Prezbyter

State of the Union Address 2012 (Adjusted for Honesty)

2012-01-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

My fellow Americans;

Three years ago I undertook the awesome task of running this nation, this nation steeped in awesomeness. It was awesome. But with your help through your generous, but mandatory, ask my brother Wesley about that, tax donations, mandatory donations, we have turned the corner and see a new light shining through the darkness ahead, behind and back and to the left.

That new light will sadly bring with it much additional darkness, unless we act with wisdom, restraint and lots of threats, veiled and otherwise. Many will suffer through these trying times – if you are one, I and all of those of us who won’t, feel your pain. And if not feel, we can at least watch it on all those high def, 60 inch, flat-screen TVs you bought us. So it all works out.

While the union itself is in various forms of tatters, the accumulated wealth of we here in this room and in many other wonderful rooms all over the good parts of this nation, is secure as long as those of you who do have jobs continue to go to them, compliantly and obedient. Otherwise we’ll be forced to give them to all the illegal aliens who are already doing most of the shit jobs in the country.

This great, great country.

Of course, all is not sweetness and light – several wars are being waged around the globe, as we speak, or at least as I speak and you listen, compliantly and obedient. While it is not up to us to judge who started those wars or escalated them into other wars, who committed atrocity after atrocity based on lie upon lie, who institutionalized torture and extrajudicial-summary execution, it is our duty to see them through to their conclusion. Which means bomb every last drop of profit from them, then flee leaving a shamble crawling with anti-American refugees. Who hate us for our freedom.

I can’t stress this enough. It is not because we set up military bases on their land, exploit their natural resources, rape their women, burn their children, destroy their homes, or reduce their nations to ruins of despair that is the problem. No, the problem is a deeper hatred, a more abiding rancor. They hate us for our freedom. (Mostly to do all that other stuff to them, but what can I say, the system works.)

That is why I as the first official act of the New Year have instituted the Executive Explosive Option, the EEO, which grants me the right, the responsibility, to blow up places where people oppose us, even if those places are us. Right here. Not here, here, but out there, where people oppose our right to defend ourselves from anyone who is offended by such rights. As Americans we grant this right exclusively to us and as your chief executive officer and official spokes-model, I then grant it exclusively to me. And anyone I say is acting for me. For us.

And so in closing I as always want to thank you for your attention, affection as well as your compliant obedience. God bless America.

We’ll be watching.

Reverse Social Engineering

2012-01-12T02:38:00.000-08:00

Fresh of womb they gave us God
To purge us of the sin of birth
Spare the children spoil the rod
Be sure to get your money’s worth
After that came education
To purge us of the sin of thought
Ignorant consideration
What we learn is soon forgot
TV schooled to learn peer pressure
Purge individuality
Take the old and make it fresher
Retrofit conformity
All nice, aligned they gave us work
To purge us of the sin of sloth
Expanding debt slightly berserk
Bite your tongue while whack sing wroth
Hard to see how hard we’re hearing
Hard to see the forest’s trees
Reverse social engineering
Helps one do just as they please
They train us how to dress
They train us how to talk
They train us to say ‘Yes’
Accept our role as flock
Indeed to acquiesce
To freaks festooned in frock
So sinful can confess
Free from fear of cell block
Where – they’re wont to impress
They’ve weaponized the cock
Sinners under duress
Raped until they can’t walk
Taught the meaning of stress
Torture sanctioned ad hoc
Crimes ignored by the press
Reduced to laughingstock
If needing to express
Expressing naught but shock
Hard to see how hard we’re hearing
Hard to see the forest’s trees
Reverse social engineering
Helps one do just as they please
Make us think the end is nearing
Say sex for fun is as disease
Reverse social engineering
Here to get you off your knees
No longer nightly appearing
No image comes from your TVs
Celebrity is disappearing
Wisdom from the spotlight flees
Silent fans no longer cheering
No behemoths to appease
Reverse social engineering
Fuck conventionalities

© 2012

Behemoth

2012-01-12T02:33:00.000-08:00

Too big to fail
Too vital to tank
Too much at stake
To pull out the plank
Too big to not fail
To be perfectly frank
Too damned excessive
Too mired, they sank
Cover their paychecks
With the amount blank
The rape of the world
We offer a spank
Prop up the mighty
And who do they thank
Never their debt slaves
Take that to the bank
Create a system
Social Darwinism
The law of the jungle
Gangster capitalism
The biggest thug will rule
Enforced through despotism
The scum then also rises
Advancing cronyism
Measures of control
Parceled out by cataclysm
Foundational support
Sinking deep in the abysm
Audacity
Assured to amaze
The behemoth consumes
All that it surveys
“Corporations are people, my friend”
I think I heard Mutt Rummy say
I suppose that ethos could extend
To every game of cards you play
Business gambles – means to an end
Underworked for overpay
On top of human wreckage ascend
Blow the competition away
Roll the dice then you can defend
The systemic disarray
On which corporate powers depend
Through the confusion that they convey
Life spent searching for money to spend
Human worth defined by our pay
Ever indebted as cattle penned
Compelled through fear: so we obey
We’re so big
While they’re so small
Numbers that
Really appall
If you think
‘bout it at all
Big enough
To make them crawl
Standing there
Eye to eyeball
With their backs
Against the wall
Disengage
And reinstall
Redefine
The protocol
Distribute
The wherewithal
Benefits
Accrue to all
Rapacity
In bellicose displays
The behemoth devours
The flesh on which it preys
800 pound gorilla
The hippo on the couch
50 trillion dollar bill a
Bengal tiger in a crouch
A massive oil spill a
Corporation’s costly ‘ouch’
The envelope manilla
In the diplomatic pouch
The house upon the hill a
Malaise on which we vouch
When it comes to foster ill the
Behemoth is no slouch
Capacity
Pressured by malaise
Behemoth redefined
When slave disobeys

© 2012

Abortion of Justice

2012-01-12T02:24:00.000-08:00

To fit within society
For many a contortion
Expend unending tension
To find ourselves in torsion
Tweaked by our polarities
Try to maintain proportion
Spend less time upon our knees
As we scramble for our portion
Some would advance
Upon other’s decline
Such arrogance
Is seldom benign
One’s circumstance
Must another define
The furtherance
Of the will to malign
The strident stance
Upon the thin blue line
More malfeasance
As corruptions align
Intolerance
And lawmakers combine
Inelegance
Systemic design
Fiefdoms finance
Through collection of fine
Gamed governance
To the black hole consign
The relevance
We no longer enshrine
Through ignorance
Innocence too confine
With acceptance
As blame we assign
Continuance
Systematic decline
Law is poorly served in justice
Based upon distortion
Don’t call it a miscarriage
When it’s clearly an abortion
Abortion of justice
We’ll get our daze in court
Extortion adjust us
We abide while they distort
In the deep south where they drawl
While referrin’ to ya’ all
Talking loud and walking tall
Texan virtue they extol
Fueled by hate and alcohol
Ever searching for a brawl
Cheapening the free-for-all
Egos huge but IQs small
When you answer duty’s call
It’s among the poor you trawl
So far down, to make them crawl
Isn’t any work at all
The first nigger to befall
Legal system’s hooded pall
Or poor fucker you can haul
Journey handcuffed to the hall
Of law where the crimes appall
Justice gagged against the wall
Someone has to take the fall
The system needs an overhaul
It was dark I could not see
The face was oh so shadowy
Blade made it far too hard to flee
They all look alike to me
Not white punk on a crime spree
Drifter lacking charity
Sociopathology
Convicted by mendacity
Those in moral poverty
Claimed victims of brutality
Random held in custody
Black man lined up hands not free
Prompted for identity
They all look alike to me
Is it in justice that we’re free
They all look alike to me
Justice blind in certainty
We all look alike to me
Abortion of justice
Disorder in the court
Distortion, just trust us
When tall tales come up short
Justice does not miscarry
Blindly allocating doom
It is freedom that we bury
Ripping justice from the womb
Abortion of justice
Deformed in form of tort
Distortions disgust us
Court where criminals consort

© 2012

God the Imbecile

2011-12-26T06:10:00.000-08:00

We have been trained – taught suggests capacity for actual learning – that people have a right to their own beliefs, that it is wrong to question what others believe because right or wrong, it is their right to believe it. Right? This seems reasonable; people should be allowed the sanctity of their notions, however quaint, in the privacy of their minds. Tyranny is the concerted effort by some to eliminate such a right, imposing the will of the tyrant upon the thinking and behavior of others.

Is it not fair to ask: Is thinking a right, to be accorded the same superficial reverence we attach to all things we call rights? Is there some legislation, or edict of tyrant, that can actually stop thinking within humans, short of structural debilitation? Have great minds been silenced by the pen where not the sword? Is not the mind in and of itself a silent mechanism made noisy by the mouth?

Thinking isn’t a right so much as a necessity, engaged in by all sentient beings to some degree or another. It’s as if to say breathing is a right, or seeing or hearing. To be alive is to do these things; one has no choice. As we breathe, as our blood pumps through our personal hydraulic system owing to the beating of our hearts, our minds are on, we are engaged. We think wherefore we are. We are therefore we will.

And while denying these functions in another is a clear violation of their freedom to enjoy the sanctity of their person, the fact of our lives isn’t our fundamental human right to be alive so much as the caprice of birth and the fortune life accords us. If a poor schmuck in Pakistan has no right to live because the USA drone bombs them to pieces, then not a one of us so privileged to live in a place not (currently) being bombed enjoys any more right to life than they.

How can we? Does one who kills someone close to you, someone you care about, have more right to live than the person they killed? Each time our nation kills, we offer up this very message: We as killers have no more right to live than our victims. And we as citizens of the USA, or any NATO nation, are killing, murdering people, slaughtering people, humans, just like us, every fucking day.

How then can a species with a stated but not actual right to life then demand a right to individual beliefs? If you can be killed for no other reason than you happen to be living someplace that some other place is bombing, you have no right to life. If you have no right to life, then how can you have a right to think? To believe?

You don’t. We don’t. We have no right to think. Not granted, not implied. To do it is the work of the individual. It is the choice of the individual, the privilege of the individual. To not do it is the diminution of the individual and the society which we inhabit. There is no one else who can make you think or stop you from thinking as long as your facility remains. It is not God granted. It is the gift of your parents. Lucky for all who can read this that they fucked, huh? Otherwise, who knows what you might have been?

Why, then, in a place so obviously not dedicated to thinking – instead given to distraction and amusement – do we culturally pay so much lip service to the sanctity of others’ beliefs? Why is it so important that we respect others’ right to believe patently absurd nonsense, often odious and repellant, especially when we can see it does them, nor those in their orbits, any good at all?

Could it be perhaps our desire not to be called out on our own patently absurd beliefs, to not have to try to explain why all the accumulated ephemera roiling around in our minds becomes reverential when we call it God? Do we gain more by keeping our questions to ourselves or giving them air where the perspective of others might lead to a clearer path?

Could not the reason we deem religious discourse along anything but very narrow lines as impolitic be owing to the very nature of such discourse? Does not light shone in the darkness lead to the enlightenment of those in the dark?

Perhaps we fear the facing of the hardest question, owing to the finality of its answer: Why is God such an imbecile? Or if you prefer, Imbecile.

It is the hardest question, because once it is asked, the asker is tasked to show why one should question it. And it should be questioned. Yet our professed reverence to the idea that belief in nonsense is a greater right than life itself keeps such discourse away from those who would be best served by it and so it remains unaddressed.

Of course, many will rankle at such a notion: that God could be anything but, well, Godly. And even though as mortals we can only guess what that might be, we’re pretty sure, that it wouldn’t include imbecility. God might be a lot of things but It/He/She sure ain’t no moron.

And the question dies there.

In other places. Here it lives in its own reverence and is as likely to be answered correctly as in most other places that ask it – if they only had the temerity (or simple disgust at a species in decline) to ask it. But, as they don’t and as most of you won’t, I’ll give it a shot.

From the beginning of human literature and well before, humans had notions of an Uber-Being; something bigger and badder than the asshole currently running things – always an asshole running things. When young, someone to smite daddy for the lashing he just gave you, when older something to strike down your oppressors or competition.

A human in such a role fails because evidence exists in abundance that humans are finite: we live – we die. To have such a protector as human would be pointless because the more protecting and smiting that is done, the higher the probability of the rate of failure. Then you need another one. Like bombs and bodyguards, good for one perilous application – then replacement time.

Clearly ancient human needed something a little more Omnipresent. Hence the first god in all probability was the sun. To appreciate its reverence among humans to this day, consider the first day of the week.

Now, the sun as a god delivered. Seriously. Without it this planet wouldn’t be here because there would be no here here, no air, water, crops, no nothing, just a big old space full of space. So, as the sun outlasted the stoutest of chiefs, kings, emperors and the like, and as it could wreak havoc on those not properly reverential (actually burning them to death) the sun made good sense as a divine thing to worship.

Problem was, it didn’t really do much, beyond affording all things life, and one could pray to it until one was red in the face, and they’d still have to clean up their cave or whatever. Go to work and all that.

While delivering big, the sun didn’t seem to deal with personal requests. And how does one lay claim to godhood if they can’t even offer up a little of the good stuff here and now? Thus enter the priest, the sun/god’s intermediary. Someone you could talk to, offer up a little hummana hummana and who assured you they would take it straight to the top and put in a good word for you.

In the priest came the public acknowledgement of God – it wasn’t all just in one’s head. Hell, it was in everyone’s head! One needn’t be embarrassed about all the weird thoughts messing up all of our relationships – the weird homeless guy in a dress talking to himself feels our pain. Who better to help us work through it?

Soon the power elite faced a division: the chief/king/emperor could ruin your life presently – the medicine-man/vizier/priest could fuck you for eternity. With the help of his invisible Super King, who could kick all those other kings’ asses. If He wanted.

So some king types had priests in their court; others became God incarnate and ruled through divine edict. Until they died. Then they either became kings again (dead ones) or were elevated to godhood through the retelling of their stories. The important thing is that they died. All of them. All those guys, who made up all this religion, who changed the nature of god from generation to generation, worshipping nature as god, the sun, animals, the air, ultimately came right back to worshipping man as God.

We all know their names: Adam, Abraham, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Smith, on and on, men who may or may not have lived claiming to be, or claimed to be, God’s direct emissary upon the Earth, with God’s special message for God’s special children, lining up in the corner for the short bus to nowhere. All of them dead, even fictionally, having died in their stories long before anyone you’ve ever known was conceived or realized – long before their parents or parent’s parents ever lived.

Could God really be so incompetent that It/He/She could never get it right, not even just once, and straighten up this whole God issue which plagues us still and makes us murder each other over our locations while respecting each other’s beliefs?

God, capable of creating the entire universe out of sheer force of will; the progenitor of all that exists; the embodiment of all that thrives can’t define Itself in such a manner that even stupid humans can understand? Santa Claus can deliver goodies to millions of houses simultaneously, but God can’t just pop over and introduce Himself to everyone at the same time, eliminate some doubt? Always makes with the homeless guys. Freaky.

God creates Adam of the dust of the ground, a little mud baby which lives only upon its first breath, yet can’t control this single man/ape, or inspire enough reverence in His creation to engender respect? What kind of shit father can’t keep His kids in line while being capable of creating all existence? What? He was busy at the office?

Bullshit. Not buying. Omnipresence demands more than asking one mud baby what the other mud babies are doing. From the earliest interaction it is established that God only talks to some people. Isn’t it odd how often it seems to be the crazy ones?

God tries again with Abraham, an unrepentant liar according to those who held him reverential enough to deify him, yet who can’t explain why anyone should believe the story of a liar in a book of dubious history. Abe supposedly walked and talked with God as a man, entered into a real estate deal on a handshake basis, kicking off millennia of slaughter to enforce a fictional oral contract.

What is this God these people demand a right to believe in? A neglectful father, a real estate broker who trucks with liars?

Neglectful father? Consider Jesus (real Westernized name Joshua): one more in the litany of Abrahamic religionistas who communed directly with God, yet lived as a homeless pauper and died brutally at the hands of God’s enemies. Really? Would you let your only son live in poverty only to die at the hands of your enemies if you could stop it? Hell, as God, One would imagine that as a wonderful opportunity to enlighten One’s enemies and bring them into the fold as allies. Instead He just let him die there on the cross. Nice dad.

Still couldn’t get it right. He tried again with Mohammed, another homeless guy. (Everybody knows that the homeless guy is the one God is talking to, just listen, he’ll tell you.) So God (Allah) shows Mohammed the real true path, not the phony unreal untrue paths that all those other guys trucked with. Then he (and perhaps a bunch of other guys who didn’t hang with God/Allah) wrote the Quran. And that cleared it all up.

Except that, as always a bunch of other guys who didn’t meet God wrote some amendments to, you know, clear up the stuff that God once again couldn’t clearly elucidate. And Islam, God’s umpteenth try, split into factions, each so certain of their interpretation of God’s pure love that they set about slaughtering those not so certain. Muslim fundamental-cases are as happy killing fellow apostate Muslims as they are killing Christians, Hindus and Jews.

And who can blame them? God has so much love to offer.

