The Root Of The Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make Mine the Ninth, Thankyouverymuch.

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

The 9A states:

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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