Just Sayin

Torture, the next logical step in a war where an empire intrudes into the affairs of unwitting nations. These actions sound similar to the tactics used by Nazi Germany against those who refused to kowtow.

Recently I have had the displeasure of reading about the report of CIA torture techniques, their fruitless results and the potential political fallout. Johnnie (war monger) McCain was quick to refute the actions of the CIA.

McCain states, “I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence…”, “I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.”

But Johnnie isn’t traipsing about the world and occupying other countries, he’s just violating the non-interventionist principles that our country was founded upon by always pushing for more military engagements. If we weren’t there swatting at the hornets’ nest we wouldn’t get stung. According to you, we have become the terrorists that we set out to fight. We’ve evolved into the evil you folks crusade against; what does that say about the policies you and the rest of the global dominators espouse? Specifically, it’s that those policies are a sign of a corrupted mind, and would be so even if they were effective. A new course needs to be charted, one that is deviates drastically from the old course: stop intervening, stop influencing, and stop bribing. You can’t lambaste the bad guy who tortures and praise the good guy whose drone-fired missiles assassinate ISIS and Al Qaida leaders along with hundreds of innocents. Either way you are the bad guy!

Now Johnnie admits that the government is a bunch of liars and will cover up their misdeeds.

“There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what was and wasn’t achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation used in 2011 to credit the use of these methods with the death of Osama bin Laden. And there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning about the security consequences of their public disclosure.”

Since you are one of these governmental tools I believe you are no different and will lie to cover your slimy actions and ambition for power. You can throw the CIA under the bus, but you are no better. They tortured people we call “enemy’, you torture people we call “citizen”. How you ask? By sending them into harm’s way to get crippled, maimed, or killed in unconstitutional actions. Your push for military intervention and those with you have created more enemies, both home and abroad, than can be forgiven in three generations. One word, STOP!

Johnnie claims there may be fallout from the CIA actions,

“Will the report’s release cause outrage that leads to violence in some parts of the Muslim world? Yes, I suppose that’s possible, perhaps likely. Sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters of the world today. But that doesn’t mean we will be telling the world something it will be shocked to learn. The entire world already knows that we waterboarded prisoners. It knows we subjected prisoners to various other types of degrading treatment. It knows we used black sites, secret prisons. Those practices haven’t been a secret for a decade.

“Terrorists might use the report’s re-identification of the practices as an excuse to attack Americans but they hardly need an excuse for that. That has been their life’s calling for a while now.”

For once Johnnie, you are right. They don’t need the actions of the CIA to incite them. You and your ilk have already done a great job of it. For decades you have pushed to expand the empire for “greater good” and “democracy”. Aside from gaining thousands of enemies and a huge debt we have accomplished little, and I can only hope the American people get wise and remove vile hate-driven slugs like you from office. Your policies in no way make our borders safe nor protect anyone within our country; I believe they provide just the opposite.

I want to live a life of peace in a free land. Your policies and beliefs offer neither. You are quick to take from others for your own ends and twisted desires, but when it comes full circle and the alphabet groups start acting as viciously as any other conquering nation throughout history, you squeal. This is just a corollary of your war mongering. There is no moral high ground with this one Johnnie, either you want war or you don’t. With war, you get ALL the ugly that comes with it and “we the people” get the fallout. It is beyond time to cut our losses and end the interventionist polices.

This is a subject that tends to bring about division and hard feelings between those who see government as a positive force and those who consider it a necessary evil, but it’s an important discussion. I’ll try to explain what my view is. I’ll focus on the federal government, as it is by far the most far-reaching and powerful body we have to deal with today. Naturally, this raises a whole slew of questions, like do we need government? If so, how much, and where? What, if anywhere, is its limit?

These questions, and many others, were posed and discussed in the early years of our country by federalists and anti-federalists in the debate over constitutional ratification; but many believe that times have so changed that the original ideas no longer apply, therefore the government they forged needs to change too. I wholly disagree with both this reasoning and this argument. As I see it, if government is administered appropriately and proportionally, as the Constitution envisioned, the only changes are local. If and when situations arise that the Framers did not anticipate, they can be addressed by the mechanism of amendment built into the Constitution, not by redefining 18th century terms with a 21st century dictionary, or bypassing the whole thing with policy changes or executive orders.