Smug Christians gladly forget about the schism which led to the Protestant Reformation, and the slaughtering of Christians by Christians who couldn’t agree on God’s message in regard to His only son’s love. While killing Muslims. As easily ignored was the slaughter of the War Between the States, where Christians murdered Christians over the rights of some to become rich off the enslavement of others. The Biblically justified right to own slaves. For the love of Christ.

There is no pass for the Hindus or Buddhists. They hold the love of their respective notions of divinity as closely as their Western brethren. They slaughter and degrade and diminish themselves and others just as we in the West do. The Buddha was a rich upper caste prince who only fled the opulent grounds he had wiled away his youth in as soon as he realized he would become a father. Called his son Rahula: ‘shackle’. Then left, never to return, so the story goes.

Into a world of poverty he entered, renouncing his wealth (yet knowing he, unlike those he begged with, could return to it if things got too tough) and becoming the sanyassi’s sanyassi. He taught of a higher plane of existence, like Hinduism, where this life is an audition for nirvana (Moksha in Hindu) and only through acceptance of one’s place and elimination of desire could one hope to ascend to this afterlife blissatorium.

Then he died. There is as much evidence that he never really lived as there is that he did. Little in the corpus of Buddhist literature is actually attributed to him. Most was written long after the character or the man passed into tales of a man or character.

The Buddha was perhaps the most reverential of all, being rich and electively becoming homeless. Suggesting the true path is not of possession or effort but subsisting on the effort of others less enlightened. In the land of the starving there are more beggars than farmers. To desire is to strive to climb from the mire, not merely accept it as a provisional home. To control one’s appetites is to avoid crawling back into the mire, making it one’s elective grave.

The Buddha spoke of the Middle Path, and reason lies there. But this is man’s reason, not more of God than anything ever written, regardless of inspiration. God only becomes limited through man: heaven is the consolation for lives turned to hell. God is not the imbecile; the imbecile is God’s creator.

Human.

Glad to clear that up.

Peace.

Prezbyter © 2011

Coincidentally

2011-11-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

It seems fair (or at least balanced) to offer up some ink, or pixels to the dominant perspective of our culture regarding the cataclysmic events which shape our society. While much snide snarkery has been directed at those derisively known as “conspiracy buffs”, these people occupy the minority perspective while receiving the majority of polite society’s dismissive disdain. Little attention is paid to the perception of the majority which would be accurately called ‘coincidence theorist’.

It is always prudent to define one’s terms when engaged in such distinctions, a conspiracy isn’t merely people talking about doing something, its people talking about doing something illegal; it’s a word crime. If you think about robbing a bank or hitting your landlady over her head and stealing her purse it is currently unprosecutable, repellant or justified as it might seem intellectually. But, if you express this intention to your buddy and perhaps ask him to hold your coat while you engage in such behaviors, then you engage in conspiracy.

Conspiracy is words between two or more people that lead to or promote the idea of the commission of a crime; whether buying some pot, negotiating for a blow job or planning a bank robbery. Conspiracy in a criminal context is a way for law enforcement to prosecute people for crimes that they may not have physically committed but who deserve a little justice none the less.

Coincidence is the apparent coming together of unrelated incidents in a fortuitous or serendipitous manner. Conspiracy is concerted effort, coincidence is mere chance. It is always wise to avoid the false dichotomy or suggestion there are only two ways to perceive reality. There are a multitude of variations and perceptions, coincidences occur all the time as do conspiracies, coincidences occur in conspiracies. How does one know?

While there is much historical precedent for conspiracies – the Mafia is an ongoing criminal conspiracy, not merely a theory, the US congress another example – coincidences of amazing depth and complexity have a low probability of occurrence, to borrow a phrase used by NIST – National Institute for Standards and Technology – regarding their own theory as to what caused Building 7 to collapse on 9/11.

An illustrative example can be found in the House Assassinations Committee conclusion that another gunman fired from the grassy knoll at the same time Oswald purportedly fired at Kennedy on 11/22/63. The notion that two men with rifles would show up at the same place and time and fire at the same moving target at the exact instant by coincidence is confounding to even the staunchest supporters of the fiction known as the Warren Commission Report. It defies statistical probability.

Coupled with some 40 material witnesses dying within years of the Warren Report and New Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s investigation and prosecution of Clay Shaw, the probabilities of such events occurring as coincidence are so minute as to be impossible. Forty people materially involved in the killing of a world leader don’t just die within a few years coincidentally any more than independent gunmen show up at the same place for a little execucide. Especially if the killer is a ‘lone nut’.

Yet that is exactly what the majority accepts as true, based upon one of the oldest logical fallacies in the book: argument of authority. To accept the word of an authority because they are an authority, especially a self proclaimed authority, is illogical because authority doesn’t necessarily equate with correctness. Authorities make mistakes. All the time. Everything is individual interpretation and capacity to impose will. Authorities said the Earth was flat and at the center of the Universe. This is demonstrably false yet was accepted for millennia because of authoritarian dictate.

Human civilization accepted said authoritarian dictates and in the 21st Century there are millions if not billions of humans who believe without question that the Earth is but thousands of years old and that humans are superior to species that existed millions of years before we even appeared and shall exist long after we’ve returned to the Earth from which we are spawned.

Authorities have been wrong since humans declared themselves as such and are proven so to this day. The EPA declared the air in New York City safe to breathe right after 9/11 before they had even conducted tests. That proved to be untrue, to the suffering of thousands. Yet many still believe what the same authorities told them really had happened on that day.

The fact that we so readily accept their word is what allows charlatans into positions of authority in the first place. Little surprise they kill each other off when perceived as an impediment to profits or position. The people’s outrage can always be tempered with some improbable explanations and unnecessary violence: our thumbs turned downward the crime is ameliorated by the execution of someone, ideally the perpetrator; but not necessarily. The redemptive value of blood for blood isn’t defined by culpability.

During the 20th Century in the USA conspiracies started to disappear. At least in regard to people who worked for the government and industry: certain migrant groups, like the above mentioned fraternal organization were always portrayed as engaging in some nefarious scheme or another. Their ethnicity and all. But the big guys, the bankers, industrialists, presidents, the big conspiracies which plagued the 19th Century seemed to bypass the power elite in the 20th. With the assassination of William McKinley, the lone nut had arrived and would be trotted out more and more over the coming century.

One of the first conspiracies to disappear happened in 1934. Known as the Business Plot it was brought to the attention of the House of Representatives, by a fellow named Smedly Butler. Or, Major General Smedly Butler of the US Marine Corps, if that sort of thing impresses you. It certainly did Congress, as they awarded him 2 Congressional Medals of Honor, making him among the first to receive that distinction.

A couple years before Smedly had addressed about 50 thousand soldiers who had converged on Washington D.C. offering his support to the men who had left their homes to fight in World War One but had not received the bonus they were promised by the government for their service. Desperate, out of work and struggling with the poverty pervasive through the Depression, the soldiers and their families set up an encampment across from the White House demanding a redress of their grievances. President Hoover had General MacArthur and the Army burn them out and drive them off.

In 1933 Butler was approached by an emissary of a prestigious group with a plan: with Butler at the head of 500 thousand troops, they would surround the White House, oust FDR and Smedly would be installed as the titular head of a new fascist regime. Butler, intrigued, began his own sting, indicating his support for the plot to the emissary. As he got deeper into it he realized that the people behind it were some of the richest and most powerful families in the nation.

During the McCormack–Dickstein Congressional Committee hearings in 1934, Butler detailed his meetings and the identity of some of those behind the plot. The House ruled that the evidence supported the testimony of Butler and concluded the hearings without any fanfare. Then, to punish the conspirators for their attempted fascist takeover of the nation, they promptly did: nothing. No one was charged; nothing alluded to the perpetrators in the media. The conspiracy disappeared.

Butler became portrayed as the lone nut.

At the onset of WWII, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy was relieved of his post and accused of being defeatist. He made this statement, released in the Boston Sunday Globe, in 1940:

“Democracy is finished in England. It may be here, too.”

His ‘defeatism’ cost him his title and his shot at the presidency. Kennedy’s political aspirations fell to his son Joe Jr. who was subsequently blown up in a plane loaded with high explosives remote controlled by his own forces. This left his tattered ambitions to his second oldest, John Fitzgerald, whose boat was sunk in the Pacific, injuring his back but giving him the war hero status he would use to ascend to the presidency. Only to have his head blown off. Then leaving that lofty aspiration to his third son, Robert, who was shot in the back of the head by a guy standing in front of him.

Perhaps Joseph Kennedy, an outcast of the powerful Boston Brahmins, who snubbed him for being not only Irish but Catholic, may have said more than prudence demanded in that simple declaration. He was rich, but his exclusion from the ranks of those who ruled society through lives of inherited wealth and gangster capitalism accorded him no loyalty to them. He could say what none of them would ever admit: fascism would become the dominant form of government of the world.

Mussolini said: “Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, because it is the merger of corporate and government power”.
As the inventor of said ethos, Benito would have known. Few industries pay the dividends of the war industry, making war the economic incentive of industry upon those who just aren’t spending enough. With prices to die for. Or from.

Did Joe tip us off that the corporatists/fascists had already won and the way it would be celebrated would be by throwing the best damned war this planet had ever seen? Did war hero Butler warn us, only to be marginalized and put out to pasture, to be followed by Kennedy whose political aspirations were crushed by a simple tip-off that nobody picked up on?

“Democracy is finished in England.” This before the shooting had started in earnest. Ambassador Kennedy couldn’t possibly know whether England could defend itself from Hitler, but he did know who pulled the strings in the upper echelons of power by inhabiting a position, albeit as an outsider, within those ranks. He could see the power of rich men with big companies who profited hugely from war among those in the corridors of government – in Germany and England as well as in the US.

Is it coincidence that subsequent to WWII conservative democrat Truman was replaced by conservative republican General Eisenhower, just as subsequent to WWI corporate interests tried to replace moderate democrat Roosevelt with conservative General Butler? By then the USA had been instrumental in usurping land in Palestine, assuring perpetual war in the Near East and had become militarily engaged in Korea, huge income generators for weapon manufacturers and war support industries.

Has the US been at war in some country or another since? Is it merely coincidence that Butler warned us of this perniciousness, with our silent (or boisterous) approbation only to be followed by another general made president warning us of the same thing in his farewell address to the nation? And that his successor, JFK, son of another who warned us, was executed in broad daylight in Texas where LBJ, his successor, hailed from?

Occam’s Razor is basically, don’t unnecessarily compound variables. Don’t add things which are superfluous, don’t complicate the issue. This is reasonable as the more you bring to the table, the more you have to sift through to find what you really want. What is more complicated: businessmen acting as they always have, or highly placed insiders with nothing to gain, independently repeating the same warning because of some deep seated hatred of the nation?

These men and others, many of whom were publicly murdered, made simple statements of their understanding of the world around them. They saw what was happening in the very government they had pledged to defend, and sent warnings. Their warnings went unheeded, their voices drowned out in the cacophony of confounding variables, the disturbing reality buried under increasingly improbable coincidences.

They had little benefit from making such statements and in some cases endured great suffering, yet they all warned of a conspiracy to subvert this nation into fascist rule. Into a Corporatocracy.

And now, we are that very thing, tearing ourselves asunder clambering over each other for money, created out of thin air, or clamoring for justice in a place that only honors credit and manufactures debt.

General Butler wrote a pamphlet called War is a Racket. It’s a quick read, can be found online for free and outlines a simple and irrefutable means to end war: eliminate profit. The first part of the bookette outlines how much each of the companies he exemplifies made during WWI. Their profits went through the roof. War makes little companies into big companies. And big companies into Halliburton, who can put their CEO into executive power and then have him declare a war they can profit off of mightily, killing millions, making billions.

Consider the real world probability of some of these coincidences we have been instructed to ignore in our acceptance of the “official story”: Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) is a company which offers material support for among other things, combat situations. The Texas based company, a big supporter of LBJ, made billions of dollars during the Vietnam war providing that support. They have been involved in many of the wars we have started and have made further billions (through parent company Halliburton) in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Their CEO was for a time Dick Cheney, former secretary of defense and vice president, who while employed for them worked his first private sector job. And made untold millions (billions?) of dollars. As vice president, in contravention to law and any ethical standards, he still profited off of his investments with the company he gave multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to provide support and reconstruction in the nations he insisted the USA invade and occupy and destroy.

Is this a coincidence? Could this possibly just be an instance of everything working out for the little guy in spite of the incalculable odds in tension with it? Dick Cheney, while instrumental in fomenting war, certainly wasn’t in a position to implement it. Was he?

The justification/sales pitch for the escalating wars of the 21st Century was 9/11. Over the course of nearly two hours on that day the man in charge of running the nation, the fellow who called the shots in mustering the defense of the nation, was Dick Cheney. At least according to the majority of the witnesses and evidence. According to the final, mutually agreed upon scenario in the 9/11 Commission Report, VP Cheney didn’t wander into the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) until nearly 10:00 AM, just in time to miss all the action.

“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President…the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out… And when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!?" Norman Mineta, testimony to the 9/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton presiding.

Mineta testified publicly under oath; Cheney testified in private, no notes, recordings and not under oath. His story as to what he was up to on 9/11 changed several times. Mineta’s – as well as Counter Terrorism head Richard Clarke, who placed Cheney at the helm as well – remained consistent. Is it a coincidence a man who made millions (billions?) off of his investments in a company which profiteers from war, would have an instrumental involvement in hastening a war? Or two? Or three?

Is war a coincidence or the concerted act of many people? As appointed commander of US forces, Cheney’s single job was to use the multi-trillion dollar war machine to defend the nation. His failure led to millions of deaths, billions if not trillions in profits and to millions if not billions of dollars in personal gain. He either conspired with others to lead us into war, or his inspired incompetence somehow made him richer and more powerful through a series of unrelated coincidences these attacks precipitated.

The 9/11 attacks occurred during two, not one, but two major drills: Vigilant Warrior and Vigilant Guardian, part of the Global Guardian exercises to combat an attack which was utterly improbable and ridiculously unlikely: a Russian attack over the North Pole. Yep, any day now. These drills effectively took the bulk of the US civil air defense and placed it in Canadia. That’s right, Canadia. To compound the confusion, they had several other drills going on at the same time, false bogies on FAA radar screens; FEMA set up for a disaster in New York City on 9/10/01.

How convenient for those crazy, fundamentalist, Muslim, drunken, whoring terrorists that they chose to attack exactly when we would be most vulnerable. And prepared. Not only was FEMA set up in advance for an attack on NYC but the Pentagon was apparently running some drills in preparation for an attack in Washington when the Shiite hit the fan. Sunni side up. So, we were wholly unprepared for the repelling of the attack, but had all of our emergency response in place.

