Re: The course of human events

Every so often I scan the Declaration of Independence to see how we're doing about avoiding a repeat of the "repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states" that led our forebears to cut the chains forged by King George III.

I have to say we seem to be locked in not-knowing-history-doomed-to-repeat-it mode.

Check this one out:

"He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."

Is that our modern federal government in a nutshell or what?

Among the truths those folks found to be self-evident was: "That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

The bad news here? I really get the feeling that that's exactly what happened: People exercised their right to alter or abolish their constitutional government, and they instituted new government, organizing its powers in such form as to them seemed most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

They just overlooked essentials like principles and, of course, independence.

Live the probabilities

"Most things I worry about never happen anyway." — Tom Petty.

You could die from swine flu. But you probably won't.

You might get killed this morning when a drunken idiot runs a red light or cuts you off on the highway. But you'll probably make it home safely tonight.

A terrorist might be on board the plane you're taking today. But probably not.

You might be laid off and replaced by an illegal immigrant. But the chances are almost zero.

In fact, the world might come to an end in 2012. But most of us very likely will live to see 2013 — and those of us who don't won't perish in a planetwide catastrophe.

Every intrusion on our freedom begins with politicians planting the seed of an improbable fear, and then cultivating it until it becomes so irrational a majority is ready to surrender a piece of liberty.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." — H.L. Mencken.

As you peruse your newspaper or Web sites, as you listen to and watch newscasts, be mindful of the percentages. Remember the truth of Petty and Mencken. Refuse to be afraid, refuse to be led to the safety of a cage — in other words, free yourself.

'Your favorite Beatles song'

Better late than never - I wish I'd thought of this suggestion before all the big Beatles hype surrounding their video game and discography re-release earlier this month:

If you consider yourself someone who believes governments in general are too intrusive, consider answering as follows should anyone ever ask you what your favorite Beatles song is:

TAXMAN

Let me tell you how it will be,
There’s one for you, nineteen for me,
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.
Should five per cent appear too small,
Be thankful I don’t take it all.
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah yeah, I’m the Taxman.

(If you drive a car car), I’ll tax the street,
(If you try to sit sit), I’ll tax your seat,
(If you get too cold cold), I’ll tax the heat,
(If you take a walk walk), I’ll tax your feet.
Taxman.

‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.
Don’t ask me what I want it for
(Ah Ah! Mister Wilson!)
If you don’t want to pay some more
(Ah Ah! Mister Heath!),
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeeeah, I’m the Taxman.

Now my advice for those who die, (Taxman!)
Declare the pennies on your eyes, (Taxman!)
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.
And you’re working for no-one but me,
(Taxman).

The last president

So his agenda is finally made clear ...

"I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last."

For some time it's been clear this guy is hellbent on steering the U.S. of A. into bankruptcy, and now he says it out loud: He's determined to be the last president of the U.S. of A.

At least now we know what we're dealing with.

Comics worlds conglomerate, and Vin tackles Teddy

Growing up with comic books, Marvel Comics and Disney Comics were worlds apart. Rather, Disney was what little kids read, and Marvel was what you grew into. It was much later that I discovered there was some sublime work being done by the Disney creators, too. But they were two different worlds.

No more. In this era of greater and greater conglomeration, Disney and Marvel are now conglomerated. Howard and Donald under the same web-footed roof. Cinderella meets The Thing. Of course Walt's heirs sucked up Pixar some years ago. Buzz Lightyear? Hulk smash! Emperor Zurg versus Dr. Doom for domination of the universe ...

It's about the movies and the theme parks, though. As Mark Evanier put it so well Monday, "the publishing of comic books (those things on paper with staples in them) at that company is a few notches less important than it was last week. And it wasn't all that important last week."

Oh, and thanks to my curiosity about Sen. Harry Reid's latest display of arrogance, I wondered what Vin's been up to, and I browsed my way into to the best single article written about Sen. Kennedy in recent days — or perhaps ever. Enjoy.

The consent of the enslaved

The only way you can become a slave is with your permission.