All right, let’s start by asking whether we need government at all? While we’ve no little experience of governments run amok, and anarchy has a point, sadly, I believe that we do. Perhaps the day will come that human beings are entirely rational, ethical, and unselfish; but that day is not today. If people did not have greed, covetousness, or lust then I would agree that anarchy – having no government – would work. If that were the state of human existence then we would live in a cooperative society and anarchy would be quite the natural order. However, humanity is not free of such character flaws and through them, we bring harm to others; violate their natural rights of life, and property, and reputation; so we do need government to protect those rights.

Of course, governmental protection means force: do as authority prescribes, or else. Laws do not enable you to do anything, because you are naturally free to do whatever you like. Laws only restrict your inborn freedom, either by forbidding something that was once open to you, or requiring something that was once optional. Of course, government power cannot compel obedience to the laws it enacts, only punish their disobedience; thus government finally comes down to forceful coercion.

The founders of our country understood that people are flawed, and that government was needed, so they combined a few systems of to try to meet that need, ultimately giving us our constitutional republic. Our government was designed to be limited, especially at the federal level, giving the greatest power to the states and the people; power which was to stop at the property boundary. The paradox is that, since we are flawed, anything we create is flawed as well; so we are forever forced to amend and correct what we have done. For example, initially the constitution didn’t include a Bill of Rights to spell out specific things the government could not stop or regulate; but, of course, being flawed beings we have twisted even that. We read this document written hundreds of years ago according to how we use and understand its words today – not as they were originally. Instead of preserving what the Bill of Rights was intended to say we have used our current definitions of words against it, so the meaning of that document has changed.

One of the constitutional amendments I would offer would specifically state that the Federalist/Non-federalist papers are to be used as the defining documents for any interpretation of the constitution. For example, those papers would completely alter how the “Commerce Clause” has been twisted over time. The founders viewed “Commerce” as the movement of goods but we have redefined it as the exchange of currency. Both are examples of commerce but originally money wasn’t used for everything, people bartered, goods or service for goods or service, so restricting commerce to just the exchange of currency was never the intent. The intent was to keep one state from imposing restrictions against the movement goods of another state. Apparently, they were trying to stop monopolies and ensure free trade. I would also repeal the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments as well, because these two have probably caused the most damage to the wealth and the individual financial growth our country and its citizens. I would like to have the “Rule of Precautionary Principle” – that basically holds, when any law or action has the potential of creating harm to people or the environment, the government has to decide on the side of the people – imposed upon all governmental actions as a constitutional amendment. However, it is more than merely reining in government that is required; what’s needed is the reduction of government as well.

We agree that government is required; now we need to find how much and where it should be located. I believe with Thomas Jefferson that we need as little government as possible, much less than exists today, and what there is of it should be local. Local government, city or county, is best situated to handle the issues of its citizens, while the federal government cannot take the subtle details of local matters into consideration, because it must enact laws that encompass the entire country. Such wide-reaching legislation cannot help but be inapplicable or irrelevant to many localities, or even in conflict with local laws and ordinances. Federal law then must be modified to permit exceptions where locally they do not apply or are in conflict; and once you make an exception, you have found a flaw. The law that was, I assume, passed to solve some problem now creates problems of its own. In our current system, instead of repealing flawed laws, we pass more laws to fix them; and the circle grows bigger because the corrections are also flawed and need correction. Not only is this ridiculously inefficient, typically it brings about unintended consequences that harm the very ones that the laws are intended to protect. The positive advantage of local governments is that they are closer to the problem, and can work quicker and less expensively than can the federal government. Local government also allows the people easy access to its proceedings, so that they may participate in their own regulation, and express their desires or grievances, without great expense or hardship.

One of the many effects of the federal overreach is the dilution of property rights. Most think that they still can do as they like with what is their own property, but when you consider that government should end at the edge of the boundary of your property it does not (I don’t think I get what you’re saying here). We not only have government at all levels telling us what we can and cannot do with our property, but it also has gone so far as to tell us what property we can buy, and force us to buy goods or services we may neither want nor desire. Why are many required to grow grass, or else? Why are many not allowed to grow certain trees, operate a small business from their homes or even grow their own food? These are all liberties reserved to the people under the original understanding of property rights. Do you realize that, because of taxation, you can never really own your land? With property taxes on the books, you are nothing more than a tenant that can be forcibly removed if you do not pay the realm what it demands. If you truly owned that property, it could not be taken from you; but it can – not as punishment for some crime, but only to feed the growing monster of Government.

