In a previous post, Water-boarding and U.S. Government, I encapsulated the fundamental premise of U.S. government in order to show its relation to the allowance and support of or lawful entitlement against and protection from torture. Here, I will show how this premise relates to governmental welfare.
In the conception of the government and law by which this nation was established, natural human right and liberty is antecedent. Government or law does not give us rights or liberties, but is instead created and bounded by our natural, pre-societal rights and liberties. Basic human needs cannot, therefore, be Constitutional entitlements, for the Constitution does not entitle us to anything. Rather, it acknowledges what we were already entitled by nature before government or law so that government and law do not trespass. Prior to law and government, we each had a right to our life. We were not entitled to someone else’s. Prior to law and government, we each had a right to property. Our property was not entitled to someone else. Prior to law and government, we each were entitled to the pursuit of our fortune of being or welfare. We were not entitled to pursue someone else’s. This is why the notion that legislation of welfare is either a right or even a lawful choice is directly antithetical to our government.
To suggest or even demand that someone either has a right to legislated welfare or that government can or should engage in welfare steals from the very people their natural and inalienable condition set in place by nature and the Creator, gives it to government, and enables government to arbitrarily decide thereafter both what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for humanity. Humans not longer allow government to exist, but government allows (or disallows when and where it decides) humans to exist. Humans no longer allow government to protect and help them maintain their well-being, but government decides for us what our well-being means and what it wants to do or not do about it. Should humans dislike what government decides, not only do they no longer have a right to do something to rebel against that decision, but they no longer have a right to well-being at all, for that has become the government’s. In the end, therefore, the pursuit of a right to legislative or governmental welfare is the loss of welfare itself.
Our system of government is not at all perfect. And if this system alone were the end of the matter, we might have good reason to think something essential was missing. But it is my belief that the faults in the best structure the Modern Age provided can be corrected by something the Pre-Modern Age gave us…
[to be continued]
The United States is a federal government founded on a single basic principle: that there are natural laws and natural rights inherent and inalienable to all humanity. Those who would be citizens of this country (and most certainly those who would hold any office in it) must consent to this principle. And it goes without need of qualification that one of these natural rights is the right to be free from torture. Government, therefore, exists to uphold and protect such a natural right from perversion.
Those who would support the use of waterboarding against humanity know that such an agenda cannot find favor in this institution or by those who establish it so long as water-boarding is known as torture. And so instead of attempting to change the rule of law, supporters have attended to an absurd and impious scheme to change the name by which it is justly called.
Such tactic is not foreign to history or our experience of government. But we are too literate to be taken in by such moral relativism. We acknowledge not only natural right but the knowledge of that right. And so we know when natural right has been trespassed. Waterboarding is torture and by no re-definition of the name can it be accepted or supported by this government.
So do I, slaveofone, declare fraudulent and unlawful any purpose of government to support or accept waterboarding. May those who do be cut off from this land of respect for the nature and dignity of humanity.
So the Republicans in the House walked out in demonstration against Democrats willing to let the surveillance bill that protects communication companies from being sued for violation of our Constitutional rights to expire. Good. Go blow that hot fascist air out your asses, Republicans. And as for all this bullshit about putting America at risk… Who cares about terrorists destroying national security when our own rulers will freely do that for them?
My final post of 2007, Coming Soon, the Greatest Depression, was a doom and gloom prophecy about the economic state of our Union. The data which reveals the presence of a recession takes time to coalesce. When we can point at it, it has been around for awhile already. There is, however, something dubbed the Anxious Index… It was begun in 1968 to gather economic forecasts from the greatest economic minds of our time. They were asked to rate the probability of a recession in the next quarter. Only six times since 1968 has the Index predicted a recession. Only six recessions have occurred in that span of time. Every one of them occurred shortly after the prediction. This is the current Anxious Index chart. As you can see, there is a rather nasty spike occurring in January 2008 not unlike the six other spikes that predicted the six other recessions. It is quite thrilling to think that someone like me, a person who never studied economics, has no title, degree, or office, and who works a meager job in a meager land among meager people can call it as well as the smartest of the pack.
But, seriously, who does not see the signs presently? When in history have the biggest mortgage lenders in the world sold their mortgages to the second richest man in the world in order to stay afloat as is now happening? If that does not cry of desperation, then what about an economic stimulus
plan that was rushed through the biggest red tape machine in the world in a matter of weeks? And if not that, then what of two of the largest Federal Rate cuts in a row in the last quarter of a century? And if not that, then what of the U.S. economy coming to a virtual standstill in terms of growth with many large companies like GM getting ready to cut thousands of jobs? And then there is this hilarious bit of news about mortgages being frozen for a month… What is the point of that? It does nothing to deal with the problem which created the mortgage fallout. It only does two things: shortens the amount of pain immediately while prolonging the length of that pain in the long term and it gives stupid people with power who did stupid things with their power more time to try to find a way to save their asses.
