Rights Do Not Exist

 

If the seemingly outlandish title has gotten your attention, then I say "good!"  But what does it mean, that rights don't exist?

Let us hearken back a few years where I addressed the question, "What Are Rights?"  In that essay we defined a "right" as a "just claim".  What I neglected to elaborate upon, however, was the fact that a right does not exist in any meaningful way whatsoever until it is asserted by an individual.  That act defines the birth of a right.  Proper action pursuant to the claim keeps it alive.  The moment the claim is abandoned, it ceases to exist and that which was claimed, arguably comes up for grabs in some manner and degree, the implications at times being profound and wide-reaching.

A right does not exist if it is not asserted in the face of challenge.  Where rights are concerned, assertion is tantamount to defense.  It is certainly the first step, though in some cases it may not be sufficient, other measures becoming necessary as challenges grow in magnitude of threat.

If I fail to assert my right to my First Property (i.e., my very life), it can be validly argued in some circumstances that I do not in fact hold that right.  This, of course, assumes that I am not asleep, in a comatose state, mentally impaired such that I am incapable of making the assertion, and so on.  In other words, the statement is qualified with the usual caveat of "all else equal".

This is the stark and most fundamentally real nature of the notion of a right.  Because it is a claim, it must in some cases be explicitly asserted in order for it to become manifestly valid and due the respect of one's fellows.  If our history has shown us anything about ourselves, it is that we tend not to respect our fellows, unless given good reason.

Consider one's abode - their home, as it were.  If I fail to assert my right to my home by allowing strangers to enter thereupon, uninvited, and to rifle through my refrigerator to eat as they please, consume that very costly bottle of single-malt whiskey, sleep in my bed to the exclusion of myself, shower, use the toilet, and basically act as if they owned the place, I have then pretty well relinquished my claims to those properties.  Furthermore, reestablishing a claim that has been allowed to the ravages of rivaling scavengers most often proves difficult, at times very costly, is risky at best, and is potentially hazardous to life and limb in some cases.

Does this mean that a man must assert all his rights every time he moves his eyeballs in order that those around him be made clear?  No.  We assume many of the claims tacitly and this is even reflected in Law.  For example, just because I do not tell you that I claim my life as my First Property, it does not follow that you may murder me, or render me into slavery to yourself or another.

But there are those circumstances, which I will conveniently call "special", where the explicit assertion of one's rights is required if one wishes not to be trampled by some third party.  Interactions with "government" is perhaps the ultimate example of this, especially in the courtroom.  In court, if you fail to assert your rights, chances are good to excellent that you will be procedurally disemboweled, drawn, and quartered by opposing counsel as the judge passively allows it because it is not his job to see to it that your interests are served, as that would indicate bias in one who must remain impartial.  The responsibility lies wholly with YOU, which is why the smart man secures the services of a competent and diligent lawyer for all such matters as may end up in a courtroom.  In court, the only person interested in your welfare is you, and maybe (hopefully) your attorney.  The rest are, at best, neutral.  Onus rests solely with you so see to your welfare in court.  And so it is with life in general.

Many people see a right as an entitlement.  While this is true in an abstract sense, it only becomes real with assertion, and only in the case where sufficiently reasonable action is taken pursuant to the claim in the face of third party threat.  That which defines "sufficiently reasonable" can become a complicated and messy issue for another day's discussion, so just accept it on faith for the time being that there exists proper answers for this question, somewhere out there in the aether.  The only time one's rights need explicit assertion is when there exists a threat, real or potential, of disparagement, deprecation, denial, or some other violation.  That is always the case in courts of law and virtually always so in any interaction with "government", precisely because the "state" is always on record as assuming authority that it cannot prove to hold, in point of fact, yet maintains at the point of the gun.

Therefore, onus rests with every individual to stand tall and to make clear to anyone or anything posing so much as the minutest potential challenge to one's sovereign rights, that they waive no whit of even the seemingly most insignificant of them, for no right is insignificant.  The moment you lose sight of this centrally important truth, you have in principle lost it all.

If you will not assert your rights, then they do not exist.  Period.  Imagine you're on the street and someone asks you about your car that happens to have the keys laying on the seat, saying "hey buddy, is this your car?"  If you say "no", you have told that guy that you make no claim to the vehicle.  If he then gets in and drives away, you have no basis for complaint in the wake of no longer having a car.  Indeed, if you were to file a criminal report with the police, the fact that you failed to assert your claim might well have the cops telling you to take a walk for that very reason.  It would be similar to giving him your car and then going to the police afterward.  And in the case where cops did your rotten bidding, chances are good that if it went to trial, a reasonable jury would look at you as the architect of your own misfortune, precisely because you failed in your duty to yourself to make clear to another human that you claim the vehicle in question.  I know I'd find for the defendant, all else equal.

One cannot lazily count on the good will of others to protect his claims to Life, for his trust will almost certainly prove grossly misplaced at precisely the moment when its fruits are needed most.  This is a sad truth about the empirically observable and common behavior of the mean human being.  If you will not help yourself when able, you merit none and deserve that which comes to you, such as it may prove.

Failure to assert and defend one's rights is the ultimate abdication of responsibility for oneself.  Such failures ought not, and must not be rewarded.  If in the face of sufficient ability, one fails to make and reasonably affect the defense of his rights, then in terms of positive reality he holds no such rights, nor any defensible claims in Law against the acts of others whose behavior would have become criminal, had he faithfully and properly discharged due diligence with respect to the affirmations to which he ought to have attested, had at the time he wanted that which a valid assertion would have made manifest.

Absorb this; understand it; accept it; alter your behavior in accordant comport and habit with it, that is, if your rights are important to you.  Otherwise, much of the world will trample you into the dust and never bat an eyelash because at the end of the day, even the best among us tend to look out for ourselves first and foremost, which is precisely as things ought to be.  This is the nature of life on planet earth and one either gets smart and acts the part, or is consumed by the manifold interests that conflict with his own.

Look at it as maintaining a balance between yourself and a potentially hostile world.  It is a necessary skill and habit for all who do not wish to be consumed in the frenzy of human activity, which cares no whit for any individual's welfare.  

Stand tall or risk being stricken.  The choice is yours.  It always has been.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The Law of Human Inertia

 Today we make it short and sweet.  I present you the Law of Human Inertia, the LoHI:

The Law of Human Inertia: 

Those habituated to freedom tend to fight to remain free. 

Those habituated to servitude tend to cleave to their chains and will often fight to preserve their status as serfs.

Those converted from one state to the other tend to cleave to the new state.

It is easier to incite a Freeman to slavery than a Weakman to freedom. 

I maintain that it is a prima facie obvious, valid, and truthful assertion that once a population passes a tipping point in terms of some sort of corruption, practically the entire population tilts toward it in time.  I further assert that the general condition of the global human population is now at or past that point. We are therefore faced with a choice regarding what sort of people we wish to be.

Time is here, and so until next time please accept my best wishes.

A New Political Concept?

 

Today I would like to introduce a (possibly?) new idea, or at the very least a new term, actually two.

I would like to introduce the idea of the unamended violation.  My intention here is that the term itself be considered as political or Law jargon with a very specific meaning as it applies to anyone elected, appointed, hired, or contracted to political office or political position of any sort whatsoever.  In other words, anyone who acts in the name of the so-called "state" is someone to whom this idea, its strictures, and its consequences would apply.

Most of us are perhaps familiar with the idea of the violation of a man's civil rights, a very broad term that could refer to anything from stealing a piece of chewing gum to kidnapping and the unjust taking of life.  This notion is important, yet it gets very little attention by media, in our schools, by parents with their children, and so on down the line of issues of immediate concern to people on a daily basis, regardless of whether they are consciously aware of it.

Federal Law addresses such violations and there have been many cases, for example, where state prosecutions of individuals for crimes such as murder have gone all wrong in the courtroom.  In cases of clear miscarriages of justice where acquittals should never have happened, federal prosecutors have charged the defendants with "violation of civil rights", a rather broad sounding charge with a catchall feel to it.  Ignoring the double-jeopardy issue, as well as that of the sanctity and authority of juries, the notion of the criminal nature of such violations is not completely foreign to many of us.

Where my idea may become somehow novel rests in part with the application, which in this case would be against any government instrument or agent who, in the course of his duties as such an instrument or agent, commits a violation of the rights of those to whom they have sworn oaths of good faith and competent service.  In such cases, the individual in question is offered the opportunity to personally make amends to their victims.  In the case of amendments made, the violation would be looked upon as amended insofar as Law and governance is concerned, meaning that the guilty party has made the good faith effort to right the wrongs he has admittedly committed in the name of the "state" against his fellows.  This may or may not mean that he is free and clear of other consequences such as loss of position or prison time, as well as others.  It does, however, serve as a mitigating factor in the final disposition of such cases, come sentencing.

