rights. It is precisely because we all share those drives in common, and act pursuant to the interests those claims seek to serve, that no man holds the authority to dismiss such claims of his fellows. This is the true meaning of "equality" between individuals. Our structural rights are equal between us because we share identical claims to life at the most abstract level.

One man cannot validly assert a greater claim to his life than I do to mine, for the contention makes no sense on the one hand, and cannot in any event be validly proven, on the other. Furthermore, one man may not validly assert a greater claim to the life of another than the other may to his own. It can be well argued that one man can assert a claim to the life of another man, certainly not without consent, and all else equal.

The very structures we share as living entities defines our rights and establishes the true and proper senses of our equality as living beings.

"Structural rights" as an alternative card to play may prove a good tool to keep up your sleeve in the event you run into one of those sorts who runs from "natural rights" as if he were on fire.

For what it is worth the alternative phrasing is offered, and as always please accept my best wishes.

Humanity Degraded Results In Today's Version Of "Civilization"

When men living in proximity to each other do so with an attitude of basic respect for themselves and their brethren, anarchy is invariably the result.

It is only when men abandon the basic morality born into them that "civilization" and the pestilence it visits upon them becomes the normal condition under which people must suffer the miseries of each others' tyrannies, heaped hand over fist by every man upon every other, most often in the form of the fictions that are "goverment" and "the state".

It is only in the wake of moral degradation that men come to accept being "civilized" by others of equal or greater corruption, and in whom no such authority to thwart and reduce can be said to exist. Men turn their backs upon themselves and their fellows in betrayal of the sacred gift of Life, equally bestowed to each by the Infinite. There is no truth sadder or less necessary than this. It is an affront to the Sacred; it is the ultimate obscenity.

But if we are to more fully understand what is actually happening, what our condition is more truly, we must first understand what it means to be "civilized". Let us start by consulting the dictionary.

Samuel Johnson's 1785 dictionary of the English language puts it this surprising way:

CIVILSATION n. s. 1. A law which renders a criminal process civil.
2. The act of civilizing.
3. The state of being civilized


Definition one is not quite clear. Turning our attention to "civil", Johnson's states:

CIVIL a. 1. Relating to the community
2. Relating to any man as a member of a community.
3. Not in anarchy; not wild.
4. Not foreign; intestine; as, a civil war.
5. Not ecclesiatical; as the civil courts.
6. Not natural; as, civil death.
7. Not military; as, the civil magistrate.
8. Not criminal; as, a civil process.
9. Civilized; not barbarous.
10. Grave, sosber.
11. Relating to the ancient consular or imperial government; as in civil law.

Now to the definition of "civilize":

CIVILIZE v. a. 1.To reclaim from savageness.


From the same source, "savageness":

SAVAGENESS n. s. 1. Barbarousness; cruelty; wildness


And "barbarousness":

BARBAROUSNESS n. s. 1. Incivility of manners; impurity of language; cruelty


So what, then, are we to make of definition 1 of "civilsation", as it is the only one that seems even remotely relevant? It says "A law which renders a criminal process civil." What does that mean? Not natural, as per def. 6 for "civil"? Not criminal, as per def. 8, ibid?   Because of this grand failure to pin down with complete rigor, we can make nothing certain of "civilization", which leaves tyrants open to make it mean whatever they please.

When we consider how much of our world rests upon the notion of "civilization", do you not find it somewhat disturbing that the definitions of the term and its semantic relatives are so vague, imprecise, incomplete, and circular?  If not, perhaps you would be well served to begin.

This semantic failure is utterly unacceptable if we Freemen are to live up to our purported ideals. How are we, the standing Freemen of the world, to move forward as such beings if we do not understand the most basic notions of what it means to live among each other with the proprieties that proper human freedom carries as matters of its very fabric? The answer, of course, is that we cannot, and ought not accept this deplorable condition, for to do so leaves the doors ajar for clever tyrants who would play on the ignorance, fear, and other raw emotions of men for the sake of gaining power over them, by hook or by crook. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, it hobbles us as Freemen because it degrades, diminishes, disparages, maligns, and leads astray our understanding of the deeper truth of Proper Human Relations. If we do not understand how to live properly among each other, then the tyrants are free to foist upon us literally anything, regardless of the outrage of it it, precisely because we are insufficient to the task of arguing against it.

What, then, are we to do in the face of this most unfortunate truth, that the very definitions of the terms in such common use, are almost devoid of concrete meaning? We remedy the situation by providing a definition that is worthy of the moniker. To that end, I offer to the world the following definition of "civilization":

CIVILIZATION: n. s.

The condition under which people live among and amid each other such that each individual is wholly, utterly, and completely free to choose, decide, and act as he pleases pursuant to his desires and judgments, so long as he refrains from violating the equal rights and consequent prerogatives of his fellows.


CIVILIZED: a.

A state of living such that the conditions thereof are those of a civilization.


This is what "civilization" ought to mean. To be civil should be synonymous with being free. Alas, it is anything but that. In today's world, civilization is precisely what we have: a prison-like environment where the whims of a ruling subpopulation are forced upon the rest, failures to comply most often carrying draconian consequences.

The current reality of "civiilization" is nothing short of a nightmare for countless billions of human beings.

Consider the so-called "drug laws" and the war that has been waged pursuant to enforcement of those invalid and tyrannical mandates. Consider the seemingly endless litany of lives that have been unjustly destroyed for failure to comply with the non-authoritative demands of a ruling elite who decide what we may do, possess, think, and feel. There are literally millions of human beings languishing in American prisons for non-criminal acts such as possessing, using, and/or selling proscribed substances such as cannabis, heroin, and methamphetamine.

Few people will argue that the illicit use of heroin is a "good" thing, save perhaps the addicts themselves. However, regardless of how unwise such use may prove, it is nonetheless not a crime to use, possess, or sell heroin. That some arbitrarily constituted body of de facto tyrants declares it a felony to possess, use, or sell heroin and codifies the prohibition by statutory means, it does not follow that it is so. That is, statute is not perforce Law, all protestations by legislators and perhaps courts to the contrary notwithstanding.

Consider now those statutory instruments that have criminalized prostitution. Is the payment to one human being by another a criminal act? It is demonstrably not, and therefore it cannot be validly prohibited to any man by any other. To do so is bald-faced tyranny, no matter how repugnant one man may find the deed. The prohibition is itself a felony masquerading every so thinly as Law.

How about homosexual acts? Are they criminal? At one time there were statutes on the books that said "yes". And yet, they are not. Men are free to be disgusted by homosexuality, if they are so moved. What they are not free to do is interfere with the rightful prerogative of all men the choose such acts if they are inclined to it.

The list of capriciously arbitrary prohibitions is sometimes appears endless, with more being added by the day in clear violation of the sovereign rights of every human being walking the planet. Is there a remedy for this? Yes, but the question is not that of existence, but rather of the will of men in sufficient proportions to make real a better world, a free world. Thus far, that question has met with the grim answer, and yet hope is not quite lost, if it be ever so skinny from lack of nourishment. We, the tall-standing Freemen of the world may yet bring some harrow to the tyrannies that beset every man, including the tyrants, for they are as much imprisoned by their own schemes as are the rest of us.

I therefore implore ye of good character and who love freedom truly and completely, to spread the word and to help us all by endeavoring to bring to clarity the very words that underpin our lives in such a manner as to give better effect to the thoughts of free men the world over. Help us form the ironclad framework of conceptual understanding such that those who yearn for something better from this world are gifted with the tools necessary for the affect of change to those ends.

We do not have to live as chattel, serfs, prisoners. Theye can be stopped. Stopping Themme is not even particularly difficult - not if you have the knowledge in numbers, coupled with the drive to achieve the worthy goal of freedom in our lifetimes. It is the will to the goal, which in turn is driven by sufficient and proper understanding, that is the trick here. We are eight billion mostly ignorant souls, generationally hoodwinked by those who presume to reign over us as lords. The only way out, the only first step, is realization and the thirst to learn the greater truth of what it means to live properly amid one's fellow souls.