"All men are created equal ... endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights ... among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Those are carefully chosen words, and today I'm thinking about the last 10. Governments tend to claim as much power as they can, but their just powers — those that are appropriate and (dare we say) legal — those powers can only be exercised when "the governed" approve or consent.

The reason government can only function with the consent of the governed is that we are created equal: No one can enslave you without your permission.

This idea is a radical departure from the status quo of 1776, which held that George III was in charge because the fact of his birth into the royal family made him more suited to govern than the rest of us commoners. From the Declaration of Independence onward, the caretakers of government were to be hired by all of us as equals, wielding only the powers we allow them to wield.

Ever since then, a large percentage of those hired caretakers have desired to seize the reins that George III once held. But they can't claim that authority by divine right; they have to obtain consent.

And that's where the concept of the political advertisement came from.

By the time a well-crafted campaign is done, you are so full of fear about what may become of you as a free man or woman that you're practically begging for a particular man, woman or program to take the liberty you've had since birth. How can you, an educated man or woman, make decisions for yourself about your own life? You must elect someone to handle the controls of your life.

It's all for the noblest of purposes: To feed the poor, to protect the land, to provide for the common good. Slavery is safe and secure and easy. Liberty is hard work. Next thing you know, you're ensnared.

Listen carefully when these charlatans promise to make life better for you — ask yourself, at what cost? What are they asking you to surrender in exchange for better health care, safer borders, energy independence, a full belly, cleaner air and water? There's always a price.

Concerned about our increasingly totalitarian world? It's happening because the architects of the police state have your permission — the consent of the governed. Solution? Start acting like you're free.

B.W.'s Book Report: They Thought They Were Free

Milton Mayer's book subtitled "The Germans 1933-45" is a remarkable bit of work. Mayer lived in Germany for a few years after the close of World War II and wanted to know how ordinary folks could have allowed the oppressive regime led by Adolf Hitler to seize control of their country and their lives.

The title of the book says it all: They thought they were free.

Mayer writes about his friendship with 10 men and his conversations about their everyday lives in a relatively small town. He paints a plausible portrait of people only tangentially aware that their government was descending into totalitarianism and tyranny — because they were busy living their lives and it usually didn't affect them directly.

He is at his best when he compares the slow, insidious progress of the Nazi regime with everyday events of the early 1950s in the United States, when he wrote the book — always with the caveat that "not that we're as bad as Germany was getting in the 1930s, of course." For example, introducing the question of how millions of Jews could be spirited away without most people understanding what was happening:

When people you don't know, people in whom you have no interest, people whose affairs you have never discussed, move away from your community, you don't notice that they are going or that they are gone. When, in addition, public opinion (and the government itself) has depreciated them, it is still likelier that you won't notice their departure or, if you do, that you will forget about it. How many of us whites, in a white neighborhood, are interested in the destination of a Negro neighbor whom we know only by sight and who has moved away?

After a spellbinding couple of hundred pages in which Mayer outlines precisely how it may have happened — and writing around the edges of the similarities to, say, McCarthyism — he then spends the last portions of the book theorizing about how something in the German character made that country more susceptible than other cultures to the emergence of a Hitler. The writer is less convincing at that stage of the book.

But it's interesting to hear the Kronenbergers' descriptions and explanations of what life was like in the 1930s and early '40s, and to imagine how a free people could be drained of their freedoms without losing the sense that they were still free.

Standing in line to have their persons and property searched before they can proceed, answering questions they are forbidden by law to refuse to answer, applying for permits that will allow them to build on their own land, and standing in the rain smoking a cigarette, Americans can be heard to proclaim their country is the symbol of freedom around the world.

Someday, perhaps, a Milton Mayer will befriend 10 of us and write a book about everyday life in these times.

Teeny little Hitlers

For tyranny to exist, sometimes you don't need one big despot like Hitler, when thousands of teeny little Hitlers are willing to be petty tyrants.

Officials at Chicago's O'Hare airport told 17-year-old Jon Meier the chewed-on document was fine, but authorities in Miami rejected it and wouldn't let him board the southbound aircraft.

His family's 1-year-old golden retriever, Sunshine, chewed a corner of the document, obscuring some numbers.