Constitutionally, the federal government is restricted to eight specific duties – why then is it so large? Much of the reason has to do with reinterpreting the meaning of the constitution, created with good intentions for the betterment of all or under the “General welfare” clause. Other reasons are the simple lust for power under the guise of safety measures, personal greed in those with access to the public purse, and political need to appear strong and useful. Originally, it was planned that the federal government would be the “face” of our country in our dealings with international issues, responsible for defense against attack and hindrance to trade, ensure that the states work together, and a few other big- picture tasks; leaving the true governing power to the states and the people. Now, the people are left powerless, the states are fighting hard to hold their ground and the federal government is interfering in everything. My belief is that the real impulse for increased federalism started with Lincoln. His sincere but politically driven obsession that the Union overrode the rights of the states fostered the idea that nationalism is more important, and greater, than any locality or individual. A socialistic, monarchical, and collectivist perspective that, one piece at a time and step-by-step, let more and more regulation and power move toward Washington.

So now, a hundred and fifty years later, we are inundated. The people are at the point of violent recourse in many of our cities where civil unrest is at an all-time high, and the populace is more miserable than during the Great Depression. The government is implementing a police state, resembling that of fascism, which needs only the excuse of one serious incident to have Homeland Security impose virtual martial law and disembowel the remainder of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. One thing is for sure: a guarantee is nothing more than words, an empty promise, without the capacity of force. Force is what truly provides the guarantee because when force is set against you, you need to use force to take it back. Sadly, as a people, we have forgotten the lesson learned so long ago, the lesson that force keeps you free. A lesson that, one day in the not too distant future will cost the lives of thousands, maybe millions. My desire is to stop that from happening by pushing to rescind the myriad actions by which the federal government has chipped away our rights, our freedoms, and the very framework of our country. We can start this by removing all laws and regulations that have exceptions to them. If a law is created that does not apply to ALL, public and private, corporate and citizen, then it is not a just law and cannot be enforced.

There is so much more on this topic but this is where this stops.

Division is not just a mathematical function it is something we do, consciously and subconsciously, throughout our lives. Our brain is wired to make sense of the world around us and in order to do so it categorizes and compartmentalizes the things we see and sense around us. As preschoolers this process occurs naturally, as we play, and in watching and listening to those around us; our parents, most notably. As we grow, learning becomes more formalized: religious teacher, coaches, and Scout leaders all present us with rules to be followed; but the overarching source of what we’re required to take in throughout our youth is our indoctrinating school system.

American society is not only fragmented by gender, race, sexual orientation, economic class, political beliefs, geography, etc, etc; but also by a deliberate atmosphere of fear – and of all the things that divide us, Fear is the big one. These divisions not only shape the way we think and react, they also subtly mold our mental processes and even define the Truth that we seek.

Despite a lifetime of listening and watching, I never really understood how or why so many fall prey to this divisive mindset, until I became aware of how much our government is involved in, and profits by, perpetuating these divisions, which not only slice us up into groups, but then pit one group against another by creating separate laws defining these divisions. Often, these ‘protective’ actions – Affirmative Action, DOMA, the Brady Law to name a few – create animosity because in this special treatment anger is created on one side that leads to fear on the other and, once again, our government seizes the opportunity to quell the fear by creating yet more laws defining yet other special groups to keep them safe. This whole practice is insane and damaging to freedom. “We the People” is quite clear. We need not be known by any other tag. We need not create any laws that cannot apply to all for if we do those laws are unjust because it creates a separation of “the People” and forces a dis-uniting.

Many years ago, through the actions and writings of Edward Bernays, our government learned that this feature of the mind, the inborn urge to sort and categorize – as well as other psychological techniques (brainwashing’ – could be used as a control mechanism. Since the ruling elite, who are few in number, require something that will maintain their control over us, using our mental make-up and egos is actually quite brilliant. Considering that the United States contains over 300 million people patrolled by militarized forces of a few hundred thousands. The government needs something more; and fear gives them the leverage, the control, they need.

