The Only Solution

Anything in terms of economies that are non-trivial in size and scope constitute as matters of their very natures, large miulti-variate systems, the characteristics of which render them generally nonlinear. Therefore, while possibly predictable (and I contend it is often not so) in trivial microcosm, size not only matters, it fundamentally alters the nature of the beast such that economists can howl and shout about how things shall be, and the system may nonetheless do something entirely contrary.

But one thing has proven itself time and again over the thousands of years men have convened civilized marketplaces: freedom is ALWAYS and universally the condition that allows for optimal efficiency to reign, thereby delivering the greatest prosperity possible in any given world. This is the most basic truth that tyrants and wannabes refuse to accept, leading thereby and invariably to war, poverty, disease in all forms, misery, and death.

Liberty is not just the best solution to the challenges facing humanity; it is the *only* solution.

Blessings be upon one and all and do accept my best wishes.

Handling Media For Interviews Redux

In "A Strategy For Handling The Mainstream Media", we examined a simple method for protecting oneself from the skullduggery in which interviewers now so commonly engage for the purposes of defaming the people they interview.  Ambush interviews are now common enough, and regardless of an interviewers intentions, even his bumbling ineptitude and/or that of his editors and other handlers can turn into a nightmare, especially for public figures such as office holders, candidates, and other people of public interest.  The damage to reputation can prove very costly, as can be the task of proving one's case in civil court.  Best to properly set conditions upfront, prior to damage done such that you retain the power to forestall such catastrophes.

However, as suggested in the previous article, arriving at an interview with one's own camera crew might prove impractical for some.  There are two additional approaches to achieving the same end that we shall briefly discuss today.  The first is to simply bring one's own recording equipment and set it up in a manner suiting the interviewee's needs.  Good quality video recordings are now easily producible with the common cell phone.

Of utmost importance is an interviewee's setting of the conditions for granting the interview in the first place.  A short and likely incomplete list of conditions might look similar to the following:

1. A full, unedited copy of the interview is to be given over to the interviewee no less than 24 hours prior to broadcast.
2. The final broadcast edit is to be made available to the interviewee no less than 24 hours prior to broadcast.
3. Neither the interview, nor any portion or other edits thereof, may be broadcast without the explicit, written permission of the interviewee, who shall reserve the final authority to grant or withhold permission to broadcast, in what form, how many times, etc.  Interviewee holds ultimate editorial authority over the interview.
4. The interview remains the property of the interviewee in equal measure to the ownership interests of all other parties for a period of not less than 99 years from the date of interview.
5. If interviewer and/or his agents/superiors/employers choose to reject interviewee's requirements for broadcast, all copies of the interview are to be placed into the physical possession of the interviewee within 24 hours of rejection, and all property rights to the interview transfer solely to interviewee and/or his agent(s).
6. Interviewer holds 100% responsibility for the security of all interview materials, regardless of form, until such time as broadcast or other publication has been affected, or those materials have been securely returned to the interviewee.
7. The interview agreement must be put into written, contractual form, and perfected by all parties.

Few media organizations will go for these conditions, at least at first.  In order for a potential interviewee to win at this strategy, he must be willing to forgo all interviews for as long as it takes to find an interviewer willing to accede to these reasonable conditions.  But if enough of the truly interesting interviewees engage in this strategy, media outlets will then be faced with the choice of accepting such conditions, or no longer providing one of the major elements of broadcast journalism: the interview.  In time, I am confident that the networks would have little viable choice but to agree to such a set of conditions, all designed to keep the journalists honest.

So long as we play by their rules, they get to do almost anything they please.  The moment a critical mass stands tall and uses the leverage it possesses, the game will change and either the media will begin to pale in terms of their offerings, or they will toe the line of reason and straighten up their acts to align more closely with the fundamental ethics of their occupation.

Don't allow them the latitude to play you for a chump.  You have what they want, and by that virtue you can force the choice between conducting an upright interview, or doing without.  The other side of that coin rests with your obligation to be equally ethical in how you comport yourself throughout the process.

We don't have to allow these sorts to get away with that which we now witness on a daily basis.  Empower yourself discovering and developing ways and skills for countervailing the chicanery of scurrilous people.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Passivity V. Tyranny = Suicide

Jean-Paul Sartre:

"Understand finally this: if violence were to begin this evening, if neither exploitation nor oppression had ever existed in the world, perhaps concerted non-violence could relieve the conflict. But if the whole governmental system and your non-violent thoughts are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity only serves to place you on the side of the oppressors."

It is our passivity, regardless of our motives, that is killing liberty. I have been telling people this for thirty years, yet they reject active non-equivocation based in the extreme prejudice of knowing what it right between men, v. what is evil.

Passivity in the face of tyranny is tantamount to a self-imposed death sentence, whether it be the death of one's freedoms and the rights that evolve therefrom, or actual physical death at the hands of the butchers.  This is one area where the so-called "lefty" or "progressive" seems to hold an understanding superior to those who claim themselves far more broadly as champions of freedom and the liberties man's natural state of being implies.  I have found it astonishing that this might be the case, given that in reality those of a progressive ideology, are actually in favor of the very societal/governmental elements that lead to the destruction they claim they wish to avoid.  The irony is so thick there, one cannot cut it with a well-sharpened saw.

But when examined a bit more carefully, we see that one of the problems with left-looking individuals is threefold.  

Firstly, their conception of freedom is stilted in that it is ever so narrow in scope.  Leftists tend to see freedom as far more narrowly circumscribed than does, say, an anarchist.  For example, sexual libertinism sits at the forefront of the list of progressive priorities for individual prerogatives.  To be able to engage in whatever sexually-based action one wishes, regardless of its nature, is a very large part of how progressives view their very narrowly defined universe individual freedom.  Drug abuse is yet another, and while in principled terms they may be said to be correct on each count, the fact that these two issues constitute perhaps the majority of the corpus of what they view as valid human praxeological prerogative give clear indication of just how narrow is their world view.

Contrarily, the progressive views the right to keep and bear arms as non-existent, and that all arguments in favor of that right are invalid and should be met with utmost bile, venom, and in many cases violence of any sort needed to see their wills made manifest in terms of daily practice.

Secondly, the progressive view of liberty is perforce and by it's one-sided and unprincipled nature, hypocritical.  "Only our list of liberties is valid.  Nobody else's counts, save where and how they coincide with ours."  Progressives are champions of a very narrowly circumscribed view of freedom and are absolutely and most violently opposed to any deviations from the boundaries that have been defined for them and that which they accept with such blind intolerance of even the least variation.

Thirdly, the mean progressive paradoxically favors the application of tyrannical force pursuant to the imposition of his stunted notion of freedom upon the entirety of the human race.  He makes no allowance for the diverse interests of individuals and cultures, a truth made so ironic in the face of his never ceasing pulpit-pounding regarding "diversity, inclusion, and equality".

And yet, they well understand that refusing to actively defy and countervail that which they (often correctly) see as tyranny is the express-lane to the loss of all hope for achieving their utopian goals, such as they may be.  This is a lesson that all freedom-loving men need to learn, understand, embrace, and pursuant to which to develop the requisite habits of intolerance with respect to tyrannical acts, and how they choose to comport themselves with regard to those acts, both philosophically and as matters of daily practice, both as individuals and as members of a population whose fundamental daily goals includes the maintenance of proper individual liberty and the rights which follow therefrom.

To tolerate violation carries with it the implicit acceptance of the trespass.  This in turn implies that what would otherwise constitute a felonious encroachment upon the sovereign rights of Freemen, is with grave mistake elevated to the status of a valid act.  Few human follies rise to this level of wild and wooly danger.  Every human failure resulting in tolerating the intolerable serves only to bolster the tyrant's position and his arguments in favor of his perfidies.  It endangers not just the individuals against whom the crimes are committed, but by extension all humanity as such acts become rapidly normalized and deeply entrenched in the human psyche.  Our history is rotten with examples.

Passivity in the face of tyranny is death to one's freedom, not to mention culture.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Public Governance

It should be clear to anyone who has given careful thought to the notion of "government", that it is not the correct solution to the issue and challenges of general governance.  This is most especially true of the governmental architectures of the so-called "nation states" of what we may call the relatively modern era of, say, the past 300 or so years.  By their very architectures, "governments" thwart the natural propensities of men in ways the outcomes of which have shown to be detrimental to humanity as a whole.  Perhaps the greatest ways in which such thwarting has damaged the fabric of human civilization lies in the invalid prohibitions on behavior that are consensual, and therefore not criminal.

Take dueling, for example.  One's initial response to the notion tends to be that of revulsion and a feeling that we speak of a self-evident absurdity.  Even if we were all to agree that it is in fact so, that we agree on the matter, it does not follow that we are within our rights to prohibit such activities so long as the participants engage in it with informed consent, and bring no others to harm in the process.   This may be difficult for many to accept, and yet it is clearly true once one gets past the initial, conditioned response that was spoon fed them by the culture in which they came up.

