Radix Fidem Blog

Most Economic Growth Is Rooted in Sin

Posted on August 15, 2010 by ehurst

Think about it. What is it burns so brightly as to fire the economic engines of growth? You can give it a lot of different names, but it boils down to folks wanting stuff they don’t have.

Granted, wanting more than the berries, bugs, roots and animals you can catch or kill is not evil in itself. With rare exceptions, none of us have faced that. Oh, I suppose if you took some survival training you might have experienced moments of it, but I can’t imagine too many of my readers ever actually lived it. But improving your odds of survival against natural forces isn’t a bad thing in itself.

It’s not a bad thing to want covering for your tender hide against those natural forces, too. Indeed, let’s throw in shelter from the weather. None of it requires economic growth, as we know it, but simply requires cooperation with sufficient numbers of folks to exchange the products of their simple labors. Like a small tribe or extended household. If you can stand to be around your kin, you can probably get by and have time left over to notice.

Up to that point, God is smiling and His Laws have got you covered. You can do all that and be obedient to Him. But how about some of those modern conveniences? Okay, but how much convenience? At some point, you are wanting things you really don’t need. Yes, I use a nice computer. I’m blessed with the ability to share my thoughts with billions of humans, should they stumble across those words, displayed via the magic of computer technology. Yes, and Paul used the Roman roads and shipping traffic, but we know he most certainly did not approve of Roman government, which took his life unjustly. He simply took what was at hand and used it as a tool for obedience to His real King.

You can use any excuse to dodge the underlying question: Why? Why do you believe you need all that stuff? Is your life so empty you would not have a life if, say, a sudden EMP pulse from the Sun wiped out the entire electrical grid? It would be years coming back, and you still would need appliances that weren’t fried.

Meanwhile, all electronic communications would come to a halt. How else do we communicate? All of it depends on electricity. And food storage, and transportation, and climate controls, and — for those of you who still have one — your job. Aside from a relatively tiny stack of currency, almost all existing money is actually just numbers in a computer.

Okay, so maybe it won’t come to that. But that doesn’t matter, because the question remains: What do you really need? Because frankly, anything not covered in God’s Laws will tend to make Him pretty unhappy. Do you suppose this has nothing to do with the entire economic system of the West is coming apart? Just how much of the stuff we make, buy and sell is really consistent with His intentions for us? So maybe He’s cool with your laundry machines, but I have no trouble saying He’s not pleased with TV, movies, and most video games. Encouraging immorality is sin.

No, not liberal American morals, nor conservative, nor even libertarian and certainly not populist morals. God help us. If all you see in your world are neat political categories, you really do need to be shaken out of your artificial environment. All that stuff came up after folks rejected everything God said, except for a tiny slice of words which could be perverted to mean something else. No, this refers to morals rooted in the dawn of mankind. In case you are wondering, they still apply. God has not somehow grown up since then, and come up with a more sophisticated standard.

We are in sooooooo much trouble!

Posted in religion, social sciences | Tagged culture, economics, law, psychology, war | 2 Comments

Chill; It’s Just a Game

Posted on August 14, 2010 by ehurst

Perhaps you’ve seen it, since there are multiple copies on YouTube and other video sites: Protester runs on the field waving a sign, gets tackled by cops who proceed to get entirely too rough, which provokes the fans to attack the cops. If you haven’t seen it, go here and watch it yourself.

What ever happened to the old de-escalation ethics of police? When I was in uniform, had I been on duty on the field that day, it would not have been anything like that. Okay, so some goon interrupts the play of the game. In a free society, we tolerate such things as the norm, in that the occasional hijinks for whatever tragic cause by itself is within the envelope of what civil society expects and tolerates. It’s not a personal insult.

So I would have been laughing as I tackled the guy. I’m bigger than him, I assure you, so I would have taken advantage of that. But with at least one other, I can promise we would eventually have cuffs on him. If he struggles, it’s still part of the game. We were trained to do it against resistance and two can always defeat one struggling resistor. Six? Too easy.