Quite the coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

© 2011 Prezbyter 11/1/11

Death by Accusation

2011-10-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

Charged in the press
Tried upon TV
Accusation
Equals felony
Our conviction
Has much gravity
Should you be our
Current enemy
Mainstream journalists write what is right
Or find they might not write so long
Corporate media flexing their might
Define what is right and is wrong
Industries profit promoting the fight
Conflict assures coffers are strong
Patriotism can always ignite
The blood lust defining the throng
The leader du jour
His fatwa declared
Position secure
With grievances aired
To prove that he’s sure
Must show he’s prepared
Destroy or injure
An enemy snared
And work to ensure
That people are scared
Of thoughts deemed impure
Dissent that is shared
Succumb to the lure
Of ethics impaired
Working to assure
No victims are spared
Death by accusation
See the elimination
Of the rights of the accused
Transcending every nation
Every role and station
Human power is misused
Convicted in the press
Weak evidence or less
Profane pundits profess
An audience impress
Something about the dress
Effective use of stress
Go backwards as progress
On fiction they obsess
Imagine war as chess
A punch as a caress
Murder obliged noblesse
Explosives as finesse
Still others dispossess
Captive under duress
Too tortured to confess
See suicide success
No thought to reassess
No grievances redress
Corruptions coalesce
Thus justice we suppress
Death by accusation
See the elimination
Of the rights of the accused
Transcending every nation
Every role and station
Human power is misused
Murder by implication
Political predation
Seen so readily excused
An insane instigation
Equal to condemnation
Human rights we have abused
Promote assassination
Embrace retaliation
Minds such thinking has suffused
Wake from hibernation
Find no consolation
Once the blindfold is refused

© 2011

The New Mediocrity

2011-10-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

Once good was good
And that was good
Cause good is always good
Once bad was bad
But that’s not bad
Cause bad is understood
Once great was great
Little debate
Among the brotherhood
Thus awful’s fate
A wretched state
In every likelihood
Then man invented evil
A bad we could call our own
To give then to receive ill
Can’t leave well enough alone
Some people still believe shill
Though so often they are shown
The power to deceive will
Make the obvious unknown
Gonna believe me
Or your lying eyes
So much work to decide
Hard it is to see
Behind the disguise
It’s easier just to hide
Among the safe, the known, the sane
Know demands, naught to explain
Reduce the input to the brain
Deaden thought with the mundane
It’s the new mediocrity
Bland dry and tough
It don’t have to be good
Just good enough
We’ve been trained that less is more
By those with more than less
We’ve been told that peace is war
And at times that no means yes
We’ve been taught that rich is poor
Rich gets richer nonetheless
Every option they explore
Leads us further to distress
Set your sights high
Aim over the sky
Can power deny
To fail is to try
Set your sights low
How low can you go
There’s plenty below
To find out is to know
Making stupid the new brilliant
Making vapid sharp and cool
Make everything into nothing
Make us succumb to ridicule
Sitting lonely motionless
Search for something to express
Nothing sucks seeds like success
A world so steeped in awesomeness
It’s the new mediocrity
Filled empty with fluff
Twist up a fatty
And give it a puff
Compulsory adoration
Love delivered on demand
Media lionization
Identify yourself by brand
Half hearted regurgitation
So few words at our command
Existential masturbation
Brains shrink - waistlines expand
Awesome is the new good
And good is just okay
And bad is terrible
Or great
Depending how you say
Phenomenal is excellent
If you look at it that way
What really is amazing
That we
Make it through the day
It’s the new mediocrity
Can’t make up this stuff
We worship our shit
Just can’t get enough
Vinyl covered leatherette
Made with tears and blood and sweat
Equal parts hope and regret
How much will you pay
Don’t answer yet
The new mediocrity
Our bluster is bluff
Cry like big babies
When we get a rebuff
When defender can’t defend
With the trillions that they spend
Is the war machine pretend
Will we get it in the end
The new mediocrity
Don’t leave in a huff
No alms for the priesthoods
We’ll have to play rough
Cash only with no cachet
Costs prey we pray you defray
So the church can have its way
Humankind must pay and pay…
The new mediocrity
Our porno is snuff
Attached to the ceiling
Wrists in a handcuff
Another tired pop retread
Singing things already said
A million times stuck in your head
The crap we choose to embed
The new mediocrity
Eliminate doubt
Suckled on refuse
Garbage in garbage out

© 2011

iCon

2011-10-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

iOwn a iPhone
iGotta iPod
iWanna iPad
iOughta cry fraud
jAcked iN logged on, eyes are down
onliNe i Am on my way
upriGht looking for the iLowdown
piXiLated there on my diSplay
miCe pAce eWe tOob dEfacebook
sO many venues iN whiCh iPlay
otherwiSe anywiSe everywiSe
iNdiViSiBle anyway
tHree diMensiOns tWo diMensiOns nO diMensiOn
iNdeliCate iNterplay
sEe pretensiOns fee intentiOns flee attentiOns
nOw how much wiLl you iPay
sUbmit to the iCon
iLiFe upon the screen
tEll us all about yourself
tAlk to the iMachiNe
iTalked to my aUnty on sKype
sUch amaziNg iClariTy
remiNded me why iDespiSe her
rEminded her why she despiSes me
iRemembered why iLiKe iGoodiEs
iLove all this iTechnology
aCts as an iElectronic buffer
bEtween iMe and iReality
bOw before the iCon
iLiFe upon the screen
iT’s been almost an hour
sO tell us how you’ve been
tWeet liTtle biRdiE
chiRp upon the screen
nOw all liTtle biRdiEs
cAn be herd and scene
siNg liTtle biRdiE
nO reason to wean
sO many sad biRdiEs
fRom theiR iMorphine
sUrrender to the iCon
iLife upon the screen
kNow that when your wiLl’s gone
tHere’s no need to iNtervene
zeniTh of technology
pLaced iN sociAl priMacy
fOstering conformiTy
iNcludes a small monthly fee
aLso costs for actiVatiOn
aNd for each new appliCatiOn
dOn’t forget your custom tone
aNd priNts for piCtures from your phone
iToons, iPorn, iLife downloaded
connectiOns become corroded
mOnthly expense becomes bloated
deviCe du jour becomes outmoded
suppliCatiOn to the iCon
iLife upon the screen
gEt the latest updates on
iVersiOn seventeen
wiTh consequentiAl diSregard
iMage engiNeers bombard
tHe consumer – bAttle scarred
commerciAl wastelands scorched and charred
liVes caught iN a memory card
raiSe your profiLe – drop your guard
hoiSt upon handheld petard
tO sPawn the traumatiZed iTard
sUccumb to the iCon
iLife upon the screen
iDread all the iSpawn
cOnsequences as foreseen
iSight
cAnnot see
iNoiSe
fRequency
iTouch
stiLl can’t feel
iSmell
nO appeal
iTaste
bUy, bygone
iDiE
bYe iCon

© 2011 10/1/11

Boy

2011-10-12T07:21:00.001-07:00

Yo boy
You the man
Number one American
Woe boy
Quite a tan
Mistake for an African
Show boy
Tilt and pan
Earnest for the cameraman
Go boy
What a plan
Ferried round in a sedan
Owe boy
Sure you can
Labor done by Mexican
Throw boy
In the van
Renditioned in Afghanistan
Fly boy
Hooligan
Return dead where they began
Spy boy
Screens to scan
Drones fly over Pakistan
Try boy
Short time span
Punish every Libyan
Buy boy
Oilcan
Lifeblood of the oilman
Sly boy
Flames you fan
Set your sights upon Iran
Lie boy
Courtesan
Corporate whore, one more madman
A man does as he must
A boy does as he’s told
To earn a little trust
One must be self controlled
Like everyone before
You told us what we wished to hear
You offered up some more
Mendacities sell well sincere
Injustice you deplore
Upon this you staked your career
Claimed you would end the war
And lead us thus away from fear
A man does what is right
A boy acts when cajoled
When time comes to unite
Fortune favors the bold
To promise what you can’t deliver
To offer up palliative
In fear and cold must humans shiver
Is this the succor that you give
As but the latest shill du jour
Helping some men own the rest
Try to avoid the allure
Of thinking you’re among the best
Hope a meaningless contrivance
To keep the cretins in their place
War a millionaire’s connivance
To completely own the human race
Be wary of buyer’s remorse
Owners oft come to regret it
The problem always is of course
What you wanted, once you get it
A man always does his best
A boy seeks to avoid scold
As so many can attest
One ain’t all that to behold
Men aren’t easily impressed
Boys can squeeze into the mold
In pieces must we then rest
To be slave is to be sold
A man strives for excellence
In himself and all he offers
Boys look for expedience
Swollen heads seek swollen coffers

© 2011

And lest I be accused of partisanship, one for his predecessor:

ARROGANT

Who’s the king of the world
Who’s the ruler of earth
Whose ambition unfurled
Who’s corrupted from birth
Who gets what he wants
Regardless of his need
Who tortures and taunts
Making so many bleed

Arrogant
Superior
Self righteous
Inferior

Upwardly failing, he is
Downward we’re flailing, we is
Wailing and bailing, we is
Junior is sailing, he is

Arrogant
Superior
Motives
Ulterior

Who’s destroying the world
Consuming all he surveys
Whose invective is hurled
In pyrotechnic displays
Who takes what he wants
Who steals, cheats and lies
Whose legacy haunts
Our cultures demise

Arrogant
Superior
Morally
Inferior

© 2003

Discipline

2011-08-12T07:13:00.000-07:00

As boys and girls we run roughshod
Over this our Mother Earth
Earthling children we are: applaud
Mother Earth did spawn our birth
As little baby roundlings
Touching our expanding girth
All groan as bitter foundlings
Sucked on tragedy and mirth
Our show of appreciation
Most evident in its dearth
Interest rotting in stagnation
Just can’t get our money’s worth
We pay too much for too little
Find too little is worth that much
Struggle hard to reach the middle
With the edges losing touch
Pay so much more for so much
Too little attention to the cost
So little attention on too much
We already may have lost
We pay dearly for so little
Yet lament about the price
Give it up for a little more
As we parcel paradise
Underpaid with the wages of sin
I could use some discipline
Stole the country fair and square
Thar warn’t nuttin’ but Injuns there
Chased out the French, Spaniards, the Brits
Some crimes only justice commits
Advanced through adversarial schism
Invented bankster capitalism
Circumvented the rule of law
Decency did then withdraw
A voracious beast was spawned
A hunger which increased beyond
Anything we could have thought
No sense of history, no reason sought
Blood lust never satiated
Profits always lubricated
By an engine designed for war
Give it all up for a little bit more
Waylaid by the pages of spin
Seems that we will never win
They want us to believe this
Believe that we’re impotent
Debt the tether, then receive this
Trembling and indigent
Supplicated to our masters
On our knees before our kings
Pay and pay for their disasters
Pussies, morons and weaklings
As long as we accept this
Then yes, it remains true
When faced with your cowardice
The solution lives in you
Overpaid with the wages of sin
They could use some discipline
In the final analysis
Should we choose to pursue it
If we don’t fix our government
The world will have to do it
To compel the world to stand
Against a people sedated
Who choose not to understand
Why their nation’s feared and hated
Should they rise where we have fallen
Though we imagine we’re exempt
Don’t think they’ll look at us with love
Instead but with contempt
We’ll find ourselves pariahs
In this land we call our own
No salvation – no messiahs
And no way ever to atone
Stuffed-crust Super-sized Chagrin
We all could use some discipline

A hearty “hoy hoy” to C. Montgomery Burns giving it all up for a little bit more!

© 2011

The Antisocial Network

2011-07-18T17:45:00.000-07:00

Alone in my room
I can broadcast universal
Unlike conversation
I get lots of rehearsal
My accumulated wisdom
Is prepared for dispersal
I man the machine
Yet I see no role reversal
Opening the windows
To a closed society
Alone here all a twitter
In this vast community
No depth in two dimensions
No virtue living virtually
The anti-social network
Keeps you away from me
Once we would talk to each other
When time we used to meet
Once we would go out of doors
We'd take it to the street
Once we would call each other
Now we just give a tweet
Bout what we watched on TV
Or the next thing we will eat
So much more to say
About the nothing that I do
Lost within the dream
Of the perfect rendezvous
Our relation to devices
Isolation does imbue
The anti-social network
Keeps me away from you
Our fingers do the talking
When it comes time to discuss
Subtract multiplication
Division is a plus
The whole civilization
Is thrown under the bus
The anti-social network
Keeps us away from us

© 2011 Prezbyter

Disposable Pleasures

2011-07-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

A porn star died the other day. Another wreck on the low road of life, a mention online, perhaps a small blurb in the local daily, but her passing, as so many, went unnoticed beyond family and friends. One of seeming multitudes, she was but another woman beaten by a life so full of empty promise and hollow success that her will to continue dissipated until she dissipated with it and then was no more.

Another disposable pleasure for a culture glutted on human degradation: as pretty much all actors and performers, sports figures and talking heads, when they have passed beyond the point of interest, they shuffle off and we change channels. Or websites.

And while I have worked with many porn stars as well as more than a few of the non-porn type, this one was not one I had acquaintance with. Just another pretty face, amazing body and willingness to suffer social degradation to fit in – to find her place. Such a strange notion: acceptance through degradation. Build your body to its highest efficiency only to have it destroyed when employed. Ask pro football players about the delights of slamming full speed into walls of human flesh, or even the ground, 15 or 20 times an hour, hour after hour, day after day, during practice or play. Ask a boxer.

Entertaining us takes a toll.

How we loved Elvis, no longer even appearing in backwater mini marts or tabloid headlines, the once mighty king fell, fell harder and now isn’t even worth lining our bird jails anymore. Michael Jackson, the new king, turned himself into a white princess, poisoning him/herself trying to keep us amused. Which we were. For a while. We loved his antics with the kids, we could mock and degrade him in absentia, humiliate him in the press, where he was convicted then tried then hanged then acquitted then released and finally buried. You know, for kids.

We raise them up to knock them down, worship them, dismiss them, discard them, then forget about them: actors, singers, musicians, dancers, sports luminaries, writers, soldiers, everyone. They are our disposable pleasures, the flashing lights and dancing monkeys which we soon forget when the power is off and the music has stopped. Amusements, they are little more than distractions for lives mundane, where not positively awful.

For even in the splendor that is our current western culture, degrading as well with escalating urgency, we are a people bereft of joy. This can be established by what entertains us, what amuses us, what demands our attention. Ever see an accident on the highway? Unless you’ve never driven on one, you’ve probably seen more than a few. The reason you see many of them is curiosity, yours and your fellow drivers. Gotta slow down to a crawl, see a little carnage – spice talk around the water cooler or dinner table. “Saw this accident tonight, the guys head was split open like a busted watermelon all over the 405 – could you pass the mashed potatoes?”

Why do people go to the races? To watch other people drive around in circles? Or to watch them crash? If you’re a race fan and were told that new protocols were in place to make it safer and that there would never again be a fiery crash, bursting into the pits scattering flaming wreckage all over the infield, would you still go? Really? How often?

Why are films where you fuck someone up rated PG13 whereas films where you fuck someone rated R or X should actual fucking occur? Why are the most popular forms of diversion those where people are hurt, or maimed or even killed (or represented as such) and the really most popular diversions are rated X so you have to watch them in private like some pervert? What is more perverse, personal gratification at the pleasure of others, or public glee at the slaughter of others?

Before the turn (of the century) porn films had a virtual prohibition against extreme violence, bondage and penetration, torture. Kind of like international law. Over the last decade that has changed. It’s not about pleasure, it’s about pain and humiliation and dominance and degradation – our national ethos. Each thrill has to sink ever deeper into the slough of human depravity to help get over that hump. To keep us amused. Aroused.

Why do we wage war on the screen and in real life if not to keep us interested, beyond the excessive profits of a few? Murder seems mighty exciting when it’s remote, distant. On film, in other people’s countries, murder can be enjoyed voyeuristically. Why is this promoted as heroic and noble whereas people who fuck on film are portrayed as sick deviants that require marginalization and debasement? What drives this sickness?

I posit the reason this appeals to us is that our own lives are so joyless, so dull, so boring that in the recounting of tales of human travail, we become interesting – or at least less uninteresting. As we have something interesting to share, our recounting transfers that interest to us. Like my story – like me. Through this common interest is established.

Look at the community that arises around a sporting event or team: advocates of one team or another call it ‘their’ team, become well versed in the statistics which prove ‘their’ team choice was the correct one, express huge disappointment when the event leads to ‘their’ team’s failure. Just like politics. They talk about players as though they are friends, as though they know these people who are destroying their bodies and brains so ‘their’ fans can get drunk and fat and shout at each other about the last play and what they should have done. Always, what they should have done. Interesting that in both cases, the players and spectators destroy their bodies.

For the game.

Or musicians: thoughtful, talented and even insightful artists arise and throw their entire being into the creation of music which elevates, enlightens and inspires only to find that such art can not compete with repetition, flash and extravagance. Their fans, as children have little tolerance for thoughtful message – they are enamored of explosions and lights and crazy dancing.

The musician becomes the showman or fades into no man, crumbling into obscurity, leading life on the fringes, watching bands which put more effort into choreography and costume than song craft or musicianship, succeed spectacularly while they dance around like flashing apes, with lots of gimmickry to amuse and impress the spectators. For kids.

And the flashy, dancy performers suffer their careers as well: they beat their bodies and ears as they pound through each grueling dance routine, over and over, blaring music, blinding lights, hurling themselves around likened to some kind of rhythmic seizure as the beat pounds, thud, thud, thud… Only to wake up one day, surrounded by handlers and accountants and hangers on and all their best buddies, realizing they are nothing but the latest in a long line of shills, corporate or otherwise, devoid of real substance, bereft of purpose beyond distraction. Sedation for a sleeping nation.

Why so many of these people, these performers on the Titanic, fall into despair, alcoholism, drugs, or even worse, religion, is the realization that they are no more than whores, disposable pleasures for a society glutted, somnolent and bored. A society that for the most part does jobs that are totally unnecessary to well, really, anything, beyond making money. Entertaining the empty – filling the hole with more space.

They realize they have made themselves a spectacle, adored by weird strangers reviled by weirder ones. The appeal of the cheer degrades into the squeal of the jeer with the realization that their fans professed love for them is no more than their own love for a pastry or wheatgrass smoothie – a fleeting joy soon replaced by the next sensation. Watching all who came before and seeing all who nip at their heels, they realize the temporal nature of their limelight and that when they fall, the last light to shine on them will be that of the coroner and that of a harsh and dispassionate media.

Why do western relationships dissipate with such regularity? Jobs come and go, friends come and go, loves ebb and flow? Because perhaps we’ve been taught that a new, greater pleasure lies right around the corner, an opportunity is poised to knock, or the thing we think we really want is imminent? If you can have a new favorite singer, a new favorite songwriter, a new favorite actor, a new favorite film, a new favorite TV show, a new favorite sports franchise every year, then why stay with someone who was last year’s fave? Or the year before’s?

Trade up. Isn’t that what we do? Out with the old in with the new. Doggy or miss kitty puss dies, rush out and buy a new one. Avoid getting too attached – they’ll just let you down. Pets as people, disposable pleasures, here for our amusement. Change the channel, change the channeler. One fuck up and they’re out, human weakness can not be tolerated. And soon, love becomes a disposable pleasure and as with the rest of the waste, gets buried in the ground as we flip around for something really thrilling to amuse us for a bit.

So busy looking for the next thrill, we miss the one we’re having, and thus become as disposable as our pleasure.