The other side of that coin presents the unamended violation, where the guilty party is either unwilling or incapable of making restitution to his victims.  Unamended violations are ultimately serious in terms of their gravity, as well as the punishments that await those who either refuse to restore their victims or, due to the nature of the violations in question, are unable to.  An example of each may now be in order.

In the first case, the guilty party for whatever reasons, refuses to restore his victims to wholeness.  Such refusal may be taken as prima facie proof of the absence of repentance and of either malice aforethought or depraved indifference with respect to the losses and consequent sufferings of their victims.  There is, however, one fly in that ointment: unjust conviction.  In the case of one who has been falsely accused and convicted of such a violation, the question arises as to how one deals with the convict's refusal to make amends dictated by the court in a given case.  This is no small fly, either, and I am quick to admit that I have no quick answer to the problem, an issue for another day.

In the second case, let us say that the actions of the guilty party was to cause the loss of an eye or limb of the victim.  In this case, and as of this writing, there is no way to restore missing body parts of these sorts and so the offense cannot be amended as a matter of the nature of the injury.  In that case the violation is also unamended and at sentencing there would be premiums placed upon the punishment of the convict.  Murder would be another example, as would be the destruction of a loved and irreplaceable family heirloom.

In my opinion, holding this sword of Damocles over the heads of all government workers, up to and including the President would go a long way toward stemming the torrents of corruption and wrong doings, whether it be the skimming of public funds from some revenue pile, or killing an infant during execution of a no-knock warrant at the wrong address.

It is only when the cost of committing such violations far outstrips the benefits of commission, coupled with the promise and prospect of rock steady and consistent application of such standards of Law to government agents of all stripes, that corruption and other gross and intolerable wrong-doing by government officials, agents, and other related entities will begin to trail off with precipitous rapidity.

By the same token, anyone who falsely accuses such an individual of having committed a violation against the Public Trust will suffer trebly in the event he is discovered, charged, and convicted of having done so.  For example, Janey is angry that officer Jim issued her a parking ticket and decides to concoct a story that he pulled her over and raped her, an inordinately serious charge that, given Law in accord with the disposition of such cases would land Jim in a whole heap of very deep kimchee.  Proof of her lie and, given sufficient evidence to charge, Janey would be given the opportunity to recant her charge and publicly admit in bold neon that she'd lied and that officer Jim was a fine and upstanding man who never did anything to violate her inherent rights.  There might still be prison time for Janey, but the sentencing for this amended violation of officer Jim's rights would be peanuts when compared with that, had Janey refused to leave her violation unamended.

In the unamended case, had officer Jim been sentenced to a year in prison, Janey would have to serve three.

Finally we come to the notion of partial amendment, which could also be taken into account at sentencing.  Making amends to the degree possible, though incompletely satisfactory, might also serve to mitigate sentencing.

As a matter of procedure, the time for making amends would be prior to going to trial, which requires an admission of guilt with the promise that one will make suitable amends where possible.  If the defendant refuses the offer, upon conviction the violation is by nature unamended and sentencing is made pursuant to that condition.

If we, the people, do not fight for such restraints upon those who are supposed to serve us, but who rather presume to lord over us as masters, the abuses and hazards of tyranny will not only remain, but will continue to grow until such a pass is reached that neither will people such as myself be able to write about such concerns and issues, nor will people such as yourself be able to read or even speak about them. Given advances in technologies, the capabilities of which will only grow in time, one day you may not even be able to ponder them in the privacy of your own thoughts.

Think on this awhile; let it roll around in the back of your mind to digest.  The future to which you relegate not only yourself, but all your fellows including those whom you love dearly, hangs in the balance, contingent on our collective ability to force the hand of "government" such that effective measures for reining in the tyrants are made real, and are readily and handily applied by anyone against those who believe themselves to hold the authority to bring unjust harms to their fellows and to stand beyond unaccountability.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Nexus

By whatever dint of fate, the free people of America now stand at a nexus.  What we choose to do with the opportunity that stands before us will determine the quality and character of our lives for a very long time to come, possibly centuries.

An ugly truth about Americans is that we have erred gravely as Freemen almost since the first days of this republic.  While we started off well enough with our Articles of Confederation, those in whom our forbears placed their trust as "leaders" quickly saw the limitations the architecture specified therein placed upon them as the trusted governors of The People.  That realization brought forth the eventual contriving and adoption of the Constitution, a weakly and vaguely written architecture for an ostensibly free land.   Fit for saints only, the vagaries of that document coupled with the power to tax (the power to destroy) made all the easier the manifold corruptions that have landed us in our current circumstance in this, the early twenty-first century.  It shall not be my purpose here to argue the veracity and validity of my opinion on the matter of our Constitution, for it is irrelevant to the facts of our current circumstances that include but are not limited to rioting, out of control politicians and their agents, corrupted courts, and many millions of people whose sanity is unquestionably and dangerously unhinged.  Freemen and freedom itself stand in grave peril that becomes more immediate by the day.

In piecemeal fashion, the parade of tyrants have through the years and since the very earliest days of the republic steadily trimmed away the rightful prerogatives of free men to the point that they now stand in real and immediate peril of losing the few shreds of remnants of the rights born into every man in all corners of the earth.  Statutes prohibiting the manufacture, possession, use, and sale of illicit drugs is a prime example of the suppression of human rights by wildly ignorant, if presumably well-intending politicians.  Prohibitions on the right to keep and bear arms is perhaps the ultimate example of the violations against men by corrupt government.  Statutes against prostitution, "hate" speech, etc. have encroached upon the rightful prerogatives of all men as those corrupt politicians and their agents trespass upon those to whom they swore solemn oaths of good faith and service.

Police have gone from keepers of the peace, questionable enough a role itself, to enforcers of arbitrary, capricious, and utterly invalid statute, devoid of any authority whatsoever beyond that of armed men able and willing to bring to harm those who fail to comply.  Statute is the product of men corrupted beyond any forgiveness, deserving of our ire, correction, and indeed in many cases, our vengeance.  And yet, we the people have mostly kowtowed to the felonious edicts of men with no valid authority to issue such fiats.  This having been the case since the first days of this land as a nation, who is really to blame for the dolorous political conditions we now face?  Hint: it's not the politicians and their vile enforcers.  They get away only with that which we allow, and it is my assertion that it is high time that such allowance comes to an abrupt and permanent end with extreme prejudice and through acts of non-equivocation.

Through our willful ignorance, complacency, self-centeredness, narrow-mindedness, cowardice, and all the other manifold corruptions that lead men from the status of Freemen to that of Weakmen, we have allowed ourselves to be debased by the false authority of "government" and "state".  Those two entities do not even exist in and of themselves, save only as scripts, the roles to which most of us have been assigned do we play with full and willful compliance, regardless of how demeaning, impoverishing, and destructive to ourselves and our fellows.  

The march to abject chattel status has been long and steady, the average American taking it all in stride as if it were innocuous; unavoidable.  "You can't fight City Hall" has been the phony baloney excuse used by our corrupted selves in order to evade individual and collective responsibility for ourselves, as well as that to our fellows.  "City Hall" issues an edict and, almost regardless of how absurd and damaging to the lives of Freemen, the people heave a sigh of dissatisfaction and proceed to comply, unwilling to rock the boat for whatever ill-considered reason.

In the past two decades, since about the time of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the bites taken from us by those in power have grown steadily in size from the nibbles originally dared by the tyrants of the late eighteenth-century, to the full blown assaults upon our liberties of more recent years.

The unexpected election of Donald Trump, however, put a twist in the fabric of American political life that I am not sure anyone would likely have predicted as probable.  I am inclined to suspect that the results we have seen over the past four years may be in some measure attributed to the Left (what some might call "Deep State") having overplayed certain hands in the aftermath of Trump's election, a result that has left them burning with the implacable fury of bitter envy.   Fueled by the inflammatory rhetoric of Democrats and the "leftys" for whom they are a front, and abetted by an apparently eagerly willing press, the useful idiots self-identifying as "left" went progressively further off the rails in their blind and knot-headed hatred for the president.  So wild has been that mindless loathing that when George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis Minnesota in the summer of 2020, the event became the cause célèbre of the frenzied zombies of the regressive left.  It became their pretext and excuse for the steady up-ramp of violence, destruction, and murder.  Since then there have been additional police shootings of black suspects, each adding fuel to the gaining fire that now threatens to consume the nation from sea to shining sea.