Get the cuffs on, lift him off the ground and carry him out. What’s the big deal? I’d still be laughing, even joking with the guy. Only if he tried to strike any of us would there be any fighting. Just catch him and get him off the field. Turn him over to a police patrol dispatched to take him away. Job done; nobody harmed.

This notion folks have to comply with your personal whims or be punished for the grand insult to your authoritah fully warrants the reaction of the fans. The cops were wrong, and while I am sorry the one was knocked unconscious, the defense of the running protester was absolutely right. That’s not hooliganism, that’s justice as the Bible defines it. Thus saith the Lord.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged demonstrating, government, resistance | Comments Off

Fear Itself

Posted on August 13, 2010 by ehurst

It’s not so much the fear mongering, but the mongering of false fears. That is, stirring up excitement over things which don’t exist (like Iran’s nuclear weapons) or which don’t matter (gay marriage). But the politics of fear is the politics of oppression.

So let me offer you something else. Here’s some not-fear.

We’re all going to die. Some day. It’s not a matter of how we go, or what takes us down. None of those matter. What matters is whether you are walking self-honestly right now. It does no good to talk about truth as if it were some objective reality, since no two of us are likely to agree on it. So let’s talk about something we can do, and which actually requires no two of us be alike. Be self-honest.

That is, at all times assert the very real necessity of what your real identity requires of you. No, I can’t get any more clear than that because words can’t bear up under the load. If you are going to find anything worth living and dying for, it must be inside yourself.

Emotions aren’t it, nor is it intellect. It’s beyond that.

For example, did you know virtually every act of so-called Islamic terrorism was the result of work by the CIA, Mossad, MI6, or allied agencies? Most of it was paid for by secret budgets with your tax dollars. What you may not have known was we even provided the neocon theorists who created the current violent trends in Islam such as they exist.

For the past six decades, the Anglo-American elite (with Washington assuming the senior partner role after World War II) has assiduously promoted the most violent strains of revolutionary Islam, often — but not exclusively — as a strategic weapon in the context of the Cold War.

The Muslim Brotherhood — which grew out of the late-19th Century agitation of Persian-born professional revolutionary Jamal Eddine al-Afghani — has long been one of the Anglo-American elite’s most important strategic assets, as well as the talent pool that was used to staff the deadliest terrorist network in the Muslim world.

While he was superficially the most devout and pious of Muslim believers, Al-Afghani, writes Robert Dreyfuss in his valuable book The Devil’s Game, “a heterodox thinker who was a Freemason, a mystic, a political operative, and above all … someone who believed in the ‘social utility of religion.'”

That belief in “the social utility of religion” is a bedrock principle of the necon agenda. No, they didn’t create that notion, but have used it in ways no one else ever did, and the politics of radical Islam bears that precise trademark.

Facts, and they reflect something of truth. Given this, what does your inner bedrock of conviction require? Can we stop yakking about the Muslim invading the West already?

Or how about the lies regarding that spewing well in the Gulf? I don’t know where to begin, but maybe you can recognize the altogether unprecedented massive fish kills all up the Atlantic Coast? Do you suppose the hidden oil drifting along well below the surface of the sea has already hit the Gulf Stream current? The folks who know aren’t telling, because it might cost them a buck or two. Gotta protect that bottom line, ya know.

I’m not one for boycotts because they seldom have the intended effect. I’m not into feel-good moralistic nonsense. I reckon the least we can do is toss the whole barrel of public information on the oil disaster in the trash. Whether the alternative news sources are telling the truth or missing by a mile is not the point. The lies are massive, so withhold judgment. Meanwhile, how about we start thinking of how we are going to prepare for some future horrors arising from this unspeakable destruction of our natural environment? Don’t panic, just know it’s coming.