© 2011 Prezbyter 6/7/11

Welcome to Jihadistan

2011-05-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Jihadistan
Population everyone
What happens in Jihadistan
Remains here when it’s done
As it was for the father
So it must be for the son
Hastening the end of time
Since before time was begun
Register our discontent
With how the world is run
Numbers huge and voices loud
Solutions sadly none
Our reason then for jihad
Is not because its fun
We must promote our loving god
At point of hateful gun
My god hates hate
And he hates your god more
Jihads await
Never waiting for war
Blessing straight from God
Heed call to jihad
Reason to maraud
Interpretations broad
A quaint religious nod
To impious fraud
Use a thing to laud
As a cattle prod
Glory is not awed
Savagery unshod
Cruelty hurrahed
Butchery roughshod
Soon only jihad
Represents your god
My god hates hate
And he hates your god more
Jihads await
Never waiting for war
My god hates love
Loves to settle a score
Jihad above
Humankind on the floor

© 2011 5/14/11

We Like It

2011-05-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

It seems, as we loom again on the brink of global conflagration, that we would be well served by a little honesty, here in our last moments, above ground at least. As the discomforts of truth are always less than, say the discomforts of having your roof crash in, in an explosive ball of flaming agony, the value of truth then can only be in its punctuality – after the roof crashes in, few will have the inclination to read or think.

Then, its emotion all the way.

So then, what is this mighty honesty I wave about, what is this truth so important that we should stop listening to our favorite songs over and over again, or watching our favorite shows and movies over and over again, or interrupt our web surfing where we look at the same stuff over and over again while writing the same stuff to the same people over and over again? Huh?

We are at war and have been the entirety of our lives. This war is upon humanity and it has been engaged at the behest of a wretched few to further their economic and egotistic interests. It has been waged as a war (as are all wars) of good against evil – a war of right against wrong, of noble intent verses pernicious design. It is promoted as a battle between God and Satan, fought by humans, because as usual, God nor Satan have had the decency to show up and deal with their issues themselves.

So, we fight for them, a proxy war where good is accomplished through the application of the most repellant evil. Murder justified because bad ideas must be eliminated by destroying the brain which entertains them. Changing minds is apparently not as easy as changing bodies, at least changing living bodies to dead ones so as always, we opt for easy. For, we are sold, evil lives in the flesh and evil must be stopped, at all costs regardless of how much profit is made.

It isn’t that we stamp out evil so much as punish it: for being evil and all. Because to stamp it out completely would require everyone to get along and who makes any money off that? We in the USA in particular feel a special affinity for punishing other people. The United States of America is the punishment capital of the entire Earth. We’re really good at it. We like it.

And how we punish: the USA has over 750 military bases (we admit to) in over 130 other nations; we engage militarily someplace else virtually every year for each year we’ve been a ‘sovereign state’ (over 250 official military actions outside of the nation, 2 of which were actually declared wars, at least in accordance with the Constitution); we murdered more fellow Americans during the War Between the States than have been killed in all of our other aggressions combined, so far; we have nuked the USA over 500 times, elsewhere on the Earth about a 1000 more and Japan now 3; we torture people that we abduct from other countries and imprison them indefinitely against all legal, military or social conventions.

We imprison more of our own citizens than any other nation, numerically and per capita. That means slave state China with over a billion people has fewer people in prison than the USA does at around 300 million give or take. We call ourselves, the land of the free.

Not only do Americans hate people in other countries, people we’ve never seen or met in countries we for the most part don’t even know where the fuck they are-istan, but we despise our fellow Americans based upon skin color (which no person born has a choice about); where they were born (ditto); about religious beliefs (which no person holding any should ever mock or degrade anyone else holding any because you’re all equally correct); about political beliefs (ditto).

It appears the reason for our almost universal disregard for anything not ourselves (and then wonder to our crumbling national infrastructure, looking at the way so many of us treat our own personal infrastructures) is rooted in our presence here, on this continent. We are the logical progression of our antecedents – illogic breeds illogic.

I live with an Australian. One of the good ones – not a crocodile dragger or those types that are about promoting bad beer and stuff – and he commits very few crimes given the fact that Australia was Britain’s penal colony (note penal and colon’s juxtaposition in a place one is intended to be fucked in the ass) and he was very likely descended of people of shady pasts. But then again, who isn’t? We were all fucked into existence and we know how bad fucking is.

In Robert Hughes fairly epic accounting of Australia’s history The Fatal Shore, he describes the nature of the hardened criminals banished from England in the 19th Century: debtors, forgers, petty thieves – especially wretches who stole food to stave starvation, and among some very nasty folks, some very desperate people who got caught up in the clean up of Victorian England and just couldn’t be made over to suit the new ethos.

So these poor bastards were transported: packed on ships, guarded by the wretched of the establishment, likewise banished, to rule over an aboriginal kingdom of broken serfs and the truly vile, to a place unknown, compelled into slavery for the remainder of their lives by the cream of polite British imperial society. British snobbery led to Australian slavery.

Consider America. The oh so superior in Britain and Europe, particularly Holland, had had enough of the Puritans and Pilgrims and their like. Sure, they were as self righteous as the next pious assholes, but even they couldn’t put up with the extremism of the fundamentalist sects. So, they made it so uncomfortable for them that getting in dodgy ships and sailing to an unknown wilderness a world away seemed like a good idea.

So our forbears – the people we’re so fucking proud of we forget why they really left Europe – were the group that felt the uptight assholes in Britain and Europe (where they burned witches) were too permissive. Too liberal.

Who better to be the bible thumping cop of the world than the descendents of extremists who murdered their benefactors and stole their land to become rich off of the labor of slaves? Who else would have the audacity to tell the rest of the world how to behave than the nation that is raping it to death, squeezing every last drop of pleasure out of her before casting her aside and complaining, “The bitch gave me crabs…”?

Australia is supposedly populated by many of the people Britain cast off as their undesirables, the dregs of their society. To my knowledge, their military incursions have been pretty much limited to politically motivated shows of support for other nation’s military adventures. By all accounts they have become a fairly progressive nation, (my room mate assures me they have even advanced to indoor plumbing and electricity for the non-indigenous blokes).

America plunders. Some guy in some BIG company finds out there is a resource to be exploited, finds that with a proper application of exploitation, money can be made. Lots of it. Guys (and gals who dress like them) in BIG companies know that in order to make BIG money for themselves, opportunities ripe for exploitation must always be advanced. Must always be exploited, wherever they occur.

Say you don’t live where you live presently but instead live in a quiet place with your family and friends, have a modest but happy life, not a lot of stuff but not a lot to worry about. Maybe, you’re about to have your own family. Then Chevron discovers oil under your playroom.

In cases like these, you’d likely best adjust to a top down remodel because regardless of where in the world one might reside, there’s no place the US military won’t go to advance the US military. And if corporations which contribute lots of money to politicians require help with the whole exploitation thing, putting the military in action solidifies its necessity in the public mindset.

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...." Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940) Major General (U.S. Marine Corps)

Smedley knew – all the feigned morality, the touted nobility in our generosity as we steal money from many to give most to a few and bomb those who don’t go along or who are just too collateral not to damage. And he was no leftist girlyman; he was the highest decorated soldier in the nation, twice recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, so apparently Congress approved of his gangsterism.

At one point I had come to the conclusion that the government behaves like the Mafia: they make offers the recipients can’t refuse; pop on over to wreck a few things, then offer a little protection – perhaps a nice military base right in your view lots; big payoffs with major kickbacks; those benefiting removed from the blight by layers of soft money and political influence.

Then I realized that before the Volstead Act the Mafia was little more than extended families of immigrants engaged in personal vendettas with each other. They were for the most part content to kill each other in peace. After Prohibition they took on the very tendencies which our government operates with: indebtedness to the family (system); tributes (taxes); when called upon you must perform as demanded; any threat to the family (system), real or perceived must be dealt with through extreme violence: kill spouses, children, family and associates, genocide.

The business model of the USA is effectively the business model of the Mafia.

Which explains perhaps why we like gangsters – we like ourselves. We bomb at least 4 different nations as I write this. Not a one of them attacked us, not a one of them posed or poses an existential threat to the USA. Over the last decade, we’ve killed over a million people: business men and women, school kids, grandmothers, infants, dogs and cats.

Because of this nation, the United States of America, these people are dead. Millions more are crippled and/or grievously wounded. Millions more have no homes or safety or even hope for the remainder of their sad lives. Ever again. It will never get better for them. We blow the arms and legs off of babies, launch steel and glass and wood and stone and fire right into people’s faces, their chests and backs, we ruin humans so some guys, who are already rich, can have more. So they can play God, point to a place on a map, a place they’ve likely never been, and relegate it to hell.

We kidnap people and beat them and torture them in illegal detention. We attach electrodes to men’s genitals, nail their balls to a chair and make them jump, we rape children in front of their parents to make them confess. Just like they did during the Inquisition. Confess.

We do all of this horrible shit to the world around us and even within us and yet, where is the protest? Out of nearly 300 million of us, try to get a million of us out on the street. We’re too busy. Cut our pensions, we’ll tear down your city hall – kill a million human beings in Iraq, ho hum, maybe we can put a hundred thousand on the street one, maybe two weekends – after that we’ve registered our discontent, there’s shopping to be done.

India became an independent nation through, among other things, general strike: everybody just stayed home. Through the simplest of actions, not doing anything, they were able to compel the British Raj to accede to their demands, forcing the once great empire to its knees, or at least its own borders. Even with half the country unemployed, striking is still too much work for Americans. We’d miss American Idle and surely Lady Gaga’s ass is on fire somewhere. What are we, animals?

Where is the umbrage? For the most part we’re too jaded to even care. Where is the dissent? Pockets of outrage swell and ebb, individuals rage and rail but the vast majority accepts this horror, this affront to life itself as part of doing business. Most Americans don’t mind at all.

We like it. We like agony imposed, like that bad people “get what’s coming to them”, like to feel superior by making others feel inferior, we like to make people who we’re told that we don’t like suffer. Make them bleed. We’re comfortable doing things to them which we would be repelled by were they done to us.

The conservative contingent will suggest that I, or people who think along these lines, should move someplace else, presumably to make bombing us less destructive to local real estate values. The liberals will say, “Yes, we’re aware of these horrible things, but we don’t like thinking about them – it’s too depressing.” Certainly not as depressing, say as having your house burst into flame or your children blown to pieces, which is reality for millions under our dominion.

It’s certainly depressing to think about it, on occasion, when you have that luxury. But this pain, this murder inflicted happens every day, not on occasion.

When under someone’s boot, you feel inferior, the position demands it. But it doesn’t make you respect the person in the superior position any, now does it? It might make you hate them. In time and with great effort we in the USA have effectively put our boot on the neck of the world. It is not love or respect with which their eyes gaze upon us.

Just because one occupies a superior position does not necessitate possession of a moral authority – grizzly bears can usually best humans hand to claw but it doesn’t mean the bear is right. Sometimes grizzly bears can just be assholes. Contrary to the old saw, might doesn’t make right, it makes wrong. We know this yet continue imposing our will, at huge cost, through might, through brutality. Though profitable for a very few, this is not smart. Given the nature of humans and grizzly bears, neither of them should be flying fighter jets; no dumb animal should have that kind of power.

Sadly, far too many do. And far too many men (and women who dress like men) who have never done any real work in their lives of privilege, who have never suffered the brutality of war unleashed, have been given the chance to play God a while, relegating more sad people to a horrific fate for their profit and amusement.

It’s good that we like it. For that fate is our own.

Peace

Prezbyter 5/7/11

Respect The Truth

2011-05-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

“One owes respect to the living; to the dead, one only owes the truth.” Voltaire

A great man was taken from us recently. Sidney Woldersnapple, 47, weighed in at 873 pounds, dripping wet, making him the world’s heaviest (greatest) human. As he was found in the bathtub, dripping wet was the measure which was used. While one would like to say he will be missed, in fact his girth made it impossible for him to get out the door, so his neighbors assumed he’d just moved and a bunch of teenager’s had taken over his house and were living on pizza, Thai take out and Pink Dot.

That no one had seen him wasn’t unusual – while many of us are familiar with our neighbors outside, on the porch or lawn, very few know what goes on inside our little caves. We can go for months at a time and never see the person living right next door. That Sidney had become wedged in the tub and unable to extricate himself was complicated by the fact his Cincinnati residence was so near a busy thoroughfare that his nearest neighbor, Etta Waddles, 87, couldn’t hear his wails.

If not for the power company coming to shut off his electricity who knows how long he would have remained there, wasting away? The utility employee was alerted by the smell of the huge decomposing Woldersnapple and contacted the authorities.

Another man was reported to have been dispatched to the afterlife recently as well. His passing as reported elicited much glee from people in the USA who were apparently so frightened by him, that they willingly gave up the lion’s share of their Constitutional protections, the entirety of their treasury, as well as the last vestiges of their sanity, so their government could murder him. The news is: Mission Accomplished! Again!

An associate of mine, while we lamented the lack of integrity and efficiency in American endeavor said, “The Navy Seals were efficient.” Having only just heard of Mr. bin Laden’s murder in Pakistan I realized that the Seals were the ones credited with the kill. I pointed out that we’d murdered over a million people in Afghanistan, untold thousands in Pakistan and perhaps another million in Iraq as well as burning through about $10 trillion trying to kill one man, and that didn’t strike me as particularly efficient.

Of course, ten trillion dollars, no one would believe we squandered that – hell probably less than a trillion or two, tops. And to be fair for that trillion or two, tops, we did kill those millions of other people. And wrecked their countries. It’s not like we spent the whole wad just killing Osama. Because that would be fiscally irresponsible. And the USA is a lot of things but fiscally irresponsible? Come on!

While I tend to agree with our clever sounding header quote from Mr. Voltaire, I suppose I’d have to lean in favor of owing truth to those of us still above ground (or at least not washing out to sea) as well, at least as much as we owe to the departed. And, as truth is in short supply when it comes to anything related to Mr. bin Laden, it seems we should perhaps temper our glee with a little of that sorely lacking commodity.

You’ll of course remember our first dealings with Osama were in the 1980s while Reagan/Bush were trying to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, their secular puppet regime threatening the harmony of the Shiite Mullahs particular fundamentalism, especially when faced with the loving Sunni warlords. Soviet influence denied these people their fundamental right to deny women their fundamental rights and as we all know, no one likes their women kept in their place better than right wing fundamentalists.

So we armed bin Laden and his nationalist cohorts, who called themselves the Mujahedin and they began a war of attrition against the Soviets (some major assholes, as occupiers are wont to be) increasing their kill ratio in direct proportion to the weapons we provided them. After almost a decade of trying and failing, the Soviets said “Adios, muchachos…” and vamoosed back to the joy and harmony within their own borders. And the Mujahedin set up extremist shop, kicked women back to the dark ages, again, and the Taliban was thus born. Then we walked away, hands in our pockets whistling, like nothing ever happened, as we have so many times before

But it had. And turning back was not an option.

So, a couple years later our buddy Saddam Hussein settled his border dispute with Kuwait by taking Kuwait over. President Bush, (no, the other one) took that opportunity to tell the world how wrong it was for neighbors in dispute to impose their respective militaries upon each other. Then he got the Saudi leaders to let the USA set up 5 high tech Strike Bases in the holy land of Islam, Saudi Arabia, half a world away. Near by where we invented Israel.

While lost on much of the world and most Americans, this hypocrisy would not stand for bin Laden, we were told, and our ultra-nationalist buddy in Afghanistan became our ultra-nationalist antagonist in Jihadistan. And, every place became Jihadistan.

He was accused by the FBI of blowing up a couple of embassies in Africa, as well as punching a hole in the Cole in Yemen, both of which bin Laden reputedly took credit for with the above stated justification: our military didn’t need strike bases in their holy land, regardless of what deals were brokered between our kings.

Then came 9/11. Before the attacks had even been completed, bin Laden was trotted out as the likely suspect. Airliners crashed through buildings, completely confounding our multi-trillion dollar defense network, making NORAD look like an idiot. With over an hour notice an unarmed, subsonic, civilian airliner (subsequently described as flown by a novice) was able to completely circumvent our nation’s defenses and crash into the most heavily defended building in the history of the world. Steel skyscrapers, intense grid-works of interlocking steel beams with massive core columns, crashed at free-fall speed straight down into the course of most resistance, owing to holes punched into their tops. The 47 story Solomon Brothers Building had fires on several floors and some asymmetric structural damage and collapsed straight down into its own footprint at the speed an apple would fall from the top. BBC reported its collapse half an hour before it had occurred.

And while this is all unfolding – this amazing, horrible thing – the media, with no evidence, begins pronouncing bin Laden as the likely culprit.

No evidence? Well, you tell me. All these things happened: the planes crashing, the buildings collapsing – nothing, according to the government we pay all this money to protect us (uh huh), was done to defend the nation. The US military shot down 0 of 4 bogeys according to the government. According to the government, the government did nothing to protect itself or its real estate. Or the people – nothing for us either.

