"Rights," constitutional and otherwise

This is for George (yeah, our own, dear but benighted, president), and all the historically illiterate who have written to me in such stentorian tones on the subject of our "more honored in the breach than the observance" federal constitution. Folks, the U.S. Constitution does not "grant" anyone rights. Rights are recognized and observed by the U.S. Constitution, not "granted. Rights (the word is derived from old German, and was a concept unique to their cultures) are the gift of god, from birth, by virtue of being human.

A government, any government, unwilling to recognize and observe certain fundamental rights - those enumerated in the Constitution and Bill of Rights by the men who founded this nation - deserves, and ought to be overthrown. Heresy? Treason? Uh-uh. None other than Abraham Lincoln said exactly that: "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of their government, it is their constitutional right to alter it, and their revolutionary right to overthrow it."

This government systematically violated - rode roughshod over, in poetic phrase - all my rights as a citizen and human being. Make no mistake: if I get a chance to overthrow the United States' government - a government by criminal conspiracy - I will. That's my right, as a human being. As a man of honor, I consider it further to be a responsibility.

You need, all of you who spew your pseudo-patriotic claptrap, to come into the real world, out of the virtual one given you by nitwit movie makers and television evangelists who work to serve the new secular god, government. As the right of every living thing, the right to defense of one's life is most fundamental. That the oppressor is the public and their government does not change that. It makes it even more necessary. That the majority has decided to kill me, rape me, or deprive me of my property changes nothing except the perceived power equation. You think you're strong enough to do whatever you damned well please. You're not that strong. You're far, far more vulnerable than you know. In fact, were it not for the children among you, I would have destroyed you utterly. You were that close.

And don't imagine that others will have my compassion for your children, or my kind of honor.

Think about it.

Shooting at asteriods, starvation, terror-bombings, and those who watch from the sidelines

The latest on my website "blog" results from an e-mail message from my niece. Sweet girl. Lost in the virtual reality created for us by the media and its government overseers.

July 8, 2005:

Somebody has terror-bombed London. Despicable, that kind of thing. Hard to imagine the kind of son-of-a-bitch who would kill innocent people (well, they're not actually shooting at the bombers, and they didn't vote for the guys doing the shooting, so they think they're innocent) in the supposed furtherance of some whim of some supposed deity.

But that's religion, a form of largely self-induced mental derangement, if there ever was one (have you heard the latest edition of the never-ending Scopes Monkey Trial?)? But then, a couple of days before, a group of the super-rich (enough to shoot at things in outer space at ten billion dollars a shot) announced triumphantly that they had hit an asteroid flying past Jupiter. They didn't actually speak the words, of course, but the announcement also said that a man with enough money in his pocket to feed a homeless child for weeks, wearing clothes costing enough to feed him or her for months, and headed for a car costing enough to feed him or her for literally years had walked by him or her without so much as a "hello" or "good-bye." It said they, the consortium shooting at things in space, had spent enough to feed a nations poor for years on one high-tech bottle-rocket. It's their money, goddammit, and they're entitled to do whatever they want with it.

And we wonder why they hate us ("we" is not me, I hope you notice).

A couple of days ago, my niece e-mailed me to tell me one of those wonderful, feel-good stories about Iraq (no one notices how every time we get caught with our tool in somebody's private parts, there is this rash of warm, fuzzy stories saying how lucky the recipient is to be our latest love interest?). I wrote this back to her (the "situation" is a federal wonk sitting somewhere nearby, screwing up my computer in order to prevent my writing a couple of books—and maybe this, too; my e-mail includes a message from Yahoo, telling me that I've been sending out "huge" amounts of "spam," and that they'll cancel my account—my efforts to reply to their message get a "delivery failure" message). I write two or three e-mails, total, a month.

Anyway, this to my niece; "I'm not sure - witness the situation I just wrote to you about - that you sent me the story about the Iraqi woman, but stories like that are great. The CIA has an entire department - as many as two hundred professional writers at any given time, writing them. They're bullshit and horse manure. Hitler, Goebbels, and later Stalin, started doing that (have you seen "Enemy at the Gates?") seventy years ago.

Sweetheart, controlling people's minds is the business of government everywhere. Usually, that has always had to do with guns and truncheons. Our guys, though, are state of the art subtle. James J. Angleton - we called him "Virginia Slim" (he was skinny, and there was a cigarette then called that) was the Director of Counter-Intelligence at the CIA. "Deception," he said, "is a state of mind; deception is the mind of the state." Wake up. kiddo. If you want to know the truth, you have to think for yourself. Government will never tell it to you. Stop and think. Governments, all of them, want power. That powers corrupts we've known for two hundred years (since Lord Acton). Those who depend on politics for power endeavor to control the minds empowering them. They lie. Not exactly a revelation, historically.

Talk to Uncle Hal, you get the truth. Not very pleasant. Scary, even. And wait till you see what comes next. When the price of gasoline reaches three dollars a gallon, it will reach the mind of the public, too. They only care when it affects them. Fifty, a hundred, three thousand, killed—just numbers. Noises made with the mouth, tongue and tonsils. They've seen thousands, tens of thousands wounded and killed on TV and the movies. There's nothing difficult, or unpleasant there. They don't even have to clean up afterwards. There's no heat, no cold, no pain, no stench, no strain. No danger of any of that, even. All very intellectual. They like it. When the price of gas hits five dollars, things will begin to stop functioning. There will be heat, cold, pain, stench, effort. Airlines will stop flying. Trucking companies will charge what they have to in order to make profits large enough to continue that "standard of living" every "American" is "entitled to." Food prices will soar. So will the price of everything else. Choices will have to be made, hard ones. To stop the air-conditioning or stop driving. To stop driving or stop eating. Etc.

The spoiled brat public will clamor, demand that their government and military go get the oil they need. Oh, they will cloak the demand in humanitarian, "spread our freedom-loving way of life to the unwashed, ignorant, and oppressed nations" (all those people whose deprivation, hunger, and suffering weren't as important to us as a shot at an asteroid with a billion-dollar a round shotgun) hype and horse manure, but no one will be fooled. Not anymore. The other nations of the world, especially those who have the U.S. right where we've had them for all these decades, have expected that (when four guys at a banquet of a hundred demand thirty-five percent of the food on the table, the other ninety-six people notice) for a long, long time, and the proverbial shit will hit the proverbial fan.

What's my view of it all? Well, hell, folks—what was it you did to me? What would be your attitude, were you me? When you start doing your "thing," your own, apotheosized and peculiar version of cannibalism—"capitalism," you always call it—I'll be like everyone else you tried to kill and eat. What would you expect? Well I'll probably try to help you. I was always that way. But you won't listen, and I get my justice anyway. God is fair.