William S. Burroughs’ Thanks Giving Prayer

William S. Burroughs’ Thanks Giving Prayer

For John Dillinger, In hope he is still alive
Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts
thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger
thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —
thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers —
thanks for laboratory AIDS —
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —
thanks for a nation of finks — yes,
thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore —
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

American Idiots

OK, this post needs an intro, a theme song, if you will & only one thing comes to mind as the most appropriate.  That’s right boys & girls, it’s the X-Files Theme.  You know, because the truth is out there & don’t worry, it’s totally not what you think.
Some time ago Jen Hanson, an old friend from high school went on a rant of unbelievable proportions.  I was an idiot, I made the mistake of going to college, of majoring in history, of making myself blind to the vast conspiracy theories that have been perpetrated by the American government on our own people.  Hadn’t I heard about the FEMA camps in New Orleans?

Of course I did, there was a natural disaster there.

Well, what do you think happened to New Orleans?  Why do you think no one lives there anymore?

Hubawhatthefuck?

I was just in Baton Rouge for a job interview, drove out to New Orleans afterwords for what had to be the most disappointing gumbo & one of the best nights of debauchery in my adult life.   Went to the place that dude from Night Court owns.  Barely caught my flight home.

Well then I should have seen the mass graves, how could I have missed them, the government killed everyone in the city in the portable FEMA made concentration camps.  They depopulated the entire city because they were Black.

The thing is she really believed it.

Fine, I’ll admit there are some vast sweeping conspiracies that are true.  But we know their names, they’ve been outed, they’ve been published & reviewed:

PBSUCCESS, MKULTRA, OPERATION PAPERCLIP, and the list goes on, all of which you can look up through FOIA.

But my fellow Americans have chosen to look away from the out & out theft that’s happening before their very eyes & instead focus on the Lizard Aliens.

1) FEMA Death Camps

2) Obama’s declaration of Martial Law & a new Holocaust

3) Obama will cancel 2012 elections

4) Mass arrests of conservatives

5) Obama birth certificate

6) Lizard Aliens

7) The Illuminati

8) Liberals Hate America

9) Sharia law in America

10) Rothschilds

The list goes on & on & on & on, one of my new favorites comes from Rand Paul & the theory that Obama is arming the National Weather Service in his new bid for world domination.  You know, because meteorologists go through paramilitary training sometime between  taking exams, writing dissertations, & studying the ice around the keg.

Ultimately, as it stands, the reason why I don’t believe any of this crap is because I was highly indoctrinated in the super secret highly covert government controlled fascist-communist higher education system & even if I did believe, I certainly can’t talk about it given that my denial is of the Lizard Aliens is proof enough given that I am now a paid part of the super secret highly covert government controlled fascist-communist higher education system.

If I really wanted an education I should have dropped out of high school & logged onto the Libertarian sites on youtube.  Then I would know the truth.

Don’t you miss the heady days of the 90s when Elvis, Roswell, & JFK were the biggest conspiracy theories nut jobs would talk about.  OK, OK, I’ll admit, I think Allen Dulles had Kennedy killed, but that’s really as far as I’m willing to go.

We’ve turned into a nation of the insane.  Teachers are now the vile & hated villains of America.   You know, because unlike most of the population they are making a living wage while attempting to get your children into a position where they too can make a living wage, or at least do long division, think on their own, know their rights,understand why mixing acids & bases is not a good idea, run a mile, & use proper grammar.

Homosexuals & Code Pink are now a paramilitary threat looking to suppress the rights of women & homosexuals in America.

During the last Great Depression, we sought answers & fought for social security & pushed socialist candidates onto the ballot.  During this Great Depression  we’ve found the real answer, it’s the Lizard Aliens & I pray to God Almighty that they are getting their information off the original miniseries, because the remake of V sucks.

We have become a nation of the insane.  The reasons are simple, it’s because of conspiracy theories, & after all the people are more likely to believe the big lie than the small one, or in this case, far less likely to believe the truth that is glaring bright & right in front of our collective faces.

St. Patrick’s Day Reading List: `Ní tír gan teanga’

Camus, Albert (1991) The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.  New York, New York:

Vintage International

Coogan, Tim Pat (1990) Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland. New York, New

York: Palgrave

De Rosa, Peter (1990) Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916.  New York, New York: Fawcett

Books

Ellul, Jacques (1973) Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York, New

York: Vintage Books

Foer, Franklin (2004) How Soccer Explains the World. New York, New York: Harper

Perennial

Gildea, Robert (2003) Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914. Oxford, England:

Oxford University Press

Holliday, Laurel (1997) Children of “The Troubles:” Our Lives in the Crossfire of

Northern Ireland.  New York, New York: Washington Square Press

Kee, Robert (1972) The Green Flag Vol. 3: Ourselves Alone. London, England: Penguin

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, “The Troubles” by inevitable politics…..thanks dad.