We humans have an overwhelming propensity for falsely criminalizing non-criminal behavior that we find objectionable.  Some might chafe at homosexuality and wish it criminalized, which once it was and remains so in many jurisdictions around the world.  Others support the false criminalization of illicit drug possession, use, manufacture, and distribution.  The list of criminalized non-crimes is rather long, the prohibitions of which have served no demonstrable good, but have in fact rather damaged the social fabric.

Bear in mind also that just because we acknowledge the validity of public governance (v. "private"), it does not follow that we condone the notion of "government".  The general belief of many self-professed lovers of liberty is that anything non-private is "statist", the single gravest insult such people can hurl at another human being, in their eyes.  This amounts to presenting a false dichotomy that hog-ties the mind, thereby eliminating avenues of alternate solutions.  There are few hazards so grave as cutting off valid solution spaces, especially for some of the more serious problems, yet this is precisely what many self-described "anarchists", "voluntarists", and "agorists" do when they rail and rave at anyone who fails to toe their line of across-the-board privatization of the entirety of human existence.

What such people have failed to properly dope out is that the essential problem is not that of the evils of public governance, but rather the evil that is the very concept of government.  Governance is an activity, whereas conceptually speaking government is a thing, an object unto itself with an existence separate and independent from humanity itself.  The idea of government may not have originated with the intention of becoming this monobloc object in the minds of people, but it has largely become precisely that.  This is how many people view "government", along with the attendant and often tacit assumptions of its vast inherent powers and authority, not so much to govern, but to rule.  Consider the old saw, "you can't fight city hall", as just one example of how the notion of objectively real government has distorted human perception so wildly out of sound shape that we now as matters of average behavior tend to obey with great and timid compliance any any all edicts issued therefrom, regardless of how wildly idiotic, dangerous, and criminally violative of our rights as Freemen.

As I have written elsewhere, remove all people from the earth, and with them "government" vanishes without a trace.  Government is the root of the problem, along with the darker side of human nature, regardless whether public or private.  Private government, in fact, poses at least an equal threat to liberty, and make no mistake about it, whatever you call it, when people become unaccountable for their actions as agents of "government", a people are already well on their ways to being lost.

Therefore, it is imperative that human beings utterly reject the concept of the object: government.  Rather, they must embrace the notion of governance which, properly defined and administered, can but only produce far improved results where liberty is preserved and tyranny stamped out with brutal and cold indifference.  When we see people we now view as Merecogs in the machinery of "government", we tend to see them as unassailable because we tend to see "government" in the same way.  They become sacrosanct by extension and association, and why?  Because "government" says so.  A prime example of this is the fact that in most US jurisdictions, if you so much as place a friendly hand on the shoulder of a police officer, he is falsely authorized to arrest you and have you charged with a felony.  It is absurd, and yet it is a reality as common as dirt.

In this way have we built our own prisons of thought and perception with indomitable walls that cannot be gotten over, under, around, through, or be sapped.

Also be clear on the fact that in a truly free land, governance is the first responsibility of the individual, the duty which he discharges primarily by governing himself in accord with the principles of proper human relations.  This is key, because the purpose of having agents of public governance is mainly to deal with those cases where self-governance has failed to meet the standard.  Murders, robberies, rapes, beatings, and other real and actual crimes are the purview of governing authority, and not the valid praxeological prerogatives of Freemen.  Without the proper comportment of what I will conversationally term the "vast majority" of a people, governing agents become necessarily either overwhelmed wherein they quit their now-precarious positions, or they turn to responses that seem uncomfortably close to those of tyrants.  Even this latter may be valid when grave circumstance leaves no choice in what we may call an existential crisis, but such powers may validly hold only for the shortest of periods until such time as people recover proper possession of themselves and return to the ways of proper behavior in the company of others.  History shows, as we are living through this very circumstance as of this writing, that once such emergency powers have been assumed, those who have taken those reins are often loathe to relinquish them.  But this is a problem more of human nature than of the architecture and implementation of proper governance in a free land.

The moment we strip away the false facade of "government", exposing it as nothing more than a collection of fellow human beings with no greater authority to act than your own, the pictures in our minds suddenly, radically, and somewhat indelicately change.  When you see the police officer in this way, he no longer stands as an irresistible monument of state-sponsored force against those over whom he lords.  Rather, he is at best a public servant beholden to serve you in all the theoretically proper ways, and at worst a murdering coward and felon.  This alteration of one's perrceptions, of course, does nothing to alter the behavior of cops.  Resist their predations and other felonies against you, and you stand to be violated in ways up to an including being murdered outright.  But this change in perception, while impotent to alter third-party behavior overnight, at least leads to the possibility of better times to come,.  If a critical mass of public awareness is reached, hand in hand with the necessary attitudinal changes by those same people such that public tolerance of tyranny wanes to a point where people become willing to put their lives, their honors, and their fortunes to risk for the sake of their own liberty, as well as that of all those for whom they hold love and affection, a deep transformational improvement cannot be far off.

With the right change in the perceptions of enough people, the tyrant and his agents are backed into a corner wherein the choice is foisted upon them: cease all malversation, or pay with your lives.  This is a reasonable path to change, and I daresay it is the only one precisely because so many people in positions of power tend to wander from the path of reason such that no message other than that of the threat of imminent personal destruction gets through to them.  Their positions lead them to behave as petulant, spoiled, well-armed children prone to pitching tantrums that know few limits when the proles fail to toe their lines.

Privatizing government does nothing to ameliorate this situation precisely because the minds of the governed remain saddled with the same baggage with respect to the ways in which government is perceived, and therefore regarded.  Furthermore, privatization invariably leads to diverse definitions of "proper governance", with nothing in principle to assure that any given jurisdiction will indeed govern properly with respect to the principles of proper human relations, which is what governance is supposed to be all about.  Furthermore, there is nothing in principle to stop such a private jurisdiction from running off the rails, especially when they have at their disposal a body of armed, able, and willing enforcers, a commodity syndicate all too easily obtained and bent to one's will, especially when imbued with the imprimatur of "authority", whether valid or false. In most cases, as may be readily seen, it is the latter.

The advantage of public governance is that in the minds of people there tends to be the trend toward seeing the propriety and necessity of a uniformly architected code of guidance and control (when needed) that is to be uniformly administered such that justice is fair and equitable across all social lines, regardless of status, purport to authority, or any other phony baloney exception or claim to immunity from being held accountable.

You might now wish to point out that this is what we currently have as you read these words, and I would be forced to agree.  You might then point out that despite this standard, we are awash in corruption, political falderal, deceit, lies, injustice, and outright tyranny.  Once again, I would be obliged to acknowledge the truth of the fact.  And finally, you might then ask, "if this be the case, then your theory of the benefit of public governance is disproved", to which I would have to respond by saying "not so fast!"

The problem is not public governance per sé, but rather the fact that we the people fail to hold accountable those who commit gross and criminal violations upon the people to whom they are in principle beholden by virtue of their sworn oaths of office.  I have attempted to offer a fair swag at a remedy for this most grievous and dolorous circumstance with my idea for Amendment XXVIII (28) to the Constitution of the United States of America.  Therein I set forth the notion and basic architecture for holding sternly to account every human being who has sworn their oath of good faith and competent service to the people of America.  To my knowledge, no modern nation-state has ever yet saddled their governing administrators with such requirements, threats, risks, and grave punishments.  As in the Amendment, I maintain that when those vested in the Public Trust quake in nauseated, sweating apprehension at the very thought of committing a violation against those to whom they swore service, malversation will for all practical purposes become a relic all but forgotten.  Those few cases that would on occasion arise to the attention of the public would be punished with extreme prejudice, thus serving as good reminders to the rest of what awaits them when they misbehave as agents of governance, sworn to uphold and protect the very rights upon which they had trespassed without cause or authority.

I have asserted and I maintain that the solutions to tyranny are simple: hold the criminals who transgress against the Public Trust accountable in such a manner that none but the most severely insane criminals would dare engage.  The small handful of psychopaths failing to comport themselves to the reasonable standard may be fed to the flames with a clear conscience as the elimination of the most grave of threats to humanity's inherent freedoms and the rights that issue therefrom stands as a vlid response to such threats, just as shooting the ghost from a rapist's carcass is a most appropriate response by the intended victim.  Nail their wicked hides to the church door in the town square that all may bear witness to the condign fate of tyrants and their minions.  In the matters of governance under the specifications of Special Trust, only the most brutally non-equivocating responses will keep the wolves at bay.  Anything less invites and encourages the disaster that is today's human world.  This reality is harsh and in many ways ugly, but ask yourself this: is it any uglier than the results of seventy five years of Soviet-style communism?  It is uglier than the ongoing tyranny that is the Red Chinese "government"?  Is it uglier than the Khmer Rouge picnic in Cambodia?  Idi Amin?  Hitler?  Any of the other grand butchers of human history who served only to sow death, disease, poverty, and misery unto all whose lives they touched?

What would you prefer, given there are no other practically effective alternatives: millions murdered in wars and under the various tyrannical purges of murdering lunatics, or a world that holds the tiny minorities of such people to account for their crimes in a manner that leaves the rest of us not just with reasonable feelings of assurance that we are protected from such people as a general rule, but that we are all give something about which to think as the hangman's rope snaps tight upon the neck of the man who would see your children relegated and reduced to abject servitude, and perhaps even extinction?