Now, we managed to pass August 10 without anyone bombing Iran, so that date was a bad guess. I thought it was too close, myself. I believe Half Past Human says it’s going to be in early November. That strikes me as more plausible. But whenever it may be, the likelihood Israel is going to back off is less than zero. The likelihood they will succeed without a huge loss is also pretty small. I can’t say what the politics here will be like then, because I keep thinking the economy will officially collapse any day now. If it does, I can only guess it means we can’t fund any more warfare. If we lift a finger to cover Israel while attacking Iran, it could easily become WW3 really fast.

At any rate, things are going downhill all over, and in very many, very big ways. Don’t panic. Keep your eye on the facts, never ever trust anyone who supports or works for the government, and plan on facing rough times. If you die, you die. It’s what follows that matters.

Posted in globalism, social sciences | Tagged government, internet, mysticism, propaganda, survival, war | Comments Off

Flogging a Wooden Horse: Law and Title Case

Posted on August 10, 2010 by ehurst

It happened today again. I ran across a posting on some website where someone was gibbering about the government, legal authority, and using all capital letters on legal documents. It won’t matter how many times someone tells me of a serious conversation with some government functionary who suddenly became worried that a commoner would know the secrets about capitalizing and such. It’s a lie. Whether some government document shows your name in all caps or not makes not a bit of difference, and it never has.

For those who are at least acquainted with the history of this wild notion, it’s referred to as “nom de guerre” — a French term (“name of combatant”) referring to some sinister act of the US Congress in the 1930s which rendered all citizens legally as enemies of the government. Putting the names of citizens in all caps makes them a corporation and thus subject to some supposed international law of warfare.

This silliness comes in the same package with a bunch of other manure regarding the question of whether, for example, the former British Commonwealth dependencies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada) are actually independent, whether the US is for completely different reasons, etc.

First, don’t try to use this capitalization business in a court of law in the US. It’s been rejected repeatedly. It won’t matter if you are right in some objective absolute sense, because the current powers-that-be won’t allow it. You might fool a cop or clerk somewhere, but it won’t work with any judge.

Second, it is also pure hogwash in terms of history and law. Try this law historian or the famous Devvy Kidd, ultimate expert of all things regarding the Patriot/Liberty Movement. In short, the use of all caps on legal documents is simply the accretion of habits from several centuries of lawyers dragging their feet when technology advanced for producing their voluminous case filings. Using all caps meets a simple legal requirement for something to be conspicuous amongst the sea of printed characters.

Third, in the absolutist sense, the vast majority of all governments today are illegitimate. I have yet to find a one which meets the ultimate and final standards published by God Almighty, so long ago, we can’t even assign a date. But we know it all goes back to the one family which populated the entire earth: Noah. Yeah, that ancient Deluge which wiped the earth of all but eight folks in a boat. I’m one of those who could care less what “science” you have for arguing in favor of other narratives of human origin. None of us were there, but God was. The whole point is not Noah nor even his boat and where you can find the remains of it today. The point is God revealed what He wanted us to know about human social structure after the Fall, and all humanity are accountable to that revelation. It doesn’t get any more absolute than that.

So if you run across any fool patriot types who yak about all caps and so forth on legal documents, tell them flogging a wooden horse won’t make it run. It just makes you tired, angry, and you still get no where.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged government, law, propaganda | 1 Comment

Good and Bad with Vocaloids

Posted on August 9, 2010 by ehurst

I am an arts curmudgeon. Making no pretense to cultural literacy, I can tell you honestly whether I like something or not when it is presented as art, and I’m hardly worried about how well that opinion matches any standards, established or imaginary.

It’s one thing to let kids experiment with tools which transform their fledgling, or even poor, talents into something more tolerable by reducing some of the complexity. Being able to pick from a menu of figures and colors does not suck the life out of artist development by itself.