An Angry Letter to American Liberals

I spent my time on the left in America.    No, that’s not correct, or rather that’s not accurate.  How about this:  I spent my time marching with the left.  By “Left” I don’t mean the “Democrats” I don’t mean what was, at the time, the Kerry crowd, I didn’t vote for Obama for president.  I haven’t voted for a Democrat for president since I was eighteen-years-old and didn’t know any better.  I remember the whole drive behind Obama in the 2008 election, I remember it vividly.  I remember wanting to vote for him, and part of what the far right is saying was true, a part of me wanted to vote for him because he was Black.  They are wrong about the whole “white guilt” part of their little perverse equation.  I’ve never felt guilty that I was white; I just felt that a Black president was historic, is historic, but what was more was the lingering hope that I might have been electing Dr. King as president.  That Obama might have had the same sensibilities.  King, after all, was in Memphis to support a strike, to support the working people of America.  He wasn’t on a race mission in Memphis; he was supporting my class, my people.    The temptation to support Obama was certainly there.

But then, Obama was a Democrat.  He was a liberal, and I had taken sides with the left in America.  I couldn’t betray them.  Obama might not have voted to go to war, but he was part of the party that supported it.  He was part of the party that denounced Moore when he made his Oscar speech.  I didn’t see “Hope & Change” in Obama, all I saw was “slightly better than Bush.”  In the end I voted third party.  I can’t even remember who I voted for, but I wrote his name down on a piece of paper & wrote him in when I voted.  I just couldn’t side with the people I was fighting against.  He might not have been Bush, he might not have been a Republican, but he was part of the party that supported Bush, and I couldn’t support that.  At the end, I think I was right, I’m content that I did the right thing, and that breaks my heart.  Deep down, I wanted to know that not voting for Obama was the biggest mistake of my life.  I didn’t want to be right.  Now we are looking at four more years of Obama, I’m not going to vote for him again, and again I’m hoping that I will be wrong about it.

Clinton killed my hopes for the Democrats in America.  Clinton passes NAFTA & with it took away my prospects for a decent job when I graduated.  I had no illusions about having my whole life ahead of me.  By the time I was graduating high school way back in ’98 I already knew enough people struggling and laid-off to understand my prospects were dim.  I was good at history & economics even back then, I understood that a white kid in the suburbs had advantages, but a white kid in the suburbs that knew college educated people searching for jobs meant that the situation would only get worse by the time I graduated.  I had already read Marx & Smith & Hitler & knew what I was facing.

I had grown up in a circle of liberal Democrats, and already leaned towards them.  But when I got to college I met the ISO, the International Socialist Organization.  The liberals were telling me that the Blacks needed Affirmative Action, that they had a culture of their own, & that if I thought there was a “Black Problem,” I was a racist.  The Socialists, on the other hand, told me something entirely different.  They told me that there IS a Black problem in America & the problem was class, the problem was that they part of a larger disenfranchised group of people in the United States.  The Socialists told me that all the “Black Cultural Heritage” & Affirmative Action wasn’t going to do a damn thing to help them.  The Socialists told me that if I wanted to improve my lot in life, I had to help them improve theirs & the only way to do that was to tear down the walls that are dividing us & help them to achieve the equality that the liberal pretend they already have.  The Black population in America is enormous & if they are doing better, than I will have the opportunity to do better.

Who was I going to believe?  The Liberals telling me that the Blacks were equal to them even if they lived in ghettos & were either unemployed or under-employed?  Was I going to believe the liberals that were telling me that if we had Affirmative Action it would create equality and solve the problem?  Or was I going to side with the Socialists that said, “Look, Sam, they are still living in the ghettos, they still don’t have access to good schools, & they are still an enormous disenfranchised bulk of the population, clearly more needs to be done.”  It’s impossible to argue against the people pointing to the ghettos & telling me to look & see for myself.  And you know what?  There were people struggling there & the system wasn’t doing anything to really help them.  America has its first Black president & the situation there has only gotten worse.

