Is it Just Me?

    One of the essential requirements to translate from youth to functional American adulthood is the ability to intelligently accept hypocrisy. If this skill is not acquired you are doomed to spiritual and material failure.

    

    Firstly, you must not be deceived by that first instinct and assume that in “human” society humanity is prioritized. No, all the laws, social stratification and good opinion of mankind are based on the primacy of ‘property’. Your entitlement to the so-called “necessities of life” is directly proportional to the amount of property you possess. And the forms of property are “real”, “personal”, fiat money, and the labor of others. So, one of the first hypocrisies that must be thoroughly accepted in American society as suggested by the flowery language of our founding documents, is that “human rights” are superior to “property rights”. In actuality, “human rights” are only the dividend paid after property rights are secured by the agency of “democratic” government, and again, are by degree as “unalienable” as the appraisal of possession and amount of property endows them. This is why one can be employed by one of the largest and most prosperous corporations on earth and ‘labor’ (fundamentally a reversion to peasantry) will not return the most basic human right – a livelihood. And why others can commit self-aggrandizing un-punishable financial crimes!

   

    Secondly, it is the unquestioned obligation of our citizenship to internalize the fantasy of “American Exceptionalism” and cling to the belief that this culture engaged in “manifest destiny”, imperialism, and perpetual warfare since the first permanent immigrant settlements on this continent – is “peaceful”. This requires an intellectual gymnastic beyond mere hypocrisy. That being the case, it shouldn’t be necessary to review our American history replete with the various and sundry mendacities that have accompanied the imperialist agenda to illustrate willful dissimulation bordering on psychopathology. Instead we can turn to current events to reveal our cultural sanctimony.  

   

    Yesterday a national budget was proposed in which one-half of discretionary spending will be directed to the military. One-half! This at a time when tremendous personal wealth is being created and centralized, food for the hungry programs are being cut, and public schools are literally disappearing for lack of funding. Why, it may be asked, does the richest, most powerful, sole superpower even need to expend half of its discretionary spending, an amount slightly less than the combined military expenditures of all the nations on earth, for “defense”? If no nation or group of nations is spending even a fraction of what we’re spending to defend themselves from ‘us’, it would seem to follow they’re not spending huge amounts in order to attack us; which begs the question, what is our huge defense expenditure defending against? It cannot rightfully be called “defense” spending. It can only be “offense”, empire building spending. Yet in our bizarre cultural narrative, our empire is the historically unique outgrowth of “peace” – despite the in-progress torrent of flowing blood directly attributable to American military foreign adventures on-going in 139 countries that goes unexamined and unexplained by “peaceful”, secure  Americans.

   

    Is it any wonder then that today, Jan. 17, our President, a lawyer and constitutional scholar, can twist his mouth to tell us that “our friends and neighbors” in the NSA may be forgiven the abrogation of the Fourth Amendment, because “friends and neighbors” are not constitutionally constrained when confronting the consequences of our national decision to wage war against the world. After all, war is peace. And Americans are “free” notwithstanding any recision of supposedly protected, unalienable rights, and appearances to the contrary. To say otherwise would make the President a hypocrite.

   

Freedom R.I.P.

    The obituary to freedom has been written, yet Americans distracted by the effluvium of trivia offered by both mainstream and ‘social’ media are unaware that it has been written and typeset.

     

    Still another frightening example of Orwellian mischief conducted by the NSA has come to light. Their TAO (Tailored Access Operation) group does, among other devilish things, intercept computers ordered online and detours them to facilities where various malware and spyware are embedded at levels that undermine any encryption or other protective measures the eventual owner may choose to install, before being repackaged and delivered to the purchaser. It is my understanding that the spy embedded will record the very keystrokes used to install encryption commands – making the encryption an ineffectual locked door with a spare key held by the NSA. It has been reported that this program has been in effect since 1997, well before the increasingly suspect empire-incentive mysteries of 9/11 occurred.