May the hunger for freedom grow and intensify such that we all begin to help one another, rather than suspect, despise, dismiss, and even hate our brethren. It is precisely that division between us that keeps the Tyrant on his throne, free to dictate as he might please. Are we going to allow this to continue? I pray we do not.

So long for now, and may the spirit of freedom bring its blessings upon you.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The Three Ls

I propose to coin yet another new term for humanity, the ideas of which I trust shall be clear.

Ladies and gents, may I introduce the Three Ls, or 3Ls for brevity's sake:

1. Life
2. Limb
3. Liberty

What, you may ask, do these three notions, clustered in some sense as a group, represent?  

The answer is simple: together, the form the very basis of all human claims to life.  I have been in the habit of late of referring to a man's life as his "First Property".  This wording reinforces the notion of a man's life as his own possession and not that of any other man, save by sound and valid agreement.

Limb, the physical embodiment of a man, is an integral part of his First Property, without which said property could not continue on this earthly plane.  The threat of destruction in toto is only one concern a man has for Limb, partial destruction through maiming or its literal expropriation into a slave condition, relevantly at the hands of his fellow men, being the other two great concerns regarding Limb.

His Liberty completes the Triad or Trinity of a man's fundamental moral constitution, that arising from the very nature of his being, particularly significant in the context of the company of his fellows.

And there you have it - the very basis of men as individuals expressed in truth that is so obvious to unclouded minds as to be nearly absurd in its mention.  And yet, the mind of the modern man is so very clouded that someone finds himself compelled to make such mentions as these regarding their very existence, as well as their individual natures, and the nature of their interrelations.

I bid you consider the 3Ls, and further mull what they mean to you and those you love.  Ponder what it means when the respect of them is thrown to the wayside by one's fellow men.  Think of what the world of men becomes when respect by one man for his fellows dissipates into the mists, unleashing every wild impulse he may have such that he makes no mind of the resulting violations.  Now imagine into what that translates when one such man becomes legions of men.

If your considerations prove vexatious and the source of grave concern, then I will consider myself as having accomplished at least one of my objectives in this writing.

Be well, be free, and as always, please accept my best wishes.

I Bet They Never Saw This Coming

This is my first non-philosophical post.  It will not become my habit to post about current political reality, but this time I just feel the desire to do so.  I will be brief.

The political stooges of the so-called "left" now nervously circle one another, eyes peeled for the right opportunity to turn cannibal.

I bet not a single one of them thought they'd be facing this possibility the moment they made their turn toward treachery. And yet, it would appear that here they now stand, wondering whether it will be to their distinct advantage during sentencing to have those in whose hands justice rests, know that they were the first to do the "right" thing. The conundrum must be crushing for them.

Consider the media on the one hand, that seem to be suggesting that the first man to turn on the rest with vital testimony will enjoy punishments far reduced in comparison with the rest, or may even enjoy immunity from prosecution - the proverbial get-out-of-jail-free card.

On the other hand, there is little doubt that the likes of Clinton, or whoever it is that is the liaison between them and the real power, the veiled power, is shrieking at them to hang together in the spirit of not hanging separately.

I cannot imagine that these people are sleeping particularly well these days with such possibilities and storming uncertainty sloshing around in their mostly empty skulls.

On the one hand, the mind reels at the prospect that America may be taking a step backwards in the direction of a state that might actually bespeak some hints of freedom.  On the other, there rises the spectre of just another cult going wildly wrong in the vein we remember as a Soviet Union or Red China.

Where politics are concerned, seemingly good things can turn very bad in a heartbeat.  Therefore, decide on what it is you want in terms of freedom and make sure you are heard, no matter the cost.

Be well, thanks for reading, and as always, please accept my best wishes.

Banning Abortion Is Not A Solution

Banning abortion is not the answer.

Teach girls to keep their legs closed and to take all reasonable precautions because boys do not become pregnant.

Teach boys to be gentlemen and to stand responsibly for their choices and the acts that follow therefrom.

Not saying we have to go puritan - very much the opposite. But proper behavior born of proper attitudes begets the better result, which is the diminution of unwanted pregnancy, which in turn reduces the "need" for abortions commensurately.

Abortion is a horror. That so many women get themselves cut for the manifold and lousy reasons they so often do, speaks to the mindsets of people, first and foremost.

When women are sound in their minds and souls, they respect themselves and cherish that which comes to grow within them. Not wanting such a thing at any given time leads them to cautions that they cannot count on anyone else to take on their behalves.

Sadly, they see this as trespass upon their rights, rather than enlightened self-interest.

To claim that a woman has no right to kill the sacred within herself is the product of the brand of cowardice that has lead the world to its current state of decay. I understand it is the product of good intentions and I am in no way saying that abortion is good, but freedom is scary and rotten as often as it is beautiful and exhilarating, if not more often so.

Banning abortion is not the answer anymore than banning drugs has made those problems go away.

Generally speaking, free men do not ban, for doing so invalidly is an act of trespass born of personal and cultural corruption. It is the mark of people who want something without cost, representing the lowest and most deeply wretched state of the human animal.

Someone recently wrote to me that "you can't unring the bell", in reference to the finality of removing life from another being. I completely agree with them, but that fact does not justify enslaving one's fellows, no matter how good the intentions, recalling that such good intentions count for nothing at the end of the day.

This is precisely how people come to reject freedom. They want the attractive bits, but do not accept those that are not quite so pleasing, which I must remind people is the price that is associated with actually being free. That is why I call it "pretty slavery", which is nothing better than human corruption made manifest in the acceptance only of that which pleases, rejecting all that which does not. Freedom does not work that way.

In this precise sense, the so-called "right" (conservatives, or whatever you wish to call them) is no different from the so-called "left": they each want something for nothing. That they want different things is irrelevant to the fundamental issue and question of freedom.

Lefties want to be able to put their naughty bits anywhere they please, boys calling themselves girls, and all manner of other wildly morbid insanity. Conservatives are, admittedly, far and away better in this regard - this is not validly arguable - and yet they are equally willing to enslave their fellows by denying those things to which all are by right entitled. In this particular instance they think they are entitled to prevent a woman from terminating a pregnancy. Conversely, they feel entitled to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to full term. This is pure evil every bit as much as is a woman's casual desire to "get rid of it".

People need to learn to mind their own business. Freedom is at least as full of horror as it is wonder and exhilaration. People want the latter, and nothing to do with the former. So long as that remains the case, they will not be free no matter how fancily they may lie to themselves and each other.

If those horrors include women aborting their pregnancies, then we as free men must accept it as fact at any given moment.  The solution, once again, is not to ban the act, but to train our children to better virtue.

When girls become responsible for their choices and boys follow suit in at least equal measure, then we will begin to see the changes that we who respect life wish to see.

And from a purely practical standpoint, we must acknowledge that we will never stop women from becoming un-pregnant.  There are so many ways of terminating a pregnancy, an iodine-soaked rag inserted into the vagina being but one very effective means, that we will never prevent any woman from ridding herself of the unwanted condition. 

There are those who will say that we can, in fact, enforce a ban.  Now I ask you to think about what that would actually mean.  The reductio ad absurdum there would see the state inside the pants of every woman in the land, constantly checking for a state of pregnancy.  Is this what we want?  I ask because this is precisely what we might get because that is what would be required, particularly in the  likely case of states adopting a "zero-tolerance" policy.  All a young girl has to do is stop eating for a week and she will miscarry.  What then?  Shall we force feed her?  Ask her daily why she is not eating and force her to have a pelvic examination?

Many will say that this is extreme and would never happen.  People also said that Hitler would fade away in time.  Well sure, he did just that, but not until after having destroyed an entire continent.