In college we had a feeling of rage.  I’m sorry; we had a strong feeling of RAGE.  We were livid, we were insane with anger.  We were mad that 9-11 happened, but we were even madder that 9-11 opened the door for endless killing.  Socialists are news addicts, they knew that Iraq had nothing to do with it whatsoever; they were the first to read that the yellow cake was a lie.  They knew friends and had family in the military, their parents served in Vietnam, even if they didn’t go to war themselves they understood what happens when you give frightened kids weapons & then push them into a live or die situation, they knew for a fact that the causalities were going to be more than just combatants.  Most of the liberals in America, at least at first, were supporting the war.  At least where I was, it was the Socialists that were the first people to organize against the killing.  They were the first to say that, no, war is murder, in fact, the ONLY thing that war is, is murder.  It’s not justified, we aren’t defending America, we’re just killing Muslims.

I remember the anger I felt more than anything else.  I remember the anger we felt, & that angry feeling is still more vivid than the marches and protests.    You marched down Michigan Avenue & you were shaking with rage, you were pointing out simple truths & no one was listening.  The liberals were largely still supporting war, at least the morality of the war.  They were appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air & MSNBC claiming that they were “reluctant war hawks,” persisting with the fact that Iraq would be better off with a military occupation than a stable government, no matter how brutal it may have been.  They were firing the journalists that didn’t tow the pro-war line, even in the liberal media.  They were attacking Moore for speaking out against the war only days after it was declared.  They instantly turned their guns on Noam Chomsky.

For those in the American left, the Wikileak videos of helicopters gunning down journalists & children wasn’t shocking.  The video was exactly what we were saying was happening.  We didn’t need to see it with our own eyes, we knew the people that were doing it.  We knew them because they came from our class of people.  We had heard the stories from our parents that had served in Vietnam.  We assumed, & assumed correctly, that the endless wars on terror would be no different.

And then came the domestic spying.  The USA PATRIOT ACT was passed and signed into law.  It would not have passed without support from the liberal in the government.  The police and FBI were sent to spy on anti-war groups, those that protested against the death penalty, & those that protested against ANY part of the system.  The most vocal among us were put on “no fly lists” and searched at the air ports, they were regarded as terrorists.  The government was running under the assumption that the people that were protesting against murder were the same people that were likeliest to commit murder.  And the liberals in America accepted that, they supported it.

The Liberals supported HR 1955, which would make this little rambling & the people that are reading it “domestic terrorists.”  It passed the House only to linger in limbo in the Senate, probably more because it meant that the Democrats would have also been labeled as terrorists more than because it would make civil disobedients terrorists.  The liberals in America ignored HR 4102, the Stop Outsourcing Security Act that would have phased out the private military contractors in Iraq & put the war & occupation back into the hands of government accountability.  Private security forces were outnumbering the people in the Pentagon, they were conducting intelligence work for the US Military, & the bill was stopped.  The liberals in the government didn’t ignore the bill as much as they rejected it.  They preferred to have our intelligence run by the people that worked for corporations that had a greater responsibility and loyalty to shareholders and profit than they did to America.

The sad thing is these views, my views, are still rejected by the liberals in America.  I want to live in a more just and equal world, I want to stop the killing, I want the same opportunities my father had, or more so, the same opportunities my grandfather had & the liberals in America label me a “crazy leftist” because of it.

But what is worse than that, is the fact that the right has moved so far to the right that the liberals that still support corporate interests, the liberals that supported bailing out the banks and not the people, the liberals that supported the wars, the liberals that supported the stripping of our civil liberties are now regarded as “Socialists” and “left wing radicals.”   The liberals in America are the vice of moderation between the financial elite and everyone else & this moderation is now seen as the far left.  Go no further, you will be off the map, here be monsters.

Instead we have a nation in the grips of fascism.  Or problems are blamed on the Blacks, the immigrants, the Jews in Israel, the Muslims, the Mexicans, the Feminists, the Homosexuals, & the people like me that want us all to have the same opportunities that my parents had.    When I was in college the people I knew were filled with rage, they were angry, now the people are hopeless.  Rage is bad for the government, anger is bad for the system, & hopelessness is bad for the people, bad for Americans.  The people that are angry are going to fight for the people, fight for themselves, side with King, X, & Debs.  The people that are hopeless are going to find someone to blame, they are going to take their side with the John Birch Society, the Heterosexual Organization for a Moral Environment, the new Fascist movements in America, Anne Coulter.  They are going to believe in conspiracy theories that give them something to blame, some minority group that if eradicated will solve all their problems.

