Dealing in Lead

The Rabbit Hole Isn't What It Used To Be

2009-11-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

What a time to be looking for work. They won't call it a depression (or even a recession) because the Masters of the Universe (the thieves on Wall St, not the homoerotic toy line) are making money. I guess we need a new word to reflect the situation where the Kings of Capital are making money and everyone else is eating dirt and wandering around in a daze.

How about we call it The Great Oppression?

Look, it's obvious things are screwed up, bread and circuses on the TV notwithstanding. Bill O'Reilly thinks everything is fine, so I guess I should shut up and get a job, right?

Except I've been looking for work pretty much since I graduated (I did get a road trip vacation as a graduation gift from my parents, so I guess that makes me a dirty hippie), and there just isn't a whole lot of anything these days. Entry level jobs for college graduates simply don't exist anymore (unless you're a R.N. or an engineer). If you don't have your first year of experience, don't expect to ever get it in this climate. There are too many overqualified people flooding the market, no one wants to hire an unknown quantity.

It's funny to me, in a way. A lot of Baby Boomers like to complain that the young generation has a sense of entitlement, that they're a spoiled bunch of idiots. And yet these same people, when faced with hiring someone, expect that someone else somewhere else will hire the new people. They want good employees, but they want someone else to have taken the risk of hiring them on and vetting them (thus, minimum one year of experience).

Most of the ones who engage in this behavior are totally oblivious to their own hypocrisy. But then, isn't that always the way?

The legacy of the 80's was the idea of "greed is good." We all gave each other permission to be selfish and screw each other over. Civilization can't survive without cooperation, and we relegated cooperation to the kid table. Now, like all cancers, this meme has spread and mutated into its latest strain, "Not my problem."

You need a job but you don't have experience? Not my problem.

You need help paying for overpriced health care so you can get back to being productive? Not my problem.

You got screwed by a banker who walked away with the keys to the treasury? Not my problem.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Of course, the central problem with this is that it is wrong. We live together, in increasingly crowded and interdependent systems. When one of us falls, all of us suffer, even if it is a third, fourth, even fifth order effect. Being six degrees from Kevin Bacon means you're seven degrees from everyone in the world. Six and a half billion neighbors, and some of them didn't eat today.

Spider Robinson has a saying, "Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is magnified." This, at its core, is what civilization is all about. The writers on the TV show Lost said something similar, "Stand together, die alone."

As many problems as we have, the alternative is worse. I want a job where I can help us hold together as much of this civilization as we can, for as long as we can. I guess those jobs don't exist anymore.

Refining ideas

2009-11-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

I look at history and see that many civilizations have declined and collapsed before. I see how complex systems based on certain assumptions fall apart when those assumptions are no longer true. I look at how dependent we are on certain types of energy and cheap, easy wealth and look at our mechanisms for coping with interruptions to those things and it leaves me with a sense of cynicism. This is heavily reflected all throughout this blog, and is pretty much the purpose for it's existence.

All of my frustration with the problems people needlessly create for themselves finds itself reflected in my writing here.

When I say things like "stockpile food, gas, and ammo" it's not because I think the world is going to truly collapse into Mad Max style anarchy overnight. It's because having something stored away makes it a lot easier and more comfortable during the inevitable hard times. All it takes is a nasty tornado or a bad hurricane or a relatively minor earthquake and you can end up without food and water for days, and depending on where you are and what time of year it is having something put away can literally save your life.

On top of that, with everything stretched to the breaking point right now due to the recession, all it would take is one nasty large scale disaster and you could end up like those people in New Orleans, unable to get food or water for more than a week and still underwater a month later.

When a nation gets to the point in its life cycle that it starts doing things like ignoring rule of law and brazenly defying its constitution (and, I'm sorry to say, Obama is still wiretapping without warrants) you can take it as a sign that things are not going to truly get better (though what gets reported in an increasingly entertainment-based media might not reflect this).

The fact that the people who have all the power in this country think that things are better now because the market has gone up, even though unemployment continues to get worse (and please don't give me economic voodoo about leading and trailing indicators, I understand how it works and if you think that is a reasonable response to what I am saying you're missing the point), shows you everything you need to see about why I feel pessimistic about the future here.

People so easily forget this nation's recent history. We need to be using what resources we have left to create a buffer between us and calamity, but instead we're eating our seed corn.

Past his naptime

2009-04-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

So I recently got a rather hilarious comment that I felt compelled to share with my handful of readers, as it is a great example of why policy revolutions are so dangerous.

Lets just take it from the top:

Millicent...Walking Shark!!! Fucking morons...both!!! Pull your heads out of each others assholes, shut the fuck up for just a few minutes, put your bongs down and pay attention for those few minutes. You might be amazed at what you might learn, the clarity, the light, when ones head is extracted from his lovers ass!!!

Ah, so I'm foolish, ignorant, blinded, and drug addled. This attack, especially the references to pot smoking, is fresh, original, and brings a sense of enlightened discourse to the argument. This person is obviously someone we should all stop and pay attention to, as he is about to bring some serious, wise, and reasoned discourse to our previously childish and simplistic rantings.

Fucking communists.

Wait... when have I ever advocated for (as wikipedia puts it) "a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general?"

Hmm. Maybe our friendly commentor meant to type a different word, and he was just thinking about communism, so it slipped out. Or maybe he doesn't know what the word means. Nah, there's no way someone this eloquent would use a word that he doesn't understand.

Serve our great republic and move to France or Venezuela, Spain or Denmark where bong toting pinheads are welcomed and admired! Oh yeah, not all socialists countries are open to fags, so you and Sean Penn might want to avoid Venezuela. But please get the fuck out fast nonethess!!!

Again, some strong semantic confusion here. Am I supposed to be a communist or a socialist? Additionally, I never knew I owned a bong, so if I've been toting one it must be invisible. This is actually pretty amazing, if I can discover the secret to this invisible bong technology I could manufacture and sell them and become rich.

Oh shit, I think I just broke my communosocialismonik vows. Now they're going to revoke my gay sex card for sure.

That reminds me, this colorful character seems to imply a sexual relationship between Millicent and myself (rightfully so), but then he implies we're both gay. Its important to note the amount of cognitive dissonance one of these cretins can sustain even over the course of a few sentences.

Ultimately, though, why would I want to leave the United States? My communosocialismonik brother Barack Obama has seized control of the executive branch through that ultimate anti-democratic, anti-constitutional, anti-moral trick of winning more electoral votes than the other guy.

Why would I leave when my guy is running the show?

Sorry friend, you and your ilk are well deserved losers. You had a chance to run the country and you did... right into the ground (or maybe off a cliff). It is people like you who make a moral revolution impossible at this point in history, you are simply incapable of true argument in the manner needed to operate a citizen government as envisioned by the founders of this country. If you ever hope to be worthy of the mantle you so greedily covet, you need to do a lot more reading and watch a lot less cable news. Stop listening to AM radio and learn to think for yourself. If your brain is even structured in such a way that you can, which I doubt.

Sincerely,

Patriots United

Really? You're calling yourselves P.U.?

You people are so far over the top, its no wonder you ended up on bottom.

Note

2009-04-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I was getting comments, but they were being sent to an old and now defunct email address. I've updated it and should see when people comment from now on.

I appreciate the comments, its always nice to know that I'm not just shouting into the void here.

I'm currently trying to sort out my thoughts on the recent spate of right wing "we're out of power so lets have a revolution" writings. I can see how some people would draw a direct paralell between those and my writings here, but what I hope to address directly is the fact that they ask the same questions that I do, but come up with totally different answers using totally different lines of reasoning.

My central value has always been the preservation of civilization (and yes, I am motivated in this by selfish as well as altrusitic reasons: I like toilet paper, indoor plumbing, and video games). My conclusions when pondering the use of force as a political tool is that it is incredibly dangerous and has in almost all cases backfired. The trick, as always, is trying to sort out why it worked in the American and French revolutions, and failed in so many others.

I suspect it has a lot to do with the enlightenment.

I know this is, in retrospect, a rather content free post, so here's an archive link to an old article I wrote for the student paper at my University, Give the French a Break.

Amazon is down with the sickness

2009-04-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

So apparently Amazon.com has decided that GLBT books are "adult" and has removed them from their rankings. Except, not all books having to deal with homosexuality. You can still see books about how horrible homosexuality is and books about what the bible says about the gays (spoiler alert: teh gay is teh bad acording to the sycophants of Jesus), but Heather Has Two Mommies is verbotten.

This is an easy one folks: Discrimination based on self selected traits (like, say, being a Nazi or a Catholic or a Bucks fan (sing along: one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other)) is generally ok, and even a good idea. If someone tells you they believe something, its usually best to believe them and make judgements based on their statements.

Discrimination based on born traits, like homosexuality or skin color or even, to an extent, nationality (in so much as nationality is a choice for the individual in question) is not ok.

Was that hard?

Here's an example sure to singe the eyebrows of most people:

If someone is a zionist radical, its ok to discriminate based on that information.
If someone is a Jew, its not ok to discriminate based on that information.

See the difference? One is an ideology, the other is just some category assigned by a third person (and often these categories we use, like skin color or whatever, have very loose boundaries).