According to the government, they had zero knowledge of these attacks prior and were utterly stymied by four unarmed passenger jets piloted by amateurs. Yet, while they were still stymied, running around, according to them, with their asses on fire screaming, “What do I do, what do I do?!?” the media was able to tell the public about bin Laden’s involvement, pull up his history, tell of his other nefarious deeds.

Within about 24 hours, according to the official narrative, the government went from complete ignorance of an attack which utterly confounded them to knowledge of all the participants and the likelihood of the mastermind to the point they could release the information publicly. This is impressive stuff indeed from a group that admitted they were completely unfit for the positions they occupied – much like the FAA, accused of incompetence in a task they carried out before with regularity (making a phone call) yet successfully grounding 10s of thousands of planes at the same time, something completely unprecedented during a particularly tense interval.

While the official narrative had bin Laden taking credit for his terroristic ways, on 9/11 no one came forth to own it. There were no demands, no group said, “Take that, infidel!” or, “My bad…you meant the other button…” According to the US government, we were victim to an incident of international homicidal vandalism.

On the other hand, the world heard bin Laden, saw bin Laden make a statement on their televisions that didn’t broadcast here at the behest of President Bush (that one). The president in that instance killed the free press guaranteed in the First Amendment of the Constitution and denied the accused in the media the chance to state his case – which would eliminate the Fifth Amendment and the Magna Carta as well.

Bin Laden stated that he found the attacks despicable and that he had nothing to do with them, though he knew he was being accused. He said that the attacks were orchestrated by rogue elements within the government with ulterior motives. Overtly and textually he showed no glee at the pain that was caused and offered condolences. He appeared not to be well; his health deteriorating. He looked tired.

The Bush administration sprang into action. A lucky coincidence had bin Laden living right in the place we wanted to invade in October that very year: Afghanistan. Convenient he attacked in September. The Bushites told the Taliban they helped invent to hand over bin Laden or face the consequences. The Taliban said, “Gladly. Oh, but could you show us some evidence.” As we in actuality had none, we opted to bomb them.

We had none? Jesus, I’m really hanging it out there, huh? Well, according to the FBI:

USAMA BIN LADEN IS WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH THE AUGUST 7, 1998, BOMBINGS OF THE UNITED STATES EMBASSIES IN DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA, AND NAIROBI, KENYA. THESE ATTACKS KILLED OVER 200 PEOPLE. IN ADDITION, BIN LADEN IS A SUSPECT IN OTHER TERRORIST ATTACKS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.

The above was lifted directly from the FBI’s website Ten Most Wanted list heading for bin Laden. I added or removed nothing to his list of offenses, though there are rewards and the mention he was left handed and walked with a cane. Regardless, is there any logical reason the Federal Bureau of Investigation would have to exclude the crimes that occurred right here in the country, attacks on the government which 9/11 were, if they had any evidence to support it? Why would an attack on an embassy in Kenya rate more FBI attention than an attack upon the Pentagon? Yet, in the ten years between 9/11 and now, they never accused him of involvement. I wonder why that is.

In December, 2001 an obituary ran for Osama bin Laden in several Near Eastern papers and websites. Numerous locals said that he was dead, or they thought he was dead – Benazir Bhutto suggested an operative working for ISI, Pakistan’s CIA had killed him. Then she got killed. Others suggest he died of kidney failure or some other related ailment (Fox said he died of a respiratory ailment before retracting the story at the White House’s behest.) The important thing to remember is that most of the information regarding bin Laden comes from the CIA, an agency which operates in secret, with no oversight, commits over 100 thousand serious crimes internationally every year and uses deception as its primary operating principle. It might not be entirely reliable.

The Bush administration announced it would release a White Paper outlining its case against bin Laden, proving our justification for the horrific crimes we are still engaged in. They never did. They openly lied to the 9/11 Commission; refused to testify under oath; had executive testimony verbal: no transcriptions, no recordings; and nothing happened to them. Well, that’s not entirely true – they got richer.

So, on nothing but the words of people shown repeatedly to be liars of the first order, we murder a million people to murder one, who died before it was convenient to kill him, so he was resurrected, killed again, photographed so nobody could see, then dumped in the ocean, like the mob dumps someone who needs to “sleep with the fishes”.

To see this as reasonable behavior is to invite such behavior unto ourselves. It is to send out to the world engraved invitations to view us as we would view anyone who behaved that way toward us – as monsters. While we can’t stop the corrupt among us from sending forth such missives, our emissaries delivering our greetings at gunpoint or on the tips of missiles, decent people would be well advised to stop affixing their names to such heralds of misery. The RSVP is going to be a real bitch.

See – the truth doesn’t hurt those exposed to it nearly as much as the lie hurts those impacted by it. To show respect to the living (perhaps to remain among them) it seems one should stop harming people over lies of the dead.

Peace Prezbyter 5/6/11

BTW: As an illustration of how detail can sell even the most ridiculous story, the characters at the head were entirely figments of my perverse imagination. Out of respect to you, the living, I owe you the truth.

Alien Guns

2011-01-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

Arizona, USA, figures into the heart of a couple of fierce ideological struggles currently sweeping the talk shows (radio and TV) and stuffing inboxes with all manner of poorly considered effluvium: gun control and illegal immigration. At first blush, (generally where the debate founders) these are very different discussions. A little reasoned consideration suggests otherwise.

As this exists as a mental exercise I will use broad strokes and popular figures to represent my premise. This is not owing to laziness, but more to maintain its hypothetical nature, which then illustrates how such reasoning can be applied in regard to any subject. Beyond that, when discussing the actual number of privately held firearms or undocumented workers in the USA, it’s always problematic as many gun owners don’t even know how many guns they have* and actual figures of anything undocumented is by its very nature a contradiction – there’s enough of that without me adding to it.

Why haven’t these issues been dealt with and put to bed years ago? They have been major hotbed topics since the 1960s and have both had significant impact upon life as we know it in America. Political organizations have sprung up with advocates for or against doing battle with advocates against or for and have generated billions of dollars, provided safe and clean working environments for those championing their respective positions while proffering endless media fodder for the citizenry to repeat back to each other before becoming indignant and suggesting the offending party go live somewhere else.

The people in favor of gun control (confiscation) tend to point to the social cost of personal firearm possession. Over 30,000 citizens of the USA are killed by other citizens of the USA (as well as visitors, documented or not) every year with the use of firearms, a number that would be greatly reduced if they were just using arms alone. Big sticks would likely fall in between. Firearms are used in robbery, rape, coercion and have left an undeniable impact on the social demographic of America. Their misuse at the hands of the emotionally unstable has ruined millions of lives and continues to.

The people advocating the deportation (or worse) of illegal workers tend to point to the economic cost of people using the system’s benefits without paying into it. More than 10 million illegal workers and their families put a drain on the economic foundation of the USA that is leading the nation to ruin and the government must be forced into action. Arizona’s SB 1070 is viewed by advocates as a good start.

To begin, let’s establish our playing field: what are we talking about here? Humans. And not just any humans: Americans. We’re talking about a nation of people who kill more of their own citizens than anywhere else in the world. And lots of citizens in other places too. Estimates of the number of personal firearms range from 150 million to 300 million plus. Let’s aim lower, we’ll say 200 million guns in personal hands across the USA.

That’s a lot of guns.

There are about 300 million Americans which suggests (with 200 million guns) that 100 million Americans aren’t pulling their own weight. (Come on people. We’ve exported firearms to people all over the world; people in Africa without food have guns, what is the problem here?) Or perhaps that a lesser number might be very well pulling more than their own weight, which is the premise we’ll operate from.

Let’s call that lesser number 50 million Americans. Some of them have four guns, some have less guns, some have more guns. What is the reasonable likelihood that all 50 million of those gun owners would willingly and gladly give up all their guns because a majority in Washington got enough votes to call it law? All of them? Less?

With the possibility, or more reasonably absolute certainty that some, if not many of those gun owners would not surrender their firearms, then the only way to force compliance to the law would be by sending in men with guns. And as the people sent in to collect the guns know what they would do to anyone coming to take their guns, they realize that every door they kick down could yield instantaneous death.

Which, given the current temperament of American law enforcement (lots of new cops back from Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. where they could just shoot people they didn’t like) means they’d go in with force of arms and guns blazing. Each confiscation would lead to a potential armed conflict. The War on Violence anyone? The hypocrisy of shooting up private residences to reduce social violence would either torment the enforcement contingent or lead to further detachment, making shooting strangers even easier.

The ban of personal firearms would make otherwise law abiding people, (the many millions of gun owners who have never harmed anyone) criminals for possessing weapons that may have been in their families for generations. And while most might actually surrender their valuable property (firearms have been proven effective in deterring crimes against individuals – that’s why police use them) those that don’t would be faced with armed assault within their homes. Cruel but fair?

It seems safe to say that the ban of firearms in the USA would kick that 30,000 dead a year figure up considerably. If that is the case, then what exactly is the benefit of the law?

Consider a success – Americans suddenly just grow up and realize love is the answer. Well, most of us. Now the only guns out there are where? Well, you know the police aren’t giving them up, if they did how would they protect us? Who would they need to protect us from? Well, anyone still possessing a gun and not with a police, or military, or government security force, or corporate security force etc. would be a criminal. And all those millions of guns in officially sanctioned hands would be used to protect the citizens from harm by those outlaws still in possession of weapons. Right?

Well, no, not really. It has been confirmed in courtroom after courtroom across the nation: the police have no mandate, obligation or express intent to protect the citizens. Contrary to every cop show on every TV everywhere, the police are not there to protect you – they are there to enforce the law.

Which means generate money for the system by arresting and citing people with money for stuff. This isn’t to suggest the police won’t protect you. I’m sure if the police are at your house when a bad guy/gal breaks in, when the shooting starts, they’ll be right in the thick of it. But usually, in the real world they’re driving around someplace else and arrive after the crime to affix fees for any violation they can find. And catch the bad guy/gal.

How about the fed? If the Second Commandment, I mean Amendment to the Constitution can be stripped away, leaving only the fed with guns (and all that other stuff) then surely the government of the USA will be there when its citizens are in peril. I immediately think of the brilliant work done on 9/11, where, with barely an hour and a half notice, the Pentagon (built with trillions of dollars and millions of lives) was almost able to defend itself from an unarmed, subsonic, civilian airliner piloted by a novice. Almost.

Gun control and immigration enforcement are effectively prohibition: which is the criminalization of an activity being engaged in by millions of people who would otherwise not be criminals. It is the persecution of a segment of society (millions of people) by another segment of the same society for the benefit of other segments of society – it is not a War on drugs, guns, illegal immigration, it is war upon citizens by their government, funded by the victims.

The stated objectives of such legislation (reducing taxes/making the streets safe) are always trumped by the reality of the impossibility of enforcement: tens of millions of anythings seldom just disappear. As the entirety of the stated objective cannot then be achieved, enforcement becomes discretionary – groups not appealing to those in charge being targeted first.

(You can be sure houses in rich neighborhoods, though just as likely employing illegal workers and possessing firearms, will not be the ones raided as the shooting starts (continues). Nor will politically connected corporations, like Halliburton, which the USA spent trillions of dollars to provide illegal jobs for in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

I suggest that the reason these issues are discussed and endlessly debated is that the reality of enforcement financially and humanly would dwarf any benefits sought, while maintaining rancor between citizens keeps them from getting together and compelling their elected officials to behave as public servants and not toadies to vested economic interests. So we can yell at each other while they golf. Or whatever.

The drain on services created by illegal immigration is nothing compared to the cost of enforcement owing to the same simple reality: 10 million + people do not just disappear. The complaint is that it costs public funds to care for people working illegally. Why does the public pay for illegal workers medical and education? Because the person who employs them doesn’t – like every other legal employer stateside is compelled to.

Those costs, you know, for the well being of the person working for the well being of the company, are oft cited reasons for many companies ‘outsourcing’ or ‘offshoring’, two popular practices that give American jobs to foreigners in their own countries far away. By not covering taxes, medical, social security, a safe work environment, the employer of those working illegally here spends less in production costs which allows the consumer to spend less at the point of purchase.

Instead of paying directly for the well being of the worker in the purchase price, we pay less at the register and kick in the rest through taxes when they show up at the emergency room with a grape stake through their hand. When compelled by law or decency to pay a legal living wage to field workers, food processors, laborers, nannies and the like, the cost of those services will increase. We will then pay the real price at the register. Will the government lower taxes for the decreased services should all illegal immigrants disappear? Will we reap a savings bonanza?

As with firearms, no legislation will make the problem go away. As long as people employ undocumented workers, they will come to work – for many people work is how they stay alive. If there is no work, they will go elsewhere. You know, to stay alive. The reason this is an oft discussed but never resolved issue is really quite simple. How do you save money evicting 10 million people, who just turn around and come back?

Clearly, many if not most of these folks won’t dry up and disappear with the tough new enforcement so many clamor for and they won’t make a run for the border. That means they have to be rounded up. That requires policing agencies. They require lots of money. Lots of it. That is in a big way what Arizona SB 1070 is all about – increased penalties. They won’t make the problem go away so much as tax it. But the tax goes right to the police, bypassing the wider, drained public trough, so those who champion it will realize no economic benefit. Unless they’re with the: GANG AND IMMIGRATION INTELLIGENCE TEAM ENFORCEMENT MISSION FUND.

To begin they’d have to go through every workplace in the nation; then they’d have to follow up with house to house raids. And as all illegal immigrants aren’t, you know, Mexican, they’d need to make ways of determining where to deport them. Perhaps they could make little badges for them to wear in the holding camps: Mexicans could have little paper tacos; Canadians little paper beer mugs, eh; French little slices of paper cheese; Catholics little communion wafers, Jews could have little bagels... Clipped to their shirts, you know, just for identification. From what I’ve read it worked before.

And while waiting through the massive deportation process, 10 million or so folks will need food and shelter, medical – their kids will need something to do during the day as the system deals with the logistics of such a massive purge. Of course, to pay for their way, while in detention, they could work for private companies, like many of the 2 million Americans already in prison do.

Of course, to make sure they never ever come back again to sully our ledgers, we’d have to build massive walls with gun turrets every few hundred yards and man them constantly. Kinda like those nice walls in Israel to keep the Palestinians out of Palestine. Perhaps, we could get some of the illegals in detention to help build it, like they did for the fence along the Texas/Mexico border that appears to be working so well.

Of course while deporting millions of people, millions of jobs would open up, jobs looking for just those kind of people: and as big companies who make big political contributions don’t get in big trouble for their big violations, they’ll just go on hiring those people and they’ll just keep coming back for work. You know, to stay alive.

Of course the extreme position is just go in and kill them all. Which means house to house armed incursions, resistance, chaos and death, spending hundreds of billions of dollars as everybody is shooting everybody else to save a few bucks while reducing gun violence.

It’s the American way.

*Often, when challenged, firearm owners will claim to have no gun when they in fact do.

© 2011

Defiance

2010-12-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

If man as product of divinity
Claims authority through this connection
Self imposed fourth on the Trinity
An ill conceived religious projection
Confirmation is never forthcoming
Mayhem enforces attested selection
Techniques applied always mind-numbing
And disastrous to the complexion
Some truths are necessarily hard to face
Disgrace looming large on reflection
Realizing in the fall from grace
One is inclined to the wrong direction
Authority is but human mandate
Thus subject to mortal imperfection
Used by small men to abuse and berate
Deconstructed with each erection

Instructed by this predilection
Wise to rethink one's reliance
Scoundrels accorded undue affection
An oft times one sided alliance
Look not without for your protection
Reject dependence upon appliance
Accept poor reason requires correction
Cast off mindless faith, embrace science
Stand resolute against misdirection
Use reason to refuse compliance
Offer power naught but insurrection
Depose despoilers through defiance

Attentive care is wisely taken
That such distinctions we should see
Realizing how often we've mistaken
Authorities with authority
One a face the other a notion
A man with a gun - the weight of the law
Bodies enthralled to mindless devotion
Mindless to thoughtless to heartless guffaw
Driven hard by unreasoned emotion
Viewed in a light at once favorable
As children distracted by any motion
Gluttons oft miss that which is savor-able

Such minds as these not hard to impress
Acceptance of our own fallibility
A stronger mind is wont to express
Defiance to such malleability
Weak minds bolstered by such display
Reject what reason would have them see
Scattered perceptions a mind's disarray
Confuse reason with authority
Perplexed by weakness we perceive
It's difficult to maintain regard
Some truths are too hard to believe
Some landings are necessarily hard
To face our own insufficiencies
Understand where we fail to rise
Compliant to our own deficiencies
Defiant to that which we despise
These shortcomings become manifest
In others we see their depredation
To our own we have acquiesced
And in that achieve a liberation
Thus free from responsibility
In the attainment of our salvation
Focus on others culpability
There to cast our reprobation

Hence revolution as it stands
In others must first then occur
The occasion as change demands
Within ourselves we can demur
In defense others must act first
To justify proportional response
In victimhood we're all well versed
Self righteousness we all ensconce
Defiant to the bitter end
Of beginnings we can never see
Reliant on that which we pretend
Of this reliance we're never free
The wise course has a power of its own
Logic authority even unspoken
Some see what most others must be shown
Most sleep so soundly they won't be awoken
To such reality arrayed before us
Defiance not the work of the contrary
Rejection of reason truly can not restore us
Pointless conflict is not revolutionary

To battle injustice in all of its faces
Is action worthy of human defiance
Rejecting reason as a means to stave stasis
Reaction smacking of simple contrivance
Rebellion then is the rejection
Of one's self imagined superiority
Contrariness more the reflection
A complex personal inferiority
Quixotically tilting at windmills
Imagined there as ominous giant
The making of mountains from molehills
No need for those truly defiant

11/11/10 © 2010

Your Papers, Please

2010-07-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

The North American continent was originally inhabited around 10,000 BCE by nomadic aboriginals presumably migrating from Asia. By the time the folks in Europe discovered it in the late 15th century it is estimated there were upwards of 50 million people living upon the North and South American continents and their outlying islands. By then the aboriginals had formed societies: some strictly hierarchical, some parliamentary with tribal elders calling the shots based upon the needs of the community, some proto democratic, influencing the creation of the American Constitution.