I have Mexican neighbors.    A family, their middle son works at Pizza Hut & brings me back a pizza every now & again, he’ll show up at my door with food and relax with me over a beer.  The mother wakes me up at seven on Sunday morning to have coffee and donuts with them.  Every third Wednesday we have tacos together at the local Mexican grease pit.  I’m tutoring their daughter in history; I’m helping the mother with her English.  We are very close friends.    They liberals are the voice of moderation, not the voice of the left, fine, but if the right has it’s way, being as far right as they are, we could find ourselves in a situation where I’d be forced to hide the Gonzalez family in my apartment as if they were the Franks.  The political rhetoric is building up to that & I’m the one that’s crazy for rejecting that thought process.  And the liberals in America think I’m crazy for wanting them to have the same opportunities my father had.

The solution is simple.  As Chomsky said:

“Don’t take assumptions for granted.  Begin with taking a skeptical attitude towards anything that is conventional wisdom.  Make it justify itself.  It usually can’t.  Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted.  Try to think things through for yourself.  There is plenty of information.”

The liberals have to up their game.  They are now considered the left in America.  It’s about time they started acting like it.

Libertarianism

So Jen, an old High School friend, found me on the interwebs.  It was a shocker, especially since I had absolutely no idea who she was.  Sorry Jen, it’s not that you didn’t make the cut, there are a fair few things I don’t remember from high school, some very important.  In retrospect, now that I know who you were, I do have fairly clear memories of you, & like most of my high school memories, they are just as pointless as everything else in my life was at that time.  As much as I hate Nietzsche & the rest of his philosophical movement I’ll openly admit he does a fair job of infiltrating the teenaged mind.  The Smashing Pumpkins might have a done better & certainly more important job examining teenaged angst & philosophy, but outside of you Freddy, the only other person that really did a great job of examining the Objectivism of the bored, self-absorbed, mind of the teenager is Ayn Rand & there-in resides the problem & our topic.

You see, as it turns out Jen is a Libertarian.  I’ve run into a few Libertarians in my life time.  I get along pretty well with Libertarians, they always seem ready & willing to fight & I have to say I respect that in an individual.  After all, John Adams did say that an argument was the highest form of conversation & I have to agree with him.  I love a good fight, especially a political fight, well, a political fight with someone who isn’t your average GOP stooge.

Ultimately I do have a lot of respect for Libertarians.  I can see eye-to-eye with some of what they’re saying. But I do feel the need to rip them apart at the moment.  It is coming, but out of respect for their movement, I will list off some parts of the Libertarian platform that actually works.  I think I owe them that much.  Don’t get me wrong, they are crazy, but at least they are the better type of crazy.

The Good

1: Fiat money:  They are against it.  This is good because fiat money only works for the wealthy.

2: War: They are against this as well & so are great minds like Edwin Starr.

3: The argument:  They are doing their part to change it.

But what is Libertarianism?  Who the Hell knows?  Seriously, can you define it?  Can you properly define it?  If you’re European & you are reading this, “Libertarianism” probably has a much different definition than the one we’re used to in America.  Stop.  Freeze Frame.  Rewind.  What I meant to say is: “If you’re European & you are reading this, ‘Libertarianism’ probably has a much different definition than the on MOST OF US are used to in America.”  Yeah, it’s hard to define, but the gist of it is simple, the word “Libertarianism” has been defined historically & that historical definition is likely the one you are familiar with if you were born & raised in Europe or most of the rest of the world.  But like the word “Liberal,” “Libertarianism” has evolved to mean something completely different here in the good old U.S. of A.

Getting down to the historical brass tacks, as it were, Libertarians are by definition, the Liberals of their time, so much so that I’m not certain which word was more pervasive first.  Confusing?  Let’s go back a few hundred years.  The world is going through two separate revolutions.  The first & most important is a revolution of the mind, known collectively as “The Age of Enlightenment.”  The poor & down trodden, in other words the “Occupy Wall Street Scum” of their time have become educated, literate, & very, very angry at the strict class system we found under Divine Right Monarchy.  They wanted the means to move out of poverty & into the growing middle class, they didn’t want to starve as they toiled night & day to pamper & make the aristocrats wealthier.