For the third time I must repeat that which bears repetition: banning abortion is not a solution, but rather an excuse to further state power and the tyranny of some men over the rest.  Show your children the better way and train them to it.  It is the far more difficult path to better living - of that there can be no doubt - but it is the way that better ensures the liberty of humanity, moving forward.

Bans are the great cop-out for people who do not want to be bothered with the hassle and demands of doing something correctly, because that requires output of effort by the individual with no guarantee of results, both of which are required of men who purport to being free.

Treading the path of freedom is always the most difficult.  It is also always the most rewarding, the many pitfalls and deep costs notwithstanding.

Once again, I thank you for keeping such good company with me.  

Please accept my best wishes in return.

Secfree: A Biggest Lie

I have found it most curious to observe the nearly universal acceptance of one of the most poisonous of the tacit assumptions upon which humans operate.  It is that of the false dichotomy of security and freedom.  I will henceforth refer to this as the "Secfree" fallacy, an ultimate lie that says one must choose between freedom and security.  Secfree has enabled tyrants of every stripe to cow vast populations into accepting their caprice.  Continuing as standard practice even today, few if any of the other tools in the tyrant's bag of tricks can boast of what appears to be a nearly perfect record of success, playing on the mid-brain fear of the individual that if they do not waive just a "smidge" of their freedoms, the boogieman is going to get them and do terrible, unspeakable things.

Secfree may in fact be the ultimate zero-sum belief.

However, as with so many other fallacies and outright lies, once exposed to the withering light of anything better than the most carelessly casual examination, the true nature of Secfree comes into sharp focus.

One of the bases upon which Secfree's success is founded is the deeply tacit assumption that there exists such a thing as a guaranty of security.  As with so many other things in life, security is a purely statistical creature, which is to say that it is a game of numbers; of probabilities; likelihoods that some event will happen, or not.  Anyone coming to another with smiles, offered handshakes, and promises of safety is either dangerously ignorant of the fundamental nature of life, psychotic as a pineapple, or is selling a bill of goods.  Most often, my vote is for the latter.

Because of this nature, security can only be offered as a probability measure.  A great and all-powerful "state" can do nothing to protect you when a twenty-mile long asteroid is bearing down upon one's head at ten miles per second.  In such a circumstance, you and likely everyone you know is doomed.  The same is true of far more mundane threats such as the sick and desperate junkie who is going to have your wallet, no matter what.  Hellbent and deciding he will brook no resistance, such a man poses a threat against which no "state" or agent thereof may offer guaranty.

The old saw that says "feces happens" is perennially true.  Nobody is able to guarantee anyone security, and yet there are those who are always willing to make the promise in any case.  It should be borne in mind that regardless of the conscious reasons for making such promises, fair or foul, at the unconscious level there is always to be found the nut for he who does the promising: power over his fellows, willingly given.

Once the trick that is the exchange of freedom for a vaporous lie is discovered, recognized, accepted as real, and its nature understood, it quickly becomes clear that the one thing all Secfree peddlers seek, whether they are aware or will otherwise admit,  is the power that the exchange brings to their pockets.  It is human relations played as a strict zero-sum where "heads I win; tails you lose."

The other end of the exchange is easily understood for what it is: people want what they want, and are most often willing to sell their souls in order to have it no matter how absurd, self-defeating, and destructive the choice to procure may prove, even prima facie, often raining those results down upon those around them as well.  The average man, what we may call the "Meaner", is sufficiently corrupted with fear and avarice that he will readily find a way to rationalize the destruction of his fellows for the sake of getting what he wants, in this case his hallowed security.  The list of excuses people offer themselves to justify and excuse the ghastly things they allow to be done in their names is depressingly long, shameful, and utterly devoid of validity.   The Meaner will often go so far as to decide that those who suffered for his choices probably deserved it anyway.  Some humans.

Secfree results in the willful handing over of one's sacred birthright in exchange for the privilege of being able to lie to oneself that they are now safe.  It is perhaps the most hideous absurdity of them all, no different in effect to taking one's life-savings in cash and setting to it gasoline and a lit match.

The deep irony there is this: freedom is the condition of human existence that offers the best numbers in the game of chance that we call "security".  It may seem counter intuitive to a great many people, but once again the most meager effort to honestly dope out the logic chain demonstrates how it is true.  A single, simple example, should provide most with enough on which to go such that they are able to continue asking the right questions.

For the sake of "security", the Secfree peddlers constantly spew the bait that we must eliminate guns because no civil society needs or wants them, and that if you give up your firearms, you will become safe.  This, of course, is a bald-faced lie of pure brass.  History has proven without any wiggle room for argument that no matter how strictly anything may be prohibited, no matter how draconian the punishments for non-compliance, there will always be those who can and will violate the prohibition, sometimes with nefarious intent.  Subscribers to Secfree most often come to the defense of gun prohibition with the absurdly false argument that we don't need guns because police will see to our defense.  In ever increasing measure, it is police who pose the greatest and most ubiquitous threats to our safety.  Such irony.

Imagine the mugger, knife in hand, threatens your life if you do not give him the wallet.  Sure, you could hand it over and count on his promise that he won't kill the only witness to his high crime, but do you really want to place the trust of your life, your First Property, into the hands of one willing to rob you in this manner?  Will covertly dialing the police via E911 result in your deliverance from danger and back into the bosom of your beloved safety?  As an old saying goes, "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away."  On average, the best guarantor of one's safety is himself because third party defenders rarely appear out of thin-air and, when push comes to shove, may decide not to fight on your behalf because they, too, want to go home to their families at night.

Now consider the free society where men are at their leisure to arm themselves in anticipation of the unanticipated.  When the mugger announces himself, you are free to hand it over if that is what you wish, perhaps even trusting your assailant will leave you in peace in your belief that a wallet and its contents are not worth killing someone.  Or you may produce your weapon, leaving you the options of holding the criminal at bay either until police arrive, or you can affect your escape.  Finally, in the case where Mr. Mugger decides to go for broke, you have at least the outside chance of shooting him down pursuant to the preservation of the life to which you hold just and valid title.  It is clear that your menu of choice is far and away better when you are free, versus being subjugated under the rubric of Secfree.

Freedom provides a far greater options to everyone, with the recognition that in life nothing is guaranteed, most especially safety from harm.  But reasonable assurances can be validly made in that respect, once again with freedom providing the greatest allowances for choice such that each individual may provide for himself as his abilities and valid means may enable him, and his predilections enjoin.  One man chooses the gun, while another may decide upon a bodyguard, while others are free to remain content to ignore such issues altogether, confident that no evil shall ever befall them.

Freedom is not the mutually exclusive antagonist of security: it is security's greatest hope for realization.

It is my hope that people will consider what I have written here with an open mind, suspending both disbelief and hard feelings, as well as any apprehensions they may experience at the thought of being responsible for their own safety and security in what I believe we can all agree is a world where "authorities" are powerless to render aid to those in need.  Do yourselves a great favor and take the plunge in a place of comfort such that you feel able to venture beyond your deeply held assumptions about such matters, and take a walk on the wild side.

My promise to you is that you can only benefit from this, regardless of outcome.  And if perchance you feel the uncomfortable tingling that new truths often bring to the fringes of one's awareness, be brave and press onward, and deeply into it.  Explore it as fully as you are able, no matter how scary or otherwise objectionable you may find it because I further promise that if you do this, you may come to a life altering moment because the more deeply and stridently one feels that objection, the more likely it becomes that the truth engendered there is important, the change to which most often results in healthy transformation.  Always consider the possibility that in the end you may become a better and greater human being for it.  At worst, you have confirmed your presently held beliefs and may at least then speak on such matters with better authority.

As always, please accept my best wishes.

Some New Rules For Police

Given how police tend to run amok, always dangerously and often murderously, it is clear that we the people, those to whom all cops swear an oath of fealty and faithful service, are obliged to set the conditions under which police may act, including the metes and bounds of such action, as well as the penalties they shall face in cases where they violate their oaths.