Starting in 1492 and continuing through the 19th century the North and South American continents were overrun with what could be accurately described as a devastating wave of illegal immigration. And of a type less than desirable: the immigrants were criminals and religious extremists, people with marginal work skills and an overwhelming sense of superiority who in many cases had been booted out of Europe owing to their extreme anti-social attitudes. Legal or not, their arrival did not bode well for the inhabitants.

The natives unwisely offered assistance to these immigrants and the immigrants wisely accepted their help. Some of these immigrants, owing to their absolute dearth of survival skills found themselves compelled into cannibalism when the going got rough. Upon establishing a foothold, the immigrants, irrespective of those inhabiting the land, began to divvy it up between themselves: Britain held the east coast, while France claimed Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. Spain snatched the pacific southwest and regions south.

This was unfortunate for the people who lived there – these interlopers did not seek to benefit from the prosperity of the existing communities, they sought to profit on their demise. And, after killing upwards of 45 million of them through disease and savagery the immigrants, turned colonists began migrating into each others territories, again not with desire to assimilate, but to consume, to dominate.

One of these land grabs took place in 1846 along the border between the Republic of Texas and Mexico. President Polk sent a contingent of US soldiers into disputed territory, between the Nueces River and Rio Grande in Texas with the clear intention of provoking a justification for his expansionist desires. He achieved his objective.

Ulysses S. Grant in his 1885 memoirs expressed his feelings regarding the military action which led to Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona and parts of Colorado and Nevada being part of the USA. As a lieutenant serving under Zachary Taylor, Grant had an opportunity to cut his teeth in the war he suggested led to the American Civil War.

“For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”

So the land the Spanish and British stole from the Native Americans was then stolen from the British in a revolutionary manner by the USA and the Spanish by the independence of Mexico – the USA then in turn stole some of Mexico’s prime real estate working to fulfill the nation’s manifest destiny. How did the people who viewed war as a good way to acquire real estate feel in regard to the people they deprived of their homes and lives?

Republic of Texas governor Sam Houston had something to say about his relation to the nation bordering his ‘territory’:

“The Anglo-Saxon race must pervade the whole southern extremity of this vast continent. The Mexicans are no better than the Indians and I see no reason why we should not take their land.”

To be sure many people opposed this action, some like Grant who advanced considerably in their careers. But, it is hard to dispute that the justification for waging any kind of warfare upon any kind of human is that they are deemed lesser beings than those choosing to murder them and steal their property. The victims of such savagery are often referred to as savages, the irony lost upon those who brandish such terms.

In one of these conquered territories, Arizona, the conflict appears to continue to this day. Legislation allowing local law enforcement the freedom to detain anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant has raised the hackles of many on both sides of the issue: some favoring walls and deportation, others the maintaining of the lassie faire attitudes which allow millions of undocumented (relatively – they certainly have little trouble providing population estimates) workers the opportunity to earn subsistence wages.

Those in favor of such law enforcement base their perspectives upon several concerns: illegal immigrants engage in criminal behavior; they draw billions of dollars from the tax base utilizing hospitals and schools as well as other public resources; they steal jobs from citizens. Arizona governor Jan Brewer played to one of these concerns to bolster her promotion of Arizona’s enhanced immigration law SB 1070.

"I believe today, under the circumstances that we're facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in," Brewer said.

Consider this statement: she immediately exclaims that she has no evidence supporting her conclusion beyond belief. This is not good governance. As chief executive of the state she should operate based upon evidence and not engage in wishful thinking to promote her perspective. That’s what we have religion for. As governor she should be well aware of the percentiles of illegal immigrants engaged in smuggling.

T.J. Bonner, president of the union that represents border agents, said some illegal border-crossers carry drugs but most don't. People with drugs face much stiffer penalties for entering the U.S. illegally, and very few immigrants looking for work want to risk the consequences, Bonner said.

"The majority of people continue to come across in search of work, not to smuggle drugs," he said. "Most of the drug smuggling is done by people who intend to do that. That's their livelihood."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100625/ap_on_re_us/us_arizona_governor_immigrants

Here we have T.J. Bonner presenting a statement as fact though he doesn’t cite any numbers to support it; though reason does. As Arizona has the second highest level of illegal immigration in the nation, according to the Washington Post, as well as a high number of Hispanic and Latinos living and working there legally, clearly any statistics which could point to a flood of drugs would be touted extensively.

According to the 2005-2007 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, Non-Hispanic White Americans made up 59.6% of Arizona's population. Hispanics and Latinos (of any race) made up 29.0% of Arizona's population. In 2010 illegal aliens constituted an estimated 7.9% of the population. This was the second highest percentage of any state in the nation.

If not smuggling drugs, then the indication is that most illegal immigrants come seeking work, which means someone has to hire them. And they do. Millions of them work in agriculture and meat packing, millions more in textiles and numerous service industries, waste collection and management among many others. Why would an employer hire an illegal worker with so many citizens out of work?

The problem became apparent during the industrial revolution: the objective of capitalism was to make enough money to not have to work because those who worked, really worked, as farmers, or miners, or loggers, or railroad men etc. never got rich and had to work to the grave. The means to the objective then was to avoid the means to the objective – getting rich enough to not have to work could not be achieved through real work, but instead through administering those who worked. Or investing (gambling).

The great fortunes of the gentlemanly south came from the administration and exploitation of slaves – humans reduced to bio-machines provided the fuel to make some men rich, just not the bio-machines. As abolition movements expanded, those who prospered off the work of others turned to machines to do the labor, once the exclusive terrain of the slave, or in the north the coolie or subsistence wage slave making a dollar a day building railroads or digging coal from the bowels of the earth.

This became the work of the Negro, the Chinese, the hated immigrant du jour; everyone had someone doing a worse job than theirs – they would vow to never reach that low. Hard work is the lot of the poor, the uneducated, the immigrant who by the very nature of arriving here by boat instead of by mom were relegated to the shit work, the work that fewer and fewer Americans felt they should have to do.

The machines took jobs from millions who were compelled to migrate to the cities, there to inhabit tenements and slums of such poverty as to exist in an economic black hole which no amount of money could ever plug and from which none (but a select few) could escape its suction, forever relegated to grinding poverty and second or third class status as a human. This was the USA at the turn of the 20th century, a class society where those with class did none of the work and enjoyed all the benefits.

The model then was to never do ‘that kind of work’. You know, the work that drives the entire society, physically grueling labor which provides harvest for our food, fuel for our machines, toil for our direct reward. Necessary work. Work without which this society, no society, could exist became the exclusive purview of the lesser citizen. The greatest, as always, directly supported by the least.

The ideal was to become a lawyer or doctor, a stock broker, a banker – jobs where one didn’t have to toil. Thus went the doctor from the ideal because even though they make decent money they do have to work, they do have to get their hands dirty, though certainly some more than others. Consider a society with more lawyers than doctors, more stockbrokers and bankers and salesmen than doctors, where those who become doctors specialize in fields based upon economic incentive rather than social necessity.

Look at the names of the doctors in your town. Notice anything? Count the number of names of doctors from other societies, other cultures – immigrant doctors – and remember the ratio of doctors to potential patients is increasingly problematic. In an article in the John’s Hopkins Newsletter a study by Jonathan Weiner suggests that the ratio between patient and doctor in the USA is between1:400 to 1:600. As a contextual comparison the doctor/patient ratio in Cuba is 1:190.

That means that in Cuba, during a medical crisis a patient will find themselves potentially in line with 189 other sick or injured people to see a single doctor (who could be sick or injured too). In the USA that line is as short as 400 and who knows how long. Why don’t Americans want to be doctors? Because doctors have to work too hard to make a lot of money, they have to perform, they have considerable risks, professional risks, heath risks. It’s easier selling real estate. The USA is a lazy nation.

Presently corporations open factories in other countries where they can employ a workforce that won’t expect a living wage, pensions, insurance, safe work environments or any semblance of human decency. This is called outsourcing. This allows American and global corporations to bypass worker safety laws implemented in the USA owing to the horrific work conditions endured by the workers here for centuries.

To my knowledge, there are no states passing legislation boycotting companies that engage in this practice, taking jobs from American citizens. A big part of the reason for this is that we get complex and intricate products for a fraction of what they are worth in human cost. Every gallon of gas burnt in every car in this country comes with equal portions of blood and suffering, yet we lament the price is too high, never considering the cost. Try to find shoes or clothes made in the USA – drive a car manufactured here.

The militarist USA has gone from an agrarian culture to a mining culture to a manufacturing culture to a service culture – we don’t want to labor, we are better than toil. A nation of middle managers and administrators, we want our toys and gas, cheap and plentiful, our taxes low (if at all) and the government to do our bidding. We have come to expect it. This expectation is called exceptionalism: the ideal is applied to oneself while the rules apply to others.

In Arizona the citizens have taken a stand against what is by any honest appraisal in-country outsourcing. At the goading of state senator Russell Pearce, Arizona passed a bill of his, actually an expansion of an existing bill allowing wider police powers in the staunching of the flow of illegal aliens. SB 1070 while ostensibly the means to thwart the bleeding of jobs away from people who don’t want to do them, and certainly not for the wages that immigrants are willing to do them for, is in actuality a way for the state to exact their ton of flesh from the human trafficking industry.

And not in actuality the state but something called

P3:23 THE GANG AND IMMIGRATION INTELLIGENCE TEAM ENFORCEMENT MISSION FUND

This collective is the group that all the expanded enforcement fines in SB1070 go to. An example of one of Senator Pearce’s expanded or new fines?

P6:1 ANYONE WHO DRIVES, HARBORS, EMPLOYS, SHELTERS OR OTHERWISE ASSISTS ANYONE DETERMINED ILLEGAL SHALL PAY $1000 MINIMUM FINE

Say you are a doctor and one of your 400 + patients is later determined to be illegal. Say you bandage this fellow, bleeding owing to an industrial accident which caused him to be fired from his job then driven from the premises – as an illegal he has no workers rights and can bring no action. Injured he can’t work; his employer doesn’t pay him enough to afford medical so the community has to pay the bill that would be otherwise paid by the employer’s insurance company. The employer increases his savings by passing his costs onto the public. This allows them to sell their products so cheap – we pick up the bennies at the checkout that we pay otherwise in taxes and ever reducing public services.

The doctor, according to Senator Pearce, can be fined $1000 minimum, per incident. So could a cab driver bringing the injured worker to the hospital or even ambulance drivers. The person renting him a room, the people who serve him food at restaurants, this bill opens the floodgates for penalties. These penalties do not eliminate the problem of illegal immigration, nor does this bill – they merely tax it. The state has given so much to the descendants of those it was stolen from, it was time to take something back.

Of course this law, as all laws, is applied selectively. And therein lays the problem. There are many illegal aliens in the USA, even Arizona who are not from Mexico. There are some who are from Canada, some from Europe, some from Asia, from Africa, hell even some likely from Australia. Illegal immigrants come in all hues from all over the world. Which means that law enforcement officers are then given carte blanche to challenge anyone they so choose at anytime of their choosing in anyplace they happen to be.

A driver’s license isn’t necessarily proof of citizenship, nor a social security number. Hence under this wide expansion of police discretionary power anyone without a birth certificate or some federal ID card could be detained as illegal. Unchecked police harassment of those deemed undesirable could easily escalate leading to problematic blowback. Governor Brewer will calm our concerns.

Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said racial profiling will play no part in enforcement, and she promised strong training. "We have to trust law enforcement," she said. Washington Post

She believes most illegals are drug runners and counsels that we have to trust law enforcement to determine who is legal or not, based upon nothing more than effective training. The police won’t stop every Mexican or Latino looking person they encounter, just the ones they don’t like. Same with blacks, Asians, and white people who speak with weird accents or don’t look like they belong – police will engage in no racial profiling, only personality profiling.

Of course, businesses that make contributions to people in the right places, local law enforcement benevolent funds and the like, can often avert disruptions in the workplace by being friend to the right groups. Law makers or law enforcers who experience corporate largess are like anyone else, they tend to not pick on those who are good to them. Competition can be thwarted by effective application of force and as this law is by its nature discretionary the potential for abuse is considerable.

But what would happen if the law was effective, would the panacea be attained?

As the majority of food in the western USA is grown, raised, tended, harvested and processed by people making less than minimum wage without additional expenses, like social security, unemployment, pension, workers comp, insurance, basic safety requirements, it comes at a price where we can afford to throw away huge amounts of it every day.

That will stop. Hiring citizens, with no skills, or inclination, who demand a living wage and health coverage et al should more than double production costs for everything we eat – which means it will very likely more than double the price of food at the checkout. Kicking the illegal workers out of kitchens in restaurants and other food service areas could triple prices there without breaking a sweat.

Those who employ landscapers or gardeners will see their expenses accrue, many pool guys, nannies and housekeepers are also undocumented and would have to be replaced with the more expensive American version with all of their expectations and demands. Waste management, janitorial, construction – those who avail themselves of these services will find their prices escalating quite rapidly indeed when the white man resumes his burden, because the not white man got a job at the GM plant in Calexico.

But the work quality should be superior, when done by Americans, especially when done by those who resent it, who feel above it. Right? Workers will find themselves doing really hard jobs for minimum wage with the bare minimum of frills and benefits and little chance of advancement and as anyone in such circumstances; they will feel unappreciated and disrespected. The work will suffer in a culture where good enough is the new ‘good’.

As gay marriage and abortion, the issue of illegal immigration is trotted out every election year to foster the xenophobic vote and every time it is it delivers. Citizens of this nation are as racist as ever and don’t blink flushing trillions of dollars and millions of lives down the toilet in elective wars for individual profit, while howling and wailing that the people who bring us cheap food and commodities and services are too great a burden.

Curious then is it not that none of these folks seems too concerned about illegal immigrants earning their citizenship killing, maiming, dying and being maimed in any of our elective wars of aggression. I suppose it seems perfectly appropriate to send our brown people to kill their brown people. You might say: mighty white of us.

Your papers, please.

Prezbyter

Gaza

2010-06-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia, the term Semitic originated in the late 18th century CE (Common Era) coined by historian, August Ludwig von Schlözer, in reference to the common origins of certain languages, including those of the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, Assyrians and Ethiopians. Hebrew is a dialect of the Canaanite language and shares its roots with Arabic. Semitic people incorporate easily half a billion humans presently, 13 million or so of whom are Jewish.

The term anti-Semitic was coined by a German fellow in the late 19th century who wasn’t apparently too keen on Jews, Wilhelm Marr. In 1879 he published a book "The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism" suggesting the Jews were the first real western power and that they had poisoned the nobility of the German people with their liberal notions. So noble. So liberal. He founded a fraternal organization (ain’t it great when men get together and express their common interests?) the League for Anti-Semitism.

(To answer my sarcastic, rhetorical question (for those of you not into sarcasm or rhetoric) no – no it ain’t great when men with common interests get together because we always seem to find such affiliations justification for something abusive when not just plain cruel. Always have (if history can be believed) and it appears we intend to continue to, until we are no longer able to continue owing to the results of these very affiliations.)

Within a century a term coined by one man, popularized by others was then adopted by still another man to specifically single out one group and his usage then became the benchmark of yet another fraternity, Zionism. Zionism was invented by Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and playwright, in his pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) 1896ish. Not at all religious, he felt alienated owing to anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in Europe, France in particular. (Nice going, Wilhelm.) In Der Judenstaat Herzl created the modern push for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Palestine was the name the Romans gave to the place the former occupiers, the Greeks, called Philistia. Philistia was so named owing to the dominant culture of the region, the Philistines. Philistine existed before Israel, says so right in the Bible (Josh 13:2/3).

The actual kingdom of Israel, according to the Tanakh, (Old Testament) was ruled by polytheistic kings for about 150 years in the present day state of Samaria. Jerusalem was in the southern hill country of Judah. This all occurred around the 8th and 9th century BCE, according to the Tanakh. But, what of the United Monarchy?

You no doubt remember when all the warring tribes of Israel came together against their common enemy, the Philistines? Apparently, the Israelites wanted the land the Philistines occupied and for some reason, the Philistines resisted – an old story. So, according to the Tanakh a United Monarchy was formed, under one king and one god to deprive the Philistines of the land God had promised the Israelites, without telling the Philistines.