These people lived in a largely agrarian society, under  extremely strict, close-minded, & pervasive religious institutions, & an economy run primarily through the forces of slavery & serfdom.  Thought control was strict & imposed by the religious institutions, reinforced by philosophers like Calvin & Hobbes (No relation to the cartoon), & harshly enforced a military that worked for the ruling class.  Life was brutish, nasty, & short.  The Libertarians of the time were the far left that wanted to overthrow the system, destroy the oppressive Christian faith, institute the radical leftist capitalist economic model which had evolved from Feudalism, shatter & behead the aristocracy & make a more egalitarian & democratic system.

Back in the day, well, the Libertarians were the Marxists of their time.  Words like “Citizen” were the crazy leftist speak akin to “comrade” today.  Remember, back then you were a “subject” NOT a “citizen” & certainly no where near as equal as a “comrade.”  The Libertarians were the insane Left.  The very thought of destroying the rule of the aristocracy & giving the people the chance to elect people to represent them in government was defined as “anarchy,”  it was a system that would NEVER, EVER, work.  Taking funds from the wealthy to redistribute to the people & create a capitalist economy was unjust redistribution of wealth & the sane good-hearted people of the world would have NOTHING to do with that.  It was considered murderous theft.  The Libertarian ideals if having the taxes help the people, NOT the aristocracy, was considered murderous theft.

It’s no wonder given this history, that Europe has morphed Libertarianism into a proto-anarchist movement labeled “Libertarian Socialism.”  That’s right, in the area where the movement developed, Marx & socialism are respected, not feared, exaggerated, hated, & never actually read.  Libertarianism to historians & many Europeans is associated with anarchism & socialism.  They have become a group opposed to the more conservative concepts of state socialism & evolved to embrace the more leftist concepts of socialism as defined by Marx & James Connolly, a type of socialism were the workers directly own the means of production.  They have become a group dedicated to direct democracy.

BUT NOT IN AMERICA

How did that happen?

Ayn Rand.

I believe it was Rand that caused the disconnect between Historical facts & flights of fantasy where every man has turned into John Galt.  This is the lady that invented Objectivism & with it warped the minds of a nation.

Lets forget for a moment that 90% of the conservative people who claim they follow the strict moral codes of the Bible & Jesus Christ are the same 90% of conservative peoples that follow the moral codes put forth in the philosophical writings of Ayn Rand who completely rejected both Christian Morality & the “Love thy Fellow Man” teachings of Jesus Christ.  I only bring it up because the moral majority that loves Jesus & hates “Liberal Atheists” & us “Catholic Bleeding Hearts” are following the morality of a woman who hated Jesus Christ & rejected Christian Morality.

Are you lost?  So am I.  If you put it under close examination it doesn’t really fit, in fact, it contradicts itself in its entirety.

But then, MOST American Libertarian beliefs contradict themselves entirely.

Libertarianism in America, as we know it in America, had its roots in the 1950s, in the form of a group of people who rejected the economic principles that took America out of the Great Depression & embraced the economic structure that, well, led us into the Great Depression in the first place, labeling the failed system as “liberty.”  From there, through the 1970’s the new party adopted many of the philosophies written by Rand, the same women who wrote our new American Bible; The Virtue of Selfishness.

The Bad

Problem 1: Laissez-faire

Now I am not clear on this piece of platform, I’ve heard different stories on it ranging from a problem with mega-corporations, to fiat money, to a vast conspiracy involving the Illuminati, NATO, & the UN.  so I’ll start with a definition.

Laissez-Faire:  is an economic environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies.  The term comes from the French, meaning roughly “Let it be.”

In any case, “Laissez-Faire” & “Deregulation” are terms used frequently as a simply stated solution to all our economic woes that can’t be answered by simply saying “no fiat money.”  Most often I’ve heard Libertarians argue that an insanely defined laissez-faire economic system is needed with absolutely no state or federal control over anything relating to the economy & absolutely no laws restricting or dealing with business dealings & actions in any way shape or form.

OK….soooo, let’s take a look at this American Libertarian extreme.

Child Labor is the first horror that springs to mind.  No laws regulating business means a reintroduction of child labor, some of our regulations on business are regulations preventing child labor & restricting the amount of hours & times that school students old enough to work can work.  Under the Libertarian economic system, these laws will disappear as well, so businesses will be free to employee children once more.

Minimum Wage laws follow at a close second.  Historically they were introduced for a two-fold reason, the first is to prevent the operation of sweatshops, the second is to prevent the need for child labor.  A guaranteed minimum wage for an adult worker, in theory, allows for a household income high enough to keep the children out of the sweatshops & put them into schools.  Most of us understand that minimum wage doesn’t actually allow a single person to pay all the bills, but with that gone, we come yet one step closer to the reintroduction of sweatshops & a family system where children can’t go to school & have to work to make enough for the family to be fed & sheltered.