     

    This preemptive attack on privacy, so intellectually similar to the atrocious criminal rationale of the Iraq invasion and the insane Vietnam reasoning of the necessity “to destroy villages in order to save them” cannot be justified as a measure to “preserve our freedom”. It is a direct, calculated assault upon that freedom with the ultimate purpose to surgically remove the communication or influence of individuals who may question the government’s policies, motives, or economic favoritism/classism and make it impossible for Government of the people, for the people, to be challenged by any formation of a disaffected critical mass that can be called “the people”.

     

    Following as it does the revelations and subsequent perjuries of NSA activity in the collection of ALL telephonic communication – a UNIVERSAL search seeking crime instead of “probable cause” warranting a search – and the new enunciation of the “patriotic” canard that journalism which exposes illegal and unconstitutional activities of government as “treason”, and the establishment of an additional standing army, Homeland Security, joined with the increasingly militarized local police combined as a force that can overwhelm any Second Amendment benefit the people are permitted to fantasize as protection against encroachment of government upon the rights the government deems inconvenient for the security and enlargement of the Empire, it would in days of yore inspire a ‘committee of correspondence’ –at least! But the exchange of private communication is too threatening to allow because all private thoughts must now be vetted for compliance with jungle-capitalism, jingoistic imperialism, and intellectually unfettered adoration of Israel.

    

     What is amazing and sad is that our highly educated representatives seem unaware that they were not elected to represent “government” or capital, but rather in the course of acting as “government” their primary responsibility is to represent “us” and assure our rights take primacy over the tempting conveniences and illusions of power.

     

    There can be no ‘legal’ justification for the excesses of the “secret state”, and since none are offered we may as well use the one remaining duty the “free press” elects to observe – and publicly print the obituary.

Obama's Generational Problem

I listened to the president’s Syria speech the other night where he attempted to convince the nation that we Americans are morally burdened with still another violent duty in the service of righteousness. The symptomatological cascade that Mr. Obama has succumbed to the pathology of imperial power, proffered by the permanent military-industrial bureaucracy, was confirmed by the encapsulation of his banal reasoning in a plethora of discreditable clichés glued together by the rhetorical excrement of empire – right down to the foolishness that some unique gift of “exceptionalism” justly enfranchises all the expedient, violent, and hypocritical activities this nation undertakes.

According to the unchanged opinions of the majority of Americans, even The Great Orator couldn’t re-legitimize our sham notion of “exceptionalism” which has been rendered intellectually and factually dubious to the ascending, culturally dominant generation geo-politically matured and edified by our brutal, blatant, and unapologetic Real politik fraud in Iraq. The demagoguery and rose-tinted lenses which for so long nullified the color of blood have been displaced by a new willingness to view impulsive militarism with the cynicism fitting to its nature and bequeaths to progressive, peaceful civilization. And that's a good thing!

Will There Be War?

Considering the continued murkiness of the facts and evidence, I don’t believe this nation should elect to war based primarily on a ‘prime time’ Presidential monologue. A serious and comprehensive national dialogue is required. If I were to ask the President some questions they would be -

1.    If violence is the answer to our grievance, why wouldn’t violence be the answer to someone else’s grievances a month from now or a year from now? Or is this war projected to be the war to end all grievances?

2.    If we bomb them, why shouldn’t we expect to be bombed? Americans have coasted too long on the anomaly of WWII and our recent conflicts where we engage in war and all the death and destruction happens “over there”. But war is not just us ‘doing them’; it is also them ‘doing us’. That’s war! And if bombs go off in their cities, we must expect they will go off in ours; exploded under the same construction of “justice” that supposedly informs our actions. Unless the President, in asking for authorization to go to war, is prepared to place this real possibility before the people, to make the people understand and appreciate the real consequences of war; that we must expect to see the blood of our children flowing down the storm drains in our streets, then his request would be less than his full moral duty. It would be an omission closely related to deception.

But there are other aspects equally pertinent to our national security and domestic tranquility to consider. We are not only debating a foreign war, we are debating a class war.