In a cooperative society, fear logically would not be present because government would not insinuate itself as the ‘protector’ of fractional groups, just the People. Though I am not a fan of Lincoln he was right about one thing, “United we stand, divided we fall”. Sadly, we have fallen, fallen dupe to the propaganda of lies, deceit, and secrecy that surrounds our current bastardized government.

I will admit that in my youth I was rushing headlong into the national collectivism, and fell victim to its propaganda; but I never saw people as different. Maybe I was just naïve, but that long list of our divisions never entered my world until I was beyond high school. Thankfully, as I matured and became more aware I saw through the lies and deceit, and discovered for myself that we are just one people – and that the rest of those categorizations meant nothing.

I learned decades ago that history is written by the victors, and therefore that truth is obscured or re-written. It has become so bad that even the alterations of factual, textbook history, though widely known and recognized as wrong or incomplete, go uncorrected because those in power quietly use such falsehoods to maintain the culture of fear and the dis-unity of our society that, were it truly united once again, would mean the end of their control.

At every turn we are flooded with news engineered to evoke our fear response, we hear about this boogey man, that our government trained/backed/supplied, or that there exists some horrible disease that has killed less people than car accidents but when it is spun up, our fear trigger is evoked and we start looking for the safe haven that our educational system has programmed us to believe only our government can provide. Fear is a powerful friend when backed by the immediate fact of danger, as it may keep you from doing risky things; but when it is a trumped-up fear, then your instinct to keep safe, actually hinders your making logical decisions and appropriate actions. Remember, fear is just an emotion it is not anything real and may not reflect reality. Fear is not danger, though danger can evoke fear, and that emotion does not need to be born upon fact to fire the psychological triggers.

The last thing that the people of this country need is more law, more government, and more fear. We can end this cycle of fear; and if we do, we will end the overbearing bloated national government. It is time to take it back, by the people…by the United People of the United States.

In my opinion, too much of our foreign policy – past and present – has made us look to an awful lot of the world like the bully on the block: meddlesome, aggressive, and spoiling for a fight.

We are the terrorists!

It seems that our aim is to make others knuckle under to our interests, economic and political; and those who refuse or resist we call evil; branding them as Terrorists, and imposing economic restrictions on them that inevitably lead to military confrontation. Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex years ago, and we did not listen. Thomas Jefferson rejected ‘entangling alliances’, which are no more than a kind of servitude – where we end up being obligated to provide financial or military assistance to other countries, and even to intervene in others’ sovereign affairs. Instead of heeding Jefferson’s wise counsel, however, we now shove them down our friends’ throats in the name of ‘coalition’ and ‘international solidarity’ – mostly so that we can damn well do as we please, but still look like we’re merely one nation among many with the same aim and goal. So now we are stuck in a conquest-model of world dominance that alienates many would-be friends, provides our enemies with an unbeatable recruitment tool, and that has, inevitably, provided the decay and demise of our freedoms and – outside of a small military-industrial elite - dissipate any semblance of wealth we may accumulate.

I have been asked many times on my feelings about the war on Terrorism. Terrorism is defined as, “The use of fear to intimidate people, esp. for political reasons”. This is the definition from the dictionary, but what I find intriguing is that most of the laws and policies created to “fight” terror are accomplishing the exact thing that the government trying to demonize! Aren’t the current policies of our government, at every level, doing just that? We have militarization of the police, Municipal and federal forces breaking down the doors of innocent people, forcing compliance at gunpoint, shooting inoffensive people to death on the street, detaining and beating people for standing up for their constitutionally protected rights, and assaulting our natural freedoms in the name of safety but, in fact, using fear and intimidation to force compliance! This is the very definition of political terrorism! If our leaders truly seek our safety and aim to protect our liberty, their accusations and secret surveillance should be directed at Washington, not at the American people nor the world community.

We have declared war not on an enemy nation, not on an ideology, like Fascism or Communism, not on an economic or political opponent, not even on pirates (like Jefferson did), but on what is simply a tactic; and since this, our foe, is not a country, nor an army, nor the Jolly Roger, I ask: Can you declare war on an emotion? Or on a religious doctrine? Or on a clothing style? Should we go to war against sadness, elation, heresy, or plaid shirts? That’d be no more ludicrous than the War on Terror. It is an unending fight, against an unknown enemy, (who can be anyone who disagrees with us and now, ALL American citizens) with no identifiable objective (how will we know when/if we’ve won – or lost?), that rides roughshod over long-recognized principles of national sovereignty, and the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of American citizens on American soil.