To sum up: Fuck you Amazon.com, unless you recant your homophobia I'm done with you.

The Problem, A Solution

2009-03-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Too much power, not enough accountability, and too much fixation (from all quarters) on the superficial appearance of things over the actual substance of them.

Ultimately this is why democracy in its current form has failed. We should really be working hard to come up with a new form of democracy, with checks and balances that allow, as a small example, sufficiently large groups of concerned citizens to do something like appoint a special prosecutor to investigate corruption in the government.

Of course, something like that would be easily abusable.

I don't know. I guess the one thing that we could do right now with off the shelf technology would be to assign to each congressperson, supreme court justice, and high executive branch member (president, vp, cabinet secretaries, maybe undersecretaries) a team of people who would do nothing but record on video and audio with multiple redundancy everything those people do, including recording every bit of binary data they generate and getting photocopies of anything they generate in hardcopy. It would become part of truly serving the public, for the years you are in office you give up your right to privacy, much like the way that soldiers give up rights when they sign up for military service.

I think it would be well worth the expense if it would help prevent corruption. If these people want trust they can buy a fucking dog, we need to watch them carefully while they wield the kind of power we've given them.

Modification, Restoration, or Construction?

2008-05-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

The rule of law is a myth in modern America. The Constitution has been abandoned, and in so doing the Government has gone from a lawful organ of the people to a group of thugs with guns pointed at our heads, making demands and cooercing our obedience.

Not an unusual state of affairs in human history.

So the question is, what form of government shall we establish to rule ourselves once the current regime collapses under the inevitable forces that tear such organizations apart?

Shall we modify our current constitution, perhaps adding more checks and balances, a new branch of government to oversee the others and ensure compliance? Or some other form of ammendment?

Shall we simply scrape out the current scum that inhabit the seats of power and maintain the current Constitution and body of law, and move on from there?

Or shall we build something new, another evolutionary leap drawing its memetic legacy from the Constitution, the Magna Carta, and the other documents and traditions that western liberal democracy have grown out of?

Those are the questions. We must use our logic and reason to discover the answers, or we face a descent into chaos and anarchy from which civilization will not soon recover.

Humans have the potential for greatness, the ability to turn our dreams into reality and live together with security and propserity for all. But there is no fate, no destiny, except that which we make for ourselves.

The time for choosing is upon us.

You have to lie to play

2007-10-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for a job lately, and so naturally I am once again coming into contact with one of the fundamental flaws of our society: the need to lie to get ahead.

This is a game I refuse to play.

I will not be an enabler for the system of deciet that is known as "job interviewing." This is where you put on your monkey suit and see if you can guess which tricks the interviewer wants you to do. If you guess right, you get the job. The entire charade is symbolic for everything that is wrong with this culture. Style over substance.

The person who will best benefit the organization can be passed over simply because they wore the wrong tie, or becuase their shoes weren't "businessy" enough. Pathetic.

And now, with the advent of google and my refusal to hide my online writings behind a veil of anonymity, I'm faced with a further conundrum: how many jobs will this blog cost me?

Shockingly for many people, I don't care. I will not hide who I am. I get along fine with people on a daily basis, I am considerate, and I attempt to do the right thing. I am not ashamed of these writings, and if someone who comes here and reads them does not understand the point I am trying to make, then the fault lies with them and not with me.

My name is Michael Leza, and this blog is but a facet of who I am. I will not hide it, I will not be shamed by it, and I will not back down.

What do we do now? (part 3)

2007-05-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

So here we are.

Our President has the power to declare martial law.
Our President has the power to declare anyone an enemy combatant and hold them indefintely without charges.
Our President has the power to send national guard troops from one state to another to enforce martial decrees.
Our President has the power to ignore laws he doesn't like.
Our President has the power to spy on anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Our President has the power to do anything he wants, and no one in the government is inclined to stop him.

He has the power, because we gave it to him.

But they who give can take away.

Arm yourselves now. Stockpile food, ammo, gasoline, and don't forget a can opener and a spare tire.

Then we wait. Our time will come. We have overshot our carrying capacity, and a correction is coming. Peak oil, global warming, pandemic disease, and the collapse of the dollar are all coming, and it seems they are all coming at the same time.

We're heading into the era that will be called, when the dark age is over, "The Big Crash."

Our job is to make sure that some shred of civilization survives. That our great grandchildren, when they've put out the fires and started over from the ashes, can pick up the pieces and learn from them.

We must make it clear to history that this was not divine punishment, this was our failure. We screwed up, and now we will live with the consequences.

The ignorance peddling religionists must not be allowed to frame this in their temples as a supernatural event, to use the crash as a way to drive up attendence numbers so that priests, rabbis, and imams can live comfortably without working. We must make it clear that the failure was in our inability to shed our childish superstitions and our beloved security blankets. We were offered a challenge, and instead of rising to it we fight each other like children in a sandbox.

What do we do now? We get ready to survive, to teach our children, so that they can rebuild. So that the world will be a better place when we leave than when we arrived.

Remember who threw the first punch

2007-05-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

So, the police, empowered under law that derives its authority from the constitution, feel entitled to do this.

As we've discussed before, when police step outside the bounds of the constitution, they are no longer law enforcement officers, no longer entitled to the respect or protections that that office holds.

These were not police. These were thugs doing as they pleased.

When the constitution is swept aside, when the rule of law is abandoned, there is only one rule left.

The rule of lead.

They long for it. They believe themselves invincible. They attack unarmed, unarmored people with weapons while wearing armor and think that makes them powerful. All they do is show their weakness.

The thugs have thrown the first punch, all across America. Just as in Iraq, where attacking innocent civilians is creating terrorists, freedom fighters are born with every swing of a billy club, with every rubber bullet they fire. Every lungful of tear gas is a nail in the coffin of this fledgeling fascist police state.

Evil always sows the seeds of its own undoing.

Even if they came for me now. Even if the five of you who read this never see another word of mine again, they can't stop us. They can only stop themselves.

And they won't.

We've already won the war, but there are battles still to fight.

sigh

2007-05-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

This country is drowning in stupid.

I'm starting to wonder if there is anything really worth saving left.

Why build something new when people are just going to shit all over it with their ignorance?

Followup: Allen Lee vs the Brownshirts

2007-04-30T17:24:00.000-07:00

So, here it is.

Go read it and come back.

Thats right. Thats all. You write that, you get suspended from school, get booted from the marine recruitment program, and watch as those charged with educating you instead do everything in their power to destroy you.

And whats the missing link? Lets look at another article from our friends at the NW Herald (who have been providing in-depth coverage of the whole thing):

"The writing assignment instructed students to write non-stop for a set period of time and to “write whatever comes to mind.” Students also were instructed not to judge or censor what they wrote."

Free writing. Except there's more to this than meets the eye.

Here is another piece of the puzzle.

"About six weeks ago, Emling said he gave a 10-minute speech in the same class describing what his life would be like as a “hit-man” and identified students he would shoot. He said he was not punished for that speech."

Emling refers to Jameson Emling, one of Lee's friends and fellow students. After having read what Lee wrote, and comparing it to a 10 minute speech about being a hit man and bumping off your fellow students...

Well, what could be the difference between Allen Lee and Jameson Emling?

Or why does Allen Lee = Cho Seung Hui in the minds of the school administration, but Jameson Emling is walking aruond unscathed?

Could it be because this is what Allen Lee looks like:

And this is what Cho Seung Hui looks like:

It couldn't be that obvious, could it? Could this story be about racism as much as it is about freedom of speech? How could an institution charged with educating the future voting citizens of this country fall into the obvious pitfall of such simple minded implicit racism?

I'd like to see a picture of Jameson Emling.

Interlude: Another papercut to free speech

2007-04-27T21:25:00.000-07:00

Let us turn our attention, for a moment, to this.

A teacher was "disturbed," and an 18 year old student goes to jail.

Charged with disorderly conduct for turning in homework. An assignment to express emotion disturbs someone, and you go to jail.

Curb your speech, for if you break the thinnest skin of someone around you, if you disturb someone, you can go to jail.

The schoolteacher and the administrators should be fired. They have no buisiness in education. This kind of action belies a sickness in our society, a failure of critical thinking, an inability to see beyond the superficial to the substance.

This is exactly why we can't afford to be meek anymore. This is exactly why we can't afford to use qualified statements, subtlety, implication. The time for being sensitive to the weakness of others is over. The time for anger is here. The time for confrontation is upon us.

We each, individually in our lives, must make our stand. Draw a line in the sand and look this kind of stupidity in the eye and call it to account.

We few can change the world.

We who deal in lead.

What do we do now? (part 2)

2007-04-25T09:49:00.001-07:00

Oh yeah, it is that bad.

You see, the problem we keep coming across, the thing that is ruining us, is that we've lost the ends in our quest for the means.

Individually, we can be smart, but as a nation, we're incapable of rational thought.

I actually used to be religious. I went to church and everything. I've since recovered.