The events in question have occurred almost exclusively in places that one might conversationally call "left-", "blue-", or "Democrat-" dominated, the perpetrators of the innumerable crimes actually and openly aided and abetted by the governmental officials local to each area in which said crimes were being committed, en masse, whether through positive assistance, or negatively through the refusal to actively put an end to the criminal activities.  Predictably, the support has served to greatly embolden the rioters and looters to the point that they are now murdering innocent people in the apparent belief that they will get away with their felonies, which thus far they largely have.

All during this time, the rank and file American has bemoaned these admittedly terrible events, not only specifically, but in a more general sense in an outcry against the chaos and violence.  What most appear to have missed, however, is that because the governmental authorities local to the rioting and looting have willfully failed to discharge their duties to keep the peace, they have abdicated all authority.  Having stood down, authority has devolved once again into the hands of those to whom it ultimately belongs in any event: the people.  That would be you, me, and everyone we know.

Because "government" has failed so abominably, we the people are now presented with a once-in-centuries opportunity to snatch back our authority as individuals and communities; to rip away and deny the false authority of the "state" in favor of that which is ours; that which is true and actual authority of free men.

The implications of this opportunity are literally staggering, not only in the rights to be reasserted, but the corresponding responsibilities as well.

Men of Snohomish Washington recently took up arms in defense of their town against roving bands of looting rioters who thought they were going take their poor behavior into that town.  When they saw the armed defenders, they moved on.  No violence, no gunshots.  The men of Snohomish did what police could not or would not do.  They reclaimed their authority as free men to keep the peace in their town and this example should become the paragon for the behavior and comport of all Americans and their respective communities.

Time is here.  Time is here to take back that which has been stolen from us.  Time is here to ignore "government" and its agents, the police and sheriffs whose authority was never valid in the first place, but which they were able to assume because we allowed it. Time is here to realize that we do not need police or any other enforcers; that they are indeed great detriments to liberty.  We do not have to allow tyrants to continue.  We have the means to stop it in short order and by God we must not waste this opportunity to do so.  My great fear in all this is that things will settle one way or another and Americans will go right back to sleep, content to allow police to run amok as always they have, enforcing the invalid and injurious edicts of the governmental felons we put into office.

These events are proving that we do not need enforcers; that we the people are easily good enough to be trusted with those duties and that we are, in fact, far and away more worthy of the public trust than are any of those who have been so vested on a professional, full-time basis.

There is much more to the list of necessary changes that must occur if we are to properly and fully take advantage of this impossibly rare gift to reclaim our statuses as free men, but that is a discussion for another day, however soon to come.  For now, just let it sink into your awareness the realization that the troubles we see, while terrible on the one hand, offers us an opportunity to reassert ourselves as the masters over "government" that we will almost certainly not see again for at least ten generations to come, if even ever again it will present itself.

The rioters seem hell bent to spread their chaos to all corners of the land.  I would implore all men of good constitution and faith to stand tall, take up arms, and show not only yourselves and the rioters who is boss, but those in "government" as well, especially the enforcers.  Remove them as threats to our liberty and we will have taken a giant leap in the direction of better living.  Without the enforcers, the rest of the political elite have no means of making good on their felonious and tyrannical designs.

I daresay that we will never see this opportunity again in our lifetimes.  Please, I beg you all, do not allow it to slip through your fingers.  We can do this and I promise you that if we do it right, we will have no basis for even the least regret, for we will have rescued ourselves from what I deem the New Dark Age that is now upon us and have set ourselves upon a path toward lives of men who are free not only in principle, but in point of practical and positive fact.

May you all be blessed with the sense and desire to do the right thing.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Nothing Of Which To Be Proud

For decades I have been listening to people justify tyrannies such as taxation on the basis of the accomplishments they yield.  Their arguments go roughly thus: "I don't mind paying taxes because of what I get in return."  This is the basis of the "muh roadz" argument.  Such people get things they want from the tax monies that are actively robbed from everyone under the threats that ultimately lead to death for those who sufficiently resist the "state's" felonious edicts.

It cannot be credibly argued that when people come together in groups as superorganisms, they are capable of accomplishing feats that most individuals cannot.  Could a single man have build the Hoover Dam?  Could a single individual erect a skyscraper; design and build a jet airliner; supply the world with iron ore or antibiotics?  No.  And so we must give due credit to the accomplishments of superorganized groups of human beings, for without them we would not have too many of those things that make our lives easier, more prosperous, healthier, and way more enjoyable.

But may we be proud of ourselves and the accomplishments in question, given how they are obtained through robbery and threats of harm and even destruction?  I say no.  "But, but why?", you may ask, further adding your emphasis on the greatness of the city art museum and the grand monuments all over town.   The vast halls of public "services"; courthouses, legislatures, police headquarters magnificently erected in huge Carrara marble ashlars, the state Capitol with its huge dome and fine gilding all speak to the glory of the civilization!  Well yes, they do... if one considers them most superficially.

But when one delves just a mite deeper and sees the basis upon which such feats were made possible, the picture changes drastically, and at a radical level.  All of it, and I mean ever grain and penny's worth, was had through robbery by men who have issued threats of bodily harm, financial ruin, imprisonment, and even death to anyone so much as considering non-compliance with the order to fork it over.  Those in power have gone so far as to remove one's earnings through the cooperation of his employer before he ever even sees his disbursement!

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "So what?:  This is, after all, the way things get done and we have to do it this way in order the have these things like roads, courthouses, firehouses, etc.  Besides, it's only fair, as if fairness were a valid justification for felonious assaults upon the sovereign rights of Freemen.  I would firstly respond by challenging the assumption that this is how it must be done.  To me, this mode of thinking represents a spectacular failure of creative thought, not to mention the abject misery that is that of the attitude of subservience which is required in order to hold such beliefs.

I further ask this: are these things worth having if we must rob people in order to acquire them?  Think about that long and with great care before you come to an answer - ANY answer.

Consider the analog of a man walking along the street with a briefcase containing $100 million dollars worth of bearer-bonds.  You've always wanted to be a millionaire, and so you bang him over the head and take his briefcase, possibly killing him in the process.  Congratulations, you are now a millionaire.

But have you anything for which to be proud of yourself in that regard, because you are also a thief and possibly a murderer.  Was it worth becoming a felon and moral degenerate for the sake of acquiring such wealth, regardless of how vast and "empowering"?  Was it worth relegating yourself to the hollow existence of the criminal, knowing for the rest of your life that you have done such grave wrong to another?  Would you be able to proudly relate to your family and friends the precise means by which you acquired your wealth, or would you be spinning lies that masked the truth?

Well, my dear friends, the precise same is true regarding taxation, as well as all the other things which "government" does pursuant to the so-called "greater good", "civilization", and all the other feel-good sounding, but false justifications cited for violating our just prerogatives and property rights.

Further consider that in which police routinely engage.  Take for instance the issue of traffic summonses, particularly where the issuance is committed on weak technicalities of statute in gross violation of the ostensive spirit of such edicts.  Fail to pay and a warrant will be issued for your arrest, even for a parking ticket.  If you are discovered, you will be apprehended by armed men.  Resist and they will beat you.  Resist better than they can impose, and they will gleefully escalate.  Resist enough, and they will murder you.  Imagine being murdered for a parking ticket.

The same result will come to anyone who resists the arbitrary caprice of the "state", no matter how trivially because the armed goons will be sent for you.  The more you resist, no matter how felonious the behavior of the state agents, the more severely you will be treated, once again up to and including being murdered for having the temerity and gall to so much as question Theire authority.

Do we want safe streets and civil society?  Yes.  It is reasonable to want this?  I believe it is.  But when it is had through the abuse and violation of those who seek to exercise rights that the arbitrary caprice of the "state" has declared forbidden, we once again lose all basis for being proud of what we have accomplished.

I would rather live in a free world that was more dangerous and devoid of great public works, if that dichotomy were anything better than utter falsehood, than to live in one where we were all physically safe from the low-rent street thug, but under constant threat of the high-rent government thug.  I would gladly forgo all the nice-to-have elements in life such as roads and museums and courthouses, in favor of my rightful freedom to carry on with my life as I see fit.

The price we pay for the shiny and relatively unimportant things that we have, is far and away too high, for what is a clear conscience worth?  Good "karma"?  The ability to look oneself in the mirror without shame, knowing the evil to which one has wed himself?

There is absolutely nothing of which we can be proud in all these superficially great attainments, for we have debased ourselves as thieves for the sake of having them.  In these respects, the only thing any of us should feel is burning shame, for we have robbed and abused our fellows in order to obtain those things, thus having reduced ourselves to criminals.

I would ask you to stop a long beat and give these words serious consideration.  The truth they speak is clear, complete, and eminently correct.  We hold no right or authority to commit such acts against our fellows, regardless of how powerfully we may want the things we buy with our ill-gotten booty, or may think that need justifies our means.  Countless souls have been put to death for the sake of "need".  How many more have been reduced to ruin by the same justification?  It is criminal madness to subscribe to such dangerously bankrupt beliefs, much less to act on them or even abet.  Is rightful pride and the joy it brings to a man so valueless?

