Monthly Archives: February 2006

TV Tip

Larisa Alexandranova say to watch Tim Russert on CNBC tonight Saturday at 10:00pm Eastern. All about the NSA watching your ass.

Update: I hope you’re watching this.

Update II: Audio here. It’s bad news. Very little really new though.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.3KB)

It Didn’t Work by William F. Buckley

Well, since it isn’t true these days unless the National Review thinks so, here you go, you bitches:

“I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America.” The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. “Everything that is going on between Sunnis and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America.”

One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samarra and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “the bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven’t proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren’t on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are “Zionists.” It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each other’s throats.

A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom. The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymakers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and anti-democratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) that we simply are not prepared to take?

It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn’t work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

(You gotta love this shit. – editor)

Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.

Happy birthday, Mr President.

“Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.”- George Washington, in a letter to Edward Newenham, Oct. 20, 1792.

Hat Tip: The other Scott Horton (you know, the famous anti torture hero.)

So I responded to a debate about “American law in the time of Suicide Killer Fascists”

This comes from a private discussion board I hang out on. It’s interesting to see how sometimes they have the sheen of Libertarians but for the most part they mean, ‘stop the drug war, but go ahead and kill middle eastern folks. They hate us after all’. Anywho, So I haven’t had any coffee yet and I see this as a new topic being posted. *sigh*

The poster is talking about the new book, “Preemption, A Knife that Cuts Both Ways” by Alan Dershowitz. The big point is that a ‘leftie’ is finally seeing the light. *sigh* I haven’t had breakfast either.

My response for what it’s worth:

Most likely, I will never post more than this on this thread. But it is something I have considered since waaayy before people were concerned about WMD or ‘terrorists’ so my opinion is not shaded by that.

There is an intersection of the amount of effort required to affect damage and the amount of damage that can be caused. That is to say for every X amount of damage you would like to create, there is a prerequisite Y amount of effort. Pretty simple. However this axis itself is on sliding scale and has been on such ever since we learned how to create weapons from stick and bone.

Ten thousand years ago, one person, even with the most highly developed atlatl (a cool weapon btw) could only do so much damage to his surroundings and other people. He was limited by physical ability, aggregation of targets, and resources required to find materials for and build such weapons. There was an easy equilibrium here in maintaining normal relations here.

As technology advanced over time, through copper, bronze, and iron. The damage a single person could inflict grew. The weapons were now more deadly. The part that most people forget is that they also lasted longer as well. Resource collection on the front end was taken care of. You and your buddies could take a bunch of spears, swords, and armor a thousand miles away and be just as effective as you had been at home even though you were away from your forge. This was the beginning of modern warfare, IMHO. It was now easier to carry damage elsewhere.

Enter chemicals, refining, steel, and special relativity. Now the damage/effort axis shifted exponentially. Not just because you could harvest the resources of an entire nation to fold into a weapon, but because the weapons themselves became so easy to use and the effort required (pressing a button at ‘kill time’) was so minimal compared to the amount of damage caused. A second factor during this age was the shift of the man to man kill-zone. You no longer had to actually see what you had done. Even for infantry the lethal perimeter grew to well over 100yds. While trench warfare and hand to hand combat was still needed. It was now used as a fallback or failed situation retrieval. “If it comes down to hand to hand, something went wrong.”

—–slight soapbox detour—–

Fundamentally this third stage is where I believe modern society has sown the seeds of its own destruction. Once you are removed from observing the details of damage you have wrought or have no contact or knowledge of the life you just eradicated, you cease to empathize as much. I would postulate that once you get past the seven degrees of separation or so where you don’t know the names or faces of the people you are destroying and better yet, will never see the consequences of said destruction, there is little incentive to care. Especially if the people around you are in the same boat and synergistically have no need to care as well. I see this in corporate culture and CEOS all the time. I would wager it applies to most politicians as well.

—–end soapbox detour—–

All that being said, the effort to damage ratio sliding scale has shifted so fundamentally now that it is not inconceivable at this point in time (I did not say probable… yet) that an individual’s actions could bring about the fall of modern civilization. A lone man or woman. And please, NO, I do not mean some terrorist or freedom fighter jackasss of today. Nothing that has been done to date by people of this genre even compares to what is possible.