One of the things that helped open my eyes was an interaction I had with many of my fellows on Sundays. You see, I read that little thing in Matthew where some guy is talking to Jesus, and he complains about how he can't represent this great new religious movement because he doesn't have anything nice to wear. Jesus just shakes his head and points at some nearby wildflowers and says, "Hey, look at those, some of the most humble of God's creations, and see how beautiful they are. How could anything you wear compare to that? Don't worry about it dude."

Foolish me, I took that one to heart.

If you want to have some fun, show up for church wearing denim shorts and a t-shirt.

When they recover from shock and saunter up to you, asking you if everything is ok and offering to help you out with money for clothes if that is the problem, and you point out that you think dressing up is kind of silly and childish, and they balk and tell you that dressing up is how you show "respect" for God (you know, the omnipotent and omnescient creator of the entire universe), and you point to their own holy scriptures and say, "Hey, I'm sorry to break it to you dude but God specifically disagrees with you," well, the look on their face is just about as much fun as you can have in a church.

When I did it, I got a lot of fun answers. My favorites were, "Oh, he was just talking to that one guy, that wasn't meant as a rule for everyone," and "well, societal norms change and now a days dressing up is whats considered respectful."

And thats when my bullshit alarm went into critical alert mode.

Now I look back and I see it as one of many symptoms for what has gone so horribly wrong in this country. Its everywhere around us, it permeates the very air we breathe, the things we read, the movies, the television. It shows its head as half-starved women with eating disorders on magazine covers. It drives people to favor neatly cut exotic grass lawns that require constant watering over native xeriscaped lawns that don't require any water at all. It makes people buy perfect looking GM produce that has no flavor at all, or eat big steaks so laden with hormones that they've grown a new set of secondary sex characteristics by the time the desert tray comes around.

It drives us to fight a war on terror instead of trying to stop terrorism.

What they told me, I'll never forget. "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you look good doing it."

Here's the now classic quote from an unnamed Bush administration offical that basically sums up this attitude:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

(from NYT Magazine)

And there it is, in black and white. The irony is thick enough that if you exposed it to oxygen it would rust in seconds.

The conservatives, those paragons of practicality, the dire enemies of "hippies" who ground themselves in "realism" have turned over all of their power to a bunch of people whose intellectual precursors were the "if it feels good do it" post-modern subjectivists they always tell us they hate. The hippies have had their revenge.

What do we do now? (part 1)

2007-04-23T12:57:00.000-07:00

What do we do now?

It’s happened. It’s done.

They didn’t do it in the night, in secret. They didn’t fire a shot. They boiled the frog in front of all of us and we never said a thing.

We laughed and joked and played on our way to the gas chambers, thanking them the whole time for defending our freedom over there so that we didn’t have to do it here.

From time to time a nation is tested. A crisis comes and reality intrudes, pushing through the carefully constructed façade of command and control we’ve build all around us. Sometimes, the bubble bursts, if only for a few seconds.

And there we stand, naked, staring out at reality as harsh sunlight spills in for the first time in years and we see, really see, how pathetic and small and fragile we all really are.

How we respond to death is at least as important as how we respond to life. It says something fundamental about a person’s maturity, their character, their strength of conviction and their love of goodness and liberty.

Individually, we each responded in our own ways, but collectively, as a nation, we failed this test. Instead of learning from the mistakes that lead to our wound, we blew a thicker bubble, ignoring the shameful weakness of our leader’s real reaction to the crisis in favor of his staged political theatre, a dramatically lit stage built from the rubble and bloody remains of our old dream world. A photo op in place of a plan. A speech in place of leadership.

In so doing, we found out who we really are. As individuals, we have different capacities, competencies, abilities. As a nation, we are weak minded children playing with toys we don’t understand. We ignore substance and focus on style, preferring comforting words about decisive action without the sacrifices that the action would entail. We pour buckets of the superficial onto our heads, covering us in a thick film of lies, so that we can ignore the truth that stands bare and apparent all around us.

The individuals who died on September 11^th did not deserve their fate, but we as a nation needed it. We still do. We need the shock therapy of reality to pierce our world of McMansions and Super-sized sodas, our world where we drink a product originally meant as a dessert with every meal and then pretend we don’t know why we’ve all gotten so fat. We need someone, something from outside ourselves to keep delivering shocks to our system until we can’t hide anymore. We need grandpa to get the belt and give us enough licks to sink that all important lesson into our minds: reality is not subjective, its objective, and it doesn’t give a damn what happens to us.

When it comes time to decide, whose blood will be on your hands?

2007-02-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

To put it bluntly, more people have died in Iraq since we invaded that country than live in the city I currently reside in (Denton, TX). The other day I imagined what it would be like if everyone in this city was shot, blown apart, strangled, beaten to death, or in some other way murdered. I tried to imagine the entire, thriving community completely empty, shut down, without a person in sight.

I tried to imagine how much blood was on my hands as a result of the actions of my government.

My mind can create phantoms of this, but I don't think I can or ever will truly appreciate the reality of what has been done to the peoples of both Iraq and the United States.

I have come to a decision though. When faced with the stark choice between having the blood of more innocents, this time Iranians, on my hands or having the blood of those instigating the war for their own political gain, I know what my choice will be.

I have so much in my life that I value. I enjoy my rather simple life. I go to school, I spend time with my girlfriend, I play video games, I read (books and, obviously, news), and I go on walks. I love this life and am hard pressed to risk losing everything trying to resist the most powerful empire to ever exist.

But what kind of life would it be if I knew, the whole time I was enjoying these things, that at that very moment someone was feeling that last jolt before oblivion, that proto-suprise moment before their brains give up and switch off for the last time, unable to cope with the extensive tissue damage of an explosive pressure wave or an invasive incursion into their various vital organs?

How can I hold my girlfriend when I have to worry about the blood on our hands rubbing off on each other?

If there is to be more blood painted onto my hands, let it be that of those who would kill the innocent and bully the weak.

Before the last election, I drew a line in the sand. I said that if the election was stolen, I would be prepared to act. I draw a new line today. If we begin a murder campaign against another country in the same way we did against Iraq, I will be prepared to act.

I leave you with two quotes to consider.

"The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses."
-Utah Phillips

"Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?"
-Patrick Henry

Daylight

2006-11-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

At least now we have hope, small though it may be.

2006-10-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

...

What is the most important thing?

2006-10-15T16:33:00.000-07:00

So, if you're wondering who I am, I'm Mike Leza.

If you're wondering why I'm writing to you, its because I'm worried.

In 2000 I voted for Bush. Like many Texans, I thought he wouldn't do too horrible a job, and would probably take advice from his Dad, who was far from the worst president we ever had. Plus, I liked what he said in his campaign.

I liked how he said we wouldn't use our troops for nation building.
I liked how he said he would make the government more efficiently use our tax dollars, and then turn those savings into tax cuts (that means lowering spending too).
I liked how he said he wanted to increase access to education, the sure path to bringing people out of poverty and into the middle class, where they can help shoulder the tax burden instead of draining it.
I liked how he said he would reach across the aisle and be a uniter, helping to heal the fractured partisan divide in this country.
I liked how he said he would bring dignity and morals back to the government.
I liked how he said he would help keep government out of our churches and bedrooms.
I liked how he said he believed in personal responsibility.

And so I, like a minority of my fellow voters, voted for George W. Bush, and due to a weirdness in our election process and some intervention from the Supreme Court, he became President. I was happy to see Clinton go at the time, and pleased that we wouldn't have four years of Gore.

With the benefit of six years of hindsight, I'm extremely embarrassed to admit I fell for all of this. I was duped, straight up, completely.

The first sign that something was wrong was when he appointed John Ashcroft as Attorney General. This extremely divisive appointment seemed to directly contradict his "uniter, not divider" campaign promise. While I didn't know a lot about Ashcroft at the time, I would eventually come to find out why he was such a poor choice, but at the time what I was sure of was that there was certainly equally qualified persons available for the job who would be much less divisive. This frustrated me, but I was still willing to let things slide a bit.

Then, he went on vacation. And stayed on vacation. For a really long time. I began to worry. What was my boy from Texas doing? He was supposed to go to Washington DC and show them what it meant to be a Texan. He was supposed to clean up the town, burn through the red tape and whip some life into the government, making it better for all of us. Instead, he was too busy taking vacation. At the time, I wasn't fully aware that he was actually from the north, Connecticut to be precise. At the time I didn't know he'd gone to both Harvard AND Yale, the classic elitist Ivy League schools that personify the exact opposite of everything you think of when you think "Texas." Again, my ignorance rose up and bit me right on the ass.

Well, then 9/11 happened, and like many Americans I was relieved that George Bush was President, even if he'd been screwing up before. I was alarmed when, days after 9/11, I heard on FOX News that the White House was saying there may be a connection to Iraq. The whole concept seemed absurd to me, as Osama Bin Laden and Al Quaeda were a highly religious fundamentalist group, whereas Saddam liked to oppress the religious authorities in Iraq because they were a threat to his power. The idea that someone as paranoid as Saddam would ever let someone with as much charisma and power as Osama set foot in Iraq was just off the wall crazy. Still, it was a warning sign I should have payed more attention to.

