The men behind the curtain

"Shift isn't about security versus freedom or socialism versus capitalism," Micah continued. "It isn't about you versus me. It's about giving the people of this union an Us and a Them. Whatever fate they end up with, our system gives them the illusion that they are choosing it. They'll know who they can bond with and who they should blame for everything that's wrong. Us and Them. It gives their lives a framework. It gives them an identity and a purpose."

The Beam, Season Two

Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant

Never

There will never be a really free and enlightened State 

until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, 

from which all its own power and authority are derived, 

and treats him accordingly.

Henry David Thoreau

Resistance to Civil Government

On spin

Sometimes I listen or watch or read the spin that politicians and government hacks lay out there, and I wonder: How stupid do they think we are?

But these are people who have been elected and/or placed in positions of trust, so I suspect they know there are quite a few actual or willfully very, very stupid people among us after all.

You read Nineteen Eighty-Four and conclude that no one could really get away with declaring, "War is Peace!" "Freedom is Slavery!" "Ignorance is Strength!"

And yet every day the ether is filled with those very words, or damn near close.

Reporters ask questions, pols respond, and the reporters dutifully journal what the pols said, without further question, even if the "answers" make no sense on their face, and call it journalism.

Surely, the observer says to himself, most people recognize that the reporters' questions were evaded, never truly answered.

Surely?

If only it were true

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Mark Twain

(The sad truth, of course, is that these thieves and self-serving scoundrels are quite intelligent and wily creatures – just not quite as smart as they think they are.)

Liberty.me: An interesting new site

Lovers of liberty have a new place to turn on the web – new to me, at least, I'm not sure how long it's been there.

It's called Liberty.me. I haven't really explored it too much yet, but it looks like a nice font of information.

It was recommended by an old friend whose recommendation is good enough for me.

How to use smoke and mirrors to frighten millions

The newscast is alarming. A couple shoots three people in Arizona before dying violently themselves. A gunman shoots up a school in Oregon. Two little girls knife their classmate in Wisconsin. A little boy brings heroin to his elementary school in Philadelphia.

Two conclusions can be reached.

1. We live in an increasingly violent and dangerous nation.

2. In a nation of more than 300 million people and 3.79 million square miles, the news people needed to travel more than 3,000 miles to find four violent and dangerous acts.

One conclusion ramps up fear and the desire for a stronger police state. One conclusion concedes that people are generally peaceable and nearly always will not commit violence against one another.

Yes, murder and mayhem happen every day – SOMEWHERE within those 3.79 million square miles.

Millions of planes land safely every day. Scores of millions of people resolve their conflicts far short of harming or killing one another. The reason the violence is news is because it is so rare, so unusual.

But don't mention that fact to the demagogues building your cage.

Guard thine enemies from oppression

A thought for the next time you wish someone would shut up, or you wish someone would stop that guy, or you wish someone would outlaw that ...

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

— Thomas Paine

Problems and solutions

Most news stories follow the same template: Define a problem and explain what the government is saying or doing about the problem.

Listen carefully enough, and you'll hear that the government can only make the problem worse.

The more individual men and women exercise their freedom, the sooner an authentic solution is found.

How to end the gay marriage controversy

Another ban on gay marriage has been overturned, and folks in Milwaukee and elsewhere have flocked to the county clerk’s office to get their relationship state-certified.

I get that this opens up the doors so that your partner can qualify for benefits of various type, and no idiot hospital or petty family member can deny the right to visit your sick or injured spouse, but the whole issue of the state interfering with gay marriage raises a broader question.

Why do you need the state’s sanction for the religious ceremony known as a wedding? What right does the state have to impose itself on a personal relationship? Show me where “defining marriage” is a legitimate responsibility of the state.

Of course the state will eventually make gay marriage legal everywhere – selling marriage licenses is a revenue stream. The more, the merrier.

Rather than having gays argue for the “right” to get a marriage license, perhaps people of all inclinations should examine whether the state ought to be in the business of licensing marriages.

Never truer words

I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

 — Henry David Thoreau

The shocking truth about politicians' great deeds

We often hear a politician praised for how much good he or she has done for the world. For example, a politician is praised for increasing the gas mileage on the average car to 40 mpg.

He has done no such thing. What he DID do was write a document instructing car manufacturers to build a machine that burns only one gallon of gas for every 40 miles it travels. This document contains the real or implied threat that if they fail to build such a machine, the government will halt their ability to do business, whether or not consumers are interested in buying the machine.

The car manufacturer, threatened at gunpoint (for how else does government follow through on its threats?), does the research, designs and builds the vehicle – or it goes out of business – or it moves its manufacturing to another country where the government threats are not as onerous.

The heavy lifting of research and production was done by the targeted business and industry. All the politician did was bare his teeth and dictate. Oh, the bullying is couched in poetic words about a vision of the future, creating a better world for our children, or some such. Don’t be fooled by the poetry: The politician points the gun, and the business person complies or dies.

The simple requirement every politician fails

It's a simple thing to ask of elected officials: Don't spend more money than you take in.

And yet, no matter how much more they confiscate from the people every year, expenditures always exceed revenues.

I know from personal experience how hard it is to live within one's means.

But when you are spending other people's means, it seems it is not only hard, it apparently is impossible.

I got nuthin today

Figures the day after I promise to ring the bell of freedom here every day at 13 o'clock, my brain goes dead.

Too much of it all. Do I write about the negotiating with terrorists? The trend toward hip hop poetry slams masquerading as collegiate forensic debate? Oliver Stone as director of an Edward Snowden biopic?

As George Harrison once wrote, it's all too much, too much, too much, too much.

So let me just assure you, it's all smoke and mirrors, bread and circuses. You're free to go. Free. To. Go.

So go. Stop trying to make that damn clock work.

A long time ago, we used to be friends

The immortal
Fay Wray

I've been blogging again for about a month, and the little button that says "stats" says not many people have noticed. Not a surprise; I haven't made a big deal about it. But the other day it occurred to me that at least I could put a link at my old blog, which still gets regular traffic four years later, a fact which is kind of sweet in itself.

So, if you followed that link, hey! Good to see you. And if we're old friends, good to see you again. This is what I've been thinking about the world recently, which isn't a whole lot different from what it was then, except in the spots where it is.

I still think you're beating your head against the wall trying to get The Powers That Be to grant you the freedom you already own in your head, the freedom that you were born with – remember that one brilliant turn of phrase that summed it all up in 27 words? "All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Remembering that the word "men" in this context also includes women, the point is: You were born free. You don't need anyone's permission to be free. In fact, petitioning a government for your freedom, trusting a government with your freedom, is handing the chains to the slave master for him to outfit you properly.

Most of the posts here may sound pessimistic as I make observations about our government's descent into chaos and totalitarianism. Underlying it all, however, is an optimism that free men and women will continue to be free in spite of the state's most concerted efforts.

And I plan to keep ringing that bell of freedom every day at 13 o'clock.

The sanitizing of Godzilla

Akihiko Hirata
as Daisuke Serizawa

Ogata, if the oxygen destroyer is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they’ll want to use it as a weapon. 

Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new super weapon to throw upon us all. 

As a scientist – no, as a human being – I can’t allow that to happen! 

— Dr. Daisuke Serizawa in Gojira (1954)

When Gojira was cut and remixed for American audiences as Godzilla, King of the Monsters in 1956, there was no reference to war-hungry politicians. 

The new Godzilla movie, while a magnificent bit of entertainment, also is devoid of emissaries of the state beyond the military personnel who carry out the policies.

Perhaps the concept of policy makers whose motivations threaten civilization is considered too much for American audiences.