Knowing now what it is you do, will you not now work to correct the error?

Be well and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The Phenomenon Of Lowest Denominator

Somewhere in the fourth or fifth grade, children are supposed to learn about the mathematical notion of "lowest common denominator" as they learn to execute basic arithmetic operations on fractions, such as addition and subtraction.

In other human endeavors, there exists the phenomenon of "lowest denominator", a term that often refers pejoratively to the level to which one will stoop in order to get his way.  There are several dimensions to this idea and many ways and instances in which it is be applied, but the basic idea is that he who is least constrained in his choices of action holds a tactical advantage over his competitors or other rivals.

An excellent example of this comes from late twentieth century economics as it applied and continues to apply to the relationship between China and the world economy.

For decades the cost of labor for products manufactured in America were considered high, but were accepted as part of the general overhead of doing business.  Labor unions, with the aid of corrupted American courts, distorted the American labor markets by forcing upon employers labor costs that a free market would not have sustained.  With time, these costs were driven ever higher, resulting in constantly increasing product costs such that in 1980, top of the line tennis shoes were selling in some cases for well over $200 per pair; that at a time when a man could live well enough in New York City on $200 per week and even have enough left over for some fun on Saturday night.

Then in the 1990s something fundamental changed: "free trade" with China, which offered the competitive advantage to American companies of labor costs so low as to be almost neglible.  Instead of having to pay American employees, say, $15 per hour to make tennis shoes, they could pay Chinese laborers $0.30 cents per hour.  It must also be borne in mind that the $15/hour American labor rate typically represents approximately $45/hour in actual costs to the employer due to onerous US labor laws, requiring them to shell out all manner of fees and other taxes for what has become the privilege of doing business in America.  Your inherent right to provide for yourself has been functionally demoted to that of a privilege, requiring "state" permission, directly or otherwise.  Something wicked has this way come.

With the "miracle" of Chinese "free trade" came not only the vanishingly low labor costs, but the absence of unjust "government" requirements in the form of onerously violative labor law.  All of a sudden, labor stood to cost maybe $3 per pair total, instead of $175.

There may have been those manufacturers who, understanding the unintended consequences of going to China, initially decided they would not jump on that bandwagon.  However, the moment the first athletic shoe manufacturer made the jump to China (or perhaps more likely, Viet Nam), it was not long before the rest were faced with the choice to follow suit, or have their lunch eaten by those who had.

When that first company left for greener labor and regulatory pastures, thus lowering the denominator, so to speak, it gained an advantage over its competitors so large, thereby allowing them to produce shoes of equal quality at costs so low in comparison with their American-based counterparts, they would be able to sell their product at prices deeply undercutting that of the competition while yielding equal or even superior profit.  The competition had no choice but to act in kind, if staying in business was a corporate goal.

By descending to a "lower denominator", a state of diminished restriction, a single manufacturer of shoes is able to alter an entire global industry at its roots.

In a similar way, we can see this phenomenon at work in politics.   Another reasonable example may be taken from the Chinese.  Libertarians, anarchists, agorists, voluntarists, as well as other presumably freedom-loving idealists, often call for the dismantling of US military forces.  While a noble sentiment, the reality is not quite so simple.  It is no secret to some that China, has designs for regional hegemony that includes utter domination of the international waters of the South China Sea.  Being international waters, rather than regional to China, Beijing holds no valid claim to them.  But by lowering the level of self-checking to which the Chinese are willing to subscribe themselves, "lowering the denominator" as it were, other nations such as the USA are faced with the choice of following suit or assuming the risk of finding themselves at a gross disadvantage in the contest of keeping international shipping lanes safe and open for everyone, the loss of which would almost certainly lead to every ship passing through those waters having to pay tribute to the Middle Kingdom, the advent of which would make clear to the world in short order just how bad the global economy could become, having become materially dependent on the production of most goods in China and having not stood up to what would amount to their piracy.

This notion of the lower denominator, which translates very directly in the increased willingness to exercise power without check, is driving the human race to ever deeper extremes of political barbarity.  The implications of this for human freedom, I should hope, are painfully obvious.

Consider the fundamentalist Muslims, scurrying all about in the middle east, sawing the heads from the bodies of those they consider unworthy of life.  They toss suspected homosexuals from the rooftops to their deaths, behead "apostates", stone women who do not toe "Allah's" line of comport, and engage in all manner of other atrocities which the rest of the world condemns as felonious, using their bent interpretations of Qur'an and its false authority to justify their actions.

In places where food becomes scarce, people devolve to a lower denominator of behavior in order to survive.  We see this currently evident in Venezuela, where the imploding socialist economy has resulted in people eating their pets, zoo animals, and so forth down what I suspect is a very ugly list of behaviors to which no typical human being would lower themselves under more normal circumstances.

War is another fair example.  Good men who are otherwise peaceable, don uniforms, grab weapons and go out to murder "the enemy" en masse.  During the American Revolution, the British complained bitterly about those damnable colonists who, rather than stand tall and with honor in lines as prescribed by the "rules of war", hid behind trees and intentionally picked off Redcoat officers, often sending the ranks into some chaos as they were generally less capable of engaging in "proper" warfare without someone shouting orders at them.

And yet, this will to make that descent to the lower denominator was essential if Americans were to defeat what was at that time the most powerful military force on the planet.  And from this we see the other side of the coin, which makes plain that the ultimate assessment of the descent will vary depending on one's point of view.  For the Brits, the American behavior was reprehensible and utterly devoid of any decency and honor.  To the Americans, it was the advantage they needed in order to throw the British vampire form their necks.

The descent is a two-edged sword, the same as most other things in life.  What is not the same, however, is the potential hazard that is presents.  Once a precedent is set, breaking the restraints people place upon themselves, it becomes perilously difficult to return to them.  We humans enjoy expansions of our personal and, in sadly far too many cases, collective powers.  We are bemused with power, even obsessed with it.  This is readily observable in children, watching them learn, which translates directly into greater individual power.  So long as we maintain a level head about such endeavors, we stand to remain well, both individually and as societal conglomerations.  The problem as I have come to see it, is that in far too many instances, we run off the rails in an instant, bedazzled by the lure of newly acquired powers.

Making the descent to a lower denominator more often results in the bad, especially in longer term considerations.  Take, for example, the so-called "war tax" imposed upon Americans in 1942.  It was justified on the basis that the nation was under peril at the hands of the evil Japanese Empire.  The promise made to the American people at that time was that it was a "temporary" tax that would be repealed the moment hostilities concluded.  That, of course, turned out to be a lie.  At war's end, the federal "government" was not about to relinquish the power of so vast an income stream as that afforded them by the good fortune of Japan's terribly ill-considered decision to attack Pearl Harbor.  They now had control of almost incomprehensible sums and, in typical human fashion, were not about to let go of so much as penny of it.

But in the wake of peace, how were the powers that were at that time going to justify such a move, especially in the face of a well-armed population who'd just come out of four years of warfare, had suffered terrible losses, and were most likely in no mood for such chicanery?  The answer was a classic: the Hegelian dialectic, and what better one to choose than the "red menace" of soviet Russia?  Oh yes, they were by all means a threat, but nothing as was blown up in the American press.  But once convinced and sufficiently terrified, Americans blithely obeyed the Master and made no fuss, for they had become willing to trade freedom for an illusion of security.

In the previous case, the descent has proven devastating to freedom because people of low moral character got their hands on power, refused to relinquish it, and have used it to sour ends in ever gaining measure, year over year.

Have we as the human gestalt learned the key lessons from all this dangerous political buffoonery?  No.  If anything, the Meaner (mean or average man) has become habituated to the corruptions of the Tyrant to such a degree that he now defends those perfidies to the point of his own destruction, and beyond, having lost the habit and inclination to ask "what sort of a world do I wish to leave to my grandchildren?"  The circumstance is now so decayed, that Johnny Q Meaner even rationalizes the corruptions of those who presume to lord over him (and the lordship to which he accedes via his lack of meaningful protest), telling himself and teaching his own issue that it's all for the "greater good".  It is unclear that humanity could devolve much further down the ladder of behavior, yet I would not assume it.

And so we return to one of the perennial truths for Freemen: freedom requires of a man a strong moral underpinning such that he is not overly tempted by the charms of his own lower self, which beckons him to make the descent to the equally low recesses of his character, always taunting and tempting him with the lie that it will have no cost associated.  It ALWAYS has a cost, and unfortunately the price associated with the descent is most often more than liberty can afford to pay, men's freedoms and their self-respect ultimately having to pay the price for those lapses of judgment and self-control that lead to that plunge to the lower denominator of human action.

