Implications Of Rights - Part Deux

 

Though I have written on this topic priorly, I feel that given the gross ignorance of the general public on a concept so centrally important to our liberty, repetition is in order.

Years ago I expounded, however modestly, on the qualities and characteristics of "Rights", where we discovered the definition of the term, as well as the fact that there exist two basic categories: inherent and synthetic (or contractual).  If you feel your understanding of the term may not be quite up to snuff, I would suggest reading at the link, above.

All rights carry implications.  There are no exceptions, for it is in the very fabric of a right from which its concomitant implications arise.  If there is no other implication arising from any given right, there is always that of the right of exercise.  If you hold a right, you then by direct implication also hold title to exercise that right.  Were it otherwise, the right in question would not be a right, but rather a privilege.  Rights and privileges do not even live on the same planet.  Mr. Apples, meet Mr. Oranges.  This truth is inherent to the very structure of a right.  Anyone who claims to the contrary, speaks pure nonsense.  Imagine, if you will, opening a door to find a man over a struggling body as he stabs it in repeatedly vicious fashion with a long knife, blood spurting everywhere while turning to you and with a straight face proclaiming that he is not stabbing a struggling body.  That is the brand of absurdity of which we speak when someone asserts that while you may hold a right, you do not hold the authority to exercise it, much less the means of doing so.

One of the iconic examples of this is the old "you can't shout 'fire!' in a crowded theater.  I hate to break it to you, but you can, and you may, no matter what any statute to the contrary might say.  This is not to suggest that one ought go out and test my assertion, because we already know that the police will come and take you away in bracelets, most likely, if you do.  But there is an important distinction to be made here with regard to the manner of exericse.  

If someone waltzes into a theater, unceremoniously begins shouting "FIRE!!!!" and the crowd panics, stampedes, and people and property are damaged, then the utterer of those words is indeed guilty of a tort at the very least, if not a crime, in that the exercise of his right resulted in such damage.  Such an act with such a result could be said to have been an incorrect exercise of his inherent right, much the same as my right to keep and bear arms would be exercised incorrectly, were I to enter a bank, draw a pistol, and try to commit a robbery.

But if prior to the show I were to get the attention of the audience, beg their indulgence to yell "FIRE!!!!", get it, and then do so, resulting in no damage done, the "authorities" would have no valid basis for molesting me in response to my actions.  The theater manager, however, might be within his authority to ask me to leave the premises.  After all, if during a play one of the cast has a line wherein he repeatedly shouts "FIRE!!!!", are the police to be summoned, with said cast member to be dragged off to the hoosegow in manacles and cuffs?  Once again, context is king.

And so we see a problem with the prohibitionists: not only do they often fail to understand the differences between proper and improper exercise - at least in any explicit fashion - but they also are of the habit to advocate for prohibition on the deeply tacit assumption that all exercise is wrong or even criminal in certain cases.  This is as absurd as claiming that all injections with syringes are wrong, just because once every three generations or so, some murderous lunatic kidnaps someone and kills them using a syringe and some poisoning agent.  Nobody makes such claims because they understand the difference between proper and improper use.  Similarly, when some maniac uses his automobile to mow down dozens of pedestrians, nobody calls for a ban on all such vehicles.  And yet, there are those who refuse to acknowledge this quality of reality along certain lines.  

Firearms are the quintessential example of this.

The anti-Second Amendment people largely dismiss the right to self-defense.  They deny this, yet their self-contradictory beliefs, as publicly professed, clearly indicates otherwise.  One can see endless examples of this in the news media where the bereaved mother tearily proclaims to the camera that her baby didn't need to be shot.  Tell that to the defender who was facing a nearly seven-foot tall, 300 pounder, coming at him with a machete in his hand and murder in his eyes.  To those mothers, there is no evil to which their children might have applied themselves that would have justified a defender opening fire.  This, of course, is pure insanity, but that makes no end of the practice of some people proclaiming that self-defense with a gun is not a valid response to clear and present threats to life and limb.

Do also note the back-channel implication of the assertion that a man holds no authority to exercise his right to self-defense: you as a living, breathing human being are obliged to hand your life over to anyone who demands it.  Some will rebut with, "I'm not saying that at all.  You can always call the police and shout for help."  Excuse me while I stuff my eyeballs, which have just rolled out of their sockets, back in.  The rank absurdity of such arguments defies words.

At the very least, you are obliged by implication to assume the risk of your own life at the hands of one who is apparently attempting to do you great harm, for the sake of not bringing them to harm.  This fails to so much as rise to stupidity.  No decent human being wishes to bring others to harm, but equally valid is the desire to avoid being harmed.  No man is obliged to risk his life for another.  That so many do so is a credit to the generosity of men, but under no circumstance are they so obliged.  Therefore, then one man threatens another, the threatened party stands centrally within his rights to take whatever defensive actions he may deem necessary to the preservation of his existence and his health, such as it may be.

If I hold title to my First Property, which is to say my life, then I may be said to hold the Right to my life, those terms being semantically interchangeable.  The first implication of this is that my life is my own, and nobody else's.  If that be the case, then it directly follows that nobody holds the least right to take my life from me in any manner or measure without my consent, all else equal.  Some would go so far as to proclaim that even I hold no authority to surrender my life to another, much less that they may take it without permission.  It has been long said that God enjoins all creatures to preserve themselves from harm and death.  Whatever the ultimate cause, it is clear that all living things struggle to remain alive because it is better than being dead.

If I hold title to my life and nobody else may rightfully take it from me, whether through murder, maiming, or by casting me into involuntary servitude, then it further follows perforce that I hold every authority to defend my First Property from any and all such threats.  If this be the case, then I hold the right to exercise the right of self-defense when I am threatened with violation of my First Property Rights, and if I am entitled to exercise that right, I am perforce entitled to obtain the means of exercise.  Such means may include empty-hand martial arts training; it may include the acquisition of various weapons such as knives, swords, firearms, sticks, billies, staffs, stones, explosives, automobiles, etc.  It would include the right for me to build a fortress-like dwelling, to furnish it with the accoutrements of defense, and that of making their use when a threat surfaces.

Several years ago a truck driver threatened to kill me with a pistol he had brandished at me on I-64 just outside of Lewisburg, West Virginia.  The moment his hand touched the hood of my car, I stomped the throttle and ran him over.  He was caught in Virginia and taken to jail.  I was cleared of any wrongdoing because I'd properly exercised my natural right to defend my life from the threat of extinguishment at the hands of one with no valid authority to do so.

So what about self-defense vis-á-vis an attacker's right to his First Property?  This is, after all, the very argument of the grieving mothers for the lost lives of their angelic, gang-banging issue.  The answer is simple: the moment you initiate an unjust action against another human being, you have effectively repudiated your claim to life.  By unjustly threatening the welfare of another, you have placed yourself at their mercy precisely because they are in no way obliged to grant you license to bring them to harm, whether great or small.  They are, therefore, fully authorized by Nature itself to take whatever actions they may deem necessary to preserve their existences.  