I, for one, am fully in favor of killing off smaller numbers of tyrannical administrators of governance, rather than allowing those same people to murder innocents by the boxcar load on trains that stretch for miles into the vanishing horizon.  It is not that I wish to see people brought to great harm.  It is precisely that I wish nobody to suffer such fates, while recognizing the irremediable nature of the tyrannical personality type.  I am willing to see evil for what it is, meet it head-on, and remove it as a threat to good and decent, and peaceable people who wish nothing more than to live their lives as they see fit while bringing no harm to their fellows.  This is not an ill-reasoned desire, but is the very essence of the lives of Freemen.  Do what thou wilt, but bring no unjust harm.

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

Private Governance Is Not A Solution

The problem with most anarchists and those of similar philosophial bents is that they categorically reject governance.  In their understandable desire to see the elimination of the evils of "government", they toss all dedicated public  governing activity to the winds with the claim that the "market" will act as the governing mechanism, as if by its own and seemingly magical accord.  This notion holds understandably strong appeal with those who love the notion of freedom, but does so in a way similar to the way in which the Star Trek franchise of low-quality science fiction appeals to its fans; the great benefits without having to do any real work.  What these presumed lovers of liberty have failed to calculate in this model are a few factors that arise as problems, at least one of them even greater than that of so-called "government".  

Allow me to explain.

Firstly and for example, when we speak of "private courts" as do so many anarchists, as being the free-market solution to issues of crime, tort, equity, and justice, there is the tacit assumption that those courts are to be beholden to those whom they ostensibly serve.  This notion is all well and good, so far as it goes, but it never goes quite far enough.  When such a private court goes rogue or corrupt in some other manner, and here it matters not whether it happens once, multiple times, or even becomes a habitual phenomenon, it matters no whit whether it is taken to task if the parties for whom injustice has been served have been irreparably damaged.  This is especially true in cases where significant time has passed since the beginning of a sentence and time has already been served.  How does one compensate those whose irreplaceable time has been stolen from them?

Yes, one can compensate with money, but that is a timid replacement for time, careers, opportunities, and family lost, as well as the rest of the grand miseries heaped upon the innocent without either just cause or authority.  And who is to say that the courts in question will be held accountable, or even that they can be?

There is an angle played by anarchists that says the competitive marketplace will handle such situations, but of this I hold grave doubt.  For one thing, who will establish the authority for a man or group thereof to hold a court accountable for its failures?  By what authority does such a man or body thereof claim the valid power to do so?  What is their standard of judgment, who gets to establish it, and by what authority do they do so?  Of one thing we may rest assured is that such a court will deny any such authority, which brings us right back to the original problem we face today: an effective "governMENT" having been established and having positioned itself above those whom it is supposed to act as a servant, but in point of practical fact acts as master.

Secondly, the next grand assumption is that there will be market competition whereby multiple courts act in a given market space to countervail the excesses, corruptions, and incapacities of the another; the good old idea of "balance of powers".   What of monopolies?  Consider the case where a court does better enough than the rest to put their competition out of business, thereby becoming, let us assume, a regional monopoly.  What is to stop them from pulling the Walmart trick whereby as the competition recedes into extinction, the prices are then gradually raised, leaving shoppers little choice, save perhaps to drive long distances to find better venues?  What is to stop such a monopoly from going corrupt, and once done, who will hold them accountable?  Bear in mind the wholly predictable human habit of seeking greater powers with a stern determination never to allow oneself to relinquish that power, once acquired.

What does one do when such a court comes into power and stands unchallenged?  What does a population do when such a court becomes practically unchallengeable by any means other than that of open warfare, replete with killing, maiming, terrorizing the innocent, and the destruction of all manner of valuable property?

Such issues are never to my awareness addressed by the proponents of these theoretically free-market driven societies in any detail, save to assert that the market will see to them, presumably in a fair, equitable, just, and non-violent manner.  I do not buy this for a moment, the reason being that the people of the United States of America have on their books every means of doing precisely this, and yet now suffer under one of the most virulently corrupt and dangerous governments on the planet at the time of this writing.

Let us imagine a group of citizens manages to overthrow such a monopolized court.  What then?  Does that population go without the benefit of a venue in which they may seek justice?  For how long?  What of the pending cases of the overthrown court?  What of the cases closed where people are in prison for crimes they may not have committed?  What of torts that never actually happened, yet for which parties had been held responsible?  What of equities imposed that were not at all equitable?  What of judgments that can now no longer be trusted in any manner or degree?  What of the records of such events?  What if no other private court steps up to fill the void?  How would such a court be held accountable for its actions?  By what standards and procedures would the new court take up its position? 

The litany of such queries is vast and many of those questions lead to mine fields of thorny issues that are not so easily solved.

Let us bear in mind here that these courts are privately established, privately held, and privately operated.  There is no principled mechanism by which such entities can be held accountable for their actions, save that the people break out the torches and pitchforks.  Each process of establishment of such courts would be private matters, technically beyond the question of the marketplace.  Granted, such establishments would almost certainly have to toe a line upfront.  But in time and as it gained effective power, such courts would invariably seek to increase their influences, even if done in very thin increments that do not arouse the suspicions and possible anger of the people served, which is precisely what commonly happens with so-called "governments" in universal fashion, if at varying degrees of advance.

And what of arresting those accused of crimes who have been brought before a judge? Under what authority does one human being appropriate the liberties of another man, effectively kidnapping him for judgment by others?  I cannot say that such authority does not exist, but that its application can run amok most wildly and in very short order, unless there are rules.  But who drafts them?  By what authority do they do so and by what standard?  Who holds them accountable to the integrity of the rules they pass into what we may call "effective Law"?

What of the arrestee who objects to the private court to which he has been taken, perhaps claiming his distrust of the ability to get a fair shake there?  What if there are no other venues in the given locale?  What of the difference of opinion on such matters of trust between arrestor and arrestee?  Will the private court have its own private enforcers to affect such arrests?  How would such enforcers, whether officers of the court in question, or ordinary citizens, be held accountable for their actions, most particularly in the case where the accused is found to have been innocent of the charges?

We could go on for days hammering out the various questions, not to mention the ways in which practical administration can go wrong.  Furthermore, by now we should be able to see that there stands a grand gorilla in this room that speaks to the need for a consistent and universal standard by which justice is best to be administered, however imperfectly at times.  Private means private, which means that within the bounds of the entity, what they say, goes.  Anyone not seeing the great and looming hazard there is either not paying attention, or suffers from some grave deficiency, mental or moral.

And so we come in a sense, full-circle, in that it can be seen that a public system of courts remains the best solution in this imperfect world.  But a proper public court system would differ from that under which we now suffer in some fundamental ways.  More broadly speaking, a proper system of governance would be public, yet very different, not so much structurally, but rather in terms of the nature of the powers of the parties in question, that is, the servants and those whom they are charged to serve.

Today, "government" stands as the de-facto master, the people being the serfs; the proles; those whose faces are effectively smashed with Orwell's proverbial boot.  In a properly formed and administered system of governANCE, the word "government" would be dismissed from service, once and for all time.  The powers of the people to regulate most directly the ways in which the servants of governance (we may call them SOGs just to be cute) comport themselves in the discharge of their duties, would be clear and unassailable in principle.  Making such powers practically invincible would, as in all cases, be left to the people.  Americans hold that power now, yet they have allowed themselves to be cowed into serfdom by forces that have consistently acted against their better interests: the interests of their status as Freemen.  The responsibility for this dolorous and rue-worthy outcome rests almost wholly on the people.  While it may be said that the so-called "politicians" had neither cause nor authority to engage in their felonious perfidies against the people to whom they swore their oaths, it can come as no surpriser that they have done so, just as it is no surprise that a man is bitten when he carelessly chooses to play with a sidewinder.  It is only to be expected that a political office holder or other agent of "government" is going to inevitably go wrong, left to his devices unsupervised.

Because this devolution is perfectly predictable in effectively all cases, there can be only one practicable solution: the people must hold and exercise the power to hold accountable all such agents of governance who stray from the narrow path that defines their duties, such as they may be in each case.  The people must be able to punish such violators of the Public Trust in ways brutal and cruel such that all who occupy positions of Special Trust (in other words, SOGs) are given the occasion graphic reminder of the tenuous nature of their positions and that they serve at the pleasure of the people.  I have outlined the basics of such powers and responsibilities in my Amendment XXVIII to the Constitution of the United States of America, a proposal I would see added to the document yesterday and made the Law of the land forthwith.

When the people are able, ready, and eager to bring violators of the Public Trust to justice, and to mete out grave punishments for those duly convicted of their crimes against those to whom they swore oaths of good faith and competent service upon their words and their honors, the face of the world will change to vast improvement in short order.