This truth should be taught to every child.  They should not be told that they may never indulge in the descent, but that it always carries with it great risk and hazard.  They should be taught to keep an eye not only on their own choices in such matters, but upon those around them such that they will refuse to tolerate the perfidious acts of their fellow men.  It is only by this cooperative checking of the self and of and by others that we keep each other within the metes and bounds of proper human relations.  Conversely, it is through our willingness to turn blind eyes toward that which we do and, most importantly perhaps, that which is done by others, that it is made possible the rise of personalities such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.  To be taken in by the lies, bent truths, and false promises of one's fellows is an all too human failing.  The promise of free stuff or things too good to be true seems to get us every time.  How else were communists, fascists, NAZIs, Muslims, and all other flavors of authoritarian tyrants able to bring humanity to so low as pass as that in which we now find ourselves?

The sin lies mainly not with those who would become your masters, for how can one blame the snake for biting?  The error lies with us; with our willingness to tolerate that which is intolerable: the violation of our individual freedoms by external parties, pursuant to some idealized lie that usually speaks to the "collective good".

We painted ourselves into this corner and only we can get ourselves out.  And make no mistake about it: we the people of this world, certainly of America, could be free by close of business today, if that is what we decided we wanted in sufficient measure.  Theye have almost no power of their own over us, but mainly that which we willingly hand to them, which they immediately turn back upon ourselves to their advantage, and our loss.  That is the ultimate effect when would be do-gooders and other tyrants are allowed their latitude with no threat of destruction erected against them.

As the denominator lowers ever further, the checks upon the actions of tyrants become ever more sparse and the hazards to Freemen ever greater.

Please consider this and what it means in terms of decisions that you make, whether you make them proactively as a Freeman, or through the default of inaction as someone less than free by your own choice.  What do you really want to be?  Do you want to be free?  If not, then bless you and may the galaxies take pity upon thee.  But if so, what are you willing to do to be free?  What are you willing to sacrifice in order to throw the vampires who suck the life from you from your neck?  Only you can choose for yourself, but make no mistake about the fact that doing nothing is still making a choice: the one to be a slave, kept in his cage like a pet and whose prerogatives exist only at the whim and caprice of other human beings, not a single one of whom holds the least authority to impose their wills upon you.

Be well, preferable freely so, and as always please accept my best wishes.

War Should Be Hell

Human beings are the oddest creatures.

We have been gifted with the power of reason, and yet we abuse it, misuse it, or turn our backs to it completely.  Consider the ways in which the purportedly "evolved" nations view warfare.  The mere fact that they sign agreements that limit the ways in which war may be waged seems to me prima facie proof that they are gone mad.

In the most general terms, what is the objective of war?  It is to defeat one's enemy.  Why would one fight without the intention of prevailing, regardless of cost?  Yet we are constrained by agreements such as the Geneva Conventions wherein we agree to never do X and to always do Y.  For example, we cannot target civilians and must always house and feed prisoners of war, treat them humanely, and so forth.  This, I declare, is pure rubbish.

So why, then, do we do it?  It is the pure hedging of our bets, that's why.

The thinking goes basically this way: "well, if we kill all the prisoners we take, they will do the same with our people whom the enemy takes prisoner."  We want to fight wars but do not want to pay the price of warring.  This, of course, is absurd.

If you do not want to pay the price of warring, then do not wage war.  The one exception to this lies in defensive fighting and in that case if you are facing an existential threat, which I will here suggest is the case any time a nation attacks you, then you should be fighting like mad bastards with the intention of committing utter and complete genocide against everyone bearing arms against you.  This is especially the case when you know you have committed no violation against your antagonist.

War should become so ghastly a prospect that nobody on the planet would wish to partake, precisely because the potential and sufficiently likely outcome would be the extinction of your bloodline and those of everyone you know, and for whom you care.  Were this the central concern, how many rulers and their vile, butt-smooching, hand-wringing sycophants would be eager to enter into mortal combat?  Knowing that their children would be hunted and slaughtered, as well as those of every member of their families out to, say, third or fourth cousins, how many of these great heroes of the people would be so eager to press Fearless Leader to send troops into neighboring lands?

How many troops would be eager to obey such orders, knowing their families would be hunted to extinction in the event they did not prevail?  How much of an incentive would it be for them to see the virtues of defensive-only action?  How clearly might they see war, not as a chance for glory, but for the thing that it truly is: utter barbarity?

Human history is littered with examples of young men champing at the bit to go to war for the sake of "glory".  The Great War was example enough, the result being an endless sea of regret from troop, sailor, submariner, and pilot alike after realizing the impossible waste that war represents in every imaginable term.  And yet, by the time the next generation comes of age, the lessons of that previous herd are lost or, sadder still, disregarded because the young always know better.  They know what dolts and nitwits were their parents or grandparents and that they will be able to do it right this time.  That is, of course, pure nonsense, and when the waves of mangled bodies and corpses return home, the cycle of bitter regret at lives wasted repeats itself.  It is almost as if we cannot help ourselves.  Almost.

War should be hell.  It should be waged as bloody annihilation of every human being, including civilians - perhaps especially them - on the losing side.  Make it the rule to commit pure genocide against anyone raising arms against you, knowing that they will do the same in return.

If the spectre of everyone we know and love being brutally murdered in a systematic genocide does not abate our willingness to war, much less our thirst for it, then we as a species are unworthy of our existences in the first place and humanity should then extinguish itself as an obvious matter of basic propriety.  At the very least, we should all shut our yaps and stop complaining about it because we get what we tolerate, so onus rests squarely with every last one of us.

War should be hell.  The very thought of it should fill the minds of men with revulsion and wild fear that everything for which they care will be written from the face of the earth in scorch and death and disease and misery and ultimate disappearance into the mists of eternity.

The very suggestion of going to war for non-defensive purposes should cause a people to immediately rise against those in power who would dare suggest it and kill them and their entire families without hesitation or mercy.

War should be hell.  But once engaged in, defensively speaking, the very roots of the attackers genetic lines should be killed off in totality such that never again will they pose a threat to one's own blood.

It is a horrible way to consider it, but I submit that the current way is far more so, for so long as war entails "reasonable" risks (to whom, exactly?), and those risks amount to near-zero for those driving others into it, we will continue to bloody the innocent for reasons that are never valid.

War should be hell.  Any people worth their moral salt would rise against leaders who aggress against other nations, killing them with prejudice, resolve, and no mercy.  Any people failing to do so are perforce complicit, thereby equally guilty, and therefore worthy of total annihilation.   Make this the rule of humankind, the violation of which brings upon the felons the fruits of their choices, and humankind would change as a pure matter of practical survival not only of the individual's thoughts for himself, but for those around him for whom his affections live.

War should be hell.  Make it so and the human race would undergo a quantum alteration in its views on many matters, the dictates of survival becoming the first-order canon of practical living.

War should be hell.  Not for a few, but for all.  Were it so, one can only speculate as to how eager would the people of Germany been to back the war-mongering Hitler.  As for the Soviets and Communist Chinese, those were internal affairs, horrible as they were, to be left to the people of their respective nation-states, though it is my considered opinion that had they treated Lenin and Mao in the same ways, things would have turned out notably better for both peoples.

War should be hell.  The incentives should lead people to avoid war at nearly any cost with a ready will to slaughter their "leaders" any time it is suggested they enter into a war of aggression.

Have I mentioned that war should be hell?

I have no illusions about people coming to sense on this matter.  Warring will continues as always, and people will meekly and corruptly accept it as matters of their cowardice, ignorance, desire, and convenience.  But they can no longer claim that they were not given the better idea on how to proceed with respect to aggression waged on a national basis.  It could be stopped today, if we cared enough.  That we do not is prima facie proof of the need for war being made hell for one and all.

Give it some thought before rejecting the notion out of hand.  Look deeply into the issue and I believe you will see the virtue in what it is that I suggest.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Language, Conceptual Stores, And Mental Health

I have noticed through the decades how many people fail to understand the expressive styles of people from ages long past.

The average man seems to regard such styles as those even as recent as Victorian english as "quaint", at best; often "corny", and even "stupid". That of Shakespeare is indecipherable to most and even modernized interpretations of ancient passages such as Song to Inanna, what is generally considered the world's first poem, in the same ill-considered and ignorant ways.

So I will mention this: men of yore departed from us in two essential ways where language is concerned.

Firstly, they respected language, whereas most of us regard it casually, with disregard, and even dismissal. They understood the power of words; their central importance in the lives of humanity, whereas the contemporary meaner has little to no clue whatsoever. Sadly, it appears he has no desire to learn this most centrally important aspect of human life.