Bush then sent a force to clean up the Taliban and round up Al Quaeda, and I was really happy about that. We were finally going to go and deal with one of the nastiest regimes on the face of the Earth, those scumbags who blew up 2000 year old monuments and publicly executed women for showing too much ankle. I was happy to see a US presence there, as I thought we could do a lot of good in a country that ended up being one of the central fronts in the Cold War against the soviets. Finally, we could repay those people and help them improve their quality of life, and their example would shine out not just to the rest of the Middle East, but to the various ex-soviet states around the area, like Uzbekistan, who were slowly sliding from the tyranny of the Soviets into home grown varieties.

And then they didn't send the troops to capture Osama in Tora Bora. They sent Northern Alliance mercenaries instead. This confused me greatly. Why was Bush taking the chance of letting Osama, the guy who blew up my people on 9/11, get away? Why didn't we have American soldiers in there so thick you could walk on their shoulders from Kabul to Khartoum?

So Osama escaped into Pakistan. I was pissed. Not at our soldiers, who did everything they could, but at their leaders back home, who didn't give them enough resources to do the job right.

And then the real insult came. "Iraq was tied to Al Quaeda! Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction! Saddam has missiles that can hit Britain with only 45 minutes of warning! We have to bring Freedom to the Middle East, and we have to do it by invading Iraq and making an example there!"

So, I thought, "If our government supposedly has such incredible evidence available about this WMD program, why don't they simply send some CIA dudes over to hang out with the Weapons Inspectors and do some surprise inspections. Surely, even if the Iraqis have a few minutes, even hours of notice, things like nerve gas and radioactive materials leave a trace that our science boys can detect, right?" We had the inspectors running around in Iraq, but our government insisted that they could not give the evidence they had to anyone, especially not the people whose job it was to find the WMDs.

That just didn't add up for me. It all seemed like a big distraction from the important job we had to finish in Afghanistan. We had world support for the fight against the Taliban, governments that traditionally wouldn't even talk to us unless we payed them off with "aid packages" just to come to the table were suddenly giving us unprecedented access. The people who died on 9/11 had not died senselessly after all, their sacrifice had created an opportunity for America to build bridges to the entire world, to strengthen the ties to our allies and to make new friends all over the globe, all the while eliminating the ever present threat of Terrorists.

But Bush was throwing it away on evidence so thin that they couldn't confirm it, either with special operations forces deep in Iraq (and don't tell me our spec ops guys couldn't go wherever they wanted to inside that country, they're the pinnacle of Military Training and if they were tasked to deliver the Moon to the front doorstep of Mars I'm sure they'd find a way) or by giving enough information to the inspectors to go and get some evidence they CAN share.

As it turned out, there were no WMD programs in Iraq. No WMDs. No nuclear program. No trips to Niger to buy yellowcake uranium. No "weapons of mass destruction related program activities (as Bush said in his state of the union)." After three years in Iraq the best they could find was some inert artillery shells from the 70's tucked away in the back corner of a warehouse, forgotten by everyone and missed in the sweeps Saddam did to get rid of his WMDs.

It was then that I finally, fully realized how wrong I'd been. They had already started the Tax cuts, but they weren't cutting spending. They were preparing to launch a war of aggression against a country who hadn't attacked us. John Ashcroft was releasing his "hit" single, "Let the Eagle Soar," and had ordered the Justice Department to put a dress on a statue of Justice because she had a bare breast. The Justice Department's number one initiative was not catching terrorists, it was tracking down online pornographers (hardly a threat to national security).

Meanwhile, Bush wasn't vetoing anything. ANYTHING. They tried to tell us that if he vetoed a spending bill, that was it. The money to run the government simply wouldn't flow. As if, if he vetoed it, they couldn't just make a new one without all the pork and send it up.

No, it turns out the only thing Bush has ever vetoed was the Stem Cell bill.

And then they called a special session of congress for Terri Schaivo, but they couldn't do it to find a way to give Humvee armor and Kevlar for the people they'd sent to die.
And then they created the department of homeland security and passed the PATRIOT act, but didn't address the office politics in the FBI that let the 9/11 hijackers slip through the cracks (thats right, the FBI and CIA both knew who they were, but they didn't act on it because it got squelched by office politics).
And then they passed a law allowing torture and removing the protections against unlawful search and seizure, and unlawful detention.
And then they cut funding to college grant and student loan programs.
And then poverty increased every year.
And then they pulled us out of the Kyoto treaty.
And then they pulled us out of the Non-proliferation treaties that helped us win the cold war.
And then they funded research into newer, more deadly nuclear weapons.
And then they spent billions of dollars on a missile defense system that has never been successfully tested, even when they rigged the tests to guarantee success.
And then they decapitated FEMA.
And then they appointed such incompetents that when New Orleans was drowning, and the incompetent and corrupt Louisiana government was standing around wondering what to do, our Federal government just stood there right alongside them.
And then they protected a child rapist so they could save a house seat, all so they could hold onto power.

And so I realized the truth. It took a while for it to sink in, but i finally understood.

Bush wasn't the man he came off as in 2000 when he ran for President. The Republicans weren't the party of morals, personal responsibility, and good government. It was all a lie.

All a lie crafted carefully to accomplish one thing: to keep them in power.

And its hard. Its hard to know for sure, because you listen to one source and it says, "Oh, no thats just the liberals playing politics," and you listen to another source and it says, "These guys are crooks and liars and they're destroying everything we've worked so hard to build."

But the world is not subjective. Our senses might be tricked, but there is an underlying reality beneath it all, an ultimate truth. And the truth is not what you hear on the News. Its not what you see on TV or in the movies, or even in the Newspaper (although that is slightly more reliable).

Once you see the truth, you won't be able to look back. You won't be able to see the world the same way you did. Once you make that leap forward, there is no going back.

So what is the truth?

You can't be told the truth. Anyone who claims to be telling you all of the facts is a liar. As certain as I am that everything I've just written is true, I've been wrong before and I will be again. So I'm not going to tell you the truth. All I can do is tell you my story, the story of my own personal search for truth. All I can do is ask you to look, really look, at the man behind the curtain and see if he really is a wizard after all, or just an excellent manipulator.

All I want is to enjoy life, finish college, spend time with my girlfriend and eventually find a nice job working in my chosen profession. I suspect that if you've read this far, you have similar desires. But freedom isn't free. You have to work at it, at least a little bit every day. You have to find your way past the smoke, the mirrors, and the illusions and ask yourself the question, "Is this true? Is this right? Is this going to make the world a better place?"

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Now open them and start to look, really look, at the world around you.

You might be surprised what you find.

A final plea

2006-09-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

To anyone who might read this and has the power: Save us, before we are forced to save ourselves.

Use the power of the pen, use the rule of law, use logic, rhetoric, and truth and free us from the Authoritarian Fascists who are corrupting our government.

Use your power so that we might avoid having to use ours. Use your power to save us peacefully, before we find ourselves forced to save ourselves with the only power we have.

If we save ourselves, we will survive, but there is no telling what form our survival will take.

But I promise you, we will not stand by forever. We will not allow our country to become the abomination that so many other empires have become. We will not sleep forever.

Make sure that when we wake up and look around, things have been set to rights, or we will put our house in order by whatever means are neccessary.

This is my final plea. I will not ask again.

Let the market work properly

2006-09-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

I believe strongly in the ability of a fair marketplace to bring up the standard of living for all people. Unfortunately, the current market is tilted in favor of slave wages and race-to-the-bottom economics. I've read "The World if Flat" and "Freakonomics," and studied some Adam Smith and other economics, and applied uncommon sense to the whole mess, and it seems to me that buying goods produced under slave conditions is a sure way to death spiral into the same conditions here. How long can McJobs keep this country and its people afloat? I'm thinking we can't last much longer. We're a flu epidimic away from total collapse.

So I came up with an idea to help turn back this tide. Its simple, its cheap, and people of good conscience can get behind it.

I call it "Trade History." The concept is simple: any item importeted into the US for sale or consumption must have marked on its packaging a history of where it was manufactured (marked as city/state or province/country) and the wage payed per hour to the workers who worked on it at that location expressed both in dollars and in equivalent purchasing power (measured in percentage of living wage).

I figure we can also replicate the wildly successful national alert level system, and color code these labels, with each entry being blue for "good" (higher than living wage, with enough resources to provide for housing, food, education, and health care), green for "acceptable" (enough for housing, food, and basic health care, with a shot at education), yellow for "basic living wage," orange for "absolutely essentials barely covered," and red for "sweatshop/slave labor conditions." Also, if children were used during that step it would be black with a white border and have a cartoony picture of a sad crying child next to it.

Then, people can no longer claim ignorance or say that its all "political" when someone points out that their old navy performance fleece was sewn together by an eleven year old girl who has carpal tunnel syndrome from sewing the same stich for the last three years every day for 14 hours a day.

Not that the cowards in Washington DC have the spine to pass legislation mandating this on their own. We'll have to force them to.

If you like it, pass a link on. Let people know. Together we will make this a better world.

Axiom

2006-08-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

One ounce of lead, properly applied, can change the world.

Imagine then the weight of a person standing for what is right.