We suffer the slings and arrows not of the chances of outrageous fortune, but of the mostly synthetic machinations of other men, whether their actions are the products of blundering incompetence, good but wrong-headed intention, or outright criminality.  It is up to us to change this.  There is no cavalry coming to rescue us from the boogie-men of "government".  We must be our own cavalry.  We must insist upon the changes needed to wrest our freedoms from the hands of the most dangerous men on the planet, keep those liberties close to our bosoms, and guard them with Patrick Henry's jealously, the more greenly covetous, the better.

At the end of the day, what is required is knowledge and determination sufficient to the maintenance of liberty.  There will always be those who seek to take from you that which is yours without your consent.  The only way to adequately ensure agains this is an attitude of absolute intolerance for trespass in enough of a population to make the consequences far too ghastly to even contemplate.

The problem with "government" lies in the minds of men, and not in anything materially substantive.  There is nothing wrong with "government" as a concept, but the practice tends to be far removed from theory.  That can be remedied, but the cost is high, requiring a vast adjustment in the attitudes of most people.  When people take "government" as something that actually exists in itself, independent of humanity, they have sealed their fates as serfs and possibly even as slaves.  But when people recognize that "government" is nothing other than a collection of other people no different from themselves, everything becomes open to change in that they see their own authority to hold to account those in whom they have vested their belief that the agents of "government" will execute the functions of governance with competence and faith to that trust.

The solutions to the problems addressed here lie with you and you alone.  Get yourself educated; develop a love of liberty; learn to see the challenges and risks as blessings of freedom and not a curse. Finally, spread the gospel of freedom to everyone you know and have them do the same.  It is not too late to reclaim that which has been so wrongly and feloniously stolen away, but you have to act.  Waiting for someone else to come to the rescue will assure your fate as a less-than-human.

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

Practical Governance: Basic Ideas

For years I have frequented fora that have been ostensibly devoted to the idea of establishing anarchic societies.  One of the common characteristics I have observed in such groups has been the glaring lack of any practical architectures for implementation.  The discussions of such arrangements remind me of the South Park episode where the underpants gnomes' plan goes something like:

 "Collect underpants --> ??? --> Profit."  

In other words, they had no idea how to get from point A to point Z.  Such has been the experience in my discussions with self-proclaimed "anarchists".  The truly alarming aspect of such interactions has been to witness how supposedly intelligent adults neither see the problem, nor want to see it, often referring to those who make reference to the practical challenges of free societal life as "statists", the most grievous insult they can hurl.  

So let us at least try a fifty-thousand foot peek at what would be needed in order to materially express a free land where neither was there a "government" to insult the rights of men, nor a mishmash of chaotic tribes killing each other for any of the usual human reasons and justifications in grand old feudal fashion.

Recall, if you will, that "anarchy" means "no rulers". 

This does not mean "no rules". 

Therefore, if there are rules, then people must be held to the lines said rules draw around each member of the population, lest there be no reason to have rules in the first place. This raises two fundamental issues. 

Firstly, if we are to have rules, they must be objectively complete, correct, and clear. One of the main reasons so many people have come to hold "law" in such contempt is precisely because most "law" is not Law, but mere statute which represent nothing better than the almost universally capricious will of legislators, with little to no respect for the rights of the people. Statutes that falsely criminalize illicit drugs, for example, are not Law. The same may be said for statutes that prohibit prostitution. Tax statutes are one of the more egregious examples of non-Law that is enforced at the point of the sword with grim vigor by drooling sadists who seem to actually believe they are doing right. 

Secondly, and conditional upon the fact of the point above, if we are to have objectively proper rules to which people must conform their behaviors, such as not murdering one another, for example, then we must have in place the means of dealing with those who violate those boundaries. 

In anarchic circles, many believe that such administration of Law can be accomplished "privately", and that any such duties performed by a "state" is inherently evil precisely because the "state" is the administrator. This is likely true, but not for the reasons most seem to believe.  Let us remind ourselves that the "state" does not really exist, nor "government".  These are confabulations that have no material existence of their own, independent of the human mind.  Remove the people and both "state" and "government" vanish into the mists as if my magic.  When we strip away such mental fakery, the mind is lead closer to the real truth that these purported institutions are nothing more than mobs of individual human beings holding no greater authority than yourself to make demands upon one's fellow human beings.  When we strip away these veils that cloud and often blind us to the greater truths of our inter-human relationships, our thoughts are immediately freed to draw conclusions to which no agent of any "state" wants his peons to arrive: that said agent has no authority, and that even the most cursory examination of the seemingly endless oceans of statutory fiats exposes their gross invalidity and often blatantly ironic criminality.

The so-called "private" justice systems to which so many anarchists appear to have wed themselves give rise to risks of the self-same sort, as well as to others that can be avoided, were we to correct the flaws in our current fare. 

For example, depending on how we define "private justice" there could arise what becomes an effective feudal system of private governance. Furthermore, the possibility exists for differing jurisdictions to have implemented widely differing notions of justice, crime, and so forth, such that the security of the individual who travels between such jurisdictions might never be quite certain.  Imagine waltzing over a line in a purple shirt or blouse and being immediately arrested and charged with a felony because purpole raiment is reserved only for administrators of Law.  For those who scoff at this as ridiculous, you need to read a little of the history of France and the French kings.  Is this what we really want?  Free lands must perforce be based in the principles of proper human relations, this being a core requirement and in no way an option, lest the administrators slide ever so slickly into the shoes of tyrants.

Such hazards exist no matter how one labels, or even structures their systems of rules and pursuant justice. 

We see it today, and privatizing what we now have is no guarantee that things would be any better, and that they may well devolve into something far, far worse. 

Furthermore, the argument that says in the case of a failed private justice system, that the "market" would simply put them out of business carries many flaws. For one thing, there is no assurance that the claims of market correction would prove out. Secondly, and more importantly, even if those claims did manifest, what about the miscarriages of justice that had already occurred? Will every case ever heard by those courts be reviewed and the wrongly convicted released with proper compensation?  Will the administrators of the presumably corrupted justice system be held accountable, and if so, by whom and by what means? Are we to assume that those administrators would go quietly into the hands of their accusers to be judged and possibly punished most severely? Given the almost universally consistent historical patterns in such matters, my expectation would be that not only would the accused give their accusers the finger, they would muster their forces to defend themselves with as much violence as would be necessary to avoid being held accountable. What of those cases where the private entity has acted justly and rightly, but yet another jurisdiction found otherwise? What about where one jurisdiction wishes to eliminate the competition in the spirit of good old fashioned human avarice?

The advantage to an authority that is "public" is that when properly structured and administered, those who comprise such institutions are given every incentive to act in accord with the propriety of their positions, accountable to those whom they serve.  In a so-called "private" justice system, no such conditions may be imposed upon the administrators and other members of the institution, for were they to be so restricted, there would be absolutely no functional difference between them and the public variant, and we are reduced to distinctions sans difference.

But what constitutes "properly structured and administered"?  The answer has several aspects, the minutiae of which we will not discuss here, and the first of which lies in the need for a very stern accountability standard where those who violate their oaths of good faith and competent service are called upon to face the most dire punishments that could even spill over into their immediate families in some cases, most especially in economic terms.  A properly authored oath of office/service would be an operational starting point with every individual required to swear such an oath, with the "people" willing and eager to hold violators accountable with a vigorous will to punish violators in the most grim fashions imaginable.  The Public Trust must be preserved at all cost, which means that unamended transgressions by those in positions of Special Trust, in violation of the rights of those to whom their oaths have been sworn, must be met with draconian consequences.

What I have described could be viewed as a "state", yet in my estimation it could as easily be viewed simply as a Public institution whose purpose is to provide a Constitutionally qualified service to the people without the same mental baggage that comes with the monikers of the "state" and "government".  The mental cancer of these appellations carriy deeply tacit notions of infallible and unchallengeable authority.  A "state" can get away with all manner of transgressions against the people that it is supposed to serve precisely because people tend to believe that it can, whether justly or otherwise.  A group of Constitutional Trustees in whom the Public Trust has been vested, however, carries a far different mental quality and effect; one that could be saved from morphing into that which is effectively identical to that of "state" and "government".

My suggestion is that we need to begin thinking in terms of governANCE, rather than those of governMENT.  Governance is an action, a function, and a role.  Psychologically speaking, "government" is a thing, an object in the minds of people that has become an irresistible juggernaut whose authority cannot be challenged; a thing in and of itself with an existence independent of human thought, this being perhaps the grandest and most dastardly lie ever foisted upon humanity.  The difference between the two is 100% fundamental insofar as they affect the minds of people; and always remember that mind is nearly everything.  Where mind goes, Brother Ass follows.  

In the case of "government", the power of belief in the lie of its material existence is immeasurable and of the most dangerous and destructive sort imaginable.  It is the single greatest factor in the erosion of our inherent liberties, and "Government" has by far been the single greatest source of human misfortune and misery since men raised the walls at Sumer.  The events of the twentieth century alone, with somewhere near two hundred millions murdered by "government" should be all the evidence needed by any nominally intelligent and morally intact adult to conclude that governMENT needs to go the way of the dodo in preference to governANCE, instituted not by nonexistent governMENT painted as a real and materially extant entity, but as affected by other men in whom that Special Trust has been vested and who may be called to account at any moment for their actions by any other citizen of the realm.  Such people govern; they do not rule. They govern in accord with Law, and not mere statute, nor do they make it up as they go along.  They would be held to a strict standard of good faith and competent service in the discharge of their duties pursuant to their roles as agents of guardianship of the rights of all men.  Such men are to be sentinels and champions of the liberties of all men, and not the destroyers thereof.