But there is no actual product. That is, what comes out of such a process is the learner still in process. We celebrate briefly, then bring on the next challenge. The greatest disaster is not refusing to smile and comment on the kid’s work, though such refusal is very wrong. The greatest disaster is making the kid too happy with it, as if your approval is so cheaply gained. Yes, be objective in the sense of setting aside your personal tastes, and know enough about things to recognize how other tastes can be valid, but don’t give fake praise just to build a fake ego on fake self-esteem. The product is the budding artist’s heart, not the fleeting bit of artwork today which should go in a different direction tomorrow, or at least reach a different level of achievement.

At some point, the work has to be meaningful to the audience. The artist can do whatever he/she pleases, but if they do not connect, they better have a day job. “Art” is too nebulous a word, despite the difficulty we have in replacing it. The passion of the artist is not the deciding factor, but one input. Without the resulting communication of that passion, it was nothing, after all.

We have had a culture which pretends to place as much power as possible in the hands of the creator. Go to any higher-priced art show and listen to the verbal garbage which passes for attempts to affirm something nobody, not even the artist, really understands. Bleeding edge art has become so free-form, it means nothing at all. It becomes an excuse to celebrate neurotic emotions. More meaningful would be to say in essence whether you like it and what the work of art makes you feel like doing. Ignore the price tags, because they have no reflection of the actual value, but a reflection of a mad, perverted culture which wants to be something it cannot. The disposition of most of the West’s art dollars have no bearing on the reality of what purpose art should serve.

So in music. We have an intellectual culture which has permitted a choke hold by the marketers. Money is the measure, and by golly you will buy what the marketers want to sell. So they actively quash anything which does not sprout dollar signs according to their established formulas. That formula includes seeking new ways to offer small modifications which test the formula in minute ways. The creator is pressured to cater to this regime, or their stuff does not get produced. The artist is allowed to pick from a surprisingly narrow range of artistic product which survived the marketing filters. The recording is engineered according to similar formulas, sold in media formats which maximize marketing control, and delivered by mechanisms to the listeners’ ears which also were selected by the marketers.

Marketers do not attempt to sense the public taste, but shape it into channels which maximize profits. They do make all sorts of arrangements for all sorts of different tastes, which we recognize as “genres” of music. But in the end, however virtuous is the product brought to market, that is merely an accident.

Vocaloids arise from the Open Source movement. Because of certain factors, it has escaped the laboratory and hit the market. By the time marketers take notice, it’s too late. The thing is deeply entrenched in the place where it is totally under the control of the creators. There is no performer, actually. It’s a product direct from the creators; it is precisely and only what they set forth, unfiltered, in that the software is just the mechanism. Poof. The entire music industry has been shot through the heart. Comaratively, we notice Linux and other Open Source system software has been somewhat a contender on the field, but it grew up slowly, and formed merely a parallel ecosystem, as it were. Vocaloid music burst out all at once, and at the one point when the music industry was already bleeding fatally after battles with the very consumers on which they prey.

But vocaloid music is not all good. Sure, it stands to gut the industry, but not the art. Humans as a whole, despite all the marketing and conditioning efforts, can be driven only so far. This new product will tend to sell best to folks who want music as a style compliment, not for the sake of art. It is not alive, and a critical element in art is the living touch between artist and audience. The most successful singer today has been dead awhile, but while he lived, he could connect to his audience like few others — Elvis Presley. It hardly mattered what he sang, only that he had that vocal charisma. Hatsune Miku, the green-haired animated teenager, cannot connect because charisma cannot be programmed. Emulation has very real limits.

That is as it should be. She won’t destroy the art of music performance, just help to keep one more generation of tastes from paying much attention to art itself. Hatsune will sing with perfect pitch and enunciation, giving the creators exactly what they envisioned for their music. But it will remain hollow and artificial. Hatsune cannot ever extemporize. But assuming they program that in, too, it still can’t duplicate charisma, that unquantifiable quality of human connection. Even when the charisma hides evil motives, serves to manipulate for evil purposes, it remains something possible only with people.