In its efforts to make both the American people and our world-partners accede to our interests (domination?), our government has, since the 1970s, maintained our country in an endless state of emergency. But, as I see it, the only real emergency is the present and urgent need to halt the government’s assault on our liberty, our rights, and our Constitution. We must end the policies that bulldoze the rights that our Constitution is supposed to protect, end the militarization of our police forces, and debunk the eternal ‘state of emergency’ that our political leaders have created to justify such laws as the Patriot Act and NDAA (and, I’m sure others, of similarly excessive control that have been created at state and local levels), which are nothing less than an affront to logic and sensibility, a slap in the face to our Constitution, and completely unnecessary by any reading of America’s fundamental principles and which I, if presented the opportunity, would strive to decry, defund, defeat, and destroy.

On the global front, we just need to cut our losses; lets bring our troops home and hope that we have not converted too many foreign nationals into enemies. We aren’t occupiers or imperialists; we’re not good at it and we should quit trying to run other countries affairs. This is nothing more than empire building, which failed in ancient Rome as it did, ultimately, with every other empire throughout history. It’s a devastating financial burden on the citizens of the United States. Today there are more than 900 American bases in over 130 countries. I would love to see our troops returned home where they would defend the borders of the United States instead; wouldn’t you?

Why do we need a standing army? To defend us from the enemies we have created over the last 40 years – enough to last the lifetimes of three generations by our aggressive policies – but I believe that it needs to be located HERE in the United States not in some foreign land. Sadly, our folly of intervening in the affairs of other sovereign nations has cost us thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and scarred more innocent lives than can be counted. You cannot go to war to make peace; it’s like borrowing money to get out of debt: you end up worse in the end.

One of the others things, more locally, I find odd is that our Senator, John McCain, is such a proponent of war and violence; one would think that someone who lived through what he did in Vietnam would fight tooth and nail to NOT be involved in military aggression. In 2005 he stated,

“Securing ever-increasing parts of Iraq and preventing the emergence of new terrorist safe havens will require more troops and money. It will take time, probably years, and mean more American casualties. Those are terrible prices to pay. But with the stakes so high, I believe we must choose the strategy with the best chance of success.”

We have no declared war, just an unnecessary and illegitimate state of emergency, yet Senator McCain said in a speech in 2008:

“…We have enemies for whom no attack is too cruel, and no innocent life safe, and who would, if they could, strike us with the world's most terrible weapons. There are states that support them, and which might help them acquire those weapons because they share with terrorists the same animating hatred for the West, and will not be placated by fresh appeals to the better angels of their nature. This is the central threat of our time, and we must understand the implications of our decisions on all manner of regional and global challenges could have for our success in defeating it.”

And In a recent interview where he was asked about his defense and foreign policy priorities, McCain said:

“First of all we have to, in my view, repeal, this so-called sequestration, which are these automatic cuts in defense spending as well as other spending. We’re decimating our military, and I get that from all our military leaders, it’s not just my personal opinion. The second thing we have to do is do everything we can to restore American leadership – that means to lead. In other words we have to have a robust policy to give the lesson, one, to Vladimir Putin that he can’t just move across Europe. And the second is that we have to defeat ISIS, the president says we have to defeat ISIS but he has no strategy to get there. So we will be working very hard to force a strategy to degrade and eventually defeat ISIS.”

With no real enemy attacking the United States, he would press to create or infer hostility among any that are not aligned and approved by the United Nations or corporate sponsors. He doesn’t believe in the Constitutional Republic that is the United States but is a proponent for rule by simple majority, which is the 51 telling the 49 what to do; which is nothing short of mob rule, also known as Democracy.

Since 2005, he has had one of the most aggressive stances against people that have brought no harm to the United States. His urging American occupation of foreign lands, and going to war with Iran, North Korea, Syria, Egypt, several African countries and soon Russia, is unprecedented and most be brought to an end. He claims to be a maverick, but it’s not so much as a Republican as an American that he’s out of step, as proved by his recklessness and desire to be a global interventionist.

In the end, he needs to be removed from office as much as our foreign policies need to change.