Instilling this mindset would likely prove a monumental task, but what other choice is there - to sit in the wash of the current status quo, waiting idly for the death of all that is good between men in the wake of a "government" that has so very clearly lost its mind?

We should all want proper governance, while rejecting "government" as the administrative agent in pursuit thereof.  Proper governance begins and ends with you, and not some airy-fairy notion of a "government" pledged to watch over and defend your rights, which has been the prevailing idea for thousands of years and which has proven a universal failure.  

Protecting each other's rights should be a paramount consideration of our daily lives, but this requires work and an attitude vastly different from that which today prevails in gross and overwhelming majority.  We have failed at this most important task with pyrotechnic misery, entrusting ourselves, our rights into the hands of the most questionable characters imaginable.  If I suffer Themme to violate the rights of my fellows, who will be there for me when Theye come knocking at my door?  You need to think on that very carefully and for as long as it takes for you to come to the correct conclusion.  Governance is a task that "government" has proven itself incapable of doing on a consistently and sufficiently proper basis in even a single case to which one might point since men chose civilization over the savage life of the hunter-gatherer.  If we are going to acknowledge the need to respect every man's rights, which is the gateway condition to every man's proper freedom, we must then also accept the responsibilities that go with such recognition.  As the old saying goes, freedom isn't free - nor is it inexpensive.

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

Making Sense Of The Nonsensical

As of this writing, the world appears to be going further into madness, especially in the developed west, and most particularly in America.

Consider the rise of the so-called "woke" movement, which strikes me as closer to a bowel movement than anything even remotely worth one's while.  Nearly everything about them is ridiculous, often flying past the line of hard idiocy.  Wokeness rose suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, aided and abetted in great part by the so-called "established media" that includes the major network broadcast entities such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc. 

Consider for a moment the odd, yet striking change in the way the media have responded to the nonsense of wokeness.  Not very long ago, say thirty years, those selfsame news outlets would have at least questioned the rise of world views that bespoke brain lesions or other mental disorder.  Males becoming females, just because they say they are?  Blind adherence to the equally blind assertions of anthropogenic global warming that thus far show no evidence in data as having a basis?  The shift from "anthropogenic" global warming to simple "global warming", and then a further backpedal to "climate change", a term devoid of any solidly palpable meaning, clearly intended to instill fear, dread, angst, and all manner of other destructive emotions in those whose personal corruptions include fear and ignorance.  At this point, the campaign has been so wildly successful, we have tens of millions of Americans who still cleave to the utterly and transparently vacuous nature of the claim that the climate is changing, portending doom for all.

Sowing fear, creeping dread, and outright terror is an age old tactic for gaining political compliance from a population, and it works like a charm every time.

But today I have a different and very specific angle to address: that of the "population bomb", yet another questionable assertion so stridently forwarded by the adherents of Malthus.

Not so very long ago the monikers of "globalist" and "internationalist" were universally and strenuously denied by all to whom those labels were applied, mainly in a clearly accusatory tone.  Today, those same people not only admit and embrace those appellations, they wear them on their sleeves with a smug pride that leaves decent men wanting to slap them across their faces such that some teeth roll right along the flight path.  The globalists have come out of the closet, guns blazing, devoid of any apologies for the perfidious insanities in which they so lustfully marinate themselves.

One of the central themes of the globalist jag is that of "overpopulation".  The notion that the earth is overpopulated with humans is forwarded not as a suspicion, a fear, a guess, or a theory, but as axiomatic truth that lays beyond dispute.  This malthusian view is so pervasive in their core beliefs that it has been made manifest in documents of institutions such as the United Nations, the so-called "Agenda 21" document being the prime example.  Therein we find all manner of wild hand-wringing prognostications of the disasters waiting to befall all humanity if the human population is not reduced.  

Interestingly, nowhere in the document does it give any details as to which populations are to be trimmed, by what means, by what methods, or in what time frame.  The document is rotten and lousy with vague innuendo portending the dire consequences awaiting humanity, just around a mist-shrouded corner.

The internationalist agenda hides in plain sight before the world.  The population must be reduced, and there will be no questioning of that indisputable fact, according to the all-knowing wisemen of the globalist cadre.

In 2019 a virus so suddenly arose, having originated in Wuhan China†.  It's official name is SARS-Covid-2, peddled to the public as "Covid19".  The media campaign hyping the deadly nature of the virus was full-on almost from day one as the news outlets quickly lapsed into paroxysms of apocalyptic doom for all humanity, particularly if even one person failed to wear a mask and get his "vaccination".  This was a psyop of epic proportions, pursuant to the immediate goal of gaining the broadest level of compliance to the tacit mandate as possible.  The fear-mongering machinery was at full throttle for two full years, the level of compliance failing to meet what I think would have been the likely expectations, yet still reasonably regarded as a wild success by almost any standard with nearly seventy percent of Americans having been jabbed with the non-vaccine.

And now we are seeing a heretofore never encountered phenomenon: people of all age groups suddenly and unceremoniously dropping dead where they stand, whether walking down the sidewalk, food shopping, getting a haircut, or whatever. But this, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the non-vaccine those people received on the initial promise that it would keep them safe from the virus that had a measured survival rate of 99.6%. Careful consideration of the promise reveals it a semantically tricky and possibly true pledge, for it is unlikely that the virus got them, but rather the non-vaccine itself. My what a tangled web we have woven for ourselves, courtesy of our non-critical acceptance of assertions that quickly proved to be false, prima facie.

Now to the real point: that of who shall live and who shall be sacrificed.  The borders of America have been opened wide since the inauguration of Joe Biden, with torrents of illegal aliens pouring into America, apparently immune to all the demands of immunization against C19.  What do we suspect may be an intended outcome of this circumstance?  If the non-vaccine is indeed the cause of all these sudden death cases, it will be the well established middle class that stands to be hollowed out in the event that this phenomenon grows in time, assuming it cannot be stayed by any medial means known to common medicine.

Assuming this is by design and not, as some claim, the product of a long chain of collectively impossible coincidences, why would the globalists endeavor so?  The likely answer is plain, clear, and simple: the elite are eliminating what they see as competition.  I suspect that third-worlders represent tomorrow's serf labor, cleaning toilets, sweeping streets, lugging bricks, and so on.  They carry no intellectual complication and are well bred to obedience, courtesy of the despots of the nations whence they came.  They are used to being told what to do and occupying stations of servitude.  Most or all the intellectual and attitudinal  competition, having been removed, the remaining elite are then freed to run the world in any manner they please, their grip upon the throats of their servant class beyond dispute and invincible because those people have no idea what freedom is, have no interest in it, and are thankful that they live and serve in a place better than that from which they fled.

The American middle class has long stood as the greatest remaining obstacle to global dominion.  The globalists want to rule it all, that goal thwarted by the mere existence of that middle class population.  Therefore, the middle class of America must perforce be eliminated.  But the elite will not want to live in a world where everyone is elite.  What fun would that be?  Who'd take out the garbage and wash the toilet?  No sir, the elite absolutely require a servant class who will do all the dirty jobs delicate hands refuse.  Besides, those who enjoy ruling have to have those over whom to lord.  This is not possible with the American middle class, especially those of the white persuasion, who are overly prone to displays of the middle finger when the false authorities overstep some line.  The elites appear to be done with being patient and want their cake now.  Elimination of those who stand in their way would now appear as the only solution.

And so here we find ourselves, the guinea pigs in a global experiment in population culling that stands to best ensure success for the perpetrators without overly risking potentially fatal backlashes.  After all, if the vast majority of the people believe that those in power are not to blame for the catastrophe befalling them, why attack them?  Quite the contrary, the victims are most likely to turn to their murderers for the help they so desperately seek.  This is a brilliantly neat approach, if it is indeed what is happening.  But if it is not, then what else explains what we are witnessing?  Coincidence and happenstance?  Not even remotely credible as an offering, so let us not even bother going there.

At this juncture, I see no other viable explanation in the face of everything that has gone before, and that which is currently unfolding, for example the grandual backpedaling of the very same authorities who so stridenly demanded our obedience just a few short years ago as they now admit in dribs and drabs that the non-vaccine are ineffective in all the ways promised, the talk now drifting slowing to an admission that those poisons are, indeed, deadly introductions that are taking life from those foolish enough to have been cowed by the threats and fear-mongering.

It cannot as yet be asserted that these notions are anything more than speculation, but once again I would ask what alternative better explains that which we now are experiencing?  I am open of mind to all well-reasoned alternatives.

For those of you who, like myself, have managed thus far to remain untainted by the jab, I would think very carefully and several times over before succumbing to the tactics designed to twist your arm such that you comply.  At this point, the jab appears as a nasty end to one's life, something I confidently assume is not the outcome desired by anyone.