Monopolies.  No just about every Libertarian I’ve spoken to will openly denounce the existence of monopolies or any corporation that has grown too large & come to control too much power.  YET, the economic system that they support, the complete deregulation they support, will also remove the laws put in place that help prevent the formations of monopolies.  The very thing they denounce will now be legal, the laws in place to regulate or at least slow the growth of monopoles & mega corporations will no longer be.  In essence, their economic platform completely legalizes the system that they are, in part, blaming on our economic problems.

Booms & Busts.  Anyone with a long memory, or at least anyone with a small background in American History can recall that our economy has never, ever, been stable for more than a decade….at least not until the introduction of Keynesian Economics & from it the birth of the middle class, which is new in the American experience.  What we had was a decade of booms followed closely by a decade of busts, always focused on the 99% of the people who were not lucky enough to be in control of the monopolies & mega corporations of the time.  The 99% that worked in the sweatshops & starved in the streets.  There were no regulations & nearly every other decade saw a depression.

This system of booms & busts, over time, came to form a Great Depression, so labeled largely because we became a global world, which meant that the small depression that hit one country running on a Laissez-Faire system effected the entire world, not unlike what is happening today.

The Summery:  In order to solve our economic crisis Libertarians want to bring us into a past with an even greater income & wealth divide & regular depressions with absolutely no laws in place protecting the people from big business & protecting small business from big business allowing for the formation of monopolies, the return of sweatshops, & the eventual & total destruction of the middle class.  Resetting our nation to the Gilded Age of sweatshops, the age of mansions & tenement houses.

Problem 2: Anarchy & Business

I have heard many Libertarians compare taxes with both murder & theft.  One one side the argument against taxes & a large Federal Government means strong anti-war policies, which is good given that the Military Industrial Complex & our two current wars are eating up the majority of our nation’s tax income as well as driving us even further into debt.

The problem here is that the Libertarians want to destroy the institutions we rely on every day in order to stop the murderous taxation on our fair people.

In order for them to do this, they are looking to take everything that we rely on through our tax dollars and give them over to private for-profit groups which run under a system with no laws or regulations holding them back.

Let’s take the Post Office, which is financially self-sufficient.  If you notice, the prices for mailing a package through the Post Office compared to a price of mailing a package through a private company you’ll notice that the USPS is not only cheaper, but often faster & more reliable.  However, this is part of the federal government & therefore evil.

You can say the same about education, which has many more problems than the USPS, but at least does educate everyone.  Private schools do not, private schools with no government involvement or regulations, or tax dollars will be for profit & educate fewer students than they do today.  After all, state colleges & universities have a bad rap for taking nearly anyone.  Private colleges like Harvard & Yale have great reputations for only taking the best of the best, or D students who have families that can make heavy donations & pay the tuition without scholarships or state & federal aid.

This rejection of a big government & taxes also falls down to the police force, the fire department, roads, libraries, courts, & nearly everything needed to run a functioning and safe society.

They do this for reasons of freedom & liberty.

The Facts: The simple fact is when you cut the taxes like the are fighting to cut & when you privatize the institutions they want to privatize suddenly these institutions become for profit, in the crudest most vulgar sense of the words. Your police force becomes a business & under these policies, a business with no regulations.

We will start with a private police force that operates for profit.  Under the Libertarian system the police force can only really operate as a for profit business, big government has been murdered & along with it most of the taxes subsidies even private police & fire departments depend on to survive.  The police are not forced to  make an income & by their mandate they will do it largely through arrests.

In America today we complain about our freedoms being violated by unnecessary stops & searches & tickets due to police quotas to insure that the police departments are doing their part in making our society a safer place.  If you suddenly & completely privatize the police force, you have a policing institution that is run like a business, a business that needs to turn a profit & like all businesses in America, a business that wants to turn a greater & greater profit each year.

The amount of unwarranted stop & searches ware going to go through the roof.  These cops are going to be under intense pressure to make arrests, and arrests, & as many as possible.  Like a salesmen or a production manager their jobs are on the line.  If the police are not making enough arrests to turn a profit for the station, they will probably be dismissed & replaced with someone who can.

The concepts of “freedom” & “liberty” have gone out the window.  They left with the first trumped-up charge the first person was arrested for so that the police office could save his job by generating profits for the people who own the police office.  You no longer own it, you don’t pay their checks with your taxes, the police force is privately owned by the people rich enough to buy them & you are still subject to them.  Subject, NOT Citizen.