I am no Republican. I have never voted Republican. But Ron Paul has my support. If you Republicans can get him on the next ballot, he will get my vote.
The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermaths of violence are emptiness and bitterness. This is the thing I’m concerned about. Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace, but let’s be sure that our hands are clean in this struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters….We must come to the point of seeing that our ultimate aim is to live with all men as brothers and sisters under God…
Martin Luther King Jr, Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 1957
You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they’d experienced the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.
And we are here, we are here this evening because we are tired now. And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people! We believe in the Christian religion! We believe in the teachings of Jesus! The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest!
Love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith, but there is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.
The Almighty God himself is not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, I love you, Israel.
He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and says, Be still and know that I’m God, that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships.
Martin Luther King Jr., address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association, December 5, 1955
Well, I thought I’d end 2007 with a doom and gloom prophecy for the U.S. economy. If you aren’t aware of what’s being going on, you’ve been living in a hole in Pakistan. The biggest housing bubble in U.S. history has popped. The banking system is going down in flames. The Fed is trying desperately to bail banks out by injecting billions into the system and lowering interest rates. This is devaluating the U.S. dollar at an incredible rate and sending inflation soaring. And since all this destruction of the dollar hasn’t helped a bit, the Fed has now promised to unload $40 billion more and will probably lower interest rates further. California had a large hand in boosting the economy as the center of the housing bubble buildup. But now California is the center of the mortgage and housing meltdown and is facing a projected $14 billion dollar budget shortfall next year because of it. The Governator recently said he will declare a fiscal emergency
in January. California, the biggest economic player in the U.S. economy, will bring down the rest of the nation’s economy just as it propped it up previously. The transportation industry is facing a crisis. Oil prices have shot to astronomical levels. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than we ever have before in the history of our nation to police and wage war against other countries. Foreign nations who might have otherwise helped support our economy from outside are being scared away as the dollar decreases in value and interest rates fall.
If this continues, I predict a stock market crash and an economic recession sometime between 2008 and 2011 that will make the dot-com fallout seem like a sniffle and the Great Depression like a bit of a cough. Peter Spence, a leading economist in Britain agrees with me: The Government must suspend a set of key banking regulations at the heart of the current financial crisis or risk seeing the economy spiral towards a future that could make 1929 look like a walk in the park.
The economist Ludwig von Mises has this to say: There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought on by credit expansion. The question is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
My advice: Invest whatever money you’d like to keep in foreign currencies and stocks ASAP. Not only will it be there when the economy rights itself, but it will yield returns you couldn’t dream of. And don’t even think about purchasing a home in the next three years.
Unless it was not evident by now, George W and most of his Republican cohorts are all Fascists. Another one of the many things this tyranical administration has done and is doing that you can add to the list of abominations is telling the Burea of Prisons to deny prisoners access to religious material (unless, of course, the government arbitrarily and unconstitutionally deems those religious materials okay
for prisoners to read). Just wait till you see what books the government says are okay
and then guess how much time we have until the Fascists tell you and me what we can and cannot read. Read the report by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times here.
About 2 1/2 years ago my CRT monitor died (went up in a puff of smoke), and so I decided it was time to finally upgrade to a nice 19 inch LCD. Unfortunately, my video editing machine would no longer boot into windows 2000 (except safe mode), because the last g550 matrox driver release, for windows 2000, doesn’t support LCD monitors. Thus, my only option to get support was to upgrade to windows XP which I didn’t have the money to do.
So I figured I would research to see if GNU/Linux could be a viable video editing platform. But everything I read at the time said no. So I just let the machine sit there for the last two years. About a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to take the plunge and installed Ubuntu on it, so I could at least backup the data that was there and then start clean. Luckily in this time frame GNU/Linux has gain the ability to mount NTFS drives, so I didn’t have to reformat my drives and thus was able to use GNU/Linux to backup the data that was there.
While I was backing up my data I discovered a folder on one of the NTFS drives I had never seen before called “RECYLER”. So I started poking around in the newly discovered folder to see what was in there. And low and behold I found a gold mine. I found the master print of my Camp Attitude video (ogg) I did 5 years ago, which I thought I had forever lost due to me accidentally deleting the wrong file, and not noticing until a year later. I can’t tell you how jubilated I am, this is the find of the century, as I thought I would never be able to make a DVD of this video, so I can show the video to friends and family on a TV instead of a poorly encoded postage stamp QuickTime video on my computer. Which, up to this point was my last remaining copy. So in celebration I’ve made a copy of the master in ogg theora, so you can view the Camp Attitude video (in ogg), here on the website.