The new rules:

1. If a death occurs at police hands, all cops with immediate involvement are instantly put on unpaid leave for not less than one year, no exceptions.  Any cop found to have been unjustifiably culpable for an on-duty death, his career is terminated as of the date of the injury event that lead to it.  Beyond any criminal penalties that may be incurred, in addition the terminated cop may never again become a sworn agent for any establishment, state or federal.  Furthermore, he is barred from holding any other government position, whether elected, appointed,  hired, or contracted.  These banishments are to stand for the remainder of the debarred party's life.

2. Any act of violence in which a cop has involvement, directly or otherwise, automatically places him off duty without pay until an investigation is conducted and concludes that he acted within acceptable limits.  All such investigations are to be conducted by independent third parties; police are never to be allowed to investigate themselves.

3. Upon the occurrence of violent action, the officer in question is to be placed into an isolation cell and held without communication until the investigative body is convened and is ready to hear testimony. No lawyers are allowed to represent the officer.  An isolated officer is to have no access to any material objects whatsoever, except food and water.  They are debarred access to writing paraphernalia, electronic or otherwise.  All officers within 500 feet proximity to the officer in question are to have their video recorders turned on.  If the have no such device, they are to leave the scene immediately and report to their headquarters.  Failure in either case shall place the officers so failing on immediate termination with loss of all benefits and retirement, and they shall become lifetime-ineligible for any job with any government agency as per section one.  They shall furthermore face criminal charges by special prosecutor with a minimum sentence of one year in state prison, general population, and up to three years.

4. All evidence of police action is to be presented to a grand jury. No police involvement beyond testimony is to be allowed, nor are any attorneys from any agency, public or private, to be admitted to such proceedings except as observers.

5. Any invocation of the Fifth Amendment by an officer under such investigation results in automatic dismissal of the officer and life-long banishments. per section one The investigative panel is restricted in its questioning to relevant queries only. Any off-topic questions shall place the questioner in peril of felony charges for which the minimum sentence shall be one year in state prison, general population.

6. Any police convicted of committing murder while on duty shall be automatically sentenced to death, sentence to be carried out within 4 hours of the failure of the final appeal. In any case where sentence is overturned, sentence shall be commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole, in general population. No exceptions.

7. Every police department shall have in place an Oversight Board comprised of non-police members. Board members will tenure for two years with no salary and may have no connection to police, whether through family, business, or any other avenue.  Upon the good conclusion of the term of service, the member will be ineligible to serve again for 5 years. Members shall serve only upon sworn oath of duty and a surety bond, to be held in trust by a reliable third party that is not a governmental agency.  Members shall have full access to any and all police documents, communiqués, and all other information related to operations, occurrences, officer data, policies, and so forth.

8. Any behavior by Board members in violation of their sworn oaths of duty shall be investigated by an external agency. In addition, a citizens' petition for such an investigation, having either at least fifty signatures or a number representing 10% or more of the community's population, whichever is smaller, shall bring such investigations to bear.  There shall be no governmental power to stop or otherwise thwart or interfere with such an investigation. Any attempts to interfere with such an investigation by any government official, whether elected, appointed, employed, assigned, or otherwise demonstrated by preponderance of evidence as being an agent of said government, shall themselves face felony charges, the conviction pursuant to which shall result in not less than five years at hard labor per count.

9. Any willful failure by a Board member to cooperate in such investigations shall result in immediate dismissal from the Board and the ineligibility to serve again for the remainder of the dismissed party's life on any such Board and shall be subject to the banishments of section one.  Barring extraordinary extenuating circumstances, such failures shall be taken as a prima facie admission of having committed a felony in violation of sworn oath, and shall result in not less than one year in prison per count, general population.

10. The results of investigations of board members may result in criminal charges being brought in the case where criminal action has been established. Such charges are to be handed to a special prosecutor. Local prosecutors shall be prohibited from pursuing such matters. In the event of a special prosecutor's failure to fulfill his duty to pursue criminal charges in a proper and timely manner, his duties shall be stripped and bestowed upon another. A citizen's petition of 200 signatures or 20% of the community population, whichever is smaller, demanding the dismissal of the special prosecutor for cause, where such relates to prosecutorial misconduct of any sort, including but not limited to vigor, shall be granted upon establishment with a new prosecutor assigned to the task.  The outgoing prosecutor shall be subject to investigation by both public and private parties with full exposure for any and all torts, equity failures, and criminal liabilities attaching to the failure of duty.  All relevant materials and information relating to the investigations for which the defrocked special prosecutor was liable are to be made available to all investigators, failure to do so constituting for any reason whatsoever to constitute a class-A felony for which each count of conviction shall bring not less than ten (10) years at hard labor or solitary confinement.

11. The purpose of the oversight Board shall be to scrutinize and investigate all police operations, as well as department policy and personnel performance from chief downward. Department policy shall become effective only upon the approval of the Board, said Board being fully, utterly, and personally accountable to the members of the community they represent. The Board shall have the authority to investigate any and all police activities including documentation such as internal reports. They shall have supervised access to all evidence relating to criminal investigations, open or closed. Any conflicts of interest between a Board member and an open police investigation shall disqualify that Board member from investigations of police conduct.

12. The Board shall have the authority to dismiss any member of the police department for cause, pursuant to and in accord with standard guidelines. The officers in question shall have no recourse, but a citizen's petition of 100 signatures or 34% of a community's population, whichever is larger, calling for further examination of the Board's dismissal shall be granted and the decision reconsidered for possible errors in judgment, evidence, etc.

13.  The destruction of any evidence relating to a police-involved incident, regardless of nature of said incident or whether said evidence is damning or exculpatory, shall constitute a class-A felony breach of the Public Trust, shall result in mandatory charges, and shall be punished with not less than five years imprisonment per count, general population.

14.  Any and all convictions resulting from breaches of the Public Trust by any government official, employee, or contractor, will result in the disparagement of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for not less than five years after lapse of sentence, no exceptions.

This is how we begin to regain control over police who, at this time, have control over us. Righteous men who choose this profession should have no problem with any of this. The rest... they are most welcome to pursue employment better suited to their characters, such as pushing a broom or scraping road kill off the county byways.

If there is any place where "zero tolerance" may be said to make the least sense, this would be it.

As always, please accept my best wishes.

The Right To Secede

In recent years, many who ID as "liberty lovers" have been making much speak of the idea of secession.  The notion, while in itself valid, has to my knowledge not been discussed as to the particulars insofar as what it means in practice.  What does it mean to "secede"?  As always, the dictionary should be our first friend in establishing the semantic baseline from which we shall operate.

Worcester's Dictionary of 1840:

SECEDE: n. To withdraw from union of fellowship in society, or in any matter or business; to separate oneself; to retire.

Webster's of 1828:

SECE'DE, verb intransitive [L. secedo; se, from, and cedo, to move. Se is an inseparable preposition or prefix in Latin, but denoting departure or separation.]

To withdraw from fellowship, communion or association; to separate ones's self; as, certain ministers seceded from the church of Scotland about the year 1733.

Oxford Etymological Dictionary:

secede (v.)
1702, "to leave one's companions," from Latin secedere "go away, withdraw, separate; rebel, revolt," from se- "apart" + cedere "to go"). Sense of "to withdraw from a political or religious alliance of union" is recorded from 1755, originally especially in reference to the Church of Scotland. Related: Seceded; seceding; seceder.

Withdrawal is the essences of secession.  The freedom to withdraw remains a central and basic human right; it is one of the marks of a Freeman.  This speaks to the right to freedom of association, as recognized, honored, and protected by the First Amendment of the American Constitution.

As Freemen, we are each entitled to reserve our individual right to associate as we see fit.  We are free to withdraw from society as we may choose, for whatever reason whatsoever, or for no reason at all.  No man, regardless of his claim of purport, holds the authority to force upon another associations against the other's will.

