"We have met the enemy and he is us." The iconic, oft remembered line from a Pogo comic book title sums up my sentiments exactly.
A good deal of the misery in the world comes from greed, which is why socialism is becoming a dominant faith. Look nearly anywhere that it's been implemented and you'll find that money isn't required for corruption.
China, for all her natural beauty, had one of the dirtiest skies until the Beijing Olympics. What changed? The people willed it. They shut down factories, brought in consultants and set up monitors everywhere. ....And when all else failed, they manipulated the numbers like any government.
Kyoto, on the other hand, is an industrial city, very famous for the Kyoto accord. Allegedly (if you can prove or disprove this, I'd like to hear from you) one of Japan's environmental "fixes" is to mandate that engines must be replaced after a certain number of miles. What do they do with those waste engines? They ship them overseas and drive down prices in countries like the USA, which is much appreciated, unless you're a "tree-hugger." It's a very Utopian philosophy, making examples of societies that still run the old machines.
One of the tenets of classical Utopianism is to hire non-Utopian countries as mercenaries, thereby making warlike cultures kill one another off. If I were a paranoid person, I might venture that that's exactly what's happening to the USA and her allies right now, since the Federal Reserve isn't domestically owned. I'd say that that's what is happening in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world. There are visible outsiders pulling the strings and causing the bloodshed. Apparently, that's the price of Utopia.
If you doubt that, consider the last U.S. presidential elections. If you were one of the infamous conservative puppeteers ("vast right wing conspiracy"), would you bet on McCain and Palin as the strongest ponies in the race? If you analyzed and invested in rising companies for a living, would you pick that team as the winners? I wouldn't bet on them in a high school debate. These are either two of the dimmest stars in the Republican party or pretty decent actors. Which means that someone paid for the Republican party to lose.
Naturally, they lost to a relatively unknown black male from Illinois, who quickly put Hillary and Joe into position, two of the worst diplomats in the Western world.
...Until you remember that they're continuing the Bush-Clinton-Bush course to the letter.
Bush Sr., who worked for the CIA when Zapata-bought warships Barbara J and Houston hovered off the coast of Cuba and waited for US military backup until JFK shut the Bay of Pigs operation down. Clinton, who claimed that Iraq was hiding WMDs and proceeded to bomb them in 1998 (and Gore, who scalded Bush junior for ignoring Saddam's alleged WMD program in his campaign promise to scale down and consolidate the US military) and Bush de deuce, whose reign was somewhat akin to a loose fire hose, incurring the wrath of nearly everyone without really solving anything. Did Obama shut down Gitmo? Has he scaled back anything, or changed any of the policies? Not noticeably.
Would the Iraqi WMDs have done more or less damage than the current state of unrest? Anthrax? VX? Not even an atomic bomb could have done as much damage to US interests as this war has, much less the rest of the world.
If you've ever seen a group of children riding their bicycles with bricks, baseball bats and metal pipes to go splatter somebody's brains out on the side of the road, you'd know that "weapons" aren't the problem. Guess what? The kids in West Tulsa, OK have succeeded quite a few times. Unfortunately, bricks don't have serial numbers on them. Then again, my brother got a call from a former neighbor asking if we'd gone back to "have some fun" because a couple of rednecks peppered them with paint balls in a drive by. (No, we didn't.)
Sure, you can pass gun laws. You can even enforce them. Then again, my neighbor was found across town in a ditch, nearly cut in half by machine gun fire a week before the US ban on automatic weapons was lifted. You can imagine that the gangster whose girlfriend my reckless, cancer-ridden neighbor was openly involved with had a beet red face afterward, "Oh, was that next week?" What a faux pas.
Blaming weapons for international genocide is like blaming cars for road rage. It's a shadow game. A distraction. Whether world leaders wield Zionism, Christianity, Islam or Democracy; the power of belief follows the power of emotion every time. Sure, Iran has weapons of mass destruction. They numbered 71 million people in 2008 and the population was on an upswing, but a combination of international politicians will activate them into fanatical nationalist pawns just like the US of A.
WMDs are small potatoes when it comes to the hate stirred up right now because angry people will always find a way to kill. It's the anger and division that needs to be dealt with. I dare you to take a person whose ideology you despise and find something that you like about them. Get to know them. Try to understand why they believe the way that they do. You don't have to agree with them. Just live and let live.
Otherwise we're all screwed and it's your fault.
Totally you. Couldn't be me.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Imagine
I was home schooled for all but one year. My mother collected a truly strange array of textbooks, hoping to widen my scope beyond the norm. She gave me everything from U.S. Mennonite Bible-study books to Yemeni secularist-socialist social studies, trusting that I'd make up my own mind. School is the single most important advertising ground in the world. The greatest lesson that I learned was how to recognize marketing and that anyone who is absolutely certain of the facts in an event that they didn’t personally witness is either naïve or trying to sell you something.
So it is with Davey Crockett's, "Not yours to give" speech. One side says that it was a congressional address, another says that congressional addresses weren’t recorded in that era and that the speech originated in an 1884 dime novel. The sacred debunker, Snopes.com, is mum on the matter thus far. In any case, it makes a decent fable.
The story goes that Crockett voted against giving a heroic Navy-man’s widow a pension on the grounds that the founding fathers wanted their new government to be a minimalist protectorate and challenged his fellow congressmen to support her out of their own pockets.
In my mind, that is the essence of what the United States of America SHOULD be, unencumbered benevolence. According to legend, the founding fathers tried to cut away the bureaucracy that they were under. That's why they were willing to fight and die. Personal freedom.