May God watch over us and help us deliver ourselves from the clutches of these rotten human beings who presume themselves worthy of continuance over us.

Be well, keep your brains in gear, and as always please accept my best wishes.

†It is always instructive to note when the powers that be are up to nothing good.  In this case, it was early reported that the C19 virus issued from a bioweapons facility in Wuhan, and that initial examination revealed clear indications of a corona virus that had been significantly modified by human hands.  In a matter of a week, two at the most, all such references were scrubbed from major news sources with the shiny new official line of lies set into place that ignored all the glaring questions that might have given rise to revelatory responses unwanted by the perpetrators of what now is clearly mass murder on a scale hearkening back to the twentieth century despots such as Stalin and Mao.

Baby Boomers May Suck, But So Does Everyone Else.

In recent years I have found myself amused most drolly by the youngins  who refer to those of my generation as "Boomers", meant as a pejorative.  It is a bit childish, just as are all such weak attempts at insult.  But to those people, and all others on the planet, I do have something to say along those lines.

Despite being otherwise decent and intelligent people, my generation (baby boom) turned out for the most part to be horrible parents. They are, after all, responsible for the so-called "millennial", who in their turn gave rise to "generation Z", a raft of functional weaklings and toddlers in grown bodies who think they are smart, when in fact they are woefully the opposite, again speaking to the mean.

How did so bright a generation give rise to the utter wasteland that is the major portion of this most recent generation of "adults"? One major answer is actually quite simple: they fell for the bait of the likes of that scurrilous clown, Benjamin Spock, and decided they would be friends with their children, rather than proper parents, based on the false belief that it is important that they be liked by their offspring.  Few things could be further from the truth.  This may seem an innocent enough position to assume, but it is in fact the basis of the current destruction we are witnessing nationwide as the nation falls to wrack and ruin.

And so we have managed through our good intentions to muck the world up beyond all recognition, and possibly past the point of redemption. But being a low-IQ optimist, I cling to the barest hair-split of hope that this miasma of raving stupidity and abhorrently poor attitudes and habits may yet be corrected. But in order to do so, the first step will be to forgive each other: the young for our unintentional errors, and we, for their wildly misguided world views that, after all, were made possible due to our own errors in child-rearing.

Imagine the utter fit that Theye would have, were we, the warring parties to stop, shake hands, let bygones be bygones, and begin to rebuild the perceptual commons where decency, respect, good manners, basic sense, tolerance of the tolerable, and all the other blessings of freedom are the norm, the old becoming new once more. Theye (those in real material power in the world) would toss a colossal conniption and we would be able to confidently expect all manner of problems to arise, whether those of an economic nature, in finance, commodities, wars, and so forth, because the last thing they want is for you and I to shake hands and learn to become friendly. When that happens, Theye are finished, because without the manifold antagonisms that keep us divided, and therefore distracted, we would be free to come together as one in the political sense of recognizing who is the real enemy of humanity. 

It's not Republicans or Democrats, lefties or righties, conservative or progressive, men or women: it's the elite and we could de-ball them in very short order, were we to forgive one another and get to the business of restoring liberty to the people of planet Earth.

We don't have to all be in love with one another. Certainly our differences would not vanish, but our reactions to those differences would. Rather than wishing all manner of horrors upon one another, we would respectfully disagree where we differ, yet be generous enough to allow each other our lives and views and preferences. Such as development would drive the Tyrant mad with frustration and fear because he already knows that the moment we stop the back-biting, we might turn eyes in common toward him, his lackeys, and begin to divine what it is he has really been doing to us all this time.  In such a case, it would spell the end of things for them all, which means Theye must prevent it from occurring at any and all cost.   

There is no possible way, short of nuking or plaguing the entire planet, that Theye can successfully dominate us if we refuse their false authority; authority that exists in terms of real world effect only because we accept it as real, when in fact it is literally nothing at all beyond mere belief.  So long as we believe, we tend to comply.  So long as we comply, the false assertion of authority becomes effectively real.  It is a house of cards that stands because we fail to take in even the most meager breath, which is all that is required to blow it down to its very foundation.

Freedom is a heartbeat away, yet it is impossibly distant, not because it is itself impossible, but because we make it so when we play Theire game, nearly every one of us being in that diversion up to our eyeballs. Why else do we have so many people tearing out their hair with hatred for this one or those over there? Theye are whispering in our ears that the enemy threatens, whether it be horrible white males, black females, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and so on down the seemingly endless list of labels that provides objects of fear and hatred for every possible taste.

It's the gag-reel of all time; the biggest scam ever, and nearly every one of us have taken up with it hook, line, and sinker.

The most productive thing we could do at this very moment would be to stop playing, because participation is a loser by intent of design.

May 2023 prove better than 2022, and may we all forgive one another for our trespasses, real, imagined, and otherwise.  What is past is done.  Some of it has been indeed horrible, but when we think about it closely, most was really not so bad.  We differ.  We will always differ.  Can we not move on now to more profitable things, such as restoring the liberties that Theye have convinced us to cede?

Imagine not living in red-alert mode, day in and day out.  Imagine not being filled with rage, outrage, anger, and hatred, all emotions that have their places, but when taken in too generous measures soon becomes erosive of health, happiness, and liberty as we become prisoners of them.  Imagine having the power to recognize the real enemies of humanity and turning your justifiable ire upon them!  Imagine a world where courtesy reigned; where people were friendly despite holding differing opinions.  Imagine a world better than the one in which we are now all inmates in a prison of our own contrivance!

It is possible.  It is so close, you could kiss it if you chose to see.  But so long as we remain in hate-fear mode, Theye shall remain powerful while we remain effectively weak, and that is the greatest and most shameful irony of them all.  We, the humans from Earth, could end Themme in no time at all, even if the cost were to prove high.  It can be done, but not if we are at one another's throats.

May the blessings of liberty be with us all, and until next time please accept my best wishes.

For a lifetime I have borne witness to the endless rantings of certain categories of people about "NAZIs".  The saws are old and hopelessly clapped-out, yet such people never cease to hold up NAZIs as the ultimate evil, so far further down the pit of Hell that no other form of tyranny can compare.

Well, I have a surprise for such people.

The NAZIs were no worse than any of the other grand tyrants of history, They were certainly better than the Soviets and the Chinese, though the differences are ultimately irrelevant when one considers the tens of millions of people each had murdered in the span of a paltry few decades. 

At the end of the day, all tyrants are sufficiently equal in their rot and filth to warrant humanity scouring them from the earth. Sadly, those who cleanse in such ways invariably become the very tyrants whom they displaced, usually with copious amounts of hot lead and, later, the stretching of the right necks. 

The bottom line is this: mean humanity is beastly in its corruption. Our tolerance of the grand evils and stupidities that yield fruits of marginal and temporary convenience to us, have kept the human race flailing and foundering in the deep end of the septic tank basically since the walls of Sumer were erected,,  It is in the deep end where we shall stay because in all truth, we have no interest in becoming any better than that which we have always been: beasts of the lowest order imaginable. 

Were it otherwise, the world would be a very different place.

Saddest of all, we could change this in no time at all, were we to come to sense in the numbers required.  Alas, the Tyrant knows so well that the statistics stand overwhelmingly against this ever happening, and were it to occur, the chances of the good lasting more than a brief period are vanishingly small.  It has yet to have happened in our entire written history, so my sadly offered recommendation is that you not hold your breath.

May we find a better way, and as always, please accept my best wishes.

Your Thoughts

"Because the ultimate purpose of crime is to establish the endless empire of crime; a complete state of insecurity and anarchy founded upon the tainted ideals of a world doomed to annihilation." 

 

-Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang's "The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse"

I've found this most chilling a quote, due in part to its actual semantic content, but more so by the fact that there are people who will come to believe such things, especially the bit about being doomed.

Our thoughts form our realities, and our words form our thoughts. Though the words come first, there is eventually in each of us a feedback loop of sorts that evolves in our minds. The words we learn and get into the habits of using in the ways in which we as individuals do, shape the ways in which our thoughts form. Those thoughts, in turn, eventually take up their role in forming the ways in which our words are put together to form the sentences that express those thoughts. The words themselves, however, continue to have their effects upon the thoughts, the tendency being that word and thought reach an equilibrium of sorts, such that a more or less consistent and recognizable manner (a "style", if you will) of thinking and of word usage arises in the individual, perpetually maintained by this mutual reinforcement loop between the two.

That people come to believe in things such as the absolute inevitability of the utter annihilation of the human race is dangerous beyond my ability to convey. Our thoughts form our realities, and if the right people in the right positions of the right sorts of power come to believe such things, they then stand within the potential to turn those beliefs into the proverbial self-fulfilling prophecy. 

We should all of us take some time to think on that awhile, and do so with the knowledge that our own thoughts form our own realities.  This is especially worthy of our close attention when thoughts such as  "you can't fight city hall" arise, almost unnoticed.  By responding in an overly reflexive manner, leading us to give in as individuals, we give in as a whole - a collective, statistical gestalt - a "superorganism", as I have come to call them. In so doing, through our beliefs we come to halt our individual movements in the right directions.  This occurs regardless of whether the beliefs in question are true, and this is yet another point to which we should each turn careful attention and consideration.