Secession is not only the right of a population, though it is that also; it is most truly the right of the individual to associate as he will, which implies association in all its forms.  This includes his choice to secede from government and its interferences in his life, regardless of the manner, degree, or justifications given them.

Those who presume to lord over the rest have nothing valid upon which to hang their assertions in the matter of their claims to authority, regardless of the premise, which perforce is always false precisely because such claims are always lies.  The bottom line is this: no man holds authority over another.  Unless the other has committed a bona fide crime, which excludes all the synthetic crimes dreamt up from the thin air by men on the basis of their corrupted beliefs and interests, one has no right to interfere in the choices of another.  Authority, as commonly exercised by "government", is nothing better than the threat of the sword against all who fail to comply with the will of human caprice masquerading as valid command.

Bottom line: the right to secede is an inherent, individual right and not one of an exclusively collective nature.  Indeed, the collective right only exists to the extent of that of each individual in the group in question.  As we all know, or ought to know, rights are not additive.  In a group of three individuals, the concurring opinions of two in accord with their rights to choose and act do not dominate to countervail the right of the third to choose for himself on the issue in question.

It is my hope that people will come to the better understanding of secession, embrace it, and work toward making it the rule, rather than the high-risk exception it is today.

Thanks once again, be well, and as always, please accept my best wishes.

Time Is Here

Time is here.


It always has been, and it always shall be.


The nexus is now.


The nexus, that fork in the road where one chooses the kind of a human being to be, is in every man's face every moment of every day. You, for example, will help choose what sort of world in which your great grandchildren shall live. You will choose, whether in the actively participatory manner of the righteous and brave Freeman, or through the limp and lame default of a Weakman's evasion. But make no mistake about it, you will choose, for there is no escaping the responsibility; there is only cheap and cowardly avoidance, which buys one nothing at all.

In spite of the ubiquitous belief that one man can do nothing to alter the future, it is precisely the opposite that is true: the world improves or deteriorates, one man at a time.

Thus far, we the people have fallen down terribly, failing to do what needs doing in order to secure our freedoms, our prosperity, our happiness, and every other good that derives therefrom.

Today we have the power of the network on our side, yet we seem to do so little of value with it.

Think about that awhile - we have more at hand than ever before, yet we fail ourselves more resolutely than ever. Previous generations might be forgiven their failings for want of information. Today, we drown in it and can therefore offer no valid reason, much less an excuse, for our idle acceptance of the outrages heaped upon us by other human beings who hold no authority to do so beyond the which we, the others, allow. And this is truer of Americans than of any other people on the earth.

The coming debridement of all pretty and deceptive varnishes previously slathered upon our statuses as serfs and perhaps as even slaves can be credited not to the tyrants, but fully and solely to ourselves, for we routinely and universally fail to take the measures necessary to throw the vampires from our necks.

Our posterity will one day curse our corruption, as perhaps even we shall ourselves.

A deep reexamination of who we are, what we believe in common, and what we are willing to do pursuant to those beliefs is long past due, as are the changes needed in our thoughts if we are tos be erious about being Freemen in preference to being Weakmen. And if we are not serious, as judged by our action rather than words, then I submit that it is high time we dispense with all the talk of it, for we succeed in naught but the making of ourselves into cheap, clown-like caricatures for whom we may validly hold no esteem beyond doleful and abiding embarrassment, shame, and bottomless, sorrow-heavy regret. Let us at least be honest about ourselves, if we will be nothing better than cowards and scoundrels unto ourselves.

If the boredom of the lie that is "security" is preferable to Sam Adams' "animating contest" of freedom, then let us admit it, the sad irony there being that the greatest assurance of security lies precisely in the contest, and not the lie. But nobody can choose for you, so I will advise utmost caution in how you decide to answer the call of your most basic nature as a free-born being.

The Freeman can always choose to become a slave. The slave, however, can rarely choose to be free.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

A Key Failing Of Humanity

Short installment time.

Humans are full of failings.  We cheat on our spouses, take more than that to which we are entitled, beat, rob, rape, war, and so on down a depressingly long list.

While all these failings may be considered equivalent after a fashion, in the context of proper human freedom, one error stands above the rest: tolerance of the intolerable.

"Governments", "states", or whatever you wish to call the mobs of humans who live to trespass upon their fellows to the greatest degree with which they can get away, do just that: trespass upon the rights of free men to the extent that those men become de facto serfs, and even outright slaves.  It makes no matter how pretty the cage may be that these mobs build around their subjects, for they remain as cages, limiting the rightful prerogatives of their fellow human beings with absolutely zero authority to do so.

And what do those people do who have been trodden upon roughshod?  Nothing of substance; not a whit.  Speech is all well and good, as may be other avenues of redress; but what happens when speech fails, Congress ignores your pleas and demands, and the courts make rulings that serve only to retrench the violations that have been foisted upon you without consent?  That is the point where material non-equivocation shows its utility, but only if people are willing to assume the attendant risks.

When in 1803 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Marbury v. Madison, they assumed a power to which they were not Constitutionally authorized, the act thereby constituting a usurpation.  The usurpation in question was that of the power to "interpret" the Constitution, what has come to be called "judicial review", a rather deceptive term.  With judicial review, SCOTUS assumed the authority to dictate to the nation which statutes were Law and which were not.  This is particularly ironic in the face of the fact that part of the Marbury ruling states:

"...an act of the Legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void."

All at once, the SCOTUS acknowledges the supremacy of the Constitution, and by extension, the full blossom of the rights of all men, and usurps the power to decide which acts are or not repugnant, apparently failing to consider the two-edged nature of that sword.  In the hands of the righteous and competent man, judicial review might serve as a defense against governmental overreach.  In the hand of incompetents or malefactors, it can and has served to destroy the ability of men to exercise their rights without the perils of the state landing squarely upon them in crushing, life destroying fashion, which is precisely what happens to people today on a basis so common as to be outright vulgar.

But what could good Americans have done to prevent this false assumption of invalid authority by SCOTUS?  Firstly, they could have endeavored to make themselves aware and to spread that knowledge far and wide, that the people of this land would learn of the perfidy of a small cadre of their fellow Americans.  Secondly, and in some respects perhaps more importantly, they could have gone armed to the court and deposed the scoundrels with rapid dispatch, whether it meant running them out of town on a rail, or killing them.

Now, you may think that killing a government official for "doing his job" is a mite extreme, and on that point I would agree fully, extremity being the precise point because it should be clear to everyone by now that individuals in government will hang on to the power they have often even unto their own destruction at the hands of angry mobs.  Those mobs, ready and willing to relieve tyrants of their heads, constitute the ultimate instruments for maintaining the state of freedom for all.  Those who would violate your rights and, upon being informed of the violations,  who refuse to amend their ways have made unto their fellows through their refusals, a statement that is as clear and eloquent as any possible: "your rights are as nothing to me."  When that message comes through via actions, the free man is faced with the choice: heed the call to righteous action, or become a Weakman.  The Freeman is obliged by all that is right, decent, and reasonable to put unrepentant tyrants to their ends, up to and including killing them, for the violations of the rights of one's fellows, as well as oneself, must not be tolerated to any degree whatsoever.  The moment the first violation is allowed, the door to absolute tyranny has been opened, if only slightly ajar.  It makes no matter, for in time those who seek ever greater lordship over their fellows will endeavor to push the doors to absolute despotism ever wider such that one day all he needs do is waltz into the realm your rights as if he owns the place, which is exactly what has been done almost since the earliest days of the Republic.

I will go not further in my exposition as I believe the point has been made, at least for now.  To reject material non-equivocation in whatever form it may take including physical violence resulting the death of unrepentant tyrants is not virtue, but a grave flaw of character marking at best ignorance that cannot be forgiven, save that it be corrected and amended.  At worst, it represents cowardice of the most despicable order.