Granted, the majority came from the racist caste system found in European Christendom, but most of their writings speak of wanting to create something better. The problem is that sweeping social change rarely comes all at once. In their embryonic democracy, they couldn't even decide whether they should levy taxes or not. Nathan Hale felt betrayed that they’d even consider it. George Washington had to decline kingship. There was a lot of confusion.
Remember that in the battle of the Barbary Coast, the US first tangle with jihadists that turned to piracy, the founding fathers added and signed an article that isn't in the Middle Eastern version of their treaty. Article 11, declaring the US a secular, minimal Union of individual, free states. They wanted the world to know that, so that the reputation would hold their successors accountable.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't matter what your neighbor is smoking and imbibing, who they're sleeping with or what weapons they have, as long as they're not hurting anyone. Those were the original, rebellious US values, no matter what any revisionist says. A house was to be a near-sovereign state in and of itself. The Confederates added something similar to their own constitution. It wasn’t an original thought.
If Ben Franklin really said that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I doubt that he'd approve of any form of prohibition. He's the same guy that designed, drafted and submitted a plan for a British parliament building with a chimney under each seat because he thought they were full of it. He invented the term "battery" because he used his array of Leyden jar capacitors to throw lightning across the room and liven up parties (hence the key & kite and invention of the lightning rod). He reputedly had a special room built in his house so that he could practice “air-bathing,” or nudism without anyone seeing him. Does that sound like an uptight Puritan to you?
At the first opportunity, Washington issued a statement of neutrality concerning wars in Europe, which mirror Jefferson's public statements. These people weren't out to police and control the world, they rebelled against that very mindset. It was supposed to be a peaceful, ever-improving state.
I said the words "tea party" before Obama was in office, and I stand behind that (not with any organization using that name, mind you).
Bullets or pills, these hucksters have made a business of taking your money and as they do it, they’re ripping any remnant of a benevolent heart out of this country.
Imagine if people set up legal social constructs that were free of both B.o.B/Fed and Wall Street greed.
Imagine "farm-bureau" medical insurance, where the board of investors are the consumers. Imagine if every vote counted. Imagine if every law was put to a public vote. Imagine if lawmakers weren't full time employees. Imagine if your leaders weren't sponsored by corporations and special interests. Then the economic bullies that are untouchable today might be prosecuted.
Imagine anything but what your big-business political heroes are selling you and you'll be their worst nightmare: a free thinker.
So it is with Davey Crockett's, "Not yours to give" speech. One side says that it was a congressional address, another says that congressional addresses weren’t recorded in that era and that the speech originated in an 1884 dime novel. The sacred debunker, Snopes.com, is mum on the matter thus far. In any case, it makes a decent fable.
The story goes that Crockett voted against giving a heroic Navy-man’s widow a pension on the grounds that the founding fathers wanted their new government to be a minimalist protectorate and challenged his fellow congressmen to support her out of their own pockets.
In my mind, that is the essence of what the United States of America SHOULD be, unencumbered benevolence. According to legend, the founding fathers tried to cut away the bureaucracy that they were under. That's why they were willing to fight and die. Personal freedom.
Granted, the majority came from the racist caste system found in European Christendom, but most of their writings speak of wanting to create something better. The problem is that sweeping social change rarely comes all at once. In their embryonic democracy, they couldn't even decide whether they should levy taxes or not. Nathan Hale felt betrayed that they’d even consider it. George Washington had to decline kingship. There was a lot of confusion.
Remember that in the battle of the Barbary Coast, the US first tangle with jihadists that turned to piracy, the founding fathers added and signed an article that isn't in the Middle Eastern version of their treaty. Article 11, declaring the US a secular, minimal Union of individual, free states. They wanted the world to know that, so that the reputation would hold their successors accountable.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't matter what your neighbor is smoking and imbibing, who they're sleeping with or what weapons they have, as long as they're not hurting anyone. Those were the original, rebellious US values, no matter what any revisionist says. A house was to be a near-sovereign state in and of itself. The Confederates added something similar to their own constitution. It wasn’t an original thought.
If Ben Franklin really said that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I doubt that he'd approve of any form of prohibition. He's the same guy that designed, drafted and submitted a plan for a British parliament building with a chimney under each seat because he thought they were full of it. He invented the term "battery" because he used his array of Leyden jar capacitors to throw lightning across the room and liven up parties (hence the key & kite and invention of the lightning rod). He reputedly had a special room built in his house so that he could practice “air-bathing,” or nudism without anyone seeing him. Does that sound like an uptight Puritan to you?
At the first opportunity, Washington issued a statement of neutrality concerning wars in Europe, which mirror Jefferson's public statements. These people weren't out to police and control the world, they rebelled against that very mindset. It was supposed to be a peaceful, ever-improving state.
I said the words "tea party" before Obama was in office, and I stand behind that (not with any organization using that name, mind you).
Bullets or pills, these hucksters have made a business of taking your money and as they do it, they’re ripping any remnant of a benevolent heart out of this country.
Imagine if people set up legal social constructs that were free of both B.o.B/Fed and Wall Street greed.
Imagine "farm-bureau" medical insurance, where the board of investors are the consumers. Imagine if every vote counted. Imagine if every law was put to a public vote. Imagine if lawmakers weren't full time employees. Imagine if your leaders weren't sponsored by corporations and special interests. Then the economic bullies that are untouchable today might be prosecuted.
Imagine anything but what your big-business political heroes are selling you and you'll be their worst nightmare: a free thinker.
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