We are reaching a point in time where nukes will seem ‘quaint’. Imagine one person or a small group with the ability to shift an asteroid or comet to hit the earth. This is just physics. The damage would be much more than anything anyone can imagine depending upon the size. How about one lone researcher for the CDC et al, hoping a plane to Bangkok, New York, LA, Paris, London, etc… carrying and spreading multiple lethal organisms. Not anthrax mind you. Mundane. I mean the things that we grow (and say we don’t) out at Dugway. Multiple vectors, multiple organisms… No one can be prepared for that.

Those are just examples. I’m sure if you reach, you can dream up more. The point is they’re possible if not probable at this time. And no amount of security is absolute. Sorry. You can pretend, but I do this for a living, and security is as all about perception. There is no such thing as being 100% secure. No matter how much effort you throw at it.

Now, back to the question at hand. Where do the natural rights of an individual reside when technology has taken us to a place where individuals can disrupt civilization itself? And I’m not just waxing patriotic about the modern concept of the nation-state here. I’m talking about the growing crops and surviving level of civilization.

It seem to me through observation the as this effort/damage axis slides to the right, there is also a declining value of absolute individual freedom. After all the nation-state must protect itself (it’s what it does best) as well as civilization. Through the course of my few years I’ve noticed or felt the slow ticking down of freedom and individual rights. To those that would argue we must suffer during this whatever-war and then it’ll cycle back the other way I would argue that we are in an unprecedented era of technology that is only moving in one direction.

My personal prediction is that Orwellian states are inevitable moving forward. I do not relish this, but frankly I do believe that’s where we’re headed. I also think that we should go kicking and screaming giving up our rights. I am an individualist and libertarian minarchist if you need to call me something. I believe in the individual and natural rights and that all law and governments should be based on this. Governments should serve their constituents and not the other way around. That being said, I think the future is bleak for human rights, and individual liberty. But I will keep fighting, if only so that I can tell my children someday what it was really like.

Sorry, I really shouldn

Why You Are Not A Socialist by Frank Chodorov 1956

In this country, more than a third of all the people produce is now confiscated by the State. To that extent, then, this is a socialistic country. This accumulation of property in the hands of the State makes it the biggest single buyer of goods, the biggest employer, the biggest dispenser of alms, the biggest factor in the economic life of the community. Either through direct employment by the State, or indirect employment by its contractors, or by virtue of its dispensation of subsidies or doles, we are all dependent on the State for all or part of our sustenance. Even what it permits us to keep out of our earnings is a matter of benevolence, not a right. Inurement to this condition of existence induces its enlargement into an ideal. We learn to worship the State. It becomes our Baal, and Baalism is our religion. And that is what gives the prediction of the Soviet speaker such force. There is no question about the growing ardor of Americans for State regulation, control and management of the economy, and an equal apathy toward the consequent State intervention in our personal affairs. Within 45 years, by a mere increase in the amount of taxation, the concepts of freedom upon which this republic was founded, even though the words remain in our language, can be obliterated from our consciousness. And then Americanism will consist of the rites and practices of socialism, perhaps not exactly like those obtaining in the USSR, but not different in kind. It will be native grown, not imported.

That is the prospect for the year 2000 A.D. … The phenomenon is strange indeed, when one puts the twentieth century against the background of human history. In all the centuries that preceded it, the power of the State was looked upon as a curse and a scourge, as something to get rid of. Always when men sought freedom, and they always did, they thought of limiting and shackling political power; freedom never meant anything else. The miracle of the twentieth century is the complete reversal of this historic pattern, and the identifying of freedom with subservience to the State.

As Long as We’re Talking About the Constitution…

by Scott Horton Antiwar.com February 18, 2006

“In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
– Thomas Jefferson

All over the country, and even in the press, the U.S. Constitution is being discussed in regards to the president’s war powers. This is apparently a side benefit of having an empire so corrupt and murderous that many folks are considering impeaching and removing the president who lied us into war and claims unlimited authority to wiretap, kidnap, torture, and murder whomever he likes – his lawyers even insist that the “commander in chief” has the “inherent” and “plenary” authority to crush a child’s testicles to get at the boy’s father. (Really. Click here to read all about it.)

The Constitution is not holy writ, but the government it describes would be a hell of a lot better than the one we have now.

It is a commonly held fallacy that the president of the United States has unlimited authority over this country’s foreign policy. What authority does the Constitution grant the president in this regard? Well, he is to retain civilian supremacy over the military “when called into the actual service of the United States,” and he can negotiate treaties that have no authority whatsoever unless and until ratified by a super-majority of the U.S. Senate. That’s it. There is nothing else.