And while the genetic pool will always offer only a limited number of artists overall, the number of those who naturally pay that much attention is only slightly larger. The vast majority of those who could be taught to pay attention can also be taught to ignore it. The latter group drives sales, but the few are the ones who actually know something about it. They tend to be the same people who most threaten every mass movement, because it is their nature to examine and see past the presumptions of propaganda. They have always done their own thing, and always will, and only relative access to art will limit their participation.

I won’t run screaming from the room if you start playing a recording by Hatsune Miku. I probably will try to escape politely if you start playing Lady Gaga. I’ll leave town to avoid a live concert by her. She is an assault on art by virtue of using art to assault truth. I’ll have a hard time leaving the room if you play a decent rendering of most classical composers. But if the performance is live, regardless of music style, it’s a whole different ball game.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, economics, linux, propaganda, psychology | Comments Off

Nobody Believes It

Posted on August 7, 2010 by ehurst

Stop and think. Have you met a single government employee, particularly in regards to their government function, who honestly works to limit government power? How about to merely increase government accountability?

We can wax eloquent on the grand philosophical themes of the founders, but those folks are dead, and so are their ideas. Sure we have lots of ordinary Americans who can read them, even quote them, and believe them. They’ll get out and march and demand those ideas be put into action. But they won’t ever see them in real life.

Okay, so take this business of the recent California court decision to strike down voter-approved limits on gay marriage. It’s a silly question, carefully designed to distract us all from things that really matter.

On the liberal left, the gay marriage movement is stoking up its engines for a major push to legitimize — so they believe — homosexual relationships in a social as well as a civil sense, and make the final push for gay “equality.”

On the right, particularly the religious fundamentalist right, the scaremongering direct mail fundraisers are enjoying a major bonanza, frightening tens of thousands of little old ladies in Middle America to cough up $10, $20, and even $50 contributions to the Religious Right’s ongoing campaign to Save Marriage From Godless Queers.

In case you forgot, the Justin Raimondo who wrote that long explanation for Taki is himself openly gay. It’s worth your time to read it. What matters most to us is the reality both sides of this big argument very much want a bigger government with more power.

But the libertarians like Raimondo are generally wrong about government in the first place. It won’t matter what caveats they offer, there is a fundamental assumption if we could just teach people the truth, it would all turn around. All we have to do is explain what is in everyone’s true self interest. That is the underlying assumption of all their work. Wake up, libertarians — ignorance is not the core issue. Mankind is fallen. Ignorance is just a symptom.

I’ll bet Elana Kagan can easily quote Jefferson, too, but it hasn’t changed her view of what’s good and right in the world. Remember Jefferson’s chief opponent, Hamilton? We can be certain Hamilton had heard or read all of Jefferson’s arguments, and Hamilton promoted what we actually now have: a powerful central government which pokes its nose into every detail of life.

Raimondo notes at the beginning it was a matter of government forced by common practice to recognize the ancient and fundamental importance of marriage. Government’s response was to slowly grab the whole thing and control every aspect of it. Family Court? There can be no justice in that institution; it stands condemned before God Almighty. Family issues may well affect what government does, but by God’s revelation government has no business getting involved. Family business is family business, and using the state as a big club to win your side of the argument is sin. If there is one damned lie of Satan at work in America today, it is the notion what is personal is best handled in civil politics.

The answer is not simply getting government out of things. That condition is not possible in a fallen world. It is the matter of restoring the governing of things to God’s original plan for fallen mankind. That I keep harping on that simply indicates what a massive chore it is restoring the knowledge of that plan, because our entire Western Civilization is fundamentally opposed to it.