Over the course of the past weeks, right up to today, there haven’t been any other or new arguments presented differing from those generated on ‘day one’. No new evidence or proof has surfaced to sway adopted opinions. All of the originally held, various, and respective speculations are intact, in place, and unchanged. And the entire population is exposed to the same corporate media.  But I submit for consideration my admittedly unscientific conclusion derived from anecdotal evidence and my personal interpretation of the polls, that it appears that the economic top ten percent of the society is for the war, and the bottom 90% is against it. Why this is the case is another debate for another time. But “IF” I am correct I don’t believe it is possible for the President to lay out a case, lacking some as yet un-communicated, overwhelmingly compelling and believable arguments and proven facts that may have only emerged in the past hours, to change this calculus. So, although it is another discomfort in an uncomfortable and complex situation for a serially embattled president, a choice must be made. The President not only has a military decision to make, he has a political decision to make as well. His most vital and meaningful decision in this scenario doesn’t involve which weapons systems to employ, designating high value targets, or proving to the world how much of a badass he can be. What will have the greatest impact on our security and domestic tranquility is his decision on which constituency to appease. The historic and social trajectory of our nation awaits his choice.

Facts Americanus

It is time for the people of the United States to cease being herded to war like sheep. It is time to question our leaders and not simply follow where they lead. It is time to stop enjoying the arrogance that we are the most powerful nation on earth while simultaneously having our “security” threatened by every event in every backwater of the world. How does the recent tragedy which occurred in the Syrian civil war affect our “security”? We hear that mantra constantly repeated, but I haven’t heard an articulation of the nature of the threat that is so massive and imminent that it justifies us going to war against a minor regime already in the throes of civil war. I find it difficult to credit the horror our leaders express over the deaths of the Syrians caused by an alleged chemical weapon, when we killed many more civilians, women and children in the first hour of “shock and awe” in Iraq in an extra-legal attack over imaginary WMD. No, they are not motivated by regret over senseless death. Any intervention by the U.S. will not be motivated by humanitarian concern or defense of the integrity of an ancient convention. It will be motivated by the reward of regime change to our on-going strategy to eliminate any challenges to our hegemonic geo-political scheme to establish suzerainty over the region and its precious oil.

Of course there will be those who will claim my allegation is “anti-American”, but I request they measure the tempo and volume of the rhetoric of our warmongers against the information in the following articles.

                     

                      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23947149

                      http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/chemical-weapons-syria

Does it seem strange to anyone that according to the first article, dated 9/3/13, that samples from the site are just now reaching the laboratories where they will be examined to determine what actually caused the deaths of the victims?  But our President has already drawn his conclusions and apparently thinks retaliation is so urgently needed that waiting for the results of the investigation is dangerous to OUR “security”. It is worth noting that some aspects of the forensic investigation will be to determine if the weapon was “improvised or designed for military use”, “possibly indicate the type delivery device used”, and ascertain the nature of the agent used.  From all that we’ve heard from official channels you’d believe all these questions had been resolved. But today we see they’re still open and haven’t even begun to be examined for actionable fact.  As “peaceful Americans” you’d think the answer to these questions would have a bearing on the grave decision to wage war. But following our imperial pattern it looks as if the President believes it is urgent to attack ‘before’ the facts are known, an urgency that is obviously tactical rather than altruistic.

The second article offers some perspective on chemical weapons and chemical weapons as WMD. The content of the two articles seem to require an intellectual and moral hesitancy that belies the rabid surety our leaders express by foreordained dismissal even in advance of the result of investigation and without a decent measure of certainty that should be required for war.

The farce of Congressional approval is meaningless unless there is someone in Congress, anyone, who will question how and why the Syrian civil war need become another American war. It is meaningless if any independent operator, any paid sociopath, any demented imperialist, any revenge seeker can compel this nation to war because of impolitic rhetoric that obligates us to act without facts or rationality. We, the President, and the Congress are too “for” war and too little “against’ it to be the positive force in the world we claim to be.