We have already won. The beast is dead from a bullet to the head. The coroner will rule it suicide, but we know the truth. You can't hide from the fruits of your deeds, as you sow, so shall you reap.

Now is not the time to flinch away. Now is the time to move in, to twist the dagger and ensure the beast does not recover.

Nothing is insignifigant. Draw your line. Stand your ground. Deal in lead.

Our Mission, should we choose to accept it

2006-07-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

First off, I've had to disable anonymous comments due to spammers. Sorry about that, but that is the price of existence in an anarchical world. There will always be those who will abuse the commons, so there must always be those who would rise to defend them from predation and over-use.

From this basic principle, we can derive the entirity of our civilization. We must create rules, draw lines and boundaries around our behavior, our living space, our freedom, in order to protect ourselves. The balance between these restrictions can, at times, be hard to find.

We find ourselves forced to surrender a part to protect the whole. We pull over when the police flash their lights at us, because the alternative is a world where there are no police, no rules on the road, and those with the biggest, toughest, most powerful vehicles can do whatever they wish to those of us stuck with bicycles.

Naturally, such a world is highly desireable to those who have the strength and power. The longing for personal freedom becomes twisted and perverted when it shines through the prism of power. It becomes not just a desire to further one's own wishes, but to subvert the will of others. The more free one feels, the more they become trapped by a need to ensure that freedom by dominating all those around them.

The more one has to lose, the more one worries about losing it. In this way, extreme wealth and extreme happiness and fulfillment are polar opposites. While the wealthy can experience pleasure, humor, and exhiliration, happiness will always for them be just over the horizon. Just one more aquisition away, one more servant, one more bedroom in their mansion, one more pleasure cruise in their yaght, one more private compound, one more dead prostitute, one more molested child, one more stolen election.

In no way do I think people should avoid wealth and consign themselves to the poor house. Being poor is also no way to live and be happy. When you are worried about where your next meal is coming from, and when you worry that if your child gets the flu they could die due to lack of the simple medicines needed to treat it, happiness will also be outside your grasp.

It is, as it almost always is, in the middle ground that we find the happiness. Those with the means to medical care, shelter, food, education, and entertainment, in a stable and steady supply, they are the ones who find true happiness.

Bringing a majority of the people in the world stably into middle class lifestyle is the only way to bring about permanent world peace.

Those who currently own the government of the United States have been blinded by that need for the next, they are the wealthy elites desperately trying to make that purchase of happiness, a purchase that does not transact in coins, a reality to which they have blinded themselves in their zeal.

Some could be educated. Some will never give up their fanaticism. These people are lost in the dark valley of a pleasure filled misery, but they are still people. It is up to us to rescue them from their wealth and power, and deliver them either to a better life or to a quiet rest.

It may be that all it would take is a few words to break that dam in their mind and let reality flood in on them. If Warren Buffet can give up the balance of his fortune to help the poor, then there is hope for any of them.

We have a mission. We must save our brothers and sisters from themselves, and in so doing save us from the results of their sickness. If we fail, then all are lost.

Imposition of Will vs Freedom

2006-06-13T08:56:00.000-07:00

All people of good conscience believe that it is wrong to force religious beliefs upon other people. Many take it a step further and state that presenting religious beliefs to children is morally equivalent to forced conversion, because they lack the perspective and life experience to be able to judge for themselves the truth or fiction of what they are being told.

I am among that latter group.

Religionists like to make the argument that teaching no religion at all is merely teaching a "religion of atheism." This argument is specious at best, and blatantly false at worst.

There is no moral equivalence between forcing people to profess a certain belief system (say, Evangelical Christianity) and preventing people from doing so. While religionists would have you believe (as many of them do) that "atheism" is a religion too, any person with critical thinking skills can see that this is not the case. Atheism is not the embracing of a particular belief system, it is the rejection of one. Atheists are as diverse a lot as can be grouped together, tied together not by shared belief but by a shared skepticism of unprovable claims based on questionable sources.

Even in this there is a polarity of thought, with some tending more towards "I do not believe in religion," and others tending towards, "I believe religion is wrong and/or incorrect." The difference is subtle but very real.

With this in mind, we come to the question of freedom and the imposition of will. While I can mouth the platitudes and participate in the rituals of a religion, this does not mean I share the underlying beliefs that formed those things. If I am forced, either implicitly or explicitly, to claim beliefs that I do not truly have, society suffers from my deception. When a person to claims to be Christian but does not truly believe in the central tenets of their particular brand of that faith, it introduces a layer of deception into every interaction they have with society. It also creates a situation where their actions, dictated by their true beliefs, do not match their stated intents, dictated by their need to present themselves as part of a religion. Good examples of this are the various Christians who regularly attend church and even refer to themselves as Christians, but when called on to oppose war or support programs to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or heal the sick use their secret ballot votes to oppose those basic pillars of that belief system.

The end result of this kind of deception (both self-deception and outward deception) is the superficial society which Americans find themselves in today, where the appearance of propriety and goodness is much more important than the truth of it, and where a token gesture is well regarded but a lifetime dedication to good works is derided. This kind of "style over substance" society eventually finds itself at odds with an intrusive reality, often in the form of a large scale natural disaster or a vicious terrorist attack.

While this is not the only factor, by making public display of religion increasingly important, the tyranny of the majority eventually becomes an albatross around their neck, one that they find harder and harder to remove. Once secularized education is corrupted and the majority religion is allowed to impose its will on the young, the core of free society begins to crumble. When children are taught what to think instead of how to think, the superficial "style over substance" culture becomes endemic in the population, and eventually the majority that originally thought itself wise in bringing the minority under its belief system finds itself face to face with a cold, hard reality that respects no books or borders, no laws be they handed down by humans or Gods or any other agency one cares to name.

Imposition of beliefs on others is thus not morally equivalent to preventing people from imposing beliefs on others. In the first case, great harm comes not just to the impose but the imposer, and all of society suffers. In the second case, a healthy diversity of ideas allows society to remain adaptive to intrusive processes, be they natural or artificial, and thus reduces the chances of negative progress due to those intrusive processes.

This is why the theocratization of society must be opposed by all people of good conscience. To fail to do so is to hand the fate of society into the capricious grip of nature, to risk actual loss for an illusion of gain. This must not be allowed to happen.

What is Freedom

2006-06-04T09:54:00.001-07:00

A person in the comments asked me, "What is Freedom?"

My answer to that question is this:

Freedom has two layers. The core layer of freedom is the freedom of mind; the acknoledgement of possible choices and the willingness to accept the consequences of ones actions.

The outer layer is freedom of action. Freedom of action is the ability to do anything one wishes, as long as your actions do not infringe on the implied and explicit consent of another. In order to truly have this level of freedom a person must be able to participate equally in the formation of the formation of implied and explicit consent agreements. This does not mean they have total veto of such agreements, it merely gives them the opportunity to register their preference and lay out their arguments for why those agreements should have a certain form.

When one is imprisoned, one can still maintain the core layer of freedom, even though one does not have full freedom of action. When one lives in a truly free society, one can enjoy both layers of freedom.

Vendetta

2006-06-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

The founding fathers gave us every tool we need to ensure our government remains our own.

Those tools sit at the ready, the question is: Do you have the will to use them?

The responsability to defend your rights does not fall on any judge, any soldier, any representative, any reporter, any public servant. Those people are the tools, it is you who must wield them in defense of our Republic.

My people are lost in the wilderness, but they are both fierce and just, and when the time comes, we will roar out of the mountains and forests in a storm of rightous rage, and we will rain justice down on the tyrants and the workers of evil. Our Vendetta will be that stuff of legends, sung about until the stars grow cold and the moon covers her face for the last time.

I pity those who will stand before us on that day, for they will repay each second of ill-gotten bliss they steal today with a thousand razor cuts, and they will feel the barbs of truth rip their flesh unto the very bone.

Prepare yourselves, brothers and sisters, the time comes when we will be called on to rise up and defend our homes and families from those who would destroy them.

The tide turns soon.

A monster in the castle

2006-05-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

It used to be, when the monster came to the castle and began preying upon the people in the village, eventually they would rise up, gather their pitchforks and torches and beat their plowshares into swords to go and slay the beast.

I guess that was because they didn't have cable television to tell them that the monster was entitled to consume their daughters and slaughter their sons, that the monster had worked hard to achieve its unnatural powers and that those powers then entitled it to do as it pleased with its hard-won castle.

No, those people knew better. They lived in a simpler time, in a day when, if a monster moved into the castle, you pulled him out and tore him apart with your friends and neighbors at your side.

Wake up. The monster is in the castle. Gather your pitchforks, ignite your torches, gather in the square. The moment is coming when we will have to go and confront the beast and assert, with one voice united, that we will not tolerate its depredations and deciet any longer.

And though some of us may fall, in the end the monster will repay the cost of our sacrifice with its own blood.

Its time

2006-05-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

Could Monday's speech be an announcement of troop deployments to the Mexican border?

Prepare yourself.

Once he gets that longed for deployment of military troops into the homeland, the Armageddon clock has swung into 11:59 and the second hand is going to be ticking furiously. Do you have tradable goods stored away? Do you have protection? Do you have a plan to escape your city? County? The country?