This isn't rocket surgery.  And yet, there are those who attempt to obfuscate the clarity of these truths with all manner of obliquely architected language that is rotten and impacted with all manner of tacit implications which have served them well in ensnaring the unwary who fall for one of the most commonly used fallacies: the appeal to emotion.

But do not allow yourself to be fooled.  LEARN what your rights are and what they imply.  If you gain that knowledge and hold it well, nobody will be able to rob you of your sovereign authority as a living and free individual.

The basics may be summarized with a list:

1. A right implies a concomitant right of exercise
2. A right to exercise implies the attendant right to validly obtain the means of exercise
3. A right must be exercised properly, lest a crime or tort be committed
4. An act of violation of another's rights may place your own claims in jeopardy
5. Want your rights respected?  Then respect those of others.  Don't be a hypocrite

The basic principles of proper human relations are simplicity itself, and yet we humans appear to find them ever so difficult to put into practice.  This is most especially true of the political class, that cancerous vestige of the Age of Kings, the members of which far too often believe themselves entitled and rightfully empowered to circumscribe and even deny the natural prerogatives of free men.  These upstarts have wreaked endless havoc and misery on the lives of those to whom they swore oaths of good faith and competent service, thereby revealing themselves, prima facie, as the scurrilous bounders and felons that they are in glaring  word, deed, and consequent fact.  

Never allow anyone to cow you into believing that your inherent rights are somehow conditional, or into surrendering them to others.  They are absolute and should never be allowed to yield to the aggressions of those who would strip you buck-naked of everything you should be holding most dearly in your life.  

Resist.

Refuse.

Rebel.

Mors omnibus tyrannis, vel magnis, vel minimis.

Until next time, God bless America, humanity's last hope, and please accept my best wishes.

A Constitutionally Limited Republic

America was founded as a "constitutionally limited republic". Forgetting the fact that a vast plurality of Americans  today do not even know this fact, all too commonly getting things grossly wrong by referring to America as a "democracy", many of even those who know the proper appellation still do not understand what it means with any sufficiency.

What, then, does it mean to be a constitutionally-limited republic?   Let us take a quick look and divine the true meaning of this term which seems to have evaded so many, myself included at a time.

The "republic" part was intended to enable the discharge of certain aspects of governance PURSUANT to the maintenance of the individual freedoms of the people as recognized, enumerated, and guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Beyond that, "government" was to have absolutely no role in the lives of the people because the people were recognized as INHERENTLY FREE and morally beyond governmental touch. 

Stay with me now, for this shall become clear in short order.

The most basic premise upon which America was conceived was the innate, inherent, and most naturally obvious state of freedom that is the birthright of every human being to take breath.  That assumption was the foundation upon which the Founders of this nation intended to affect humanity's escape from the boot-heel of the endless litany of tyrants who had taken humanity by its throat with iron fists.  This was the cardinal assumption of the Framers of the Constitution upon which America was architected for the sake of offering humanity a fighting chance to exercise those liberties which the infestations of world tyranny has had for so long diminished, disparaged, denied, and so brutally and criminally violated.

That was the intent.

Pursuant to that intention, the Framers cobbled up a constitution whose purpose was to institute three basic functions of protection to best ensure the individual freedoms they recognized as being innate to our human fabric.  These functions were the national defense, the passage and enactment of Law, and the courts to adjudicate issues of crime, and civl contention.

In my considered opinion,  the Framers did a pretty good job of it, especially considering that nobody in written memory had ever really done so before; an indication of how temporally extensive has been the tenure of the Age Of Tyrants.  They did well, save in one respect: the formation of Congress and the grant of powers thereto.  It is clear in our 20/20 hindsight that the Framers of our Constitution grossly overestimated the moral character of those who would occupy the seats of the legislatures, as well as that of the people at large, whose job it has been to ensure that those in Congress comported themselves properly.  Perhaps the Founders cannot be faulted for having failed to sufficiently prognosticate the depths of the manifold corruptions to which the American people would plunge themselves so eagerly as we see everywhere today.  But if nothing else,  they knew that the power to tax was the power to destroy, so my ability to excuse their architectural missteps is tempered thereby.

Yet another way in which the Founders failed most deeply is in having not been more explicit in the expression and specification of the authority of the People to take immediate procedural control of any institutional element of governance that has run off the rails with respect to their duties to those to whom they swear their oaths.  Furthermore, the Constitution remains devoid of specifications for the holding to account of those who violate those oaths, the punishments for which should be draconian.  Finally, the oath of service is itself lacking in specificity and completeness and, in my opinion, should be rewritten to a far more correct, complete, and exacting standard to which any Freeman should be able to hold those in "government" in cases of betrayal.

Back to the more salient point, the "republic" aspect of the nation was supposed to be so minimal as to be of vanishing perceptibility in terms of the daily lives of the people.  The major, primary, and most forceful quality of the American nation was supposed to be the very innate freedoms of the people to which the Constitutional document refers, the rest existing but to reinforce those freedoms and ensure they were respected by all, for every breathing soul in the land.  The raison d'être for the establishment of "republic" was not so assume powers not granted in the document of ordain and establishment.  And yet, we sadly see how utterly that intention has failed.

We have run afoul of the Founding Intention so widely as to leave thinking men in abashed awe and appalled disgust at what we have all allowed.  Our "government" has gone from ostensible guardians of freedom to the very worst sorts of tyrants against which the founding of this land was intended to hold at bay.  But we the People lost our ways, having allowed ourselves to be corrupted with the seek of material comforts, regardless of cost and to accept as truth those stupidities and evils that made us "feel" better.  We have traded our most sacred gifts of innate liberty for the sake of having cell phones and net.pornography.  We have literally sold our souls for not even thirty pieces of silver, but have in fact given them over most freely to the devils in whose hands our world now rests.

The Constitution limits the REPUBLIC, which is to say the form of governance, and not the people to whom it is supposed to answer.  It is governance that is supposed to be limited to a very narrow spectrum, and not the other way around.  And yet, how many people do you know who see the "government" as some all-powerful authority whose edicts may not be defied?  Are you one of them?  If so, do you now believe that you should remain as such, or is it perhaps time to reconsider your views on such matters?

It is all up to you, and him over there, and her over in the other corner.  It is up to every one of us to get ourselves right in our thoughts and views with respect to the actual, objective, and demonstrably correct principles of proper human relations.

Our Republic is supposed to be all about our freedom, and not the powers of madmen running amok with pen and sword as they pile-drive our sacred freedoms into the dust.  Our "government" is supposed to be all about protecting us from violation, rather than being the primary source thereof.

Protect our freedoms from external threats with the militia.  Protect our freedoms from internal threats with the courts.  Remove nearly every power from Congress which it has so feloniously usurped and arrogated unto itself.  Leave people to live as they please, with the usual restrictions against bringing damage to one's fellows, and leave the rest to us.  We neither need the other ministrations, nor should we be wanting them, much less accepting them.