Congress holds “all legislative powers,” according to the first sentence of the first section of Article One.

One could argue, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the spirit and letter of the Constitution has been corrupted since the first Washington administration, when the president accepted Alexander Hamilton’s view that the new government could do anything not expressly forbidden by the Constitution and signed the law creating the second Bank of the United States – an act that caused Jefferson to resign his position as secretary of state. Even accepting Hamilton’s false premise, as every generation since then has, it is apparent that precisely what is considered forbidden by the Constitution has been about as fluid as George Washington’s interpretation of it and the whims of various politicians in the years since.

No where is this clearer than in the record of America’s wars. Of the five wars that were actually declared by the Congress, as required by Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, not one was defensive. The war of 1812-14 was the result of Jefferson and Madison’s perfectly constitutional, yet economically and politically suicidal, trade war against Britain. James Madison, the Constitution’s principal author, chose to take an aggressive posture against Britain (while, of course, playing the victim), and succeeded only in getting the Capitol burned to the ground and making Andrew Jackson (who would go on to centralize more authority in the presidency) into a war hero.

It’s too bad Madison ignored his own advice on how to keep the government limited. In 1795, he had argued that America should do its best to avoid foreign conflicts since,

“[O]f all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

The war against Mexico (in which half of that country was stolen) was provoked by U.S. troops as soon as possible after Texas’ entry to the Union. Congress was “notified,” that is, lied to, and declared war after the fact, to the infernal consternation of a congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. After gaining the presidency for himself, Lincoln turned around and provoked the first shots of the Civil War by sending troops to occupy Ft. Sumter, a tax-collection post in the bay of a state that had declared its independence. According to Thomas DiLorenzo, Lincoln “wrote to his naval commander Gustavus Fox thanking him for his assistance in drawing the first shot.” Congress never did declare war, only that the war the president had started was for the purpose of “preserving the union” – months later.

By the time the Civil War was over, the idea that anything could limit the powers of the federal government was gone forever. The final step from a limited constitutional republic to a single nation-state had been taken – the union had become the nation – the united States, plural, replaced forever by the United States, singular. The right of people to secede from what they consider to be an illegitimate government, articulated so clearly in the Declaration of Independence, had been replaced by the president’s prerogative to conquer them by violent force. (Yes, private slavery is also wrong.)

As soon as the settlement of the West, and the near extermination of the American Indians, was complete, the American empire went looking for foreign colonies to conquer. Apparently, the step between post-constitutional “statehood” and empire wasn’t quite as far as the step from republic to nation-state. Hawaii was taken at 40-inch gun point in 1893.

(Throughout all this is a history of violent intervention in Central and South America that defies imagination.)

The “splendid little” Spanish-American war of 1898, which William Graham Sumner argued actually resulted in the U.S. being conquered by Spain, was sold to the people and the Congress as a defensive response to Spanish sabotage of the battleship Maine – which was, of course, a lie. “Acquired” were Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines– where a brutal “anti-insurgency” campaign took the lives of hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “liberation.” There was no constitutional provision for how to suppress insurrections by the subjects of foreign colonies, so the Marines just improvised.

With the arrival of the butcher Woodrow Wilson, favorite of American court historians and thus of state-educated folks everywhere, came a whole “New Freedom,” which included mass arrests, deportations, jailing of dissenters, and all the other staples of a totalitarian reign of terror. He had already invaded Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic – all without just cause or congressional declaration – before lying the U.S. into World War I. The suspicious sinking of the Lusitania, a ship full of civilians (and unbeknownst to them, munitions for British forces fighting the Kaiser), was not enough to convince the American people to get involved in the “Great War” in Europe, but when the people were shown an intercepted message known as the Zimmerman Telegram, which showed Germany’s offer of an alliance with Mexico in the event of war with the United States and a promise to help them retake the American Southwest, opinion against Germany hit a fever pitch. How Germany could help Mexico retake New Mexico and Arizona when they couldn’t conquer France, England, or Russia was never explained, but it was enough, and Wilson got his declaration of war.

America’s entry into World War I set the 20th century on a course of death and totalitarianism. As described by Jim Powell in Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II, due to Wilson’s interference, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Paul Wolfowitz’s hero, Leon Trotsky, were able to seize power in Russia and create the Soviet Union, and the French and British were able to so humiliate the Germans as to assure the rise of the Nazi death machine.