God’s Word demands we first acknowledge His design for human social structure, which happens to be tribal. Tribes can be based on any identity you choose. So for example, it matters not a whit there is no such thing historically as a Palestinian nation in the Middle East. If those folks want to congregate into a nation, all it takes is a valid covenant before God, and we aren’t in a position to judge that very much. So if they want to be the Nation of Palestinians, everyone else is required by God to at least give it serious consideration. Any mixture of any people who want to be a nation, who can present a united front with all the proper marks of tribal unity, is a nation in God’s eyes. Do you think “Jewish” is an ethnic identity? We can argue all day long over the meaning of the label, but according to God’s Word it meant someone who committed themselves wholly to the Covenant of Moses, which was the basis for their identity. Not a matter of DNA, but of clinging to God’s Law for that nation.

All our nifty scholarship arising from the Enlightenment creates an artificial divide between God and man; it revels in the Fall. It embraces as good and right the enthronement of human intellect, which is precisely why we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

So every political structure and system you can imagine has been tried already, and failed, so the search for Utopia through finely detailed variations means nothing. However bad we may think tribal social structures made life on this earth, it was the best we could possibly have after the Fall. It is the underlying assumption of all God’s Laws, His entire Bible revelation. Even the first churches were expected to be tribal, and it was a major challenge for the Corinthians, for example, to accept it.

Here is what’s crazy: It doesn’t have to be taught. It’s our instinctive behavior. We have to be untaught the lies. Every time I’ve been in a situation when the commonly assumed social rules did not apply, when events and circumstances rip off the false edifice of what we consider “civilization” most people know they need a leader, and they typically turn to people who seem unruffled by the chaos. That is invariably someone who has some experience with riding out chaos, and most of the time it’s someone who is older than the bulk of the group. They always come to the elder, at least elder in terms of maturity, the one person who is least at a loss to respond. They become in essence a family by association and interaction. It’s not education; it’s survival and we know it instinctively, and the only kicker is folks who have been conditioned to become savage. That is more a result of “civilization” than instinct, because nothing is more savage than the urban born.

But we have been so heavily schooled in everything else, we resist until the last moment. Guess what? God has had His fill of our ways, and He is in the process of crushing Western Civilization because it rejects Him, at least in the sense as He has revealed Himself. We’ll all be thrown back into chaos and social disorder so that we are forced once again to do it His way, even if only in half measure. Of course, since there is yet so much material property and resources of value lying around, we can be sure other organizing forces will quickly move in to harvest what is left.

God only knows what that will be, but it won’t be pretty. We have created for ourselves an impossible situation, so it is impossible for the situation to continue. Going back to recent history won’t solve anything. The persistent arrogant notion we are somehow wiser than the ancients is what will destroy us.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, government, history, propaganda, survival | 2 Comments

Epperly Heights Grade School Nightmares (Updated)

Posted on August 5, 2010 by ehurst

Update: The principal himself took charge of this issue, and promises to keep an eye on it. He explained some parent of a student gave our number as a point of contact. We don’t know these people. Way to man up, Sir. I hope you succeed.

Original post continues below.

————

Midwest City, Oklahoma — The Mid-Del School district isn’t too bad as public school systems go. That means they sometimes are good enough to be considered SNAFU.

Perhaps you recognize the unofficial military jargon. SNAFU = Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. Granted, troops generally used a different world for the “F” part, but you get the picture. If things got worse, it was TARFU (Things Are Really Fouled Up). Then just before you died, you might say things were FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition).

Epperly Heights Grade School is at the upper limits of SNAFU, and approaching TARFU, at least from my perspective.

Perhaps you’ll forgive me for sounding petty: They are merciless about calling us. That is, they drop our phone number into their callout list, and we get these dreary cheery messages about things which have no bearing on any part of our lives. Almost daily. Our now-adult children never went there. I never visited the building. I believe I’ve ridden past it once or twice on my bicycle; that’s about as close as it gets.

But then, they call us about some family we have never met. If we can get stop them from hanging up, we can get them to realize there is a mistake and remove our number. For a week or two. Maybe a month tops. Then it starts all over again. We thought we had it solved last year, and during the summer we had silence from that quarter.