Maybe it'll be nothing. But think of it as an exercise in emergency preparedness. Can you get yourself and your loved ones out of the path of George Bush's domestic pacification forces before they begin the crackdown on "race riots?"

It won't happen in your neighborhood? Good. You'll make a useful speedbump to give me and mine more time.

Bush told you already, you're either with him or against him. He can never win in the long term, just like Hitler and Napoleon and all the other petty, spoiled children of history couldn't. The trick is to survive the short term to see the long term.

Are you ready to take back your country? Rally your fellows? Call a civic meeting of concerned citizens. Call a constitutional committee to order in your neighborhood. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper and call everyone who reads it and wants to assert their rights and liberty to meet at a public square or park to take an oath to defend the constitution against all enemies, especially domestic.

We can't afford to waste time with "opposition" marches anymore. They don't work. We march in opposition to war, opposition to exploitation, opposition to tyranny, and we march in circles.

Its time to gather together to assert ourselves. We are not protesting. We are demanding our rights. We are spitting in the face of the tyrant.

The time for cowering in crowds is over. The time to stand up and loudly proclaim our freedom is at hand.

I, Michael Leza, am a free man. Those who try to deny me this freedom do so at their gravest peril. Join me and we will reforge this Union from its shattered pieces and achieve the greatest aspiration of any person: to leave this planet a better place than it was when we arrived.

Do you see what I see?

2006-05-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

They came for the gays, and I was straight, so I said nothing.
They came for the muslims, and I was an athiest, so I said nothing.
They came for the immigrants.

Boy, was that a bad idea.

Looks like the corruption machine has finally picked the wrong minority to oppress to mobilize their racist base.

Things are coming to a head. Don't be caught unprepared.

What are you going to do when the corruption machine steals the 2006 elections?

The Citizen's Veto

2006-04-14T02:06:00.000-07:00

We declare a citizen's veto of nuclear first strikes, and proscribe the harshest punishment for anyone foolish enough to launch a nuclear first strike regardless of their excuse. We, like all people of good sense and moral character, find the idea of launching a nuclear first strike, even using so called "tactical" nuclear weapons, to be abborhent in the extreme and absolutely will not stand by if such action is taken.

We hereby declare our veto of any government policy that involves a nuclear first strike. Any attempted or actual nuclear first strikes undertaken by our government will be met with the most severe resistance, and all those responsible will stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Arguments about the morality of second strikes are for a different time and place. For now, we must pull together and, with one resounding voice, decalre "No! Not on our watch!"

Spread the word. Sign your name in the comments.

A letter to the future

2006-03-26T15:54:00.000-08:00

Dear Future,

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I decided I have to write this. I owe it to you. I owe you a big apology.

To my grandchildren, yes, you were cute and showed so much promise. I'm sorry I didn't protect you from the people who pumped all that poison into the air. I'm sorry you had to suffer so much before you died, unable to breathe because of the asthma. I wish I could say, "Had I only known, I would have stopped them," but I promised myself I would tell the truth in this letter. So here it is: I did know. We all knew. I was just too afraid to do anything. Too afraid to even say anything, lest my friends think I was some kind of radical freak.

You can understand why being thought well of by my peers was so important, can't you?

To my great-grandchildren, what few of you didn't end up dead of obesity before fifty because of all the horrible food we pumped into you since you were too young to talk, I'm sorry. Honestly, I have trouble really caring too much about you. Its not like I'll ever meet you, and even when I do you'll just be a baby, so you honestly don't matter that much to me. Thats why I supported all those tax cuts. Sure, I knew the money was actually a loan, and I know loans come due, but I really wanted to feel like I would be able to keep as much money as possible once I reached the upper income brackets. Sure, I never did, but what if I had? I hope you can accept that I had more empathy for the living rich people I wanted to be than I had for the unborn poor people I was handing the world over to.

And to the generation who will have to fight and die and spill an ocean of blood to win back their rights goes my biggest apology of all. I'm sorry I didn't make the small sacrifices now to stop the beast when it was young and weak. I'm sorry I didn't rise up, rally my fellows, and take back control of my government. I know that it was my duty as a citizen to oversee the government, but I just couldn't be bothered to change things. I didn't think they'd really pass the neosedition laws. I didn't think they'd really use their new powers against their political enemies. I didn't think letting them interpret the constitution to mean they didn't have to follow it was a very big deal. I didn't think they'd come for me.

Sometimes I made mistakes. Sometimes I simply chose the easy road. In the end, I traded your future for my present, your blood, sweat, and tears for my greed.

I don't expect you to forgive me. I don't deserve forgiveness.

All I hope is that you can learn from my mistakes. When the time comes that tyrants raise their head in your era, do not give them a single inch to hang you with. When the beast rears its head, chop it off without a moment of hesitation. When you are faced with a choice between an illusion of security and the hard road of liberty, don't choose the way I did.

Don't make my mistakes. I failed. And I'm sorry.

Regards,
Everyone

A Thought on "Action"

2006-03-10T06:36:00.000-08:00

Sign this petition. Be a citizen co-sponsor! Write your congressman and demand action! Call your senators today!

Bread and circuses.

We're being had, folks. Its a smokescreen designed to make us feel like we're doing something, while at the same time effectively getting us to neutralize ourselves.

They don't have to put us in camps. We've neutered ourselves. We blindly spout about "non-violent" protest and how the truth is going to set everyone free and how if we could just educate the voters, things will be fine.

Meanwhile, they've got people in congress holding meetings where lobbyists literally line up to loot the country. Blackbeard would be in awe of the audacity of these people, to pirate away everything of value in the plain sight of everyone.

We're not fighting back. We're participating in the illusion that we're fighting back to make ourselves feel better. Like so many things in our culture, you strip away the surface and find out that what you thought was true was a comfortable lie.

Well, its time we wake up to the truth. While we've been signing electronic petitions and getting our asses kicked at "non violent" protests by the police, those who would strip our freedoms, steal our wealth, and make women into property have been advancing their agenda ruthlessly and without respite.

You have to decide, right now, how far you are willing to go. If all you're willing to do is what you've already been doing, if you would rather live the comfortable lie, then go for it. But you'll always know that as you stood by, the last vestige of freedom slipped through your fingers.

As for me, my line is firmly drawn across election day this november. When they steal the next election, we will indeed live in interesting times.

Do Americans Want to be Free?

2006-03-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

As incomprehensible as it may seem to those of us who understand the stakes involved, we must consider the possibility that Americans simply do not want to be free. They've glanced over the whole freedom issue and decided that it simply isn't worth their time.

If this is the case, if Americans know that their freedom has been taken away by a Dictator-President and simply don't care, then no revolution, be it a peaceful revolution within the system or a violent uprising, will ever succeed in accomplishing anything except trading one dictator for another.

Even if every member of congress, the entire supreme court, and the executive and his administration were removed from office this very minute, if the people do not care about not having rights they'll simply elect more of the same. Like a man trying to solve his cockroach problem by stomping them with a shoe, we would find that for every congressperson we removed, two more people would be waiting to take their place.

If this is the case, a national scale revolution would be pointless. Provoking a police state crackdown (the only plausible method for success at this time) would do nothing but leave people even more oppressed than they are now. If these people are really this apathetic, or terrified of external threats, they will welcome the boot as it is planted firmly on their neck.

Should this turn out to be true, the only viable solution is to try and gather those who wish to remain free and form a majority in a sparsely populated state, perhaps North Dakota. Such proposals have been made before, perhaps it is time for those who wish to live free in a fair and just society under a rule of law, not a rule of lawmakers, to develop one of their own.

A Message for the Federal, State, and Local Police

2006-02-28T21:13:00.000-08:00

We can't let it go on. We can't let them destroy this country. Fuck that shit, and fuck you for loving them. You just sit back and watch me? Well fuck you. Fuck you for selling us out. Fuck you for not doing your job, and forcing me to take up the slack. Fuck you for wasting your time watching me and not spending your time doing your job: putting the tyrants who are looting this country behind bars. Fuck, you fucking cowards. You think you're so much better than me because you have a gun? Fuck you. You think your badge makes you special? You think you're immune to the shit you're doing to me?

When you're done rounding up all of us, what do you think they will do with you? A bullet to the head is a lot cheaper than whatever reward they promised you. You think once they get all of us rounded up and "taken care of," that everything will be good? You think its me that is threatening this country by questioning the people who are throwing away everything that made it such a great, special place to live?

Fuck you. Fuck you for selling out our people. Fuck you for selling out our families. Fuck you for selling out our country. And fuck you for being a self righteous little shit without the backbone to stand up and honor your oath to defend this country from domestic enemies.

Your oath was to the constitution, but the moment you listened to my phone call, the moment you put me in detention without my rights, the moment you even conceived in your filthy little head that it is somehow ok to shit on the Constitution that binds us together and guides us to lives of morality and justice, in that moment you didn't just sell us, you sold yourself. You went from being a public servant to being just another whore, just another hired thug in a long line of hired thugs. The money you draw to watch me, to imprison me, to unleash your rubber bullets and your teargas and your tazers and your hollow point rounds and your double-ought buckshot and your 5.56 millimeter high powered rounds – that is blood money. Not my blood. Not the blood of my brethren. The blood on your hands is your own. You and your family will pay the ultimate price, not at my hands, but at the hands of the men and women standing next to you. Once I am gone, once you've dissapeared the last of us, do you think it will all just suddenly stop?