The English had it right when they established the common law, whose tenets are but three:

• Be good for your word
• Bring no unwanted harm to others
• Make whole those whom you damage

It isn't rocket surgery, and yet when men's hearts have been tainted with the four corruptions of Fear, Avarice, Ignorance, and Lassitude (FAIL), they find every means of, and excuse for complicating things such that they get what they want, no matter who gets hurt.

It is time this all came to ends.  Leave us to freedom and to the governance of self and the defense of that which is a man's rightful property.  Get off our backs, for we will not tolerate you for much longer.  Our technologies are offering means of liberating minds that tyrants will not be able to overcome, save that we allow them to defeat us by pure force of our own wills.  We, the Freemen of planet earth, are not obliged to return to slave status, but will do so if we allow it.

This is all on us, now.

Mors tyrannis.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The "Destruction" Of The West

Earlier today I viewed a video by Jordan Petersen.  It was a string of discussions with various people regarding the rise of totalitarianism in America, as well as in other places once deemed as the "free" world.

Early on, and speaking to the warfare that has been waged against him, Petersen opined that the assault never ends, and essentially asked why it is so.  To that question I responded in the comment section as follows:

"It doesn't stop because you are pissing in Theire cornflakes. Theye seek the removal of western civilization from the hands of the Mean Man. This makes it appear as though it were being destroyed, but it is only being stolen and squirreled away for the Worthy. Theye will keep it for themselves, of course, because it is powerful, and power is the whole point of all this Machiavellian churn. Western "values" empower the individual, which is anathema to the authoritarian who would be king despot. There can be no rival and competition begins with thought. Therefore, the destruction of powerful thought skill is paramount for broad and unquestioned dominion. This explains virtually everything we see these days. We are in the midst of a revolution. This revolution is the most dangerous ever, setting those of Russia and China to pale precisely because they were not subtle, but rather blood-soaked. Despite the conflagration of Portland, this one is far more nuanced, insidious and I daresay, pervasive. The base of this revolution is not a comparatively small raft of wildly violent "freedom fighters" acting out as the other 99.989% stand idly agape. This one has the support of a vast plurality of young people whose minds have been turned to functional pudding through the wildly powerful mechanisms of the public school systems, in concert with choice and specific corporate collaborators (think "MTV", for example), all of whom have erected a structure of perceptual indoctrination sufficiently coherent to steer millions of young minds away from the tenets of freedom and basic human decency, toward one that superficially appears as those things (Brave New World appearance), but is actually something very different (rotten heart of 1984).

That plurality who have drunk the koolaid of envy, resentment, entitlement, and the naturally resultant rage, are legion, and wildly eager to see the changes that promise what they think is the Utopian paradise to which their world view will give rise. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that those things with which the young minds were inculcated and lead astray from basic sense, is naught but the cancerous beginnings of a nightmare which those stilted and stunted minds cannot imagine, much less accept as the fate to which they have committed themselves. These are the perfect stooges, engineered by those who have used the very values of the west to contrive the framework and methods for achieving their goal of utter domination. Part and parcel with this whole notion of a global despotic hegemony, one must consider the possibility of a program of broad liquidation of "undesirables", at the very least. The world view that is now being promoted and peddled to the young strongly suggests a program of mental preparation for the eventual cull of a large subpopulation. As insanely evil as this notion appears to people who retain some shred of sense and humanity, it must nevertheless be considered as a possible element in the overarching architecture for dominion. Those who can and WILL think independently pose an intolerable threat to the technology-enabled tyrant. There is no degree of independence that can be regarded as innocuous. Therefore, I would have to reason that those who are "not of the body", so to speak, must be eliminated.

Acclimate the young, who shall then become your allies - partners in crime if you will - to the notion of the desperate global circumstance, and they will "understand" (i.e., blindly accept) even the idea that those billions HAD to be sacrificed in order that the lucky survivors would have a future. This is rioting evil, and it is marching toward victory as the race of humans stands and watches, and does nothing.

If all of this is viewed through the lens of one whose ultimate objective is the final acquisition of absolute power over the entire globe, then everything to which we bear daily witness makes perfect sense. What we are witnessing, *living*, is a highly tuned, technologically-enabled, scientifically-based revolution intended to be the final realization of something very big - something on a global scale.

Raise a new crop amenable and perhaps even demanding of your whims and caprices, eliminate the thought-competition (mostly the "old" people, as well as the statistical outliers), and you shall truly be master over all that can be observed from any point on the globe. This is the fundamental transformation of the human condition for which tyrants, despots, and other conquerors have striven since Sumer. It is in a very real sense a TRANS-HUMAN mental metamorphosis that, if pulled off, will leave western thought in the hands of the ruling elite as Theire most powerful instrument of acquisition and maintenance. What will be left for the dregs over whom they wield their largely bootless gestures of material power, is a state of functional intellectual castration which the hobbled will embrace and indeed demand as their blessèd status quo. Brave New World will have been made real. The top tier will be the true alphas. The Betas will be their wholly obedient front-line administrators and the rest will be the effectively mindless Gammas, whose raisons d'être will be to do as they are bid, without question. As in BNW, there will be "soma". Phones, drugs, mindlessly obsessive sex with no love or deeper feelings are already in place. We all see directly how effective they have been, and stand with tuning to become even more so with the generations. One can only wonder what other traps our technologies will contrive to ensnare and coddle those who will come long after we are dust.

I am afraid there is little hope in all this. I may be mistaken, and pray that I am, but it seems clear that some dimly lit threshold has been crossed where the character of the mean man has been so compromised with corruptions subtle and blatant, that as these megalomaniacal loons continue to close the noose around humanity's neck, we will do nothing but watch, fret, and wait for a non-existent knight to come with his legion to save us all from the boogie man.

Dire is the circumstance, as are the prospects. I have tried to sound the clarion's call, but to no apparent avail. Perhaps that is for the better. I no longer can tell with any certainty. But I suffer the defects of my virtues, namely that I am stubborn and believe in hopeless causes. Press on, regardless, I say, for to do otherwise is to dishonor oneself and all he may claim to esteem and love."

The instrument of western thought built the world we now know.  The material world stands as non-equivocating testament to the power of the western mind, which has in many ways far outstripped all rivals, certainly in terms of those material results.  Our technologies and moral principles are all the products of the western mind as it has evolved over the past several thousands of years.  All other modes of civilized thought-architecture long disappeared in the west's rear-view mirror.

The rights recognized by and the morals derived therefrom are all the products of the western mind.  No other cultural tradition has so much as approached the qualities of western civilization's philosophical underpinnings.  Most ironically, those who curse the west as racist, homophobic, and so forth down the dreary list of Regressive talking points, do so from the standpoint of that which they condemn.  More sadly amusing yet, they think that their moral positions derive from something other than the wester philosophical tradition.  Nothing could be further from the truth, but when you point this out to them, the most frequent response is rage-soaked denial, replete with the usual wishes that you die of cancer and that your children are kidnapped, raped endlessly, and then slowly murdered in the most freakishly agonized and prolonged manners possible.