Ask yourself this: what if key beliefs we hold about reality are in fact, false?  We see this happening on the so-called "left" with the entire doctrine of the "woke", not to mention the "transgender" phenomenon that has risen so suddenly.  Especially the latter, these developments demonstrate the power of belief, which is the power of thought, which in turn is the power of words.  Granted, in these cases the applications are unsound, but that is orthogonal to the point we make here: the power of word and thought.  Altering your belief alters you, and it can alter reality on a global basis.

We, the horde of humanity, could stop Themme (those in real and material power, worldwide) in short order, yet we fail to do so in spite of the clearly stated agenda they have of seeing the human populations reduced by non-trivial proportions in ways, numbers, and timelines that remain mostly held close to the vest. But we see manifestations, especially in recent years with chains of events that any actuary would quickly tell you are nigh impossible to occur without "help", and lots of it.

Your thoughts form your reality. Your words form your thoughts and your thoughts form your words. Changing thought can change the world. Therefore, if you change your words, perhaps you can change your thoughts, and if that happens, perhaps the world will change... for the better, I mean.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes, and may you find your way good and worthy.

Why Civilization?

What has so-called "civilization" brought to humanity on the whole? What is the net result? I submit that it has been nothing better than disease, misery, poverty, destruction, and death.

It is so very easy to dismiss my claim, what with so many people pointing to the "miracles" of civilization in the form of technology and concepts that presumably did not exist prior to men becoming civilized. But when one conducts even a comparatively cursory but suficiently noiseless analysis of human civilization, it becomes rather rapidly clear that these claims of the purported miracles are eminently questionable. 

Once again, words matter: they form our thoughts, and our thoughts form our realities. Depending upon the exact presumptions under which one chooses to labor, civilization may be deemed a blessing, a curse, any combination of the two, the kitchen sink, a barn door, and so on.

But what does it really mean to be "civilized"? That, too, may change depending on one's presuppositions. Let me not wax too pedantic and come to my own box of brass tacks. The very word itself, the verb "to civilize", to me means to domesticate; to bring to heel; to break the nature of.  Don't take my word for it, but let us once again consult several dictionaries.

Starting in economy class, dictionary.com puts it this way:

civilize verb (used with object), civ·i·lized, civ·i·liz·ing.

to bring out of a savage, uneducated, or rude state; make civil; elevate in social and private life; enlighten; refine: Rome civilized the barbarians.

The Oxford etymological dictionary says:

civilize (v.)

c. 1600, "to bring out of barbarism, introduce order and civil organization among, refine and enlighten," from French civiliser, verb from Old French civil (adj.), from Latin civilis "relating to a citizen, relating to public life, befitting a citizen; popular, affable, courteous," alternative adjectival derivative of civis "townsman" (see city). Intransitive meaning "become civilized" is from 1868.  

Samuel Johnson's 1785:

To CIVILIZE, siv'-il-ize. v. a. To reclaim from savageness. Wallor.

 So what, then, does it mean to be civil?

Dictionary.com:

adjective

1. of, relating to, or consisting of citizens: civil life; civil society.
2. of the commonwealth or state: civil affairs.
3. of citizens in their ordinary capacity, or of the ordinary life and affairs of citizens, as distinguished from military and ecclesiastical life and affairs.
4. of the citizen as an individual: civil liberty.
5. befitting a citizen: a civil duty.
6. of, or in a condition of, social order or organized government; civilized: civil peoples.
7. adhering to the norms of polite social intercourse; not deficient in common courtesy: After their disagreement, their relations were civil though not cordial.
8. marked by benevolence: He was a very civil sort, and we liked him immediately.

Oxford:

civil (adj.)

 late 14c., "relating to civil law or life; pertaining to the internal affairs of a state," from Old French civil "civil, relating to civil law" (13c.) and directly from Latin civilis "relating to a society, pertaining to public life, relating to the civic order, befitting a citizen," hence by extension "popular, affable, courteous;" alternative adjectival derivative of civis "townsman" (see city).

Meaning "not barbarous, civilized" is from 1550s. Specifically "relating to the commonwealth as secularly organized" (as opposed to military or ecclesiastical) by 1610s. Meaning "relating to the citizen in his relation to the commonwealth or to fellow citizens" also is from 1610s.

Johnson:

CIVIL§, siv'-il. a. [civilis, Lat.] Relating to the community. Hooker. Relating to any man as a member of a community. Bp. Taylor. Not in anarchy; not wild. Roscommon. 

We see the notion of savageness, barbarity, and wildness are referenced.  Therefore,

Dictionary.com:

barbaric adjective

without civilizing influences; uncivilized; primitive: barbaric invaders.

savage adjective

fierce, ferocious, or cruel; untamed: savage beasts.

Offensive. relating to or being a preliterate people or society regarded as uncivilized or primitive.

wild or rugged, as country or scenery: savage wilderness.

Archaic. uncultivated; growing wild.

wild adjective

living in a state of nature; not tamed or domesticated: a wild animal; wild geese.

...

uncivilized or barbarous: wild tribes.

...

undisciplined, unruly, or lawless: a gang of wild boys.

unrestrained, untrammeled, or unbridled: wild enthusiasm.

disregardful of moral restraints as to pleasurable indulgence: He repented his wild youth. 

Oxford:

barbaric (adj.)

late 15c., "uncultured, uncivilized, unpolished," from French barbarique (15c.), from Latin barbaricus "foreign, strange, outlandish," from Greek barbarikos "like a foreigner," from barbaros "foreign, rude" (see barbarian (n.)). The meaning "pertaining to or characteristic of barbarians" is from 1660s. Related: Barbarically.

savage (adj.) 

 

mid-13c. (late 12c. as a surname), of animals, "ferocious;" c. 1300, "wild, undomesticated, untamed," also "wild, uncultivated" (of land or places), from Old French sauvage, salvage "wild, savage, untamed, strange, pagan," from Late Latin salvaticus, alteration (vowel assimilation) of silvaticus "wild, woodland," literally "of the woods," from silva "forest, grove" (see sylvan).

Of persons, "indomitable, valiant," also "fierce, bold, cruel" (c. 1300); from late 14c., of persons or behavior, "wild, barbarous, uncivilized;" c. 1400 as "reckless, ungovernable," and by 1610s as "pertaining to or characteristic of savage peoples, living in the lowest condition of development." In heraldry, "naked or clothed in foliage" (1570s). The -l- often was restored in 16c.-17c. English spelling. 

wild (adj.)

"to run wild, refuse to be tamed," Old English awildian (see wild (adj.)). Wilding (n.) in the teen gang sense first recorded 1989. Earlier it meant "plant that grows without cultivation" (1520s).

 

 

Johnson:

BARBARICK, bar-bar'-ik. a. Foreign) far-fetched.  Milton. Uncivilized. Milton.

SAVAGE §, sav'-vldje. 90. a. [sauvage, Fr. ; selvaggio, Ital.] ;  Wild ; uncultivated. Milton. Untamed; cruel. Shak. Uncivilized; barbarous; untaught; wild ; brutal. Raleigh.

WILD §, wild. a. [úïld, Sax.; wild, Dutch.] Not tame ; not domestick. Shak. ... Savage; uncivilized: used of persons, or practices. Bacon. ungoverned. Milton. 

 

There are two things I would have you notice here.  For one, the difficulties apparent in these definitions.  One of them is that of circularity.  For example, to be civil is to be non-savage.  To be savage is to be uncivil.  Defining words in these ways is semantically dangerous in those instances where semantic rigor is necessary to proper and sufficient understanding.  Furthermore, these sorts of inadequacies in our words underscores the tenuous nature of our communications, which in turn make glaring just how tenuous is our grasps on reality, at least in terms of our abilities to think abstractly.  And yet, we manage to get from day to day without destroying ourselves; we manage to feed and house and recognize beauty and danger, love each other, avoid the destruction and other harming of others.  To my mind, this is all prima facie proof of the inherently miraculous nature of all that we are, and experience.  God is ever so real, and ever so omnipresent, even in the horrors of that which we deem our misfortunes.

We are, at our cores, wild animals. To believe anything less than this is to lie to oneself. It is this wildness that is the very embodiment of our freedom, that thing for which so many here claim to pine and to which they tell the world their honors and fortunes are pledged. But how can this be when most people fail to understand the most basic aspects of their own nature? Any suggestion of the true nature of men gives rise to the deepest and most violent revulsion in the vast majority, and that is the reason the world is what it is: people want pretty slavery and nothing whatsoever to do with actual freedom.