You can find a historical example of this in the US with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.  Here we see examples of private individuals hiring a private for profit police force to terrorize US citizens on behalf of their business.  We even have examples of big business with government interests using the Pinkertons to police in ways that federal, state, & county laws & the Bill of Rights prevented public policing agencies from enforcing due to legal restraints.  In other-words, businesses were using tax payer money to hire private police on their behalf to break the law for business profits, more often than not to stop people from striking over things like child labor laws & minimum wages.

What’s more is that the people who now own the police are in the same class & socialize with the people who own most of the big businesses.  They are more likely to enforce laws that benefit their friends & ignore laws that benefit the people.  Their friends are more apt to be able to pay them, thus generating the profits they want.

Look at education & taxes.  Today many of the private schools are able to educate students through tax payer subsidies–often at the expense of public schools–once you completely eliminate the education system as a public institute, suddenly the only students that these completely tax-free private schools can afford to educate are the children of the people who can afford to pay for the education.  It costs a lot of money to run schools pay teachers, heat the buildings, provide electricity, supply the schools with the textbooks, computers, blackboards, desks, & so on.  All of this has been either paid for through taxes for both public & private charter schools.  If these are removed, the schools are forced into outstanding tuition hikes.  Look at our university system as an example, as their government subsidies are removed their tuition rises to cover the increasing costs & Americans are either forced into crippling debt to attend college, or simply cannot.  Under the Libertarian system America’s problems paying for college are going to double & families will find their way into the same crippling debt from the expense of primary & high school.

As far as the post office in concerned, I can’t wait until it’s gone & I am paying $5 every time I mail my rent to may landlord. And the same can be said about tolls on roads, road repair in areas that business doesn’t need for shipping & profit will disappear.  Water is largely public & the bills are often too high.  The list goes on & on & you life, liberty, & basic freedoms will be stripped away more & more as the society you depend on every day becomes total a for profit business.

In Summery:  Like many conservative arguments, the facts just don’t work.  Again we find the same problems we face every time we try to assess the right in American politics.  Essentially the past is idealized to the point of fantasy & the hard historical facts are ignored completely.  It appears that neither the basic Libertarian nor the people who are running for office under the party’s name have a little understanding of how much your taxes actually provide or make possible.

What will happen will be anarchy, only a horrible form of anarchy.  The leftist anarchist wants to eliminate government in order to empower the common man.  The Libertarian view is just as anarchistic, however rather than empowering the people, it’s empowering the same big business they blame the problem on & they are doing it at the expense of the people.

The Ugly

Now it’s not EVERY Libertarian, but more often than not when all else fails the arguments I hear resort to vast conspiracy theories.  Youtube is filled with conspiracy theory videos defending the Libertarian stance.  Many of these are utterly void of any facts or historical basis.

One of the most cited “eye-opening” videos I have been linked by Libertarians involves a link between the United Nations and the Social Security Act.  In the video the United Nations (founded in 1945) as a means to achieve the New World Order & bring America into the vast communist/fascist global conspiracy made the US government issue the Social Security Act in 1935.

I know, the dates don’t exactly work.  in fact, they don’t work at all.  But it’s a conservative world we have entered a world where Obama was still born in Africa & never graduated college, let alone taught at one.  Facts & history don’t matter & truth is only what people will believe, not what happened.

Here is a list of links to some of the ugliness, some of the conspiracy theories, that have been sent to me by Libertarians in order to persuade me their platform is valid.

The Invisible Empire

FEMA

Liberal Fascism

CIA Assassinations

Obama is Stalin

The Illuminati control your thoughts

Let’s face it, Libertarian propaganda fall short of historical fact, often even getting simple dates wrong.  Sometimes the attribute future events to the past, the past to the future, & at all times are backed by the belief that lizard aliens are turning America into a global communist entity with the help of Charlie Brown, the Illuminati, the ghost of Joe Stalin, & the resurrected corpse of John F. Kennedy.

It drives historians mad whenever we hear them speak & gives us the feeling that we have ultimately failed in our jobs when we hear them support their arguments with “the facts.”

The Bottom Line

Government is still who gets what, when, & how.  You still have two basic sides of the argument, the left believes that the system should be more egalitarian.  The right believes that the system should be more exclusive.  The libertarians, at least the libertarians in America, are taking as extreme a right stance as the Tea Party, only with a slightly hipper argument.  The bottom line is, even the libertarians are fighting for a platform that arguments that who gets what, when, & how, should be exclusive as humanly possible.