Similarly, they curse "capitalism" using means and methods that only the capitalist west has provided them, and could have provided.  Would that I might live to see the looks on those faces the day they twig to the truth of that for which they so stridently clamor.  By that time, of course, it will be too late to retrieve, so much juicier the raw anguish of realization.

Recognizing the vast capacity of the western mind, Theye now seek to remove that power from the hands of the common man, seeking instead to replace it with a toddler's sphere, such that when provided with a minimal set of vapid diversions, babies in adult bodies will remain content with their status as slaves, a truth which will remain opaque to them for all their days.  It is a brilliant, if obscenely evil, plan that as of this writing appears to be coming off quite well.  Well enough.

May we find our way out of this nightmare quagmire.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes. 

We Are All To Blame

In another forum, I've been admonished to trust God, prompting me to respond:

"The problem lies not in whom one may place trust, but with those in whom trust must be withheld. God isn't the problem, people are, and it is people with whom we must daily deal. It is people who disparage, violate, and trespass against us.

Trust God, DEAL with people.

I've never cottoned to the idea that trust in God necessitates passivism in men, which is to say that we sit idly, expecting God to do it all. Furthermore, I've never had cause to believe that God micromanages our lives. After all, what would be the point?

We have been gifted with brains and the capacity to judge.

"Judge not, lest ye art prepared to be judged" is not an admonition against using one's ability to assess, but is rather a warning to employ one's judgment with humility and great caution, for it is ever so easy to run afoul of propriety in the process.

God gave us everything we need to live good, happy, prosperous, and healthy lives worthy of the motions.

That there is so much disease, poverty, and misery in this world rests squarely and solely at our feet, not because evil men make it that way, but because good men do nothing sufficient to stop them.

Every last one of us who have attained his majority is to blame for the evils that now gallop roughshod over face of the earth. We have been remiss in our duties to basic sense and propriety and have much for which to atone. That is at least in part the reason I write these lines, though it is not enough.

I admit my shortcoming in all of this.

Will you admit yours?

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

1984 Or Brave New World?

When I was in high school, we were required to read both "1984" and "Brave New World".

When we were done, the teacher asked which of the two do we think most likely to make itself real. Most of my classmates felt 1984 was the likely candidate, whereas my answer was "both". Being the odd man out, the teacher demanded I defend my position. I'd come to the suspicion that our immediate future was to have the face of BNW, but that its black heart, which was precisely the same as that of 1984, would become less candy coated, and thereby more 1984-like, with time.

At the time I was unable to articulate why it would be so, but I believe my instincts have proven themselves correct over the decades since. The face has mutated from that of a bright future full of wonder, to that of a vacuously inane clown where the superficiality of life becomes caricatured in itself. This is reflected everywhere we turn in the outward behaviors of far too many young people these days. Huxley's depiction of the idiotic mantras of BNW's dopey "alphas" are made manifest in the meme culture that has arisen as one result of the network technology we now "enjoy".

The standards of assessment for what it considered knowledge is now so low as to leave me wondering at times how it is that the human world does not come flying apart, though we appear in some ways to come closer to it by the day.

The emphasis has run wildly away from the classic virtues of individual freedom, learnedness, mutual respect, honor, love, and self control, to that of utter self indulgence. The manifestations of this are everywhere made apparent, particularly on the network, which has become a major source of influence in the ways that young people come to see the world, and their places in it. Aided and abetted by "media" and the so-called "educational" system, all former senses of the world appear to be slipping away as the fog of what was once pure relativism has been transmogrified into what I will call the New Absolutism. This has taken place either by the wildest set of coincidences, unimaginable, or by some very clever artifice. It mirrors most perfectly the absolutism of our religious past, and against which it continues to rail and shriek to this day. Anyone failing to subscribe, subordinate, and prostrate themselves to the new Absolute Truth as doled out by the Oracles of Eternal Progressive Wisdom, is to be condemned for heresy. This is most literally the case now.

Could anyone of a now-older generation have imagined a time where "men" who swear that they are not homosexual, publicly proclaim, nay brag, that their girlfriend's "peg" them? If you do not know what that is, look it up. It's hilarious and miserably sad and pathetic all at once.

What passes for knowledge in what seems a vast horde of humanity, is something at which one can only marvel whilst shaking his head as if to wake himself from a goofy dream of killer klowns, soon the turn into a black nightmare.

As I suspected, the cancerous heart of this innerly rotten apple, has become ever more apparent in time, with the once nearly latent tyrants now having made their presence and position most painfully apparent to anyone taking but a moment to notice. In 1984-style, we are seeing a reversal of everything. Good is bad, evil is virtue, up is down, yet the candy-coating of BNW persists, even if it becomes more gossamer-like with each passing year.

It's the old stick-and-carrot act. People have been bent toward the weakness that arises through excessively indulgent self-centeredness and the pleasure seeking that arises most predictably therefrom. The ready availability of the most base forms of self-seeking, namely that of the sexual variety for example, is universal in the "west", with porn sites more popular than ever, acting as a primary source of indoctrination of the young. Make no mistake, I am not on a diatribe against sex - far from it. But when it is made a focus out of proportion such that other life considerations of equal import take a far back seat to it, it requires no feat of rocket surgery to figure out that something is not quite right in the world.

Concomitant with the carrot of strongly advocated self-worship and gratification, is the stick of ever more draconian results for those who fail to adopt the new orthodoxy of obedience to naked, bald-faced evil. Do not question anything, lest ye be stricken from Facebook and Twitter, heaven forbid!

And so in time, my suspicion that with the years we would see an ever expanded edging of encroachment upon the rights of the individual has come to pass and continues to wreck its way through the lives of every man on the planet, the exceptions representing a vanishingly small subpopulation. My perception of the tyrant's nature proved close enough to correct in that he cannot contain and control himself, such that he is no different from those over whom he presumes to lord, save in the dint of his having landed into some seat of power that enables his rot and corruption to be realized in ways the mean man will never know for himself. The tyrant is ill-disciplined in his apparently insatiable lust to exercise ever greater management authority over increasingly minuscule details of the lives of those over whom his tyranny reigns.

The question that arises is whether the tyrants, having perfected their system of domination, will be able to contain themselves over the longer term to the metes and bounds of prudence in the administration of that system. Or will they themselves fall to the perennial human failing of never being satisfied, thus creeping or even leaping over that hazily defined line that would give the now utterly cowed dullards cause to rebel? My suspicion is the latter, if left to their devices. But our technologies stand as the wildcard predicators in that question, and here I speak very specifically of artificial intelligence. If Theye (those in material social power) are smart, and I cannot with certainty attribute their successes thus far to intellect, versus pure determination, they would endeavor to cause the contrivance of an AI sufficient to the task of general, central governance. Were Theye to hand their prerogatives largely over to such a system, elevating it to the effective status and function of an oracle, they might be able to hold on to power indefinitely into the blue future.