And thus was Peru spared the terror of another high school Spanish student invading its borders. I feel so much safer with these sentinels of liberty patrolling our airports.

The coming universal health care

"How will we pay for it?"

We will pay for public sector health care coverage same way we do for private sector health care coverage: Those who can afford to pay will be billed for the expenses incurred by those who can't afford to pay. And the more expensive care will be rationed.

The only difference will be that the government will collect the money and ration the care by force, as opposed to insurance companies performing those tasks on a more-or-less voluntary basis. Many people think this will be an improvement; they will be sorely disappointed.

Peter Townshend summed so much of life and government up in the triumphant conclusion of "Won't Get Fooled Again":

Meet the new boss;
Same as the old boss.

The only caveat I might add is that the new boss is almost inevitably worse than the old boss, especially in matters of government.

Meanwhile, in Washington and state capitols everywhere ...

"Quick! While the world is distracted by Michael Jackson ... pass that bill, raise that tax, strip those liberties — they won't notice until it's too late!"

How many egregious laws will be traced to legislative action of June 26, 2009? I bet lots.

Would you buy a car from this guy?

Associated Press said it best:

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defining moment for American capitalism, President Barack Obama ushered General Motors Corp. into bankruptcy protection Monday and put the government behind the wheel of the company that once symbolized the nation's economic muscle. The fallen giant, the largest U.S. industrial company ever to enter bankruptcy, is shedding some 21,000 jobs and 2,600 dealers. Sparing few communities, the retrenchment amounts to one-third of its U.S. work force and 40 percent of its dealerships.

"A defining moment for American capitalism"? Under what definition of capitalism does the government own 60 percent of one of the largest corporations in the country? Don't worry, I know the answer; it's a rhetorical question.

As Mr. Obama assumed the reins of General Motors and touted the smaller, more environmentally sound cars that the new GM will bring to the people, I couldn't help but recall the grainy film images of another powerful leader who coaxed automakers into producing the People's Car, or as they said in his language, the volkswagen.

Maybe it's because I'm currently plowing through Milton Mayer's brilliant book, They Thought They Were Free. No, I'm not saying Mr. Obama is a 21st century version of Mr. Hitler. Yet.

If it was us

It took about three minutes to find what I was looking for — all I needed was to Google "sentenced income tax evasion."

Here's what I found ... all but one of the names have been removed to protect the guilty. And I barely went halfway down the first page of links. The first page had "Results 1-10 of about 94,300 for 'sentenced income tax evasion."

XXX was sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 36 months, supervised release term of 3 years and ordered to pay restitution of $717,899 to the IRS. In August 2000, a federal grand jury charged XXX with three counts of income tax evasion for the years 1993 through 1995. According to the indictment, XXX attempted to evade paying a total of about $180,000 in taxes.

YYY was sentenced to a year in prison to be followed by one year of supervised release. YYY was also ordered to pay costs of $1,227 and an assessment of $200 ... YYY admitted evading over $183,000 in federal income taxes for tax years 1997, 1998, and 1999.

ZZZ has been found guilty in federal court on four counts of income tax evasion ... He will be sentenced Jan. 21. He faces a maximum five-year sentence and $250,000 fine for each count, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

On October 18, 1931, Capone was convicted after trial, and on November 24, was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison, fined $50,000 and charged $7,692 for court costs, in addition to $215,000 plus interest due on back taxes.

If it was us, and not Tom Daschle or Timothy Geithner, we'd be going to prison. For the rulers of the U.S. of A., all it takes is an "I'm sorry" and a check. You may not get to be health & human services secretary, but you get to go home tonight — and you may even get to be treasury secretary and give the IRS its marching orders.

"Hope and change," my muscular buttocks. The U.S. government is still run by thugs and criminals. People are angry. Angry enough to change things? We'll have to see.

The truth, by Papa Joe

The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin 1879-1953

Santa strikes a blow for freedom

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

The State as speed bump

Now here is an interesting conversation over at Sunni's blog, as anarcho-libertarians discuss the questions that "given that we live in a world dominated by states, at what point does interacting with them 'cross the line' and become immoral? How is the line determined?"