Except they weren’t united – Saul ruled from the North at Gibeah while David ruled from Jerusalem, in Judah; Saul tried to kill David; David allied with the Philistines, who killed Saul (suicided him), he in turn killed Saul’s reputed killer, realizing what a bad precedent allowing people to kill kings would set, especially now that David had become king and all.

Eventually David’s son, Solomon (the wise one) rejected the Israelite god for one of his thousand or so special ladies divinities du jour. If this represents a kingdom united under one god, the Diaspora becomes easier to understand – these people didn’t get along.

As the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans came and went, many of the local residents of the Levant left as well, many others were killed and the rest remained – it was their homeland. Those who left made new places their homeland (one’s homeland being where they were born, not where somebody they may have been related to may have lived 3 millennia past). For some who moved on, the notion of a Promised Land held appeal, especially because they didn’t particularly like where they ended up.

Allow me to offer an observation: you are not a people, you are a person – if you have a people it is your family, not some unknown group who died a thousand years before your parents were born. We are all the same race, the human race and no matter how fast we run, we will not win it. It is not a race to be won.

The reducing of life from an experience to a competition comes from the notion that there are separate human races. There aren’t. We’re all one big unhappy family. These spurious racial notions surfaced hugely in the Tanakh where those humans deemed inferior were condemned to destruction, their cities to be razed. Interestingly, it seems their virgin daughters, gold and other valuables were not inferior and the Israelites were to collect (steal) such booty and turn it over to the priests. For God.

Initially, one who viewed religion with contempt, Herzl reputedly admitted to a friend that he "wrote what I had to say without knowing my predecessors, and it can be assumed that I would not have written it, had I been familiar with the literature". This suggests that he read the Tanakh after promoting the whole homeland notion and in retrospect found it a dubious foundation upon which to construct a viable community.

Regardless, Herzl approached the Sultan of Palestine with his idea, to which the sultan responded “Over my dead body” or words to that effect. He approached Cairo, eyes on the Sinai Peninsula, but the Egyptians took a negative view of the idea as well. He got the British involved and tried for a homeland in Uganda and British East Africa, both with similar expected results. That was some porous Promised Land.

The idea of creating a homeland someplace for people who had never even been there, in the midst of people who had lived there their entire lives, because of a pamphlet written by a guy who didn’t even believe in the religion he based it upon struck many as problematic at best. History has certainly validated their concerns.

By the turn of the 20th century, Herzl’s ideas had taken hold and his movement begun in earnest, even though he died in 1904 owing to a bad heart. Zionism became the political mechanism to enforce a religious contract reputedly between someone they call (or actually don’t call) God and some of their purported ancestors created by a guy who didn’t even believe in Him or even necessarily them.

Of course, were there such a real estate Broker, one could argue, as the Creator of, well, everything, had He (according to the Torah, god is a Man, though Moses described Him as a flamer, go figure) wanted a group of people to live someplace, He wouldn’t need a group of men with guns to force the issue. He could have put the Israelites smack dab in the center of anyplace He wanted, I reckon, being God and all. Yet, according to their own literature, God went out of His way to deny them the very place He offered them. It’s easy to see why Ted felt some reservations.

Be clear on this: Palestinians are Semitic people. To hate them because of their culture or ethnicity would then be anti-Semitic. But it’s not. Why is that?

In present application to be anti-Semitic is to be anti-Jewish though it seems more based upon the people than their religion. To be anti any group of people based solely upon ethnicity is to be racist. While the term racism is acceptable when applied to everybody else in the world, racism in regard to Jewish people or expressed opposition to Israeli action is anti-Semitism. They adopted a term originally popularized by people who didn’t even believe in the Tanakh, then coined specifically by someone who disliked them. A lot. They became the Semites. To revile them isn’t merely racist, it’s anti-Semitic, all the other 480 some odd million Semitic people be damned. Hmmmm…

Is it racism to challenge atrocity? Were the allied warriors in WWII racist because they reviled the Nazis, or were they understandably outraged by their horrific behavior? Is thwarting criminal action racist? Would the world have collectively bowed to Hitler’s whims had he claimed stopping German aggression against people unable to defend themselves was anti-Aryan? That Germany was only trying to defend itself?

Why is it when O.J. Simpson claimed racism toward him by the clearly racist LAPD he was mocked for playing the ‘race card’ (which worked) but when Israel commits murder in broad daylight (or the wee hours of the morning) outrage at the crime is labeled anti-Semitism? When it comes to Israel, it appears the race card is always acceptable, I suppose because we’ve made them the dealer.

If a nation with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet (real smart), fighter jets, missiles, tanks and submarines needs to murder unarmed people based upon their right to defend themselves, one wonders why does not that right of self defense apply to anyone else? Is it perhaps because that right is only granted by the capacity and willingness to murder with impunity on a grand scale? The murder defense.

Can we only defend our lives by destroying the lives of others? Are not we all others to others? Must we all die to show how right we are? If we don’t stand up for reason soon, we will lie down soon for no good reason and then we will all inhabit the Promised Land.

Shalom

Gaza*

Gaza the world has turned its back on you
Owing to ancient words written of Philistine and Jew
No god in Gaza
No heaven only holy hell
No peace for Gaza
No freedom in a cell
Gaza we won’t see the suffering you endure
Owing to our reluctance to affect the cure
No god in Gaza
No heaven only holy hell
No peace for Gaza
Until hatred we expel
Displaced and disgraced
With haste misplaced
Encased and erased
Reality is never faced
People punished for crimes that they could not commit
Generations suffering unjust because of it
Thrown off, gutted, cut off – our refusal to admit
Atrocity is something to which no one should submit
Even if you imagine you’re God’s chosen little shit
Gaza there are some who will see your plight
Sad so few will stand up and join you in your fight
Killing people’s bodies doesn’t kill a people’s pride
Criminal pariahs for the wrong place to reside
Prisoners of racists ruling within apartheid
None dare give voice to the truth
It is but one more human genocide
No god in Gaza
Justice crucified

© 2010

*Interpretation of an instrumental by simmbiosis. Thanks!

Gaza can be heard here: http://www.myspace.com/prezbyter

Open Letter to Jon Voight (Unnecessary Roughness)

2010-04-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Jon:

Saw you sitting on Fox with Mike Huckabee, (what is it with republican governors with shows on Fox?) where you read a letter to President Obama while ostensibly addressing it to We the American people. Your missive began with a bitch slap at Obama (though I must have missed your letter to Mr. Bush upon whom Obama appears to be modeling our national decline) then became a blowjob to capitalism. It was at that point I turned it off.

While I number myself no fan of Obummer – new packaging of the same bilious shit – he is merely continuing the desecration wrought by all the corporate shills before him – he is just the national salesman du jour. You certainly know what salesmen are. They are people doing an unnecessary job. They are professional liars.

Like you. I mean, I’m not throwing rocks at you, you are an excellent liar by profession, I’ve enjoyed your lying for decades, you sir, are a fine liar indeed. But you are a liar by the very nature of your trade.

You are an actor. You pretend (lie) to be another person or whatever to manipulate the behavior of strangers. You manipulate their emotions by speaking another’s words as your own; you manipulate their perceptions by engaging in behavior you would never personally engage it; you manipulate their commerce by compelling them to leave their homes and come and pay to view the spectacle of your lie, motion pictures.

While I enjoy some movies, the fact is that you occupy an unnecessary profession. If movies never existed, if wholesale fantasy was not perpetuated throughout the ages, humanity would still be here, would still be vital. Hell, without all the fantasies which empower cruel and corrupt people, men, mostly, like yourself, convincing and impressive, who knows where we might be as a civilization. We might even be civil.

Probably not. The reason I shut off your broadcast letter is simple – I’ve heard it all before. From my father and his father, from politicians to preachers to pontificating prevaricators on the television – the business of America is business; capitalism isn’t the best system, it’s the only system; money is god.

Fascinating, isn’t it, that people, like yourself, you know, rich people, are always the ones peddling this line. Sure, you hear plenty of mouth breathers with delusions of adequacy parroting this stuff back at you fueled by alcohol, ignorance and exceptionalism, but the guys always out there on the front lines of capitalism are rich. The only battlefield you guys show up at. What a surprise huh?

Never hear that slurping adoration of your beloved from poor or lower middle or even melting middle class types – it’s always you rich guys. The guy who puts in his 12 hours in the coal mine or on the oil derrick or farm or doing any one of a thousand other jobs which provide the power which provide the industry and the means to broadcast for rich guys like you don’t work less hard than you. They don’t give less of their lives. Their families don’t suffer their absence less than yours.

I work on set, have for nigh unto 25 years – acting is hard work, but so is gripping or make-up or electric or camera or any of the other jobs which make you look so good. I’ve also worked on a farm and no job on a movie set is harder than farming – not a one.

The wonderful people who make all these delightful distractions, who made you a rich man – I, when I work in my filmic capacity – engage in unnecessary professions. We help you lie effectively, help you get rich by being so damned convincing. But if movies had never been made, if TV had never become the black hole of human interaction, humanity would have marched on. Where do you suppose we’d be without agriculture?

For you to be rich while promoting the very thing that made you that way gives you the veracity of any other corporate shill – none. Why are you and your fellow shills so damned rich – hard work providing a better world for your fellow man? Fuck no, nobody gets rich doing that, right? You get rich by gambling. Rich people call it investing. You gambled on your talent. You got lucky.

So, tell me again, why should those of us who work just as hard as you, if not harder, why should people who do necessary jobs, jobs on which any and every society depends have to live in poverty and desecration so you can make, what, $4 million a film? I have no idea and I don’t care because your excessive pay is no more excessive than the pay of hundreds of thousands of other multi-millionaires, all promoting the very thing which keeps them in power and all doing unnecessary jobs. Capitalism.

Capitalism defines one life as more valuable than another by success in acquisition and containment: Acquire as much as you can and contain it so no one else can take it from you. The way you acquire it isn’t important, the collateral damage unworthy of consideration – the pay is the thing. And if you make money creating weapons, then once more into the breech, cause you don’t make money with weapons unused. The belief that weapons of mass destruction are necessary is as demented as it is suicidal – it is the belief that tyranny is necessary.

Our world, right here right now is the picture of capitalism. You like this picture? War, poverty, racism, hatred, all sluicing out of this nation like untreated waste into a kiddy pool. Flaccid pale businessmen who have never faced real battle and bored with their excess swinging nuclear dick at each other across continents so others equally imbecilic can rake lots of imaginary dollars into their fictional bank accounts. The bodies stack up so a few can have more than they can ever use. Brilliant.

Men and women who give their very lives in their work provide you food, water, power, shelter and live on the edge of economic collapse while you live in splendor as fictional royalty in a nation deluded into the belief that not only doesn’t our shit stink, but it makes a great main course.

I for one ain’t swallowing.

Peace

Prezbyter

End Socialism!

2010-01-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

End socialism, all of it. Eliminate public education, real men (children) learn for themselves. Eliminate libraries, if you want to be educated, pay for books like everyone else. Dump public water and power and especially trash pick up – the private sector can handle it all just fine and real Americans are happy to pick up the tab for corporate profits when it comes to human necessity.

Sell the postal service; let the private sector deliver, keep those prices escalating, because profit is god. Shut down any public hospital, the healthy are only those who can afford it – the poor can wither and die. Right there on the streets. Hell, the private sector can pick up their desiccated bodies – I'm sure they'd be glad to charge you to remove diseased corpses from your yard. A real growth industry in capitalist paradises.

Definitely get rid of police and firefighters – both these jobs can be done by the private sector and we can be billed as they see fit. And the courts. Who better than corporations to determine justice, right? Those with the greatest profits can write us up a new corporate friendlier constitution and charge us per use – a proprietary constitution.

And, to be truly rid of the scourge of socialism, we must eliminate the military and other governmental law enforcement agencies – why should someone on the west coast have to pay to protect someone on the east coast from invasion and attack? If we can’t afford to protect their health, why bother protecting their bodies? We can just pay Xe to do it.

Those of us with any money left.

Every rugged individualist was fed by a socialist at some time or another. Socialism is society working for each other, capitalism is gambling for oneself. Is our world stronger inhabited by selfish gamblers or generous workers? One supposes the sickness of a society can be determined by looking at the availability of its health care. According to the World Health Organization, the USA ranks around 39^th.

Either accept socialism, or end cherry picking. Society is socialist by its very nature. Civilization couldn’t exist otherwise.

Peace

Prezbyter

2009-10-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

The Drug of War

“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.”

Sun Tzu “Art of War”

It can be said that addiction is a war within one’s self. I know it can be said, I just said it. But that doesn’t make it true. It is a struggle, a weakness, a cave-in to fear, a place to try to hide, (operative word, try) – it is a hunger never sated, a thirst never quenched. And while on the surface this sounds bad, only when a living human becomes a dead one, is their hunger sated or thirst quenched. Until then, we get hungry and thirsty all the time.

Addiction is often reverse laziness, satisfying it often requires considerable effort. Overcoming it is the terror of doing nothing: don’t have a smoke, don’t pour a drink, don’t pop a pill, keep your nose outa the bag and the needle out of your arm. Or where ever you might stick it. And whatever you do, stay out of the fridge where even food is your enemy. Addiction is doing something, usually unhealthy, when you’d be better served doing nothing, or at least not that particular thing.

Overcoming addiction is overcoming your inability to stay away from that which you’ve determined isn’t good for you – that determination based upon the fact of your addiction. The standard therapeutic approach is effectively substitution – do something else when you’d prefer to feed the monkey. Swap your current unhealthy addiction for a more socially acceptable habitual behavior. Go to therapy, a lot. Become religious then convert your junky friends and hell, even strangers. Watch TV. Sell Amway.

While perhaps intriguing, nothing in this protocol describes a war – just more problems at home. War is when you substitute your problems at home for problems in someone else’s home, problems that your presence there has caused. This describes the war on drugs: a bunch of pill popping alcoholic smokers in a neurotic bid to negate their manifold deficiencies creates a prohibition on the addictions of total strangers then extracts public funds to persecute them. In their own homes.

The War on Drugs was officially declared by Richard Nixon, likely in response to predecessor Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, where G-men swarmed poor people’s hovels and gave them watches and Cadillacs. As the poor were prone to drug abuse, (often the drug abuse the reason they were poor), Nixon felt the government should take something back and the poor had so much to give. Many of them, in fact gave their children to LBJ and Nixon to murder people in Viet Nam.

Interesting then that within a decade, two presidents declared war on Americans within the country while militarily engaging three other countries in wars not declared as such. Many of those lucky enough to return from those undeclared wars with a pulse brought with them considerable addictions, while remaining poor. Go half way around the world and fight a war, on drugs, return drugged and the nation fights a war on you. Two failed declared wars combined with 3 failed undeclared wars – quite a track record. Or mark.

In present practice President Obama has toned down the war rhetoric in regard to drugs while maintaining the warfare in other countries. In 2009 anyway it has been reduced to a Police Action on Drugs with heavy emphasis on counter intelligence and subversion – which theoretically could work, as everything about such prohibitions is decidedly counter intelligent and subversive.

The likely reason the government declares these kind of insanities as wars is that without a declaration of war, their action would be rightly called robbery: armed and deadly men and women swooping down upon business people and their clientele, stealing their product, profits and property, killing those who interfere and abducting those who endure – only to beat information out of them for use in future assaults.

These are not the actions of those concerned for the sanctity of human life – it is war upon the citizens by their government – paid for by the citizens. Like having to buy your rape-kit from the cop who raped you – while he’s raping you. It is the tyranny of the terrified and willfully ignorant majority, voting as they are told, lest they be tarred as fellow travelers. It is hypocrisy most foul and a crime against humanity.

As in all ideological conflicts, when rhetoric is reduced to an exchange of gunfire, the battle is already lost. Instead of acknowledging the underlying pathology of habitual intoxication, we agonize over an effective means of eradication and its cost in human life and economic resource. We treat some drug users as criminals, who deserve what they get at the hand of excessive law enforcement zeal, but treat others…whooo hooo hooo…as but victims of their conditions to be pitied or mocked. They act as cautionary tales to warn the young about the dangers of certain drugs. Bad drugs.

But just as in any war, it doesn’t end until the shooting stops. And, just as in so many wars the USA engages in, the shooting never stops. What is it about drugs that make people so crazy around them that they shoot each other? The same thing that got more or less sober fellows during the reign of the Volstead Act to shoot each other, the police/G-men and lots of other people – the US government declared war on certain citizens.

Edicts written on paper, by some men (and in the case of the Volstead Act and beyond, some women) declared that agents of the government had the legal right to kill citizens for drinking alcohol and resisting their authority. As a result government agents killed many people engaged in rum-running or other distribution of alcohol, while creating a climate where they killed each other and anyone who got in the way owing to the back channels Prohibition forced them into.

Without Prohibition the Mafia would likely have remained a small cabal of protection punks and numbers runners fulfilling some vendetta or another. While you can only beat so much money out of poor people, the allure of liquor insured they would give it to you gladly. Gambling provided them certain fiscal benefits: being Catholic, they knew well the amount people would invest into false hope, but without the revenues and power they achieved through defiance of Prohibition, their power base wouldn’t have flourished.