The problem with tyrants has always been a lack of self-control in the respects to which I here refer. Having the correct measures programmed into a system which would then be trusted to maintain the proper balances between tyrannical interest and the boiling point of the proletariate, could become the near-guarantee of dominance with no foreseeable end.

Only time will tell, and we old geezers will likely not live to see the longer term outcomes. But it would be quite interesting to be a fly on the world's wall, witnessing how this all pans out over, say the coming century or two, assuming we don't send ourselves to hell in a nuclear fireball, the prospects of which have been recently revived from their former states of rest.

But if you defocus your gaze and zoom out to a broader view of things, the one thing that stands out in all this is the eternally immutable principle of change. Things always change, and so bearing that in mind, it is no wonder that that which we knew and accepted as right and proper is swept away in the currents of time. This may be the only real hope remaining to us: that the need for change is so embedded in the very fabric of our existences, even the most technologically enabled tyrannies must eventually transform, replacing themselves with... well, what exactly?

It seems I have wandered adrift from my original purpose... or have I? You decide.

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

Mr. IQ, Meet Mr. MQ and Mr. SQ

The concept of IQ, or Intelligence Quotient is well known to many people as a measure of basic, innate human intelligence; the ability to dope out very basic patterns, essentially.  While there remains some controversy over the merits of the actual measurements used to arrive at the relevant numbers, the basic idea that there are differences in intellectual magnitude between individuals is well accepted across a broad cross section of the human population.

I would now like to introduce the idea of two more measures: The Moral Quotient (MQ), and the Smarts Quotient (SQ).  I would like to think of these as close analogs to the IQ assessment, only relating to a man's "moral intelligence", and that for his smarts, respectively.  The latter, of course, is as yet something of problematic, given that the body of human knowledge is so large.  This raises the question of for what shall we test?  Knowledge of physics?  Machining? Painting?  Farming?  Medicine?  Professional wrestling?  I would suggest that the useful bit in determining SQ would lie in establishing a method for calculating a normalized score for knowledge on any given narrowly defined body of knowledge such as the Principles of Proper Human Relations, for example.  

As for MQ, that is a slightly different issue in that it is a far narrower channel.  We must obviously begin by choosing the standard of measure.  There are many who would complain and wave their hands in dire and urgent warning that such a standard could never be objective, nor could everyone agree upon it.  To the first objection I say "nonsense!"  The Principles of Proper Human Relations are a very likely candidate for such a standard, seeing as they recognize the inherent sovereignty of the individual whose rights are sacrosanct, save when one is committing a crime against one or more of his fellows.  As for the wailing and the gnashing of teeth over the claim that not everyone would stand in agreement with such a standard, of course they would not, and that it matters no whit.  The hard core criminal objects to the standards of criminal Law.  After all, who would expect him to cheer for and accept and abide by it?  He is, after all, a criminal.  Does anyone of sound mind, reason, and moral makeup care whether criminals object?  No.

In an analogous vein, those whose moral senses are objectively and demonstrably failed cannot be taken seriously as to their opinions on such matters.  Would anyone wish to give heed to the opinions of a pederast; of one who condones the violation of the rights of some human beings?  Methinks not.  And so we can readily see that not all opinions on the matter are valid, meaning that the indigestion of such people are inconsequential to the issue and may be validly set aside.

Imagine being able to measure a man's MQ and SQ and have the numbers publicly available of those people seeking to run for public office.  If the measures were reliably and predictably accurate, it could go a long way toward dissuading the wanker wannabe tyrants from bothering in the first place, and failing that, providing a trustworthy starting point from which voters could make their choices.

It is just an idea, but I thought I would toss it out there to give you all something about which to think.  Imagine making it a requirement that all candidates for any government position take such tests, as well as that of basic personality types.  Naturally, the viability of such things would necessarily require the honest and competent administration of such assessments, but if we assume it for conversation's sake, perhaps it might give voters and edge against the scoundrels.

That's it for now.  Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The Means Of Production

Socialism/communism and all other similar authoritarian collectivists paradigms are the philosophies and attitudes of bitterness and capitulation before the challenges of life.  They found upon a mindset that surrenders to those challenges without so much as the thought of meeting them head-on. They are the philosophies of defeated men.

So absurd and cowardly are these ridiculous notions that it stultifies the intelligent man's mind to consider the manner and shocking degree to which these architectures of collapse fail.  How is it possible that human beings are able to accept, much less advocate for, arrangements so bereft of understanding of basic human nature, not to mention basic moral sense?

Marx inanely brayed and bloviated about seizing the means of production, and idiotic idea on its face, given the bankrupt assumptions upon which his ranting polemic was based.  To this day, his low-IQ adherents continue to parrot Marx's mantra of bitter idiocy, essentially calling for the violent expropriation of private property, allegedly to be redistributed to "the people".  This continuing faith to Marxist stoogery represents a monumental failure of creative thought - of capitulation to the challenges of life such that rather than meeting them head-on, such people believe we should devolve and degenerate into robbery for the sake of distributing the petty wealth of the world to those "in need" such that everyone on the planet may be equal.  Sure, equally poor.  Equally miserable.  Equally enslaved.

The other failure to which this mindset of drooling stupidity gives rise is that of paying attention.  While the "left" were grinding on with the endlessly repetitious repines about seizing the means of production, the people who have been actually solving the world's problems through inventive entrepreneurship have brought to the common man the first generations of digital production instrumentalities that actually put those means into the hamds of pretty well anyone who wants it.

There was no need for blood-soaked revolution, but only the freedom of individual people to come together and use their brains as more than mere hat racks.  The 3D printer is slowly revolutionizing manufacturing such that anyone with ten square feet of space and a modicum of creative intelligence and the diligence to follow and idea to its end is now capable of going into manufacturing, whether on a small scale, large, or anything in between.  We no longer have to steal what is in our neighbors' houses in order to make our ways in the world in good prosperity and, presumably, happiness and freedom.  Advances in technology are enabling that which was heretofore not possible for want of instrumentality.

But have the lefties given up on their demands to eliminate all private property and to steal the means of production from those who built those means with their own diligent effort?  No.  They have, in fact redoubled their demands several times over with ever greater stridency and threats to those who oppose them.  This tells me that their agenda has nothing whatsoever to do with freeing men from the shackles of evil capitalist overlords.  Very much the oppoiste, their agenda is all about grabbing power into their own grubby mitts to the exclusion of all others.  In other words, it's the same old pig with a different color of lipstick.

The means of production  are well within the reach of any man willing to do what it takes to acquire them in morally just ways.  We have no remaining excuse fro advocating widespread destruction, theft, and murder as means to the purportedly just end of "equality".  Work your minwage joh if you must, saving those pennies for however long it may take until you have enough to purchase the machines you need to produce the products and services you imagine.  At that point, the rest is up to the quality of your ideas in the context of the markets and the times.  There are no guarantees, but there are opportunities just about anywhere one may care to look.