Secondly, men of yore were less beset by conceptual noise - the myriad of ideas swimming about in their heads that lead them astray from a more essential mental bearing. The people of ancient Sumer knew nothing of cell phones and the political idiocies of our contemporary times, such as communism for example. The swamping of men's minds with noise that separates them from essential thought cannot be helped, so far as I can tell. It is an unavoidable consequence of the gaining of new knowledge, for better or worse. As that body of concepts grows, the new knowledge and its attendant thought-volume revolves around the more highly-abstracted, newer ideas perforce because they seem more practically relevant to everyday living. This places distance between the mind of the individual and more basic considerations - ideas that were central to the mental lives of the people of ages past.

The farther back in time one goes, the less "polluted" were the minds of people, simply because the store of human knowledge was smaller.

While in some ways we find advantage in this augmented body of conceptual stores, there is a price to pay, which is precisely the fact that the most basic sense becomes foreign to us. My suspicion is that this presents a deep and abiding problem for humanity and my proof of this lies in the fact that the world of humanity is a hot mess and getting messier, rather than less so.

And that is why I have been writing about the basics, in the effort to at least make available little reminders of the most fundamental notions that SHOULD be serving as anchors for our mental and spiritual health.

We do still find such reminders in places such as in religious texts, but those suffer from serious drawbacks, mostly related to language, it's style and how that style deviates from our contemporary usage. Christian writings, the Bible in particular, is a good example of this. The catastrophic example is well represented in Al Qur'an, which has sown more destruction and misery than any other tome, save perhaps the body that represents communist/socialist/progressive philosophy and attendant thought.

The Christian church attempted, however ham-fistedly, to keep people well anchored through the imposition of their political might upon the mass of humanity under their aegis. This, of course, failed miserably in the end precisely because it was forcefully imposed and not made attractive such that people wanted to maintain virtuous relations with the sacred, rather than toeing a line due to fear of dire punishments, whether in this life or that hereafter.

The Muslims took the Christian model and stepped it up several orders of magnitude in error via sheer viciousness, the results being plain to see in places such as the middle-east, which is a study in human disaster.

An interesting aspect of this mental noise is that it is very effectively employed, consciously or otherwise, as a fog into which politico-social chicanery is injected into the minds of men, leaving them less able to understand the truer nature of what is being presented. This is how the scourges of all modern authoritarian thought and action have been so successfully foisted upon the people of the world since the twentieth century, at the very least. When people are separated from basic sense, they are less able to discern nonsense when presented to them, further leaving them unarmed and consequently unable to repel the assaults of the Tyrant upon their innate rights and liberties. When people do not know better, how can they even be inclined to fight the violation of their individual sovereignty?

Retaining the basics is essential to the health and prosperity of the human race. The depressingly absent health and happiness of men is the direct indicator of just how little we as a race of beings have retained of that basic knowledge. That we are so widely separated from the basics bodes deep ill for humanity's future, which is why my suspicion hovers about the thought that nothing short of reset will save the race of men.

Individuals can think their ways out of this sort of trouble, for illumination is the necessary condition for setting then right once more. But such enlightenment means nothing to men as a body gestalt if sufficient numbers fail to come to sense. By that failure are the good dragged into the pit with the rest, and so it appears to me at this time that reset is the only hope remaining to us; an even so deeply and unforgivingly disruptive of daily life that the choice becomes immediately clear to all but perhaps the most stubbornly dull among us: come to sense now, or have your name stricken from the Book of Life.

That, I fear, is the fate that awaits us because I see just this side of zero possibility of a critical mass of humanity so much as wanting to come to sense, much less making the actual effort to do so.

Perhaps none of it matters, but I cannot help but feel deep sorrow for the innocents, the children mainly, who will pay for the sins of the rest.

Ask yourself where you stand on this issue: do you want to know what is right for all men?; how to live properly amid the throng without destroying them and yourself, or being destroyed by the others... or does it just not matter? To that last question, I have no answers for you, but will suggest you turn your thoughts to those whom you love and regard with fondness and care and then consider the question once more.

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

All Rights Are Property Rights

I was introduced to the notion that all human rights are in fact property rights about a decade ago on an internet forum.  At first I balked at the idea, largely because I'd not thought of things in that way prior, but as I allowed time to work its digestive magic it quickly became clear to me that this was indeed true.

Going back to the definition of a "right", which is a "just claim" to something, it becomes clear upon even superficial consideration that human rights are claims to property.

The immediate objection that arose in my mind upon introduction to the assertion, was that regarding life itself.  I'd never prior considered my life as property.  My life was my own, of course, and yet the idea of it as my property never quite made it to the surface, so to speak.  However, it took very little time and consideration to come to the realization that my life was, indeed, my property, even if the thought implied some sort of separation between "me" and "my life".  But even if we agree that I am my life, who is to say that I cannot own myself?

My right to my life, which is to say my just claim to myself, implies most forcefully the idea that we own ourselves.  Our right to our own lives may be restated as our just claims to our own lives.  So put, the notion becomes more clear and more forceful in its own favor.

Now consider the Other - your fellow human being picked from the great wad of humanity at random.  If we call him Johnny Q. Public, then I ask you this: all else equal, does Johnny Q hold any claim to your life that is greater than your own?  Does he hold any claim whatsoever?  The only answer to which I can ever bring myself is "no" in each case.  How might Johnny Q make a valid claim to YOUR life that is of greater valence and salience than is your own?  What might such a claim look like?  I see no way of answering that question in a manner that does not stem from a presumption that is innately and embarrassingly obvious in its arbitrariness.


If it is correct across all possible pairings of human individuals that a man holds the primary and possibly sole just claim to his life vis-à-vis any other man, then we must perforce conclude that no man holds authority over another, once again and ever so importantly, all else equal.

In other words, so long as I have not trespassed against another, there is nothing that I might do that could justify the interference in my affairs by another.  Whether I smoke a joint on the courthouse steps, employ the services of a prostitute, buy and sell illicit drugs, go helicopter skiing from eighty-foot high ice cornices, or do any of a nearly endless number of things that might cause me serious injury, it is nobody's business that I so engage myself, much less that men in uniforms and with sidearms place me in a cage for it.

The basic and inherent freedom of the human individual directly implies agorism as the only valid societal foundation.  For those not familiar with the term, "agorism" is a philosophy wherein all human interaction between individuals of their majority is undertaken on a strictly voluntary basis.  Coercion and other means of force must not be employed in an agorist society, such use exposing the perpetrator to both criminal and civil liability.

For example, the rape of one individual by another would leave the rapist open to criminal charges and liable upon due conviction to the consequences of his actions.  Someone stealing a stick of gum from another might be liable for recompense, being given the opportunity to make good.  Failure to balance that scale could result in the escalation of charges into the criminal.

As for those who have not attained their majority, they live under a slightly different set of rules whereby their basic rights are maintained, but their individual prerogatives may be validly curtailed for the want of life experience and sufficient physical and mental development.

This brings us to the notion of life itself.  One's life is what we shall call his "First Property".  It is literally the first thing with which the living entity is endowed.  The entity owns itself, leading to the idea that he is autodiathistically entitled to keep and dispose of himself as he may see fit.  It is also eminently arguable and seemingly self-evident that one's life is also cardinally "first" in significance.  Therefore, "First Property" appears to these eyes to be a truly appropriate moniker and appellation.

Upon one's acceptance of the notion of his First Property, the rest of human rights as those pertaining to the property of the individual come into sharp focus, usually with little to no help.

I own my life, which is to say that I own myself.  That which I materially or intellectually come to possess through no demonstrably criminal act also becomes my property.  As I stroll along the Gulf Coast, I come upon a sea shell that I find beautiful, I am free to pick it into my physical possession and take it with me wherever I may choose, for as long as I might.  The taking having constituted no crime, the shell becomes my exclusive property.  Being property, I retain and reserve the right to defend it from destruction or theft at the hands of another, for unless I voluntarily relinquish exclusive ownership of the shell, nobody else may lay claim to it and act upon that claim as if it were valid.  In such cases of a counterclaim, we have courts who, in their presumed wisdom and impartiality, will hear the case to be made by one man against the claims of another, to some object or other asset, and render judgment as to whom said asset belongs in exclusive, or partial right.

When one begins to consider themselves and all that surrounds them in terms of property rights, their ideas of how the world properly works becomes far more clear, if deeply altered.  Lo and behold the world becomes an easier and better place in which to live.

Be well, and until next time please accept my best wishes.

Covid-19

In this post I will depart a mite from the standard purpose of discussing issues that relate to human liberty directly and touch upon one that could strike deeply, however obliquely, to the same issue.

There is much debate over whether covid19, the so-called "corona virus" of Chinese origin, is a weapon.  If you know the basics of that which drives bioweapon design, the confusion should subside at least in good part, though your unease may not.

