Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberty. Show all posts

Saturday, August 25, 2012

America: A Militarized Police State that Sexualizes Tyranny




‎"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."  General Omar Bradley

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."  Albert Einstein

"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again." Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Never in a million years could I ever have imagined that I would bear witness to the end of America and watch it churn into a Nazified Police State.  The compliant sheeple have shocked me into a new reality.

Every day, millions of Americans voluntarily consent and allow TSA sexual predators to grope and probe their breasts, vaginas, anuses, penises and testicles, all without a whimper of protest.

America has more folks locked up in prison than any nation on earth, including some of the most ruthlessly oppressive regimes ever to exist.

US Prison Population: The Largest in the World
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—more even than China or Russia. In fact, more people are in prisons in the United States than in all other developed countries combined. Professor Daniel J. D’Amico explains that as of 2010 over 1.6 million people were serving jail sentences in America.
The 4th amendment has been effectively nullified and law enforcement searches of citizens without probable cause or a warrant are now routine. The Supreme Court has upheld the right of law enforcement to perform cavity searches on anybody in police custody, even if picked up on a routine traffic violation.

Bend Over and Spread Em says the Supreme Court
Regarding the recent 5-4 SCOTUS decision to uphold strip searches, Supreme Court Justice Breyer describes a strip search in his dissent (joined by Kagan, Gingsberg and Sotomayor) as follows:

“‘..a visual inspection of the inmate’s naked body. This should include the inmate opening his mouth and moving his tongue up and down and from side to side, removing any dentures, running his hands through his hair, allowing his ears to be visually examined, lifting his arms to expose his arm pits, lifting his feet to examine the sole, spreading and/or lifting his testicles to expose the area behind them and bending over and/or spreading the cheeks of his buttocks to expose his anus. For females, the procedures are similar except females must in addition, squat to expose the vagina.’”

The Supreme Court has upheld the right of the police to do this to anybody for any reason who has the misfortune of ending up in police custody for any reason, including minor traffic violations.
As America morphs into a full fledged militarized police state, few are even noticing this horror, except for the civil liberties activists who are trying to fight these draconian assaults on liberty, and all without the support of even the people.  Moreover, the presence of the militarized police state doesn't even seem to bother anybody as Americans just accept it, along with many other assaults on their liberty, privacy and dignity.

How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police
Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed...

In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks.
Benjamin Franklin warned “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Franklin was right and he absolutely validates how sacrificing liberty for security ends just like Gibbons' described the end of the Roman Empire.  "In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.".

I shudder with horror at the thought that this is the future that Americans wants.  But based on the voting habits of the American people, it appears that they do not value liberty as they flee to the bosom of tyranny.  Such a choice will carry a horrific price from which there will be no escape.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Is Marxism Back?


In recent years, Marxists and socialists have been euphoric as their delusions kick in and they announce with glee that capitalism has failed and they have the smoking gun proof - collapsed economies and and human misery is piling up everywhere. Not that Marxists or socialists even know anything about capitalism but then again neither do capitalists or those masquerading as capitalists. In Europe, hardcore socialists have been elected, voted out of office and elected again. This happened in France where the French did indeed elect Francois Holland who campaigned on taxing the rich at a rate of 75%. Holland fulfilled his promise, here.

All those warm and fuzzy sounding "ism's" like communism, socialism, Marxism, progressivism, egalitarianism, communitarianism etc. have never really existed. The concept of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to their needs' has not only been proven to be a BIG fail, it's well documented that such ideologies killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, mostly by starvation.

Take the collectivist "ism's" and toss in fascism, corporatism, oligarchism and crony capitalism and what you get isn't something that benefits humanity and human prosperity but a monster that merely facilitates the massive concentration of wealth and power. The high ranking communist party officials never suffered and were well supplied with the finest of everything. It was everybody else who waited for hours in a breadline for a loaf of stale and moldy bread.

The west and its so-called 'soft socialism' is sinking faster than the Titanic but this isn't a failure of capitalism.  It's the failure of the evil fascist marriage between Big Government and Big Business that grew government by zapping the wealth of the people.

While I may have a hard time convincing a Republican that fascist crony capitalism is a bad idea and quite destructive to middle class prosperity, I have an even harder time convincing liberals that capitalism truly empowers the 99% at the expense of the 1% and that all forms of statism exclusively benefits the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

 How the 1% Defeated the 99% By Concentrating Wealth and Power

Collectivists everywhere are excited about a new and updated version of The Communist Manifesto. In fact, an economic blog, azizonomics.com, wrote about it in a piece titled Is Marxism Coming Back?
In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome...
That's an amazing statement. What is naked self interest, the callous 'cash payment' and a system of exploitation? That's just a dude working to survive and provide for his family. Since when is voluntarily hiring out your skills for wages an act of exploitation? While that's what humans have done since time immemorial, work to survive by making and trading goods and services, the collectivists somehow denigrate work and producing as an undesirable human  character flaw, with the major flaw being that an individual just might want to decide what he wants and needs vs taking orders from the government on his wants and needs.

Amazingly and despite the fact that collectivism vaporized 100 million folks, Professor Hobsbawm does understand that folks will be reluctant to accept Soviet style Marxism. Hobsbawm laments " “It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” and then goes on to suggest that communism will have to be redefined “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”  While the linking of humanist values to totalitarian collectivist hell  may be a stretch bordering on the lunatic fringe,  it's still a veiled suggestion that social change can and will painlessly produce the acceptance of communism (even though folks may not actually know they are being herded into communism).

With all its flaws and bad and unjust as it is, our deeply problematic corporatist economic system is still a much better deal for humanity than totalitarian collectivism. Still, we must continue to strive to shed the shackles of statism because it's absolutely crucial to human liberty.  Statism never recedes and it always tightens the noose around the necks of human beings until it squeezes the life out of them, their liberty and their prosperity.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. C.S. Lewis