Those who wish to be free must perforce assume the duties, responsibilities, costs, obligations, and all the other burdens of maintenance.  As an old saw goes, "freedom isn't free."

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Stupid v. Stoopid

Today, I would like to introduce a term I coined long years ago: "stoopid".

As you probably suspect, it is related to "stupid" through the term "stupidity", but before I get into the connection, let us define out terms.

Samuel Johnson's dictionary, 1841 edition defines "stupid":

STUPID  a. [stupide, Fr. stupidus, Lat.]
Dull ; wanting sensibility ; wanting apprehension ; heavy ; sluggish of understanding-. Milton. Per- formed without skill or genius. Swift:

Note that it is an adjective, which is to say it modifies a noun or a verb.  From Webster's of 1898:

STUPID a. 1. Very dull; insensible; senseless; wanting in understanding; heavy; sluggish; in a state of stupor;  - said of persons.

2. Resulting from, or evincing stupidity; formed without skill or genius; dull; heavy; - said of things.

Stupidity, a noun, is as follows, again from Websters:

STUPIDITY, n. 1. The quality or state of being stupid; extreme dullness of perception or understanding; sluggishness.

2 Stupor; astonishment; stupefaction.

What is "stupor":

1. Great diminution or suspension of sensibility ; suppression of sense or feeling lethargy.
2. Intellectual insensibility ; moral stupidity ; heedlessness or inattention to one's interests.

Note how "sense" is part of every definition.  From Webster's, the relevant passage:

SENSE n.  ... 4.  Sound perception and reasoning; correct judgment; good mental capacity; understanding; also, that which is sound, true, or reasonable; rational meaning.

"Good mental capacity."  There's the pay-dirt for our purposes here.

Therefore, "senseless" connotes an absence of good mental capacity, that this is the place where "stupid" and "stoopid" are distinguished from one another, through their linkage with "stupidity".

While stupid and stupidity are related, one cannot perforce infer "stupid" from "stupidity".  Many very intelligent, which is to say not-stupid, people have engaged in or subscribed to stupidity of one form or another.  We are prone to making such errors on occasion, even when we are very smart.  A stupid person, on the other hand, one who is un- or ill-equipped for intelligent living, cannot be held fully accountable for his acts of stupidity because he is, after all, unaware of it precisely because he lacks the capacity of understanding.  A man with no legs cannot be blamed for his inability to run a marathon.

"Stoopid", on the other hand is the term I have coined to denote the condition where someone willfully chooses stupidity, whereas the stupid man has no choice due to incapacity.  The man with brain lesions, microcephaly, or any of the other organically-based malformations of intellect for which there is no compensation to normal capacity, cannot help being what he is.  Therefore, we excuse his stupidity because he has no choice in the matter; he is simply and irreconcilably stupid.

But the man who is organically intact and possessing of nominal intellect, or better, yet chooses stupidity over intelligent reasoning and choice in his actions, cannot be so excused, for he has everything he needs to avoid the calamitous results of stupidity, yet embraces it nonetheless, often with the accompanying belief that he is, in fact, very clued-in and wise in both his knowledge, opinions, and the choices he makes pursuant to that which he thinks so highly in himself.  That is what defines the stoopid man, v. the stupid.

The world abounds with stoopid people, I am so very sad to report.  The degrees and sorts of stupidity that now pass as intelligence is almost not to be believed.  We could go chapter and verse for thousands of pages listing the mind-bending idiocies to which vast pluralities of humanity wed themselves and upon which they make their choices and undertake action.  There is no point in going through that list as I am sure nearly anyone reading these words will have lists of their own.  That is a discussion for other times.

The thin slice of good news there is that there exists at least a theoretical potential for bringing stoopid people back to sense.  If a man becomes willing to depart with his errant beliefs and deeds, then almost anything of good becomes possible.  Thank God that the stoopid people of the world have sufficient native intelligence to be able of making the choice to turn away from stupidity, an option unavailable to the truly stupid man.  The only question, then, becomes that of the will to lift oneself up and out of the pit that is the willingness to live in self-deceit.

I hold vanishing hope that people will adopt "stoopid" in their daily expressions when describing people who choose stupidity over intelligence, but shall nevertheless encourage everyone to do so.  Calling a man "stupid" puts him on the defensive, but if "stoopid" were to become well enough known and understood, referring to one as being "stoopid" would indicate that an otherwise intelligent man is choosing stupidity and that it may be corrected with some effort, large or small.

Stupid people are not a great problem for humanity as a whole, for they are few and far between.  Stoopid people, on the other hand, represent an enormous threat to humanity's survival, much less the status of men as free beings upon the earth.

So consider integrating this term into your well used vocabulary.  There is so much stupidity running amok in every corner of the planet, I daresay it could become one of your more often employed words.

Thanks once again, and as always, please accept my best wishes.

The Chain Of Obedience

This is a video installation, well worth the two and a half minutes watch.

Cheers.

The Truth About Human Rights

In a previous essay, I addressed the question "what are rights?", describing what they are, precisely.  What I failed to do in that work, was reveal a deeper truth about them, an error I shall correct presently.

People yak a blue streak about "rights".  Forgetting the nonsensical ravings of the misguided who go on about "gay" rights, "women's" rights, and so forth, the only rights of which to speak in the realm of men are human rights.  There are no special rights for these guys, those gals, or the creatures lurking over in the dark corners.  We all share the same rights.

There is, however, a deeper truth to the story of rights, one that is rarely, if ever, discussed.  It is that short, but important story, to which I now turn our attention.

As previously discussed in the above reference essay, a right is a claim.  To wit, the definition from Worcester's dictionary of 1840 states a claim to be:

CLAIM, v. 1. To ask as a right ; to demand as due; to request authoritatively; to require;
CLAIM, v. To become entitled to a thing; to derive a right.
CLAIM, n. 1. A demand as of right; a challenge of ownership; 

 Note that a claim always refers to some property and, in the relevant sense, a demand.  Therefore, your right to life is your claim to your own life, which in turn is the demand and notice you assert and serve to the world that said life is your property, or what I like to call one's "First Property", or "FP" for short.

The deeper truth about rights, to which little or nothing has been written of which I am aware, is that in order for a right to actually exist, it must be asserted.  That is, the claim must be explicitly staked, the demand to property due made clearly, or it does not exist.  Courts and other institutions of Law may rule for the sake of practicality that a right may be inferred through certain assumptions for particular cases, and they would perhaps be correct in doing so.  After all, it would likely be a terrible waste of energy to feel that one must assert his claim to life anew with every person he passed on the street, for fear of some stranger's attempt to take him as a slave or even to slay him for want of having stated his claim to First Property in advance.  The world would become a very much more complicated place to navigate than it is already.

But are all claims to be assumed?  Clearly not.  If a man finds a gold coin on the roadway, is be obliged to leave it where is rests on the assumption that its rightful owner retains claim to it?  No.  The coin may be reasonably regarded as lost and without owner.  Furthermore, the discoverer of the coin is under no demonstrable moral obligation to seek out the most recent owner for the sake of restoring his property.

What if the same man discovers a car in a ditch, keys therein?  May he, after perhaps some "reasonable" amount of time waiting there, get in and drive away?  Practically speaking, no.  Why?  Because the property is by the means of a state motor vehicle institution, registered as belonging to someone in specific, the apparent abandonment of it not perforce giving license to a passer-by to claim it as his own.  There is a demonstrable link of claim between the property and the registered owner.

As we see, these things can become a mite complicated in some respects, yet for the most part people appear to manage well enough.

That all said, it remains that a claim must be asserted in order to become valid.  Some will say that the mere happenstance of birth establishes the individual claim to First Property, and I can accept that as an eminently obvious and practical view to take on the matter.  And yet, that claim may in cases have to be reasserted under certain circumstances.