Between Wilson and his fascist spawn, Franklin Roosevelt, there was an attempted “return to normalcy,” but the incredible consolidation of state power during the Wilson years was far too extensive to be undone, and the Republican administrations of Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover were hardly in a hurry to undo Wilson’s gains. After all, he had just been emulating their conservative socialism.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt and Harry “Lucky” Truman were through, the Constitution was nothing but pretty calligraphy on parchment for folks to reminisce about on the Fourth of July. Through various states of national emergency, the wholesale rewriting of the interstate commerce clause by the courts, and America’s participation in WWII (another war in which the American people were deceived into thinking that our intervention was defensive in nature, though their sons were conscripted when that still wasn’t good enough), Washington, D.C., had permanently established itself as the center of economic and political power in the United States. Garet Garrett called it Ex-America way back then: a massive warfare/welfare/regulatory/national security state, the final reduction of the several states to the status of large counties under “federal” control, a permanent military-industrial complex, and the inheritance of all the Western empires, plus Japan’s. War could now be declared by the president or the United Nations Security Council. The Constitution was no longer amended when politicians decided they needed more power – they just went ahead. The rule of law was dead.

It is impossible to have a limited constitutional republic in a state of perpetual war. Since WWII, the Right has agitated for more foreign conflict – a government’s most effective means of expanding its control – while the Left has sung J.P. Morgan’s song of good democratic government and pushed for the disregard of the limits the law places on the actions of the state. As the historians Gabriel Kolko and Murray Rothbard have shown, the push for “progressive” government regulation of business in the years before World War I and during the Great Depression was led by the big businesses that were to be regulated. They had decided that competing over control of congressmen was easier than competing in a free market. The Left bought it, and continues to. When the Republicans are in charge, the Left is mad at them for “not doing enough.” When Democrats are in power, the Left openly laments that our government doesn’t interfere in people’s lives quite as much as in Europe. Even the most atrocious and aggressive wars are sometimes praised by liberals, who, believing wholeheartedly in the benevolent power of the state to order the domestic sphere, carry that faith over into “humanitarian” and “peacekeeping” roles for the U.S. military around the world. Enumerated powers? Never heard of such a thing.

The Cold War – a neat euphemism for 40 years of constant fear and warmongering – required even those most dedicated to markets and the rule of law to accept a “totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores,” according to the court intellectuals, as the military fought its proxy wars and the CIA installed its dictators overseas. As the Cold War was winding down, the National Security Council was preparing to scrap the Constitution altogether and create a military dictatorship, as detailed in the Miami Herald on July 5, 1987.

When the Soviet menace imploded, the U.S. government created and found new enemies here and abroad to fight in the name of ending the distribution of illegal drugs and stopping aggressive war, beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which American diplomats had, of course, invited.

It is easy to see why the politicians lie us into all these conflicts: Americans don’t want empire and never have. We have continued to believe in the traditions of our nation’s founders, who led a successful rebellion against an empire and created in its place, at least they claimed, just enough government to protect our rights. When the politicians send our families off to war, they must always call it “liberation” and “defending freedom” against the forces of malevolent tyrants in order to disguise our empire’s truly aggressive nature.

With the “war on terror,” we see the brutal face of the $2.5 trillion per year government that has been created in this land, supposedly under this Constitution, in the name of all these good works. Halliburton – which has done such a great job with the ghost prisons overseas – has now been awarded the contract to build domestic concentration camps. In the event of a “Red Alert,” we may very well see the Department of Homeland Security fulfill its destiny as the American National Police Force; the repeal (or reinterpretation out of existence) of posse comitatus; and the deployment of the military’s new Northern Command over the people of this once-free land.

Some may try to pretend that the U.S. has become like the Soviet Union “allofasudden,” under the corrupt direction of recent leaders, but the truth is that our government has been turning into this imperial leviathan for generations, while the citizenry has bought every lie and cheered it on. It has taken the blundering stupidity and ruthlessness of this recent gang to make people see what’s happened – and now it may be too late to do anything about it.

There’s one course left open, and that is the election of the House of Representative every two years. (Look out, they’re trying to destroy that, too.) All bills for raising and appropriating revenue must originate in the House. They finally ended the Vietnam War by refusing to continue paying for it.

The U.S. Constitution provides us with the mechanism to completely purge our government without bloodshed – and we may not have many chances left. We could, theoretically, in this year’s primary elections, send the machine candidates in both parties home and completely purge the House of Representatives (current reelection rate 99 percent). But will the choice between republic or empire be on the ballot in 2006?