My light-bulb-flash moment came as "galacticmonk" mused:

my evolution started with attraction to free markets & liberty. from there i became active, getting angry (reacting emotionally) at the constant barrage of noise that conflicted with my ideal (at the time) libertarian paradise.

soon i started to realize that the perpetual stream of things that go against my current understanding would eat away at my core. i had to re-evaluate what was important. and frankly the state ranked so far down the list that it became a non-factor.

as soon as living a meaningful life and finding joy in the day-to-day aspect of it became my reason for being here, the state was like a speed bump--annoying but something i really had no control over (unless i chose a different road of course).

So here's a guy, me, whose entire career has been in media/news, with news defined as observing and explaining the latest stuff that The State is doing. I'm all wrapped up in watching The State, and I hear that "living a meaningful life and finding joy in the day-to-day aspect of it" is probably best accomplished by not getting all wrapped up in watching The State. I know this instinctively, but haven't seen it verbalized quite this neatly for a while.

Should I seek a journalistic beat that doesn't involve itself so much in State News, or seek a completely different path that takes me out of my media/news comfort zone but into something a little more joyful because it does not expose me to The State every day? This is the question that's been driving me nuts for some time, in part because I haven't phrased the question so well before.

As for the answer ... Stay tuned. And remind me that I was talking to myself when I said "Stay tuned."

Police state news

Some morons broke windows on a police car and threw stuff Monday during demonstrations near the Republican National Convention — those reports were easy to find. "Sporadic violence" results in 284 arrests.

But the earlier pre-emptive strikes by the goons of the police state — those were a little harder to seek out, although semi-mainstream Salon had good summaries here and here.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald calls St. Paul "the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be" here.

... even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 -- with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies. Numerous protesters and observers were tear gassed and injured.

On the various news channels, none of this is happening, as far as I can determine — although I confess to being a very sporadic news channel watcher.

B.W.'s Book Report: Little Brother

I couldn't put down Cory Doctorow's Little Brother to save my soul. I have been tinkering with a collection of thoughts called Refuse to Be Afraid, and it turns out that Doctorow has already taken most of those thoughts and converted them into a page-turning thriller of a glimpse into our possible near-term future.

Four geeky 17-year-old friends are playing an intriguing Wi-Fi game when a horrendous terrorist incident goes off in San Francisco. Our main hero ends up spending some time in a dark custody that opens his eyes to the ways fear has converted many of our countrymen and -women into a form of terrorist themselves. He finds himself engaging in activity that could land him back in custody, but freedom has become more important than his personal safety and security.

This is An Important Book, but it's also beaucoup entertaining. As I said at the outset, I couldn't put it down. I knew I wanted to get up before dawn this morning to write, but I had to finish reading the book first, which brought me close to midnight. It was time well spent.

This one goes on my short list of essential reading. If you want to see where the US of A is heading — if we're not there already — read this book. Now, if not sooner.

Constitutional amendment

Now here's an intriguing development — Top Men in the U.S. administration are pressuring Japan to change the Constitution written by U.S. forces after World War II.

Specifically, the U.S. would like to persuade Japan to change this section:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Know what I think? Leave the Japanese alone. I think the U.S. Constitution should be amended to include this section. It's an idea that's well past its time. I especially like the last line: "The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized." We had good talkers back in 1947. The next 61 years have proven talk is cheap.

A snapshot of contemporary America

Yes, I know there were some numbskulls lurking hoping to do violence of some kind to the Olympic Torch, although the main goal was a nonviolent protest of the oppressive Chinese government (is there any other kind, in the end?), so I understand why the mayor of San Francisco felt it necessary to deploy police officers to protect the folks who were participating in the torch run Thursday.

I just found this image from the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage to be a remarkable summary of life in the land of the free and the home of the brave, circa 2008.

Post 666

Revelation 13: 16-18

16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads,

17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.

No particular reason to bring that up today, other than Blogger informs me this is the 666th post I've posted since launching Montag in the summer of ought-five.

Oh yeah, that and this.