For example, imagine you are accosted by a police officer who demands you produce ID because he "needs" to know who you are.  In such a case, faced with a man with a gun, the class of such men having statistically proven themselves ready and willing to use those guns in the event you fail to comply with their invalid orders, you have a choice to make.  You can meekly accede to his invalid demand, or you can remind him of your countervailing right not to be molested by strangers, regardless of the presence of a sidearm and a meaningless badge, connoting no actual authority whatsoever.  Often times, when capably challenged, a cop will back down precisely because he knows he doesn't have Law on his side.

So then, the reality of rights is this: they must be asserted explicitly in some manner and they must always be defended.  A right is not a guarantee to the property it claims.  Just because I assert my right to my First Property, which is to say my life,  it does not follow that I am guaranteed that life from being taken from me.  I must take steps to best ensure that my life will remain intact and my own throughout my time on this earth.  My claim may be effectively voided through events beyond my control, such as a building collapsing upon me, or it might be destroyed through the criminal action of another human being.  Finally, my life could be expropriated as the ill-gotten property of other human beings.

Tax laws, for example, reduce every tax-paying human being to the status of a serf because there is now some proportion of his time spent at his labor, the fruits of which are taken from him without consent, by another.  That is, at best, serfdom, but more likely the better label is "slavery", bearing in mind that one need not have manacles of iron about his ankles in order to be a slave.  The threat of physical violence to coerce compliance is sufficient when compliance is the result.  Such people are slaves no less than those with said manacles.  They are, in fact, more so slaves because they remain compliant in the absence of immediate physical restraint and compulsion.  That tells us that they are men defeated in their minds and spirits, unwilling to walk off the plantation for fear of the master's retributions.  It is one of the most wretched states in which any man can find himself.

The "state", or "government" if you prefer, routinely acts to violate your rights.  It is done every day, all day long.  In New York City and under the colored authority of the so-called Sullivan "law" (which is no Law at all), anyone choosing to walk down Broadway at noon with his sidearm openly displayed on his hip will be arrested and charged with illegal possession of a firearm, that is, if the cops do not simply dispense with those formalities and start shooting right off the bat.  The "state" is fact in the sense that people believe it is actually there and behave accordingly.  Those who comprise the "state" will violate your rights without compunction, which is why onus rests with you to defend those rights against trespass.  Normatively speaking, this should never be the case, but in the real world, it is almost always the case where the "state" makes contact with you, the sovereign man.  The only hope you have of escaping an encounter without some damage is to assert your rights and stand fast no matter what the goons may throw at  you.

Remember that even though agents of "government" may know they are doing wrong, that will not stop them from trying.  Intimidation and deceit have been primary tools of tyrants for thousands of years because they tend to work, and they work because the people against whom those tools are turned most often cower in fear when they ought to be standing tall, come what may.  This is a primary reason the world has been what it has, politically speaking: people willing to tolerate the intolerable.  That is where the vigorous defense of one's rights through proper and effective assertion comes in, along with the attitude of absolute intolerance of that which must never be tolerated.

Therefore, learn your rights and how to defend them from the caprice and violence of the "state" and its goons with badges and other symbols of false authority.  Adopt an attitude of intolerance, backed by one of an absolute determination to make those goons back the hell off as you unleash upon them volley after volley of ironclad assertions of your rights such that they have no choice but to abandon their perfidious behavior.  Be aware that it may not always work.  Goons are well known for murdering people for having had the temerity and brass to question their authority.  That is a risk only you can weigh as to whether it is worth assuming.  But consider the wretched state to which you reduce yourself every time you back down from their criminal trespasses upon your rightful claims.  What price, your self-respect?  Only you can answer that, but I will advise great care and deliberation when deciding the question, because crawling from the pit of despair is far more difficult than remaining out of it in the first place.

Attitude is nearly everything in life.  To quote Charles Swindoll:

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company...a church...a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes.

Take that one to the bank and invest in it.  I promise you before God that the dividends it pays are well worth the efforts of investment.

Thank you once again and as always, please accept my best wishes.

Proportionality

Purloined Chewing Gum


Fred chews gum. In fact, he loves to chew it and does so every day. He treasures his chewing gum.

One morning, John takes a stick of Fred's gum without permission. John and Fred are not well acquainted. Fred takes serious exception to John's violation of his property rights. Fred beats John soundly and with some severity, perhaps even killing John.

Is Fred justified in his response to John's action? The answer is, "it depends". It depends on the basic assumptions under which one labors when considering such questions.

Many people, perhaps very much most, would raise the idea of "proportionality". For a vast majority, beating someone for having taken a stick of gum without having first asked is not justified, much less killing for said cause. It is largely deemed "irrational". But is it? Let us take a somewhat deeper look.

What, exactly, defines "proportionality"?

Who gets to determine the standard that defines proportionality in an objective, objectively valid, and universally applicable way? Whence their authority to determine it for all men and foist it upon them? These are not rhetorical questions, nor are they in any way trivial or invalid. Not only are those questions central to the validity of the concept of proportionality, upon close examination one will find that they have no satisfactory answers.

Similarly, by what authority does one man get to judge the perceptions of another and deem them inadequate or even criminal and worthy of... what, exactly? Punishment? Imposition of judgment upon them? The taking of his property in some presumed act of equity and justice?

What is the objective standard by which all this presumably well-intended busy-bodying is justified?

The answer is: there is none. The concept of proportionality from the standpoint of objective validity is hopelessly unanswerable precisely because an objective and practicable definition is not possible.

What, then, is the valid basis of action where defense of property rights is concerned?

The ONLY salient fact where acts of defense are concerned is the fact that one human being has violated another; an act to which the former cannot validly claim as justly perpetrated against the latter.

Any purported absence of proportionality, even presuming that the notion has even the least shred of credibility, is at best a distant secondary consideration.

If A violates B, regardless of manner or degree, it is clear that B is within his rights to take action against A. Through the very act of violation, A places himself at risk, regardless of awareness or intent. In pure principle, in violating B, A has risked forfeiture of all he possesses, including his First Property (life).

In reality, people do not react with great extremity, save very rarely. Therefore, the "problem" really isn't. Thoughts to proportionality are of no practical importance in most situations. But if this is so, where rests the delineation between this and the cases where proportionality is justly mandated?

The notion of proportionality, once accepted as valid, establishes a slippery slope. By small increments does that slope find itself becoming steeper and more generously slathered with ever better lubricant. This is what human beings do, our histories overwhelmingly lousy with examples. How does one think we humans have gone from our ancient anarchist roots, to our currently deplorable state of government-imposed, arbitrary, and capricious restriction upon our rightful prerogatives to act? It did not happen over night, but rather by small incremental, creeping motions away from freedom, toward restriction in usurpation of the rightful claims of every man to act.

Consider further the more extreme case where one's life is placed in immediate danger of destruction at the hands of another. How easy it is in the comfortable, time-flush, and safety-rich environment of a prosecutor's office chair to judge the "proportionality" of another man's acts of self-defense, enjoying the advantages that were unavailable to those forced into make what were likely a split-second decisions, their very lives riding on next choices?

Every day there is some chiseler in a cheap suit presuming to stand in judgment of the "proportionality" of another's actions, absent an objectively measured standard not only by which to judge the validity of another man's acts, but to justify it before the public. Given this, ought the concept of proportionality not come under strict scrutiny?

The foremost and perhaps only consideration in cases of a man acting in defense of his rightful property is the initial violation perpetrated against him by another. No man holds the least authority to violate the rights of another, no matter the degree, absent violation by that other. The concept of proportionality, imposed upon others under color of just authority, introduces the notion of degree in such a manner that potentially erases all authority of the individual to act within the metes and bounds of his inborn, autonomous right. The very definition of "proportionality" may be altered in whatever manner and degree deemed desirable or "necessary" by those who presume to lord over the rest, whether it be kings, legislatures, or what have you.