Today it began again.

We could probably think up all sorts of explanations for this, but it won’t matter. Someone keeps putting our number into a computer database. All it takes is a few seconds to tag that number as invalid. Even as far back as DOS days I knew how to do that. But no, they aren’t that competent.

I suppose it’s a good thing I’m a pacifist and patient man. But I felt at least one time I should blog about this because the next step is to go over their heads and file a formal complaint with the district.

This is a symbol of why I hate public education, and all bureaucracies as a whole. It’s part of why I surrendered my teaching certificate from this state, and refuse to ever work in public education again. But I suppose they can’t resist reminding me. They are SNAFU at their best.

More Update: I’ve been asked why it matters. Somebody consistently giving out my phone number, as it appears the same family keeps doing to several different agencies and businesses, could get us in deep trouble.

Try to imagine when a suit-happy collection agency, or heartless enforcement agency, has decided you gave some fraudster permission to use your number, so you can warn them when the heat is on, while offering deniable cover. It’s not implausible. I’ve been all too close to such things, and I don’t intend to see it happen again.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged government, resistance | Comments Off

Let’s Imagine War

Posted on August 5, 2010 by ehurst

Just for your entertainment, I offer these feeble predictions. I’m half serious, of course, but I have no inside knowledge. This is what I believe is likely only at the moment I post it, and is subject to revision on the basis of more facts, or just whatever strikes my fancy. It’s a game.

I keep running into folks who seriously believe war with Iran starts on or about the 10th of this month. That’s next Tuesday. What would be a likely scenario?

Seems to me Israel will start things off. She wont invade Iran, just try to bomb some targets. The invasion part will be for Lebanon, and possibly some battles with Syria. The latter is more likely for the sake of interdicting support for Lebanon.

Who’s to say whether the bombing of Iran will work? Could get shot down, since the business of those Russian S-300 missiles is not exactly settled. Israelis almost certainly will use a nuke somewhere because they are that crazy. The world won’t be very forgiving, and this could well be the end for Israel. You can bet the US is not afraid to use them, either, but I would expect more of the highly advanced energy weapons no one talks about. Yet, I’m pretty sure the attitude of the US-Israeli military planners is this need not be total warfare, just a good heavy strike on the nuclear facilities.

So they say, at least. Actually, since they all know in reality Iran’s program is no threat at all, it’s just the lie they tell to cover up the insistence on trying to force other states to have governments and policies they like. Such arrogance is good at blinding folks to real results. Let’s understand: This is about forcing Iran to become yet another resource for corporate profits. Iran knows, and correctly says, this is about a forced “regime change.”

Iran will surely shut down the Straights of Hormuz. It wouldn’t be that hard, and very difficult to reopen. All it has to do is become unsafe for most commercial shipping to stop. Think about all the petroleum suddenly not shipping out. If nothing else, that would very much be our best excuse to get involved, since our government has been planning in very concrete terms to bomb Iran since at least as early as 1995.

Now, we have to wonder if Turkey will sit idle, since it would be a good time to grab a few Kurds in Iraq. Given China and Russia have billions invested in Iran, we can’t afford to ignore the very high probability of at least indirect support. Say, early warning of Israeli and American jets, as a starter. More active support would surely draw us in, since Israel can’t face either of them, much less both. I suppose Georgia might try to pull a stunt to distract Russia, but it won’t be enough.

And then there is India, allied with Israel, and itching to settle that issue with the Kashmir border and Pakistan. And China has an argument with India, too, over their shared border region.

What I’m getting at is this: It could quickly become WW3, the event we’ve all been waiting for. And the US will probably re-institute the draft, and there will be riots over that, not to mention transportation grinding to halt on gasoline prices trebling. So we can throw in food riots in almost every big city, since none of them grow their own. Oh, and I predict we will get our butts handed us on the field of battle this time. We won’t be able to field enough troops and resources quickly enough, completely underestimating the enemy.