There are a few holy grails after which the designers seek:

1: long latency (incubation) period.  Thus far it is confirmed the latency is at least 14 days with some reports claiming as much as 24.  This is quite long, so here we have a mark in favor of this being a weapon, and a rather suspicious one at that.  Think of how far and how many people may travel from a single place in two weeks' time in this age of air travel.  China with its billion and a half people could have thousands of individuals in every nation on earth in much less time than that.  Thousands of highly contagious people could spread the virus to such an extent that there comes with it effectively zero hope of containment on any mass scale.

1a: And what if the actual latency varies between individuals such that in some people the agent incubates at intervals counted in months?  Highly varying latency between individuals reduces predictability, which leaves people in a state of relative uncertainty not only as to the nature of the bug, but diagnostically, and also in terms of how human organizations such as "government" tend to respond.  The less predictable the bug, the more difficult becomes our decision-making processes, diagnostics, etc.  The longer a bug has to spread and the less telltale the outbreak pattern, the better for the wielder of the weapon.

2: Sudden onset.  The virus appears to bring on symptoms rather suddenly.  Mark the second, if a less convincing one.

3: High contagion during latency.  It seems clear that the covi19 virus is at least very contagious during the latency period, if not wildly so.  Mark the third.

4: High lethality.  Because the numbers reported are not to be trusted, especially those offered later in the reporting cycle, it becomes very difficult to determine the rate of lethality.  The possibly less-massaged numbers from January suggest a lethality of around 30-35%, which is very high.  Those figures may not be representative of the truth, but then again the same may be said for those reported later on, which suggest far lower danger.  Therefore, we remain in limbo on the question of the kill rate.  But if perchance lethality is that high and this bug goes pandemic, which it now looks like it may, we are talking about nearly three billion dead at the speculated rate.  Let us hope it proves less lethal.  We cannot quite issue mark the fourth due almost certainly to the lies of the Chinese government.


5. A vaccine exists.  If a vaccine already exists, and thus far there is no way of knowing, then the likelihood that covid19 is a weapon comes to perhaps 95% or greater.  No mark in favor due simply to a lack of data.

We see three of five elements are marked in speculative favor of the covid19 virus being the product of willful human endeavor pursuant to the goal of developing a weapon.  Sixty percent is not quite damning, but it gives great reason for pause.  If this proves to be a weaponized organism, nobody should be surprised.

With this issue arise potentially great implications for human freedom as this is the precise sort of chaotic circumstance that permits for enormous force behind a tyrant's moves to gather ever greater power and false authority into his hands at the cost of individual liberty.  In this sense, a pandemic of a highly lethal biological agent is functionally no different than that of a more conventional "terrorist" attack.  It is, in fact, far greater a threat for any of several reasons, not the least of which is that the parties responsible always hold some plausible deniability.  If there is no positively identified enemy beyond "mother nature", then there is nobody against whom to train one's weapons, further meaning there could possibly be no secure victory against the instrument of one's destruction.  This is the brand of chaos that could be employed as the justification for utter usurpation of all power, whether by design from the get-go or by the pure opportunity of happenstance.

The justification of public health and national survival, when couched in the context of a general terror of a deadly plague, stands to meet with near-universal public acceptance.  Frighten people sufficiently and they will surrender to you anything you might demand, if you can convince them even for a brief moment that you and only you are capable of delivering them from catastrophe.

Whatever the truth, I would advise one and all to keep their eyes on this issue to see how "government" ultimately responds.  My tendency is to expect further claims to power with commensurate denigration of the individual prerogative.

Let us hope this does not prove out in the worst way imaginable, but be prepared for it in any case.

Be careful out there, and as always please accept my best wishes.

GovernMENT Is Cancer

The degree to which "governMENT" exists in any given land and is freely accepted is a direct measure of the corruption of the people therein. If we are to have governMENT beyond the governANCE of each man over himself, then let it be so minimal that it becomes difficult even to detect that it is there.

GovernMENT's role should be to take into hand those cases where men fail to govern themselves, and even then the bodies of men functioning as such an institution must be treated with utmost suspicion that borders on contempt. The people must be ready to strike down with great and cruel resolve any governMENT which steps from the metes of its delegated authority so as to remind every individual in the land the hazards that await anyone as reward for treachery against their fellows.

"GovernMENT" should fear we, the people, with the deep thunder of knocking knees. They should live in abject terror of those whom they serve, the least thought of any presumption to rule shivering their souls to shards long before any action is so much as contemplated.

It is time to rein "governMENT" in. It is time to scrub the legislative gene pool free of the false law Theye call "statute" which serves but as pure trespass against the rightful prerogatives of free men.

Time is here; time to become a righteous people; a free people.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Beware The Phenomenon Of Trump

Since about 2015 we have been seeing and hearing about the huge turnouts of Americans to the manifold Trump rallies. It is quite amazing to behold, given the past several decades of American political somnambulism. While potentially encouraging, I must advise caution and warn of the possible dangers lurking with the rise of President Trump.

My reasoning is as this: it is arguably good that people are becoming in some ways and measures politically aware, and at least active enough to show up to events, which prior to 9/11/2001 most were clearly not. The good here is the increase in interest and action. But is it enough? That remains to be seen, and therein lies one of the hazards - what if this is a flash in the pan? What if we have not the commitment to see a vision to its completion? More troubling still, is there even a vision present, or are the tens of millions of Trump supporters representative of tens of millions of half-baked and disparately vague notions, desires, and impulses? This should be a very real and immediate concern for anyone with a genuine and abiding interest in freedom and its prospects.

The potential bad: this becomes a cult of personality. Hitler and his Germany were in this sense a similar circumstance. Conditions were bleak, the Man rose in the wake of rhetoric that struck chords with a sufficient mass of the people, and he got things done. I am in no way accusing or equating here, but only observing the similarities in terms of the circumstances and historically-demonstrated human habit.

Further bad potential: the throng comes to rely on the icon to get it done, rather than taking responsibility for their own better interests, which includes becoming smart on certain crucial matters, and refusing to pimp those responsibilities off onto others whose trustworthiness can never be safely assumed regardless of outwardly apparent saintliness. This is perhaps the single greatest threat to the welfare of humanity, taken as a gestalt. It is certainly a central causal factor as to how so much abject misery has managed to rise in the human world and come to be accepted as inevitable, the mean man telling himself resignedly that this is just the way things are. Perhaps the worst of it is the apparent fact that this does not arise in mean man out of malice, but as the result of personal corruptions of which he is perhaps not even aware.

Untimely and gratuitous death, poverty, disease, and misery are not inevitable; certainly not on the immense scales to which history bears grim witness. They are vastly avoidable, far more so than the degrees to which we currently observe. But effective elimination requires proper human freedom, which in its turn requires the attitude of the Freeman. Restructuring one's world view from that of Weakman to Freeman is no mean task. It is monumentally difficult, and as we may readily witness it has thus far remained an unattained realization on a large-scale basis. The rot and cancer of the Weakman's mindset is deep and terribly destructive, for it is as the depiction of the vampire's victim in novels such as King's "Salem's Lot": once bitten, the victim no longer wishes to escape, but rather to give himself utterly to his murderer.

Think carefully on this and then ask yourself what it is that you really want from yourself, for yourself, of and for your life. What would you have for the lives of those whom you love and hold with deep regard and affection? Becoming and remaining in the servitude of pretty slavery is easy, but only so in a very false and deceptive way, for it is as living death even if one is unable to readily perceive it as such, particularly at the time of infection.  

Choosing the path of freedom is eminently difficult, but the life of the Freeman is exhilarating, as well as challenging and even quite frightening at times. The benefits of freedom do not come at zero cost to those who would be free, nor should those costs be viewed as taxations upon the appeal of liberty. Rather, the proper view of those costs are that they constitute much of the spice of life; they are challenges worthy of free men who meet them with courage, strength, honor, dignity, eagerness, great love, and the heartfelt generosity and charity that the Superior Man carries within himself throughout his days.

The mere existence of the Weakman is, in contrast, dull such that if one remains in this world long enough in such a state, the prospect of his end becomes greatly welcomed, even if only unconsciously, for the boredom and the taxing mental poverty of it all becomes too much for even the most tepid and timid to bear. The condition of the Weakman acts in diametric opposition to the fundamental nature of the human animal, and yet just as with any other disease, we are as individuals all prone to such contamination, the result of which appears most often as a fate far worse than death.

So my rarely given advice to all the good people who support the forty-fifth president of the United States of America is that they take to heart my call to caution, self-examination, and to make it a point to learn what it truly means to be properly free, if freedom be decided as one's personal desire.

As always, please accept my best wishes.