Are you ready to pull out your service pistol, put it to your child's head, and pull the trigger?

Are you ready to beat your mother in the street?

Are you ready to watch your wife dragged away in the middle of the night because she annoyed the wrong person at church?

Are you ready to watch your husband and everyone else you love taken away from you for supporting the wrong ideas, the wrong candidates, the wrong policies?

You are the ones with the power. You are the ones with the guns. We have entrusted you to serve no man, no woman, but to only serve the law. You chose to take up that burden. Will you stand proudly and wear it on your shoulders, or will you let the tyrants crush us all under its weight?

A look back

2006-02-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

A week or so after Hurrican Katrina hit, I realized I had downloaded quite a bit of really amazing video while keeping up with events over the web. Using my video editing software, I cut together a video I titled "Week of Hell."

You can view it here. I can't afford to pay for hosting fees for this, so its filefront for now. I'm looking into getting this on google videos, but I have no idea how to post content there.

This video shows us the consequences of our failure of vigilance. By letting our government slip loose from our control, we've left ourselves vulnerable. Until we regain control of the government, expect more Katrinas in the future.

We Need Air To Breathe

2006-02-16T15:48:00.000-08:00

This is not about saving the environment. This is about power.

What good is the biggest protest in history if no one sees it?

What good are the best ideas about how to live if no one reads them?

What good does all the shouting do if no one can hear you?

The enemy has taken the air, air that is rightfully ours. They have cut us off from that which belongs to us.

The air is not theirs. The air does not belong to corporations. The air does not belong to the government.

The air belongs to the people.

The spectrum has been taken from you, repackaged and sold back. But what they give back is not what they took. Instead, it has been polluted and defiled by advetisments for poisonous products, poisonous services, poisonous ideas.

Buy an SUV, we can always kill for more oil. Buy liposuction and then buy a lawyer to steal money from your doctor. Submit to power and it will protect you, question power and it will destroy you.

The holders of office have forgotten the faces of our fathers. Elections, oversight, and rule of law do not only exist to protect the people from the government, they also exist to protect the government from the people. Without elections, the only path to regime change is the path of blood and death. Without oversight, the people lose faith and trust in the government and wish to change it. Without rule of law, chaos reigns and people look for stability from anyone who will promise it.

The pigs at the trough of power can only see the slop in front of their faces. They roll in their own shit gleefully, gripped by the insanity inherent to all worshippers of power and money. They see only that which is placed directly in front of their snouts.

And now they have taken our voice, our eyes, our ears. They slowly, surely back us against a wall. They remove our options one by one, assured that they are impervious to harm.

No, they are not impervious. But we owe to our children and our children's children and the countless generations beyond to make every effort, make every gesture, make every attempt to end this reign of tyranny without violence, without violent confrontation. A civil war in this day will turn the world into an ash heap, and what few crawl out of the ruins will be a thousand years in the rebuilding.

To those who use our air, we say this: do not take lightly your obligation to us. Do not take lightly your responsability to this and all future generations. Do not so casually throw away the sacrifices of our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers before them. Do not fail us now. Question. Probe. Investigate. Watch. Then come and report to us the truth, as pure as you can make it. Do not fail us in this hour of need. Do not shrink before the hard choices. Do not fall silent under the tyrant's watchful gaze. Stand and speak truth, pure and unfettered.

And woe to the decievers, for every victory they win in the now they will pay back a thousandfold on the morrow.

When the dawn of the next age comes, will it be to the blue skies of hope and justice or the red skies of blood and death? The time of choosing draws swiftly near.

A Beast Unchained

2006-02-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

“May you live in interesting times.”
-ancient Chinese curse

Indeed. Have any times since the invention of agriculture or the printing press been as interesting as these?

The entire system of government that our country is founded on makes an assumption that, in the era of corporate owned media and super-partisan politics, may no longer hold. This assumption is that the people who are voting will be informed, and will be outraged when their government fails to live up to its responsibilities.

As we have seen, despite an almost continual string of scandals involving corruption, incompetence, malicious deception, and gross negligence, the electorate has failed to remove those responsible from power. A large part of this is the tendency of people to pick a side and stick with it, completely discounting any information that questions their chosen world view. Once a person's paradigm is crystallized, it becomes nearly unbreakable. This fundamental failure on the part of the citizenry to embrace their responsibility to truth over tribe is compounded by the unreliable channels of information available to them.

By breeding distrust of what has become known as the “mainstream media,” (but which would be better known as the “corporate media”), political operatives have closed down one of the vital branches of government: the press. In an era of information overload, where every person who wishes to stay informed must make decisions about where to get their data, it becomes easy to isolate oneself in a bubble of unreality, crafted by those who we agree with to match all of our preconceived notions and never call into question our fundamental assumptions.

This weakness has turned out to be the soft underbelly of democracy. This situation is compounded by the fact that many Americans are not properly taught critical thinking skills and lack intellectual curiosity, and thus do not have the ability to discern the differences between truth and the art of peddling half-truths, lies, and other deceptions known as “spin.”

Even those who feel confident in their ability to do so often get taken in by the spin. No single person has the time or resources to do the detailed research that would be required to fact check every news article they read.

This job, which should be performed by the media, is now often left to amateurs, such as bloggers and indymedia reporters. Unfortunately, most bloggers do not have the resources or time to focus on more than a few stories at a time.

And so we are left twisting in the wind, where those with the power to inform us choose instead to serve their own self interest, and those with the will to inform us do not have the power to do so. This leaves us with a government run amok, riddled with corruption, rotten to its very core, and little to no means to work for change within the system. The powerful and elite have taken away our peaceful means of keeping them in check, and believe that in so doing they have tamed the people. But those who try to domesticate wild animals know that it is only a matter of time before a beast, denied too long its food, air, and water, will turn on its handlers. And when that day comes, woe to those who stand against the fury of a wild creature unchained.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars

2006-01-27T13:42:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Crooks and Liars, who included Dealing in Lead in Mike's blog roundup today. Go check them out. I read it daily.

Those who subvert elections do so at their own peril

2006-01-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

What more do you need? Election machines are in place that allow simple, untraceable election fraud on a scale never dreamed of before the advent of ubiquitous computing.

The resistance to even the suggestion of electronic voting machines being compromised is easy to understand. Even though they do not consciously admit it, every person of even cursory education knows what it means when the election process has been systematically defrauded. Without the ability to overthrow their government peacefully, using elections, the disenfranchised will inevitably rebel against the tyrants who hold the keys to the voting box. Blood will be spilled, and chaos and destruction will follow in its wake.

No sane person wishes to see a violent revolution happen in their country. No sane person wishes to see their family turned into refugees by their own fellow citizens.

Sadly, the American love affair with the concept of "subjective reality," the ideology that all of reality is purely subjective and no one view of reality should be placed "above" another, has produced a mentality among its people that if you ignore something studiously enough, or if you repeat a lie often enough, unpleasant truths can be replaced with pleasant fictions. They have pulled the towel over their head and hoped the monster that stalks them is so stupid as to believe that if they can't see the monster, it can't see them.

This attitude, if left unchanged, will result in American blood flowing in the streets. This country will be torn apart as its people realize the magnitude of the loss of freedom they have endured. The people involved, after all, are not Chinese, not Russians. Not for them the meek submission to authority. This country is a land of misfits, rebels, and individualists.

Those who tamper with elections do so at their own ultimate peril. The longer a revolution is put off, the more intense it is when it finally arrives. In their wisdom, the founders of this country arranged for bi-annual opportunity for revolution. In their hubris, the rulers of this country subvert that process.

My voice is not the first to speak of these things, but in this time it is one of the few. I know, however, that in this land our chorus will not be quiet for long. Even if the powers strike me down and burn my words, the tide has changed. The water of revolution is rising. If the powers do not return to us the peaceful tools of overthrow, they only invite a return to the old ways.

Do these men and women truly wish to sharpen their own guillotines?

FBI analysis of Usama Bin Laden's recent tape

2006-01-26T12:22:00.000-08:00

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
Office of Intelligence and Analysis
Homeland Security Assessment
Federal Bureau of Investigation

(U) Warning: This document is UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (U//FOUO). It contains information that may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552). It is to be controlled, stored, handled, transmitted, distributed, and disposed of in accordance with DHS policy relating to FOUO information and is not to be released to the public, the media, or other personnel who do not have a valid “need-to-know”, without prior approval of an authorized DHS official.

(U) Perspectives on Bin Ladin Statement
19 January 2006
(U) Attention: Federal Departments and Agencies, State Homeland Security Advisors, State and Local Law Enforcement, Tribal Government, Information Sharing and Analysis Centers, and International Partners. (U) Distribution Notice: Secondary release, dissemination, or sharing of this product is authorized by Federal Departments and Agencies within their respective departments and agencies, and by State Homeland Security Advisors within their state and local jurisdictions to authorized homeland security partners, that have an official valid need-to-know. Any further release, dissemination, or sharing of this product, or any information contained herein (beyond that indicated above), is not authorized without further approval from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) –Production Management Division (PM) at IA.PM@dhs.gov.