Even my Canon of Proper Human Relations is something of a fib because it compromises the true nature of men away for the sake of the illusions of peace and security, and that is the unvarnished truth. You want pure and wild freedom? I do. You, most likely, do not - but I shall speak for no other man. True freedom is largely terrifying. Imagine another man attempting to kill you for a stick of gum. While unlikely in a truly free world, it remains a real possibility. However, when we look at it more circumspectly, it is not appreciably more likely than under our current cultural circumstance. In point of practice, it may in fact be less likely for reasons I hope will become apparent shortly. Imagine it: we have literally millions of "laws" on the books and yet people still murder each other for the most inanely flimsy reasons. Law is NOTHING. Human nature and the decisions of the individual man are EVERYTHING.

The difference between being a savage and a civilian is almost precisely this: the savage assumes full responsibility for his every action, whereas the civilian renounces the greatest proportion of responsibility for that which he thinks, feels, and chooses, preferring to pass them off onto his fellows. But in doing this he abnegates his sovereignty, tossing his sacred freedoms to the wind because he wishes to live his life in the manner of an ill-bred child in preference to being an actual adult.

In a savage society, every man is free to do precisely as he pleases. If he wishes to walk up to a stranger and attempt to put a sword through the man's belly, that is his choice, just as it is today, all false appearances of "law and order" notwithstanding. The only difference lies in what happens next. In either case of savage or civilian, the intended target may not cotton to the notion of being run-through. The only question then remaining is, "who will prevail?", and generally speaking we may say that it is anyone's guess because combat is inherently non-linear.

But if we assume Johnny is successful in running his blade to the hilt into Tommy's belly, what then? In purest terms, nothing. Johnny is alive, if a bit blood-soaked, and Tommy is skewered. In more real terms, however, if Tommy survives, Johnny faces the risks and dangers of retaliation. Whether Tommy dies or lives, Johnny may in either event face the same risk of vendetta, whether at Tommy's hands, or those of Tommy's family, friends, or other agents on his behalf.

There need be no contrived legislation to pose Johnny's hazard, as is the case today. In the savage world, just as in the civilized, the only threats to Johnny in the wake of his choice are other human beings. The difference between the two worlds is that the savage is honest, whereas the civilized is endlessly otherwise. The savage society is honest about how such things work, whereas the civil society lies endlessly about justice, impartiality, and so on. What a sad and obscene joke.

I greatly prefer the savage world precisely because it forces people to be responsible for the things they think, say, feel, and do. The civilized world renders men as imbecilic infants, whose heads become filled with the most idiotic of notions that aim to treat their fellows with gross and often felonious disrespect without having to face any consequences for their perfidies. And they rely upon the machinations of men in suits to pass edicts that guarantee the ability to get away even with literal murder in more than the rare and passing case. The list of ways in which this has been made manifest could take us weeks or even months of dedicated discourse here in order to name, analyze, and discuss them all.

The civilized man has been taught to believe in a great and endlessly harmful raft of lies about the savage world. For instance, he has been taught that savages are wildly undisciplined maniacs with nothing but rape and murder on their tiny, misshapen minds, every second of every day. The most cursory analytic consideration of this assertion quickly exposes its raw and suppurating absurdity. Generally speaking, people like being alive and do the best they can to ensure they remain that way. In this, the savage is no different from the civilian. Given this, how long does anyone think a savage society would last if being savage meant endless killing and destruction? It would be over in matters of days; weeks at best. This has never been the case in general terms where savage societies have been concerned. They have survived the millennia just fine. Certainly they have many examples of one group wiping from the earth all traces of another, but this is no different from civilized people. Just consider the countless millions, savages and civilians alike, slaughtered by the Roman church, or the Pharaohs. How about the kings of Europe; the emperors of the various east-Asian empires including but not limited to China and Japan; the empires of South and Middle Americas? Africa? Middle-east?

Can anyone point to an example where a savage society has so much as attempted to do what Stalin and Mao did, much less actually accomplish it?

So far as I can see, civilization has been the grandest show of smoke and mirrors in all human history. People have fallen for the false miracles of architecture, technology, and the hideous idolatry thereby raised in so many forms. Truly, where civilization has been concerned, the medium has always been the message: pure power - don't mess with us. The typical modern man whines about "muh roads", "muh internet", and so on down a depresingly long list of things that, were they never to have to into existence, would not be missed by anyone. I cannot begin to count the number of people who have used these sorts of miserable examples as the justification for demanding that every man submit to their visions of pretty slavery.

The repulsive "leftie" demands not only to be allowed to engage in all manner of unsavory acts, but that everyone must praise him for it. The similarly repugnant "righty" defines freedom more broadly, but still ends up with pretty slavery as his vision of paradise on earth.  And damn it if most of them all want "muh gummint" to provide the force needed to compel the compliance of others, no matter who gets hurt or how terribly someone else's quality of life may turn out due directly because of said applications of force.

And just look at the pure absurdity of it all. For example, Obama signed an executive order, only to have Trump undo it all with the stroke of a pen. There's your "civilization"; back and forth like a lethal yoyo moving in whichever direction those currently in power decide it shall swing. It is pure whim, and as often as not, caprice. Few give a true damn about your rights. Most don't even care about their own rights, save to the paltry extents their limited and frightened little selves auto-circumscribe and build their own prison walls at the sadly narrow delimiters dictated by their willful ignorance, cowardice, avarice, and indolence.

Similarly, some people attempt to justify our slavery because it has provided all the miracles of modern medicine. Once again, the absurdity of this is of such a nature and degree as to leave the thinking man numb. For one thing, the attitude is reflective of the determination to squelch all risk from life. It's the same old rotten saw about wanting something for nothing; in this case, wanting all the perceived benefits of "freedom" without having to pony up for any of the costs. This is the mindset of thieves and dull, ill-bred children, rather than proper adults.

It is instructive to note that were all these miracles of modern medicine not available, several things would happen. For one thing, people would SLOW DOWN. Their physical movements would become more careful and deliberate in a world where a broken leg or even a cut could mean death. They would slow down their mouths greatly, the necessities of a truer reality driving them to put their brains in gear long prior to engaging their yaps. Why? Because to speak ill-advisedly could result in one becoming severely injured or even being killed. Death tends to be a wonderfully sound advisor, by and large.

A savage land would be different in so many ways precisely because the prospect of death or dismemberment at the hands of other humans, or even just happenstance, as the result of one's poorly considered behavior would teach one deep and abiding respect for his fellows, as well as the cold and hard realities that surround him. He would learn and practice REAL respect, vis-à-vis this thin and hollow gasbag shell so many today mistakenly conflate with actual respect. By "respect", I do not mean the modern and comparatively superficial notion of esteem and the sense of worth, but rather the more ancient meaning, which goes something as follows:

deference to a right...or someone...[recognized] to have certain rights...; proper acceptance or courtesy; acknowledgment

There are so many intertwining layers of the various aspects of this that I am certain a very large, laborious, and verbose tome or three could be written on the matter of what it means to respect another human being in the sense that is relevant to this discussion. It has nothing to do with bunnies, light, love, and running around in one's underwear while making childish noises. It has everything to do with recognizing the just and valid claims of other men such that one refrains from trespassing upon them with intent, and making whole that which has been insulted when done so by accident.

Suffice to say that this is a topic that is broad, endlessly deep, and goes on well beyond the horizon. For my money, civilization is more bad than good. Yes, without it there would be little to no modern medicine, but how many have considered the possibility that without the rest of the steaming pile that has been heaped upon us over the centuries, maybe most of the diseases we so deeply dread such as cancer, HIV, etc. may never have come to any notable rise in the first place? How much of that which we suffer can we give thanks for to our forebears who polluted the living hell out of the land, air, and seas? Are we so cock-sure that the ever climbing cancer rates are not attributable to such causes and would have come to what they are today, even if we had we forgone civilization, in favor of the savage life?

And I reiterate the fact that despite all these miracles and statutes, people appear today to be more miserable in their spirits than ever their savage forebears seem to have been. Civilization has done nothing as much as it has fought the natural order of the planet. Our technologies and medicine have resulted in a world choking on nearly 8 billion people. The idiotic religions of the civilized world have given rise to thoughts so poisonous, yet so deeply and I daresay terminally ingrained that we fail to see the folly to which we have committed ourselves. That, to me, is the insanity of civilization; it is the codification, formalization, and deification of raving, howling madness.

And for those Christians (just to pick on one of many prime candidate classes) who might chafe at the notion that their religion is somehow less-than sane in any aspect, I would point out that had men remained as savages, there would have been no need for God to send a messiah in the first place. Think on that awhile... if you dare do so honestly and with open mind.

But since we are as a species now hopeless committed to civilized life, it behooves us most powerfully to endeavor to make that choice as worthy as possible of our lives.  That ironically suggests making our collective ways back to savagery to the greatest degree possible, which means a return to liberty. I say turn your back to pretty slavery.  Do not allow the false idols of civilization to buy your soul at any price, much less on the cheap.  Certainly there are advantages to civilization, but having them does not have to lead to rank servitude.  Freedom and civilization are not mutually exclusive, but in order to have them both one must accept the less attractive aspects of liberty.  There is no other way, which is why so many people have in fact sold their souls cheaply to those who threaten and cajole, sabers rattling in hand and bellicose words spewing every which way against the man whose self-interest is his first priority.

The minority of one has written, and please accept his best wishes.