Political Freedom In An Unfree World

The world is run by two major factions: tyrants and willing slaves, the two in my very rough estimation comprising about 99.5% to 99.9% of the world's population. Some small dreg of the remainder is comprised of those very few humans who do not share the mindset of either controlling interest, but are in fact free men. There is much to discuss on these matters, yet so little of value has been put forth that is worthy of pursuit, architecting, tuning, and realization. The vast majority of humanity are, in their minds, willing slaves to those who presume to lord over them. They are do deeply hoodwinked, so blinded to the greater truth regarding proper human relations, there is little to no hope that they can be brought around to the veracity of their innate status as free beings. Such people, the vast majority of all humanity, are bred and trained to fear, and consequently hate actual freedom. They have been long marinated in the mental swill that bends their thoughts and perceptions to the will and convenience of the tyrant. And so it has gone for thousands of years to ever growing advantage of the would-be lords of humanity as the body of man's knowledge has grown, hitting what currently appears to be at least the beginning of an asymptotic stride upward such that even a single man can now wield nearly unimaginable degrees and sorts of control over vast populations. The oddly paradoxical element in all this, however, is that those of the tyrant class are every bit the inmates as those over whom they presume their false authority as valid, the only differences lying in the dimensions and appointments of their respective prisons. Theye are every bit as trapped in their roles as tyrants as are those who willingly submit to the various and manifestly cruel oppressions. In this way, the slaves are not only willing participants in the play that is human politics, they hold an oblique brand of odd authority over the tyrants as well, the practical upshot being that Theye are as shackled as are the rest. The result is a system of mutually reinforcing authoritarianism whose truer nature is belied by the superficial differences between the respective roles. Theye only think they are in charge in some gestalt manner, suffering under the symmetric delusion that the proles have no power over them. This, however, is in itself deeply delusional, for Theye have no more access to freedom than do those of the slave class. The moment one is able to realize this truth, the machinations of the so-called "elites" become mostly droll with punctuations of hilarity. Hilarious and boring it would all be, were it not fo the fact of Theire murderous natures, but that is a topic irrelevant to this far more fundamental topic. The ruler and the ruled form a gestalt, a whole. Each has devolved in such manner that each can no longer live without the other, even though they both seem, statistically speaking, to believe that each is somehow better or more important than the other. They are, in fact, equally corrupt and responsible for the grand and miserable fiasco that is the human race. But what of the one percent of the one percent; that small handful of men who not only see themselves as free, but who act in accord with that very belief to the greatest degree possible, which does not bring the wrath of master and slave alike upon them and those dear? Those are the people to whom my concern and affections turn, for they are the only examples of the human animal worthy.

What, indeed... Given the Gordian Knot of mutually fortifying corruption between ruler and ruled, is there a social architecture that allows for meaningful freedom in the vast oceans of putrescent tyranny? I am not sure, but I have given this much thought over the decades. The older I get and the more clearly I see the hopelessness for the greater wad of humanity, the clearer it becomes to me that the ideal of anarchy is currently unworkable in any population other than those of trivial proportions. In my opinion and based on my observations of contemporary human societies, humans were not designed to do well in the large populations we currently see. Rather, they appear to better flourish in comparatively tiny groups that are more akin to extended families than great undifferentiated wads of fungible units. This truth seems to eliminate anarchy as a viable option for the human world as it currently exists. Barring a "reset event", one that is so deeply disruptive of daily reality as to present every living man with a set of clear and immediate choices that bear on their abilities to survive from one moment to the next, the future for ideal and proper human freedom appears bleak. All, however, is not lost. The next best thing, which so far as I can see may be configured so as to be nearly indistinguishable from non-formalized anarchic life, is what some call "minarchy". I am not particularly fond of this moniker as it carries certain baggage that appears to lead to little better than endless bickering precisely due to the typically poor habits of language and, thereby, thought of far too great a plurality of humans. The best I have been able to concoct for my own purposes is "panarchy", suggestive of the fact that governance is the responsibility of every man, rather than some elite subgroup upon whom personal responsibility is pimped by the corrupted masses who wish to be free of their personal obligations pursuant to the proper conduction of daily commerce between men.

But central to the notion of anarchic or panarchic life is the concept of autodiathism, which is nothing fancier than the idea that people hold the right and the corresponding responsibilities of self-determination. The freedom to choose for oneself how to live and what to do on a moment by moment basis is inherent to men. There exist none of the falsely concocted "societal" obligations forwarded and in many cases foisted by master and slave alike. The only obligation of one man to his fellows is that he refrain from violating the equal claims of others. The rubric of the Free Man is the canon of the Golden Rule itself. It is simple, clear, complete, and correct, requiring no modification of any sort.

This all said, what then is the practicable solution for free men? Separation, plain and simple. Physical separation is very helpful, but mental and "spiritual" or "attitudinal" segregation are paramount, as is that of deeply ingrained habit that comes only through endless repetition and refinement such that these qualities become one's first nature.

To this end, territorial secession becomes a deep practical necessity, particularly in the absence of a binding and unifying sense of the sacred such as that found in various religious communities such as those of fundamentalist Jews. But even that is not a good replacement for physical territories wherein the inhabitants are nominally safe from the violent predations of the tyrant. Consider those same Jewish communities in places such as New York City. There is great cohesion within the Lubavitcher community, and yet they are not quite properly free a they remain beholden to the violative ordinances of the municipality, the so-called "Sullivan Laws" coming immediately to mind, which prohibit them from keeping and bearing arms for defense of the individual and the community at large. This sad truth leaves those people and all like them in a degraded state where either they comply with the "law" or risk severe repercussions if they choose not to comply with the possession of a firearm without the approval of the "state". In my opinion, this is no way to live. It is certainly not a free man's living.

And so it would appear that given the current circumstances, the best practical base step is to secede as a group in physical and legal possession of a territory and establish a conceptually separate entity that has well defined physical borders and a properly architected social order upon which all residents are in sufficient agreement such that everyone is able to live as he pleases so long as he does not engage in violations of the equal prerogatives of his neighbors.

Furthermore, and contrary to the common wisdom of the so-called "left" or "progressives", "socialists", "communists" and other mentally unsound sorts, if the new society is to survive, much less flourish, a clear, sufficient, and faithfully applied set of rules must be set into place that controls those borders, as well as who is allowed to cross them. Americans knew and accepted this as intuitively obvious until comparatively very recently in their history. Today, the progressives prattle on endlessly about how we as Americans are absolutely obliged to admit any and all comers to this land of opportunity, regardless of their political biases against the dominant culture, their hatred of the people of this land, any wildly communicable diseases they may carry, and so forth. This, of course, is raving, suicidal madness. It is of interest to note how those same people appear to have no issue whatsoever with other nations controlling their borders, often in what might be viewed as draconian fashion.

To summarize, the best and most practically viable path toward the establishment of a place in which free men are allowed to exercise their full prerogatives as such are as follow:

1. Begin at the beginning, which involves the identification of the set of rules by which the residents of the free land will comport themselves without coercion, but rather with understanding and the eagerness that arises therefrom.
2. Inculcate the members with the spirit and specifications of the Freeman. Teach them to recognize, distinguish, and understand the differences between Freemen and Weakmen. Teach them to value the Freeman and to pity and despise the sadly corrupted Weakman who poses endless dangers to himself and everyone around him.
3. Teach to deep understanding and appreciation the centrally vital role that language plays in the life of the Freeman, ensuring that everyone as a matter of basic culture understand how lost they are without profound skills in the art and science of verbal communication; that they are little more than an empty shells without a well and sharply tuned facility of spoken and written language. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
4. Render aware the two-edged nature of freedom, benefits and costs, rights and responsibilities.
5. Render aware that which freedom demands of a man, specifically:
• Intelligence
• Smarts (intellect developed into practical knowledge and skill)
• Courage
• Integrity
• Generosity
6. Inculcate and attitude of eagerness for those demands, such that they regard them as great things to which to aspire, rather than as things to be dreaded and avoided at nearly any cost.
7. Self-respect
8. Respect for others
9. Value in one's relationships
10. Rights: what they are, their characteristics, how they work and, equally importantly, how they do not.
11. Respect for property
12. The beauty and value of love
13. Identify a territory, such as a county-sized region, and settle it with large numbers of like-spirited cohorts. Attempting to secede on a statewide basis is likely too ambitious.

Secession, while a fine idea in principle and likely the only practically meaningful path toward liberty, must be undertaken with great planning and care, lest the result end up as just more of the same old tyranny.

Unlike pretty slavery, freedom is difficult. As much as it is exhilarating, is can be exhausting and terrifying because it demands much, while offering no guarantees whatsoever. The things it does offer, however, are opportunity and, ... itself!

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.