We’ll have to change our military salute, unless the commanders simply refuse to admit we were actually defeated. The business of facing the palm to the ground is a subtle brag we’ve never lost. Facing the palm outward recognizes we’ve been beaten at least once.

But, of course, this is all for fun, right?

Posted in social sciences | Tagged economics, government, propaganda, war | Comments Off

The Revolution Has Already Failed

Posted on August 4, 2010 by ehurst

(Pulling together a lot of threads, most of you, dear readers, will follow along fine without a jillion links.)

There won’t be a revolution. The moment for that was long, long ago. About the only way you could get a decent riot now would be for something truly life-threatening, but then you’d have to convince everyone it was really a dangerous situation. That won’t be easy.

So we had this big pile of Afghanistan reports leaked out. Yes, there is some significance to them. Taken together as a whole, they are proof positive the warfare there is a failure. It also shows the utterly disgusting ethics which steer this warfare, the vast sea of cruel inhumanity upon which floats the US military.

It is not news.

Remember the My Lai Massacre? I was about 12, living in Anchorage, Alaska, and it was all over the schools. Being on the Left Coast, you can bet the peacenik movement was quite strong there, even if it was the far north end of that coast. We even had a strong Green movement before it was called that. But it was just about as powerless as the little flowers they picked from the meadows to wear in their hair. I suppose the most powerful element of leftism there was the Anti-War movement. That awful event greatly strengthened it among the secondary school age population, and draft resistance might have been significant, had we the population to see much drafting.

I wasn’t conscious of current events before that, but it was the beginning of such for me. Since then, I actually served in the military twice. I’ve also taught history among other things, and I can assure you, even though I spent most of my adult years on the Right, I realized how dirty it was. As far as I have been able to determine, there has never been a clean, just war in the whole of Western Civilization, at the very least. There was a time when atrocities stirred the masses, but not here, and not now.

The mainstream press has reported on some of the worst during our national history. Even if the dirtiest secrets had to wait until alternative news got rolling, what we got was bad enough. My Lai didn’t stop the war; we simply got run out of the country. You can analyze it to death, but that’s how it ended. You want to stop the war in Afghanistan? That’s what it will take. Same with all the other places we have troops fighting. However much difference was made by public sentiment over Viet Nam, we won’t be seeing that again.

Indeed, the most egregious, unconscionable violations of all government activity are uncovered every day, but we aren’t in the streets screaming for blood. Little victories here and there, like that tiny town in California which tossed out their overpaid city staff, will not make any significant difference. The Tea Party was compromised before it got rolling. Folks notice, alright, but then they go back to watching the clot of drunken exhibitionists selling t-shirts in New Jersey so they can become famous on MTV. Indeed, they travel hundreds of miles and stand in line all day so they can sign a waiver and walk in that little t-shirt shop. We didn’t have that when I was a teenager.

We also didn’t have the Internet, but that hasn’t helped much. A slender handful of folks do notice all those revelations of malfeasance and war crimes, and we talk about it a great deal. But if we think there is any hope of whipping up a popular movement for change, we are lying to ourselves. All we are doing is making sure TPTB know who to round up and put in the FEMA camps KBR is building. Yeah, you and me.

If we organize, they’ll simply murder us, because we aren’t stupid enough to be suckered like those much-publicized “terrorist plots” of mayhem, all of which uniformly arose from the informant getting it going. No, they realize the real deal would never threaten the public, just the government thugs. Most of us know better than to organize in the first place, at least not such that we form an easy target for rulers’ fears.

And some, like me, simply have no plans to hurt anybody, not even the thugs. Indeed, a solid commitment to avoid hurting anyone. But that won’t blunt their fear, since they aren’t rational in the first place. They’ll come for us, too.

Posted in social sciences | Tagged culture, government, history, resistance | Comments Off

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