So to the Marxists and their manifold ilk I say this: if what you purport as your true intentions are in fact as you claim, then cut your revolutionary talk of overthrowing the evil capitalist world and get on board with the objective reality that now stares you in your kissers.   Opportunity is pretty well guaranteed for anyone seeking it.  Success, on the other hand, is not.  Such is the nature of actual freedom, vis-à-vis the nature of the absurd fantasy of the authoritarian collectivist.

If you want to seize the means of production, you need go no further than you keyboard.  Amazon and a thousand other vendors carry the full spectrum of instrumentalities at low low K-Mart prices.  So relax, forget about violence pursuant to crimes you once thought noble, have a beer, see friends rather than enemies in your hard-working fellows, and join in the animating game.  The only reason not to is fear, and the box awaits us all over the long horizon, so why give in to that most counterproductive of emotions?

It's a big pie and it gets bigger by the day.  Go grab yourself a slice, but without committing the very crimes against which so many rightfully complain.  Don't become that which you claim to deplore.  Just imagine how satisfying a feeling it is to make your own way without riding the backs of others in criminal fashion.  Until you've experienced it, you cannot imagine what it is like - the sheer joy of it.  There is no need to rob and kill.  Where you see scarcity, there exists abundance, but it must be made and you can be a maker - a PRODUCER.  You are the means of production, so seize yourself and get to the good you say you wish to see for the world.  That is how you will help make the world a better place.

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

Have We Finally Learned The Lesson?

The patterns of "government" are steady and predictable.  Tyranny and lies are Theire stock in trade.  Speaking in net terms, "government" brings nothing other than repression of our natural freedoms, violence, poverty, disease, and misery to the world.  The evidence in support of this assertion is so overwhelming as to render absurd, prima facie, any and all attempts to argue to the contrary.

Humanity, having crossed some threshold of technological capability, has now provided "governments" with levers of power so mighty, a single individual given the false authority of dictator is able to threaten the wellbeing of the entire global population, human and otherwise†.  The amounts of power now resident in the hands of those whose stewardship is rarely, if ever questioned, and yet stands eminently questioanble, are such that all life on the planet stand in peril precisely due to the dubious characters and agendas of those holding its reins.

The world is in the hands of madmen, and as the common perceptual sphere of the human race continues to wander ever farther from a central line of basic sanity, the average man becomes ever more accustomed and acclimated to ever wilder dangers such that those in power, the proverbial "Themme", are also swept along with the tide of perceptual change.  This perforce renders the once unthinkable ever closer to becoming things to be considered.  This is demonstrated by the recent threats of nuclear war by a head of state whose mental condition must be called into question by virtue of the very fact that he has so much as mentioned nuclear conflagration as an option.  It is prima facie proof that the mind in question is either unhinged, or headed in that direction.  To threaten such a thing is manifestly insane, and yet into such hands have we, the rest of humanity, placed such power.

Consider doddering old fools with nary the mental faculties to tie their own shoes, much less to lead a nation through a crisis brought on by the foolery of himself and his foreign counterparts, each chasing their respective, idiotic political agendas pursuant to ultimate goals perhaps unknowable, but which can be soundly assessed as incompatible with basic human freedoms and basic survival sense.  What do such people want?  The answers are irrelevant.  All we need to know is that Theye violate their fellow human beings with cheap fanfare, hand-waving, and braying sounds; that it endangers every soul on the planet, and that time is long past for mean humanity to rise ever upward to a new and better standard of being, and take action to eliminate all tyrants and their rotten tyrannies from the planet now and for all time.  To fail at this ensures the ongoing march toward abject chattel status of every human being on the planet, including that of the tyrants, for they build prisons of their own design about themselves, thinking they are somehow in better positions than those over whom they presume to lord.

Will you choose to see that which stares you in your face, or will you continue to buy and propagate the idiotic lies of "government"? The claim that without Themme, the world will fall into bottomless and unrecoverable chaos is the damnedest of all lies anyone has ever told.  Are we so corrupted that we will, for the sake of our manifold duplicities allow the tyrant to achieve the goal of global hegemony such that the proverbial face being smashed by a boot will finally be your own?  Is the standard you hold for the quality of your own life so timid, low, and paltry, that you will sell your soul in the form of all your freedoms and the rights that derive therefrom for the sake of a hollow existence of mere convenience and cheap, shiny trinkets?

Time is here, and the choice stands before you as it always has.  You will make the choice, if only by default, because to not make it is to make it in fact, by the cheapest and most shamefully cowardly route possible.  Is that the way you want things to go for you and everyone you purport to love?  Doing nothing guarantees your inevitable fall into slavery so stark and obvious, that even the most willfully blind among us will no longer be able to deny the condition.

How can it be that anyone finds this circumstance acceptable?  How is it possible that anyone could be so stricken with utter rot of the spirit and mind that they would stand for the dangers to which Theye expose the entire world?  How can you stand for it without a sense of burning and agonizing shame, knowing that you are throwing away the only things for which life is worth living in exchange for lies of all sorts whose only intention is to secure your capitulation?  How can you allow yourself to plumb the depths of individual depravity such that you quietly acquiesce to the stick and carrot show by which the tyrant both entices and threatens?  Do you not see the power in the greater mass of humanity to put tyranny to its rightful end in virtually no time at all, the only requirement being that people simply refuse to cooperate?

Humanity debauched presents the single most pathetically sad spectacle imaginable.  At one time people may have been able to justly claim ignorance, but in this era of readily available information, that era is now well past us, all the old excuses rendered invalid.  We have no just basis for doing nothing in defense of that which should be defended to our last breaths.  There is no excuse for failing to place the dissevered heads of all tyrants and their minions on the ends of spears; to physically destroy with grim non-equivocation all in "government" who trespass against their fellows; to finally show that least shred of self-respect that drives a man to remove from the book of life without hesitation, compunction, or the least tranche of mercy, each man and woman who steps up to don the mantle of the public trust, only to violate that trust in the manifold ways that those in "government" so commonly tend.

The time for equivocation and phony baloney pedantry is past.  It is time to choose and then to act, for what time remains in opportunity for that choice, grows thinner by the day.  People are beginning to awaken, but it is not enough.  Wakening and expecting the problems newly perceived to be solved by others, much less by those who are the very source of those troubles, is no solution, but only the guarantee that the tyrant shall prevail.  Wanting better is worth nothing when one is willing to make no effort toward it.  In the case of liberty, the stakes are life itself.  If you are unwilling to take that risk, then you are unworthy of your freedoms and deserve what horrors may then befall you.  But being unworthy of salvation may in any event see you liberated nonetheless, for the relatively few of us who do in fact love their freedom sufficiently to merit saving, may drag the rest along in the wake of the fight which will have to come if humanity is to see anything of the better.  But is that how you want it recovered to you, by din't of another's work and risk?  Low will you have had to have plunged on the evolutionary scale to allow such a thing to occur, and cheap will you hold your freedoms if indeed you allow others to do the heavy lifting where you could have done your part, but failed to even try.