(U) Executive Summary

(U//FOUO) DHS and the FBI are releasing this Assessment to provide perspectiveson the recent audio statement that is attributed to al-Qa‘ida (AQ) leader Usama Bin Ladin (UBL). While we do not believe this statement is an indicator of a near-term attack in the Homeland, we urge readers to maintain vigilance and security awareness as AQ remains the most serious terrorist threat to the United States and U.S. interests worldwide. The Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) alert level will remain ELEVATED (Yellow) at this time.

(U) Assessment
(U//FOUO) Multiple open-source reports indicate al-Jazeera broadcast various excerpts earlier today from an audio statement that is attributed to Usama Bin Laden (UBL). At this time, DHS and the FBI believe the statement was most likely recorded in the past two months, given a reference to an alleged U.S. government plan to attack al-Jazeera which first appeared in the open press in late November 2005. While the Intelligence Community continues to analyze the statement, an initial review of the excerpts includes:

- (U//FOUO) Offer of a “compromise” to the U.S. leadership as a way to end the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he proposes is based on the withdrawal of U.S. and allied partner forces from those countries.

- (U//FOUO) Insistence that despite this “compromise”, the U.S. leadership has ignored this offer despite the U.S. public’s desire for a withdrawal of forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.

- (U//FOUO) Claim that AQ has delayed carrying out attacks in the United States -- but not because of heightened security measures -- and that operations are “under preparation” and could potentially occur in the future.

- (U//FOUO) Emphasis that AQ is patient and will ultimately win the larger conflict with the United States even if it loses a few battles in the interim.

- (U//FOUO) The UBL statement is the first such message since December 2004, in which he then recognized Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the leader of AQ in Iraq. Previously, UBL issued a number of public statements, most of which contained similar criticisms of U.S. policy on Iraq, Afghanistan, and other issues. We note that UBL’s last overt reference regarding possible attacks in the United States was contained in an October 2003 audio statement.

- (U//FOUO) We lack corroborating information indicating that AQ is prepared to execute attacks inside the United States in the near-term, although intelligence indicates that AQ leadership has the intent to conduct another dramatic attack in the United States.

- (U//FOUO) In reviewing public statements from UBL and other senior AQ leaders, we are unable to correlate the release of such messages as “cues” or “triggers” for terrorist attacks. We have no information to suggest the release of today’s message is designed to authorize a terrorist attack in the Homeland or against U.S. interests abroad.

(U//FOUO) We continue to analyze the contents of today’s statement from UBL. We will provide additional updates as appropriate.

(U) Reporting Notice:
(U) DHS and FBI encourage recipients of this document to report information concerning suspicious or criminal activity to the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC). The FBI regional phone numbers can be found online at http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm and the HSOC can be reached by telephone at 202-282-8101 or by email at HSOC.Common@dhs.gov. For information affecting the private sector and critical infrastructure, contact the National Infrastructure Coordinating Center (NICC), a sub-element of the HSOC. The NICC can be reached by telephone at 202-282-9201 or by email at NICC@dhs.gov. When available, each report submitted should include the date, time, location, type of activity, number of people and type of equipment used for the activity, the name of the submitting company or organization, and a designated point of contact.

(U) For comments or questions related to the content or dissemination of this document, please contact the DHS/I&A Production Management staff at IA.PM@dhs.gov.

A Blast from the Past

2006-01-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

Special thanks to Larry Wilson, of Hypocrisy Exposed, for posting the following to the texas_kos mailing list. Go check out his blog, he has a lot of interesting and thought provoking things to say.

Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775.

No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve. This is no time for ceremony. The questing before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss.

Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation; the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none.

They are meant for us: they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne! In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free-- if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending--if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained--we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field!

Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

(italics mine)

That last part really sums it up for me. Do you really want to live in a world where you can be fined, arrested, imprisoned, or even killed simply for speaking your mind? Is the comforting boot of security on your neck really so important to you that you'll give up your humanity and make yourself a slave to feel it?

If you prefer an illusion of safety to a life of liberty, what does that say about you as a person?

I would rather die than live a comforting lie.

Force as a Political Tool

2006-01-22T11:53:00.000-08:00

(note, this is intended to speak to the idea of Force in a political context, and not in the context of law enforcement)

Lethal force and coercion are unacceptable when used as political tools to implement and enforce policy within a country.

Lethal force and coercion are acceptable only to establish and enforce a system of equitable democracy. One person, one vote, and all have an equal chance to be heard.

When a system for creating public policy becomes corrupt, it is incumbent upon those who wish to change the system to first work within it, and give that system a reasonable chance to do its work. Only when all lawful methods of systemic change have been tried and have failed should a patriot consider the use of force to correct the corruption of the system.

A patriot puts the system and its integrity before their own policy and ideology. A patriot never corrupts the system to advance their own policy. A true patriot ensures the system is fair and equitable, and then works within it to effect their policy, letting that policy stand or fall on its own merits.

History is filled with examples of revolutions that began with a call for systemic reform, but which ended with the revolutionaries giving in to temptation and using their power to enact policy. The communist movement of the early twentieth century is an example of this. What started as systemic revolutions became policy revolutions. Iran is also a good example of a policy revolution and the negative effects such actions inevitably have on a country. In one case a secular revolution, another a revolution based in religion, in both cases we see countries plunged into tyranny and oppression.

Policy revolutions inevitably end in abject failure, and leave the country in a state of ruin and chaos.

In global history, one true systemic revolution stands head and shoulders above the rest. This is, of course, the first American civil war against the British crown. Due to the exceptional patriotism and devotion to Natural Philosophy of the Founding Fathers, a system was created into which an incredible spectrum of policy could fit. Over two centuries, this system has grown more robust and equitable, shedding its roadblocks to democracy rather than face a revolution in force.

The one significant attempt at a policy revolution against the government failed, for the same reasons that all policy revolutions must fail eventually.

The dawn of the twenty first century sees the seeds of systemic corruption once again planted in the United States. It is the duty of the Patriot to ensure these seeds are not given a chance to grow.

How Far?

2006-01-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

How far do they have to go? At what point do you say, "This far, and no farther?"

What is your personal limit? What does the Government have to do to drive you over the edge, from a closet dissenter to a Patriot?

Its time to think about this, long and hard. The Government, in thrall to the red team, invaded a country who posed no direct threat to us on the basis of lies and misdirection. They did so with no regard to the safety of our soldiers, sending them in without proper personal body armor, among many other logistical and supply errors. During wartime, under direction of the President and his staff, veteran benefits have been cut and proposals to cut them again are in the works. Under the conscious, willing direction of the President and his staff, the United States has engaged in torture and murder, in some cases of men detained solely on the word of rival warlords in one of the most war ravaged, savage areas on the planet. All of this information can be verified in the press. All of it is factual. The administration has held American citizens without charges, trial, or any of the other rights promised in the Constitution. The Administration considers the Constitution to be a roadblock to its powers instead of the basis of them.

Defend the Constitution from all enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Draw your line in the sand.

The Fifth Estate

2006-01-22T11:46:00.000-08:00

The founding fathers, having just won independence in a civil war against the British crown, understood the importance of revolution as a political tool. Thus, they created a government that, by its nature, can be peacefully overthrown every two years, overseen by a limited administrator who could himself be overthrown every four years.

The beauty of democracy is that it allows people to overthrow a government without having to resort to violence and warfare.

The rulers of a democracy subvert this process at their own peril. A free people denied a fair, equitable system for peaceful revolution will rightfully seek other means. Being elected is meaningless if one rigs the system so that one can not be thrown out during the next election cycle.

The Constitution provides us with a broad spectrum of checks and balances. Government is broken into separate branches, each charged with keeping reign on the others. In addition, the Bill of Rights provides additional checks and balances. The first amendment establishes what is often called the “fourth estate” through protection of speech and the press.

But the system does not end there. In their wisdom, the Fathers empowered a Fifth Estate, a final option for when the system was so corrupt that all other courses of peaceful overthrow have been subverted.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

And should it come to pass that those in power subvert the system of voting, that the checks and balances fail and the Fourth Estate, held in thrall by the power elite, shirks its duty, that all peaceful roads to revolution are closed; Then will the Fifth Estate rise up and show the world the true power of American Democracy.

The Pen is mightier than the sword, but the pistol is mightier still.

Hello, World

2006-01-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

Hi. Welcome to Dealing in Lead. You might recognize the title, a phrase I first came across in Stephen King's Gunslinger series.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss dissent, revolution, and the obligation of vigilance in a democratic republic. My goal, in creating this blog, is to map out the moral issues surrounding government, culture, and civilization. It is my hope that, together, we can be one of many nodes in the new internet based marketplace of ideas that is the last, best hope for preserving progressive civilization.

Join me, and together maybe we can leave the world a better place than it was when we arrived.

To start us off, I will be posting some of the essays I've written over the last two years concerning the topic at hand. I look forward to seeing what you all have to say.