History readily demonstrates that such standards tend to be arbitrary in the best cases, and intentionally, viciously malevolent in the worse. The false onus of proportionality places our very lives in jeopardy through invalid obligations that leave men without the freedom to act spontaneously and with the knowledge that they will safe from the capricious responses of his fellows under false authority. In dire situations, such reservations and the hesitations that arise therefrom can cost a men their lives. Is it not bad enough that a man is forced to act in defense of his very life? Is there any just cause to further burden him with having to worry whether his choice of response to a threat to life and limb will earn him a prison term and possibly the financial destitution of those whom he loves?

This imposition of the false standard of proportionality constitutes a gross and criminal violation of the rights of all men. It is, in fact, a deep, gross, and insidious violation of the much touted NAP†, wrapped in a false narrative of just limitation of the rightful prerogatives of free men pursuant to "justice". It would be laughable, were it not for the destruction heaped upon righteous men for their purported failures to respond "proportionally" to crimes acknowledged to have been committed against them.

Furthermore, even for "lesser" violations of one man by another, the ultimate right of destruction of the violator remains a valid claim for those violated. Consider unamended violations, where the violator refuses or otherwise fails to make amends for his crime, regardless of how trivial someone might regard it. If the violator is allowed to escape without consequence, then the rights of all men have been ceded in principle. If one may get away with X, then what in principle invalidates his claim to the right to commit Y without consequence? Upon what basis do we justify the effective allowance of one violation while denying another?

John steals a piece of Fred's chewing gum and the latter decides to take great exception to the act for reasons his own. Fred demands John make him whole, but John steadfastly refuses. Is Fred ultimately entitled to John's life? I say he is, for if he is not, then an arbitrary line has been drawn between "yea" and "nay", the position of which is equally arbitrary. Once that has been established as an accepted (by whom???) precedent, ANYTHING is possible in terms of moving that line such that a man can be required to hand his very life over to another on demand, as is the case in principle in the UK where any morally valid act of self defense is likely to earn the defender a stint in prison pursuant to the arbitrary and grossly unjust "laws" of that land.

The concept of proportionality looks good on cheap paper, written in large scrawl with crayons of bright and pretty colors. However, once one breaks out the scalpels in scrutiny of the idea, problems begin to show, as we see.

Proportionality is an emotion-driven fallacy that provides tyrants a toehold by which their usurpations are falsely, yet compellingly, justified and by which the lives of men thereby stand perpetually in ruin's shadow.

Therefore, it is my gentle and respectful recommendation that you give these ideas their due consideration with the requisite diligence and open mind. If you ever find yourself discharging the duties of a juror, reject all assertions of proportionality as a justification of prosecution, for it is a false basis.

As always, please accept my best wishes.

Warrior Philosophers

Greetings once again, my fellow spirits.

I saw a post on a social media's site just a moment ago that cited a quote from Thucydides that goes thusly:

"The society that separats its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."


The propriety of it prompted the following response.

It is agreeable. The classic notion of the warrior philosopher denotes the ultimate warrior. Why? Because the intimation that he is a philosopher implies he thinks for himself and in the cultural context in which I assume it was made, I must further assume it also carried the implication of being a moral and courageous man. Those are the men we need in uniform, so to speak; men who will say "no!" to orders immoral.  We need as many of these as possible, the ideal proportion being 100%.

Police, for example, are not such men. They almost universally obey blindly.  On the few occasions we read about a cop bucking the status quo, bad things happen thereafter to he who showed such temerity.  The "system" does not tolerate those who rock the boat.  It has a long memory, and is not at all forgiving.

If somewhere a charismatic "leader" rose, and in the wake of his hand-waving tirades a fever spiked in his subjects such that all people of X-persuasion were to be separated and somehow made eighth-class properties of the "crown", you had better bet that there would be someone enforcing the edict with single-minded and likely vicious devotion, police being the candidates topping the list.  Barring them, there are always others willing to answer the call.

It doesn't matter who the target group might be - perhaps we could return to old reliables such as blacks and Jews. More likely these days, it would be white males. Someone, I guaRONtee, would blindly accede to whatever orders were issued. Round `em up! And if the orders ultimately crowned in "kill them all", there would always be those willing to press that gore-laden labor. History has demonstrated the willingness of men to engage in acts of mass murder, given the right incentive.

This is not likely possible with a body of warrior philosophers because they would not only understand the gross impropriety of such orders - the very criminality - but would have the courage and motivation to refuse them and, if necessary, air out and neutralize the sources.

That is what humanity needs. We don't need charismatic "leaders". We don't need leaders at all, save that every man be the leader of his own life. We need men courageous and loving enough of themselves and their fellows to do the occasionally ugly work required to maintain the state of freedom not only for themselves, but for all men.

Rottenness is a fact of humanity. There will always will be men who fail to abide by the principles of Proper Human Relations, whatever the reasons. Such men need to be excised from the company of their fellows, whether by killing them or through exile and forced containment, if the freedom of men is to be protected in perpetuity. It is ugly work - no decent man wants to do such things to another. He takes no whit of pleasure in it, yet may still derive an appropriate sense of satisfaction in having justly and with correct basis protected the fundamental rights of all men, for in neutralizing one transgressor's acts of trespass, he saves all others, for the doom of the humanity begins with the first failure to protect. This is part of the price of being a Freeman.

Observe how we fully as have failed at this, allowing vicious tyrants of all stripe to commit their atrocities without sufficient answer. Because we are moral cowards, unwilling to engage in the repugnant business of maintaining the proper order between all men, which is to say the state of mutually respectful freedom, insanity and tragedy ride roughshod across the face of the globe, the conditions they set having become the rule rather than the exception.

We shrink from enlightened self-interest because of our natural distaste for that which is clearly distasteful.  Such disinclination says good things of us, but our failure to command over it where necessary indicts us with far greater rebuke.  There are those times where the repellent act proves necessary if we are to preserve our birthright freedoms and not devolve into the chaos we now find in nearly every corner, nook, and cranny of the world.

You have failed and I, shamefully, have done no better.

Courage is not enough. Intellect fit for the task of being a Freeman, a protector and guardian of all humanity from the predations of transgressors upon the common rights of all people, is an absolute necessity, as well as the smarts that come with training.  Absent the right knowledge, how can any man know what to do in a given situation? Without knowledge, children drink poison in their innocence and good men allow themselves and others to be abused and ruined by thoses who may do so with intentions fair or foul.

Freedom proper, equal, and respectful to, and of all men, demands everything of the individual. It is hard work that requires devotion, charity, love, trust, vigilance, grace, and courage. It demands all that men can give, and then a smidge more. That is why we run from it; it is simply too much work for the Meaner - the average man - who rathers the false convenience, economy, and comfort of idle entropy, usually in the form of going along to get along.  Sadder still, we pick and choose the elements of our individual visions of "freedom", that which I call "Pretty Slavery", and stencil "freedom" upon its forehead.  

Look what it has gotten us. We live in Hell, the gut-wrenching tragedy of it being not only that none of it is necessary, but trebly so, given the grace and love and beauty of spirit of which we are capable and so often demonstrate in other ways. Choosing horror over love for no other reason than we are too lazy or fearful to lift a finger to choose otherwise reveals our most terrible flaws.

I do not know the proper solution for all this, the measures that might serve to correct our doleful state, but the cultivation Warrior Philosophers must, in my opinion, be part of it.  It is not clear that such an endeavor may be realized in any manner beyond the theoretical in numbers sufficient to address this deep breech of nature.

In principle, the path forward is clear and simple.  In practice, it is the same, and yet statistical reality of mens' minds nevertheless reveals the low likelihood of such solutions' potentials for successful attainment.  Our minds build our reality and we appear bent on clinging to the evils which, having become so familiar to us, have become comfortable regardless of the horrors they bring.

Please forgive the dark mood of the subject, but I believe it needs to be aired in the slim hope that it will set people to thinking.

Thank you for your time and attention, and as always please accept my best wishes.