Mors tyrannis!  Death to tyrants I say, and it is to this idea I pledge my life, my liberty, and my fortune, meager as they may all be.  Will you do the same?

I pray for the people of America and of the greater earth to come to better sense; to rid themselves of the filth and stench of fear and the manifold other shortcomings that have lead them to this dolorous condition of meekly accepting the mandates of bloviating men unworthy of cleaning the average man's boots after his having stepped into a great steaming pile.  May you all find the respect of self necessary to shake you from your stagnation in the great pools of filth into which you have allowed yourselves to be wallowed through the lies and false promises of devils pretending to be men.  May you rise to displace and destroy those who would see you brought to ruin and misery.  May we all find the better way, for the current conditions of privation and unnatural constraint are not mandatory, but are fact only because we have chosen them.

Have you learned the lesson yet?  Rise and be free; rise and refuse further abuse!

Death to tyrants!  God bless America and the promise it yet holds out to every man within its borders, and may that promise spill forth to every land, to every soul, and let us put tyranny to the sword, never again to be tolerated in the least measure.  

Resist!

Refuse!

Defy!

May you find your way to the good, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

† The current situation between Russia and Ukraine is a most recent and prime example of how one man, in this case Vladimir Putin, threatens the future of all life on the earth as he single-handedly initiated the invasion of Ukraine and has threatened nuclear war against his perceived enemies.  How much more of a lesson does one need to see that "government" is never to be trusted to tell us water is wet?

Why Tyranny Is Self-Perpetuating

I an certain that many people wonder how it is possible that despite our long human history of tyranny upon tyrannies, how could it be possible that no significant population in the civilized world has broken with it, save perhaps for a few precious moments, even in the face of manifold revolutions throughout the past several thousands of years by people yearning to be free of the yoke.

Well, I'm here now to spell it out, and the answer is a very simple two-part explanation.

Firstly, and perhaps trivially seeming, is the fact that human beings are corruptible and, once corrupted, are wildly difficult to return to the fold of virtuous and honorable behavior.  This is especially so of larger populations.  I cannot precisely give a number, but it seems clear that when a group or population grow past a certain size,  mutual support pursuant to the maintenance of proper behavior becomes non-viable in practical terms.

Then there is the most unfortunate phenomenon of entropy, the tendency of things to simply fall apart.  In order to retain a structure's integrity, effort must be invested in its maintenance, of else it crumbles.  If one fails to conduct maintenance on a house, for example, it will eventually fall and it will do so much more quickly than if it is properly maintained, all else equal.  Thus we find it with the structure of a culture - a nation if you will.

Combine the entropic nature of things with the human predilection of not wanting to strain oneself, also known as laziness, and it takes no great feat of the intellect to see the possibilities.

Further combine those qualities with the other base human bent for free and easy living at little to no cost to oneself, and the DNA for misery and failure is thereby established on both sides of the tyrannical fence.  That is, both oppressor and the oppressed end up with sufficiently strong incentives for establishing and maintaining tyranny, including their respective roles in such schemes.

Each party, being constituted of human beings, wants something for nothing.  The tyrants are willing to say and do whatever is required to live off the necks of those over whom they presume to lord.  The oppressed are willing to be tyrannized, as they conveniently choose to see the tyrannies imposed upon them as something more benign, and in fact beneficial.  They may go so far as to choose to regard bald-faced tyranny as freedom itself!  This can be seen at any time one wishes, just by observing with unclouded eyes.  The tenets of Big Brother are alive and well in the world, and have been since long before Orwell was born.

In the golden age of establishment, there arises what I like to call a "balance of corruptions" where the lies that the new Tyrant tell pursuant to his ends mesh well enough with the corrupted desires of the people who are more than willing to believe those lies pursuant to their own objectives, usually for free stuff and illusions of security and false freedom, a condition I call "pretty slavery".

The general pattern is that of the political scoundrel promising whatever it is he thinks the masses want to hear, whether it be security, free stuff, or what have you.  Those who guess wrong tend to have short-lived careers as politicians, though this is by no means always the case.  But those who guess correctly usually score in a big way with the people ready to carry his water, chop his wood, and build him. a very nice palace.  So long as the Tyrant keeps himself in check such that he delivers enough of the illusory promises (which are never what the people think they are in reality), the people who corruptly want what they want, tend to remain quite happy to live the lies peddled them for as long as they might live.

It is the common error of the Tyrant, however, to allow his own corruptions to get past his better judgment, which invariably leads him to overstep some line, upsetting the balance of corruptions, which in turn upsets the apple cart of the rotten-at-best social harmony, and gets people in a humor to grumble.  If the Tyrant fails to come to his senses, the downward spiral of dissatisfaction grows ever more steep in time, eventually turning to talk of treason.  Eventually threats surface and finally actual violence erupts as the once well-disguised trespasses of the Tyrant become so blatantly that which they actually are, even the most rank and corrupted dullard can no longer accept them.  If the revolution "succeeds", victory is met with much drinking, carousing, the making loud and happy noises, and is likely punctuated with much celebratory sex.

This leads us directly into part two of the tyranny phenomenon: it is built into the very architecture of civilized life.  It cannot be argued that civilization has provided humanity with enormous benefits, even if many of them were a long time in being realized.  But along with those miraculous benefits there have come many dangerous and destructive liabilities of which the average man appears largely unaware.

It all seems to have begun innocently enough, long ago with the realization that there is strength in coherent, properly coordinated numbers, what I like to call "superorganization".  Humans likely posed sufficient threats to other humans to prompt someone whose name is lost to us, to twig to the possibility of not only strength in numbers, but the idea that building a walled dwelling might provide a measure of security that was theretofore non-existent.  And so arose humanity's first city, the identity of which remains debated.   It may have been a glorious place, but because of the nature of what it took to bring such a place to realization, superorganization was required.  Superorganisms require management, which perforce implies the existence of at least one chief, or "leader".  In such matters, hierarchy cannot be entirely avoided for reasons we shall not go into here, but you may take it on faith that at least some level of hierarchy is absolutely necessary in order for the organization to occur in the first place, much more so to maintain it and direct its actions to good effect.  That means bosses and bossees.  The Walden II notion of the bossless society is a childishly unrealistic fantasy, save in those tribal circumstances where populations are small and the ambitions of such small groups are meek in the extreme.  But the moment those ambitions reach beyond that which but a tiny handful of men can accomplish, superorganization begins to come quickly into play, and you now know the rest.

It would appear that at some point, some fellow in that mix realized a few things that were to alter human destiny in ways I bet they could never have imagined.  One was that it was good to be the king.  Yes, there were many responsibilities associated with the role, but the benefits were spectacular.  Live in special quarters, get to tell people what to do, especially a labor force in which you did not have to toil, not to mention your pick of the best women, and so on down a list I'm sure you are well able to conjure without help.  Another realization was that it was actually possible to get huge numbers of people to do your bidding if you bent the truth in the right ways, or even lied through your teeth on certain matters.  

Any of this sounding familiar?