And we wouldn’t have The Godfather.

“War is like unto fire; those who will not put aside weapons are themselves consumed by them…”

Sun Tzu “Art of War”

Killing people because of a societal obligation to protect them from themselves is as logical as defending the fetus by killing the abortionist – then turning around and casting the baby into the streets to fend for itself because it made such a poor choice in its parents. How does one protect oneself from one’s own illogic?

Eliminate predisposition.

Everybody has a weakness or 50. It’s okay – if you can’t admit to any, you’ve just discovered one. No one, or collective, should persecute anyone, or collective, because they don’t approve of their weakness, unless we’re talking about pederasty or something where second party harm occurs, but we’ll leave the church for another day.

On one level it could be suggested that the drug war is an expensive and debilitating experiment in behavior modification, a kind of aversion therapy gone so far a field that heavy armaments have to supplement the paucity of other effective control methods. Smoke a joint, get dead. What could be more aversive or perverse?

But reality makes it clear that a society awash in alcohol, tobacco and panoply of pharmacologically dispensed mood altering chemicals is not as concerned about the implications of substance abuse as it is in exerting its selective control, at a price.

Therein lays the real issue at stake. While the war on drugs costs upwards of $50 billion annually, the cost to humanity is incalculable. In the war on human weakness there are no victors. The money to fund this madness doesn’t appear magically courtesy of the anti-drug fairy, but indeed, as with all socially sanctioned compulsory self-improvement programs, is culled from the ranks of the taxpayers. You and me.

We are reluctant to address the fact that all that money is going from our paychecks into other people’s pockets, especially when that bill just keeps getting bigger. It’s less threatening to imagine that this vast, seemingly bottomless resource is being used to construct an invisible drug shield to protect us from chemically induced euphoria and giggling.

The fact is that a large number of our fellow citizens are reaping huge profits from the illegal drug trade, many in ways that have nothing to do with the manufacture or distribution of socially demonized substances. There is growing evidence that the USA is aiding the growth and distribution of opium in Afghanistan, obscene if true.

Consider the benefits of prohibition to the very people who advocate and fight to maintain it. Clearly the majority of our representatives in the legislative, judicial and executive branches attained their rank and stature after working as lawyers, judges and in other capacities within the legal establishment.

The prosecution, defense and incarceration of drug users and dealers is extremely lucrative for those who shepherd them through the legal system. Even small time dealers keep lawyers on retainer - just an expense of doing business in the free market. And attorneys will tell you drug dealers money spends just as good as anyone else's. The drug war is an enormous cash cow and the government is first in line at the feeding trough.

With the onset of Prohibition in 1920 a huge and vastly profitable underground economy was born in accommodating the provision of our human need for psychological diversion. Obviously, alcohol has a deleterious impact on society. Just as obviously no piece of legislation will make it disappear.

"Moral luminaries are people who forgo the ordinary pleasures of life and compensate for it by interfering in the pleasures of others..."

Bertrand Russell

In response to the economic reality of bootlegging an equally dedicated legal system sprang into existence to combat what was in actuality nothing more than a statutory crime invented by people addicted to telling others how to behave. It was as if we invented the crime to create the means to eradicate it. It is in such environments corruption thrives.

By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, a vast legal hegemony was in place and firmly entrenched in our national consciousness. Just because the crime no longer existed was no reason to eliminate the crime fighter. Surely other battles could be fought with no shortage of troops or profits to go around - surely another enemy could be found to justify a war without end – drugs.

Who in their right mind would oppose a war on something as insidious and degenerative as drugs? Who in their right mind would be unable to see that all war is fought upon us, people, not drugs, or communism, or Islam...

War is unto human as it is out of human and it is always fought for gain, be it money or property or just something to eat. In war we prove that we've not only evolved from other beasts of this Earth but just barely, as we now consume and devour over ideas - ideas like money and personal superiority and nations and god.

This war rages unabated, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into millions of pockets on all sides of the conflict and consuming millions of lives in the process. But the real issue of diversionary intoxicants is never truly addressed, lost in the currency exchange on which a free market economy depends.

The effectiveness of suppression and interdiction is clear and has been for ages. Our instinctive compulsion for the alternative consciousness that intoxication provides is a more powerful force than moral indignation or legal intervention can ever overcome. Human nature will not bow to legislation.

The question, then, is what compels us to hide from ourselves? What drives this need for psychological diversion? Until we are willing and able to address this condition honestly, without guilt, shame or recrimination, all of our efforts to eradicate its consequences will fail as surely as dousing the smoke to kill the conflagration.

This honest self examination is another casualty of the Police Action with subversive counter intelligence on Drugs because as we all know, you always stand in lockstep with your leader when he commits atrocity, or you hate your country. When a nation wages war, that nation can not admit guilt, or wrong or error, for any of those admissions negate the justification for the war.

Why we become addicted will not be learned until those so addicted are no longer treated as the enemy.

War is over. We all win. War continues. We lose again.

Peace

21st CENTURY FAITH BASED INITIATIVE

2009-10-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2001 a collective of dangerously audacious men commandeered at least two and as many as four commercial airliners, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City. The United States government, helmed by George W Bush and Dick Cheney, also reported that another commercial airliner, American flight 77, a Boeing 757, also hijacked, crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania.

The reason for the ambiguity of this statement is because virtually all the information provided by United States governmental officials in regard to this series of events defies reason, logic and the laws of physics:

5 to 7 of the reputed hijackers, invisible to the government prior to 9/11, yet accorded relatively comprehensive dossiers within hours after the fact, are still alive and well in their native Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen (at least one has since died) a fact alluded to in the major media within weeks of the atrocity, then kept strangely silent subsequent.

Numerous New York City Firemen on site, reported explosions in the main towers of the Trade Center; the twin towers as well as building 7, untouched by the aircraft, collapsed in a manner consistent with a controlled demolition and even though no building in the history of steel skyscrapers has ever collapsed in such a manner owing to a fire on their upper floors, the official commission investigating the crime interviewed not one fireman from the scene while FEMA concluded their assessment had a low probability of occurrence.

Photos released by the government show that there is no manner possible that the damage to the Pentagon, left undefended by its multi-trillion dollar military for over an hour during an invasive national assault, is consistent with the high speed impact of a 110 ton aircraft piloted by a novice. They have not released one picture demonstrating the contrary.

Mr. Bush stated publicly, twice, in recorded interviews, that he watched the first plane hit the tower prior to his entering the classroom where he sat reading with second graders, even though there was no known footage of that collision available before 9/12/05.

The Secret Service made no effort to protect the President, his entourage, or the children at the school by removing the President immediately when the nation was determined to be under attack, instead allowing him to remain in an undefended elementary school, five minutes from a local airport for over 30 minutes.

To believe the government in regard to this catastrophe is to accept information that runs contrary to the facts and reason. It is to accept the proclamations of people with a historical propensity to lie, people who are good at lying and do so frequently to protect vested interests.

Thus, nothing the government states as fact should be viewed without a high level of skepticism, rendering our knowledge of the events of 9/11 as incomplete in regard to what happened opposed to what we are told happened.

Consequently, nothing unknown for certain can be reliably reported as incontrovertible, hence the ambiguity in this first example.

On March 19, 2003 the United States Government invaded and subsequently conquered, destroyed much of and now occupies the nation of Iraq. A campaign of massive deception was perpetuated by the Bush/Cheney administration and presented as factual by the media of the nation, with rare instances of skepticism among the media’s ranks, effectively creating, then bolstering the justification for this horrible atrocity.

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of humans have been slaughtered, starved, or poisoned to death by disease as a direct consequence of the actions of the USA against the nation of Iraq. Millions of lives have been ruined as a result of official rapacious mendacity with the willing complicity of the American media.

The media’s readiness to distort reality, misdirect affections and attentions while acting as the official propaganda arm of the government makes their proclamations highly dubious and consumers would be well advised to tread lightly when using information found therein as the foundation for their perspective as well.

On August 31, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf States leading to the collapse of levees which protected communities in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Army Corps of Engineers previously warned that the levees would never withstand anything higher than a category 3 hurricane. A written proposal to shore up the system sat idle for over four years while Washington dickered over the $500 million Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu requested to bolster their protection.

The Bush administration offered up $166 million and Congress upped the figure to $250 million but their muted largess and foot dragging kept work on the project from commencing, relegating the indigent and otherwise unfortunate in New Orleans to a horrific and pointless death. The primary reason given was that government officials had faith that no category 4 hurricane would hit. Katrina was a category 5.

These are three of many examples of faith in action. Faith based initiative if you’ll indulge me. They are cogent representations of humankind’s unyielding capacity to accept that which appeals to us in direct contravention to reality, to fact. Examples of our embrace of the temporarily comforting to hold the perpetually disquieting at bay, at least a little longer. Our willingness to believe.

The people we have been told committed the atrocity of 9/11, Muslim fundamentalists, acted out of outraged faith. They believed the words of their leaders, believed in a God that rewarded those who committed horrific atrocity in His name, believed that ideology is more important than life itself. There is no evidence to support this conclusion.

The citizens of the USA had faith that all of the multi-trillions of dollars they have paid to the government to create the largest and deadliest military force the world has ever known would protect them from outside attack, would protect them from evil.

They believed the words of their leaders, believed in a God that rewarded those who committed horrific atrocity in His name, believed that ideology is more important than life itself. There is no evidence to support this conclusion either.

It’s been said that “Science is based on facts with no certainty whereas faith is based upon certainty with no facts.” Science is a technique to understand what is real through the examination of evidence. It demands scrupulous attention to detail and rechecking of facts, because facts change. A moment ago you were reading the paragraph above.

Science is a living process constrained only by reality and the open mindedness of those who apply it. Science can not function effectively with prejudice - bad science shows its bias. As the world changes, science then changes to keep up. It is the way of knowledge and our best hope for the future.

Throughout 2002, while the Bush administration was promoting false evidence through the media to justify their imminent invasion of Iraq, experts from the world inspection body of the United Nations, IAEA, combed Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction (the very weapons possessed in suicidal abundance by the US).

Professional weapons experts, on the ground in Iraq repeatedly pronounced that there were no weapons that qualified as WMDs and nothing that could be characterized as a direct threat to the only nation to ever nuke humans, three times, the USA.

The CIA pronounced that they had no direct evidence of WMDs in Iraq and even Condi Rice and Colin Powell stated that Iraq was no threat to the USA (pre-9/11). Applying reason to facts, only a suicidal madman would launch a military assault on the USA and the first designation clearly did not fit former US asset, Saddam Hussein.

Facts and reason provided sufficient justification for not invading Iraq, for not continuing to perpetuate mass murder on a grand scale. Yet we went to war and continue to wreak pointless carnage on the people of Biblical Eden. Why?

Faith. We the people of the United States of America ignored evidence, fact and reason and followed a known liar into yet another military adventure at inconceivable expense in human life and resource. Enough people believed lies and propaganda to crush the dreams and aspirations of millions of people who did nothing to warrant our aggression. Millions of people who will never enjoy a good life again.

On the home front, in the heart of the Bible belt where faith is pre-imminent, thousands perished needlessly because our faith based initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan (where hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more have perished) along with our faith that giving multi-millionaires more money will somehow make everybody richer have strained our fiscal capacity to provide for our national infrastructure.

These policies, these initiatives, these invasions have not improved our world one iota, although, to be honest, they have improved the lives of thousands of rich men and women by making them richer, (only to turn around and devalue their currency through fiscal wrongheadedness) while casting millions deep into despair and desolation.

A cynic might suggest that the rich and powerful use the propagation of faith in order to further entrench their dominance and control. There is much evidence to support this conclusion. Clearly those who promote the conceit that ideology is more important than life itself have a disquieting knack for finding other people to die for it.

The fundamental paradox of faith, ideology, is can the conception be more important than the conceiver to the exclusion of all conceivers? Is the idea of freedom more important than freedom? Is the idea of justice more important than behaving justly? Is the abstract more valuable than the actual?

To embrace faith is to face this paradox, to even end life in defense of saving life. Ideology negates reason, for ideology demands that you defend it by ignoring its contradictions and fundamental flaws. Hence, you can never learn in that regard, only promote and defend.

Rare it is indeed that we suffer the consequences of a well reasoned decision, whereas our personal and business difficulties are almost always based upon faith, be it in things going the right way, someone going along with our plan, luck, or perhaps intervention from God Itself.

Undeniably, science has made the dangers of faith even more urgent and imminently perilous by manifesting the most perverse and deadly of our creations. But just as men of faith march off with the certainty of the justness of their cause, scientists, inventors, engineers and technicians exercise faith in that they trust their ideological masters to behave appropriately with the monsters they create.

Thus, even scientists aren’t immune from the wiles of faith and all of our lives hang in the balance. The pursuit of the absolute is the pursuit of oblivion for only in nothing is there no change – nothing is absolute.

“Only when we realize there is no eternal, unchanging or absolute truth can we arouse in our selves a sense of intellectual responsibility…” Hiu Shi

Faith has led every soldier into war, made every collective atrocity committed by man a reality, whether religious faith or secular faith. While Stalin was no theocrat in any conventional sense, those who carried out his brutal dictates had faith that they were doing the right thing even though reality and abundant evidence pointed to a contrary conclusion.

As with Hitler and Napoleon and Alexander, men who take up arms in pursuit of some objective (beyond self defense) are exercising faith, not reason, not logic. Not even sense. They believe what they are told, because usually they are told they are better than the human vermin they have deigned to exterminate. They do what they are told, expressing their innate superiority and morality by slaughtering and raping and looting.

Science and reason dictate that one make decisions based upon the reality of conditions at any time, not follow orders of authority blindly. Faith requires that you cast off reason and logic and embrace conceptually that which you really prefer as opposed to what really is. That way, one can feel good about doing wrong.

Contrary to popular dogma, faith is the thing that keeps aristocracy in power and plagues our species with unending war. Faith is extant in virtually every catastrophic decision made by humankind (during the Manhattan Project, the possibility of an uncontrolled atomic chain reaction consuming the planet and perhaps even the fabric of space/time was considered very real, yet they proceeded out of faith).

We inhabit a planet teeming with ignorance and rabid fundamentalism, armed to the teeth and waxing wroth. If there is a deity, a God, that created all this, reason compels us to consider how upset It would be if in our blind faith and ignorance, we destroyed It’s creation.

The empty worship of antiquated and desultory rules from millennium past is a certain path to our demise, especially when that path is strewn with the most awful weapons ever devised by the minds of man. It is well past time for humanity to rise above the prejudices of the past and face the world we’ve created as responsible and clear headed adults, not craven worshipers of idolatry and myth, not as children afraid of the dark.

Peace

Clear Fraud

2009-10-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

The problem with God is human. The problem of heaven is human. The problem of the world is human. The problem with human is human. Until the problem is addressed, the solution can not be realized. Unknown illness has unknown cure - unknown locations are very hard to find.

Humans are taught to fear God, that God demands our fear. Is not to desire fear from others admission of fear in oneself? Consideration reveals that to desire fear is to feel fear. Fear is generated where peril is imagined. For God to demand our fear is for God to admit to fearing us. Beyond embarrassment, what would God have to fear from humans?

To suggest God fears humans is to admit that God as worshiped by human is human. To worship God as human is but to worship human - displacement narcissism. How’s that for reverence? Could a human manifest the entirety of existence? Obviously not. Humans can’t even maintain the planet we inhabit without consuming it like locusts lost in frenzied feeding, consuming till nothing remains, exploding from glut or wasting from starvation. The difference being that locusts do not fear God or man. They merely consume, devour, mate and die. They do not fear, they do not instill fear, at least deliberately.

Human fears human, human fears animal, human fears insect, human fears microbe, human fears life, human fears death, human fears everything. Humans are very afraid. Fear is the foundation of all human generated malady, it is the base of prejudice, the precursor to torture, the justification for war.

It leads to the destruction of the Earth and all of it’s inhabitants, all creations of God. How is God served by this destruction and fear? Would you be mollified if the fire that consumed your home claimed to worship you? Would such a pointless claim compensate for the loss of all you hold dear?

How is human served by fear? Through fear, human becomes elevated to god, to king to president or premier, through fear man is elevated to pope or priest or even presbyter, claiming authority they do not have to regulate and diminish the lives of others to achieve and maintain a sense of power and self importance at the expense of the fearful.

God is not served by fear, but human is. But only some humans - those not served are then the servants of fear and no one should have to bow to such a master. Prezbyter counsels that no human should have to kneel before another, that the slave can only exist when the master exists. Make no one but yourself your master - lose your hate, lose your fear and steal their control.

Prezbyter knows of no persuasive evidence for or against the existence of God yet is steeped in evidence that should God exist It would have no affiliation with any human enterprise which isolates, marginalizes and diminishes humans while desecrating the Earth and all that reside here - religion and government two such institutions.

Prezbyter advocates a close look at that which we claim to believe for that which elevates some necessarily diminishes others. Often the only way some can be elevated is through such diminution. Prezbyter promotes the wisdom of working to be better than we are so far, not better than someone else. Self progression is more work than diminishing others, but the rewards far outweigh the effort expended.

Certainly worth considering.......