Since the earliest moments of civilized life, people have been trained to think in certain ways about the civilizations of which they were part.  Those societies were home to those people, as they are today, and no doubt the open tyrannies people accept as facts of life today were not quite so blatant in the early times.  But people are prone to creep - the slow and perhaps imperceptible alterations of mind that occur as seemingly innocuous change is introduced, most often by authority figures, but also by the people who live as denizens of their cultures at any given time.  The earliest steps toward what we now call "tyranny" may have been very sensible changes imposed by leaders upon the people for the most solid and practical of reasons at those times.  Once acclimated to the new reality, further impositions were undoubtedly made upon people by chiefs, this practice continuing until the chief held so much power that he became a king, emperor, or perhaps pharaoh, no longer human as the rest, but a living and breathing god in the flesh; a most convenient evolution of circumstance... for the king, at least.

From such a point, the rest is easy to dope out.  Once the authority of the chief became unassailable, he became more than just a leader; he most often became unquestionable.  The minds of people were by then so trained to thinking along the lines of the absolute authority of "government", the fate of humanity was more or less set in concrete precisely because of the fundamental and usually utterly tacit set of assumptions under which nearly all humanity labors, and of which has yet to break itself.

It is precisely because we tend to think in the ways we do about such things as leaders, "government", authority, and so on, in league with the general bent toward corruptions of all manner, that we have failed to break the cycle of tyranny.  In. brief, we don't really want to, and in large part because the Tyrant absolves us from a vast litany of responsibilities in which we have no interest in assuming for ourselves.  We revolt, kill the Tyrants and sometimes even their entire families, and what do we do in the aftermath?  We seek more of the same, somehow thinking that things will be different this time.  It is the perceived need for leaders that gets us into trouble - the convenient belief that we are incapable of leading ourselves and that order must be imposed upon us from without, rather from within ourselves, that leads us inevitably to instate the new tyrant-du-jour every single time we manage to shake the old one from our necks.

Until we sufficiently break ourselves of this most self-destructive of habits and couple that with a will to dispense with our manifold corruptions petty and grand, humanity will continue its race to the bottom, with the dangers now more threatening than ever before due to the great technological advances of the past several decades.  Furthermore, looming advances in cybernetics promise technological manacles so unbreakable, freedom may fall beyond humanity's reach for good.

How do we accomplish so monumental a feat?  Once again there are two factors.  Firstly, there is education, a necessary yet insufficient requirement.  Education here entails the apprehension and complete understanding of the principles of proper human relations.  The principles are simple and easy to understand, yet are not easy to accept for the average man due to the fact that humans so willingly accept their roles as functional slaves to scoundrels and criminals they call "leaders", which leads us directly to the second factor: the human "heart".  Education, however proper, is of no value until the individual's attitude, his "heart", is right.  People reject real freedom in preference of pretty slavery precisely because real freedom is no picnic.  Our individual corruptions tend to lead us to want all the benefits and shiny bits associated with freedom, without having to pay the piper.  This, of course, is a dog that doesn't hunt, for one cannot enjoy the benefit in any temporally sustainable way without bearing the high burdens of becoming free and remaining that way.  Remaining free is the real trick, for it is a relatively small affair to fly into rage against a tyrant, and go on a made killing rampage to oust him.  The real question, the trick, lies in what comes afterward.  If history demonstrates nothing else on that point, it is that we as the human species have failed universally.  No matter who the felon at the top, every one we have toppled, have we replaced with another of the same rotten cloth.

Proper freedom demands everything of a man.  The Freeman must be intelligent, loving, smart, courageous, intolerant, honorable, eternally vigilant, must have vast integrity, must know right from wrong and be devoted to living righteously while shunning evil, and must be generous.  Here, generosity is not the forced giving from his wallet to the less fortunate as the communist would demand at gunpoint.   Rather, generosity in this sense is that of allowing your fellows to live freely as they please in exchange for their equal considerations to you.  The Freeman gives unto others that which he expects of them for himself, even when the choices of his fellows offend or even appall him.  The Catholic must allow the Jew, the black the white, the homosexual the heterosexual, and so on, as well as vice versa.  This is not to say we must tolerate criminal acts - for how could we be free under such conditions?  But for those whose life choices others find disagreeable, perhaps even disgusting, so long as there is no criminality involved, the Freeman is bound by the requirement of liberty to eschew hypocrisy, and by his honor to freedom itself, to be tolerant.  This is the only viable way forward that stands even the least chance of stamping the life from tyranny, as we adopt and embrace an attitude of eternal vigilance against, and utter intolerance for, trespass by one man upon another.

Freedom is at least as frightening as it is exhilarating, and so it should be, for who wishes life to be dulled with the poison of excessive ease?  In freedom there are no false guarantees as we find so prevalent these days in the world of pretty slavery that is hailed and praised with fictitiously concocted and fraudulent appellations and monikers like "socialism", "collective/social obligations", and so forth down a depressingly long list of notions that have wreaked endless havoc, chaos, misery, poverty, disease, and death upon our numbers.  We are given life, inherent freedom, and our valid claims to both.  All the rest is up to us as individuals to make of it what we might, the only rightful prohibition and constraint being that we commit no trespass against our fellows, and that when we do, we amend and restore those whom we unjustly damage.

It is a simple formula that is endlessly challenging to live by on a daily basis, which is largely why the mean man rejects it with such raw and utter violence, in preference for the lies and bends of good truth that underpin the pretty slavery that he chooses to embrace.  He makes his choice under the false belief that it absolves him of responsibility to his fellows, not to mention himself, for to be a Freeman is the single most difficult and challenging thing in the world.  But is it also by far the most exhilarating and rewarding.  To be in complete and utter possession of yourself as a matter of choice, and to understand most fully those choices and the will to devoting oneself to the greatest of all challenges, the mastery of Self, is the greatest of all human accomplishments.  There is no more worthy a life possible, the second greatest choice residing so far below that it cannot even be observed.

Fear you neither hardship, work, great challenges, or being without, for these are the summons to the superior man, the FREE man; the man whose foremost master is of himself.  He is clear, confident, in control of himself, and is utterly invincible, unconquerable, ungovernable.  The Tyrant has no purchase over such men and in their presence is reduced to choosing between backing way down or showing himself for what he truly is through escalation, ultimately to that of physical violence that includes murder.  The Tyrant can never win, regardless of how many he may put down even to the point of taking away life itself.  The Tyrant can but only debase himself as he allows his corruption to dictate his thoughts and actions, because he is an abject cur, unworthy of a Freeman's consideration, save that the latter dispatch the former in defense of all that is good between men.

Tyrants and their games can be eliminated, but doing so requires the absolute commitment of men willing to don the mantle of the Freeman.  Without this in critical mass, humanity stands doomed.  What will you choose for yourself, the bracing competition of free living amid your peers, or the timid and tepid snooze-fest life of Weakman?

May this missive find you in good health, happiness, prosperity, and on the warrior's path of the Freeman.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.