Yeah, that’s on my shoe

When I was getting into graduate school, they continually demanded the transcripts from UC Berkeley, which I never attended, but apparently my social security number has.   Now, while going to China–attempting to go to China–I’m facing off against a long dead 90-plus-year-old dead man in St. Louis, this is despite the fact that five other background checks totally missed the fact that I’m dead.  Or at least the St. Louis medical doctor that shared my name & got arrested in 1956 is, in fact, dead.   That is the tip of the ice berg in my life, suffice it to say, if there’s shit, I’m stepping in it.

Are You Smarter than a Teacher?

First things first, I’m going to come right out & say it.  This dude, for the most part, knows how to make a solid point.  I’ve read through his blog & though I don’t agree with most of it, it still makes a fair enough point where I’m going to continue to read it.    I know, I know, I know, it sounds like a compliment, but it’s a compliment from a dude that will read ANYTHING.    Seriously, I read American Thinker & Yahoo! Answers politics page.  So you can either feel proud or ashamed that you’ve made my regular news circulation.

But he’s been debating me over private & public schools under my blog post The Problem with Privatized Schools. But even when he’s fighting me, he still makes strong points.  But there is something that is pissing me off.

Now it could be I’m overly sensitive on this issue because I was a teacher & have strong first hand knowledge about the inner workings of our national education system both private & public.  It could be because I’ve watched Waiting for ‘Superman’ & saw it for the propaganda film that it was & am still pissed that people can & do watch one documentary & suddenly know everything about the subject.  Or it could simply be that I taught history & government & am still upset with the Tea Party.  I’m not sure what it is, but I am, admittingly overly sensitive.

But then, in my time as a government teacher I had parents tell me “You should watch less CNN & more Fox News.”  I’ve been told that I’m teaching fake history because everyone knows that the US fought a German/Russian alliance during World War II, & that I should stop teaching their children pro-communist indoctrination.  It could be because I’ve seen politics rewrite history, I’ve heard Palin make an inaccurate remark about Paul Revere Midnight Run, & I’ve seen the press attack her for the wrong part of it.  When she first said it, she was right, Paul never completed the run, she was wrong about the rest of it, but initially the press attacked her for the wrong correct fact.

If that makes any sense.

When you teach history & government you are not expected to teach history as it happened.  People instantly assume that history teachers do not know history.  People want you to teach their version of history.  Thanks to American politics I was told that I have to teach that the Founding Fathers, the great F.F., worked tirelessly to free the slaves.  I was expected to know that, as a history teacher & an educator.  I was also expected to know a lot more than that too.  I was expected to know that Communism & Fascism were the exact same thing, you know, despite the fact that they are & have been bitter enemies since they were created.  Those are only a few examples, don’t get me started over the issues that will come up when you teach Thomas Paine, or Thomas Jefferson, or Eugene Debs, or the absolute parental nightmare that you can expect to face while teaching The US Constitution.

Believe me, my principle & I, the school board & I, have had countless meetings with Tea Party parents dealing specifically with indoctrinating their youth.  Most of the time, the Tea Party wins.  Now keep in mind that they don’t win because they are correct, they win because they out vote us.  They out vote us because liberals generally don’t show up to school board meetings.  It’s really democracy in action.  You liberals can counter that by showing up to the meetings in greater numbers than the Tea Party.  That is kind of how democracy works.

Apparently, however, as an educator, I’m also expected to know that private schools, without this type of democracy are somehow more democratic than public schools where you have a say in what your children learn.  I’m supposed to know this because, somehow, tax dollars & institutions run through tax dollars are less democratic….despite the fact that you have a say in just about any institution that you pay for through taxes.

What?

I know, it doesn’t really make any sense.  But then I’m a teacher, & even the people who praise my noble profession are better at it than I am.  It’s en vogue to assume that teachers are drooling idiots & terrible human beings.  And if you don’t bring it to that extreme, it’s en vogue to at least assume that people who study & teach history know less about both education & the subjects they are teaching  than people who work in banks, retail, factories, or any other profession.

As a teacher you are stuck between a rock & a hard spot.  As a teacher you deal with your subject & education every day.  You live it, you breath it, & then you take it home with you & grade it off the clock.  Sure, you have summer vacation–a good point of which is used to plan for the next year–but most of that time, if you teach history or science, you’re a buff, you spend that time feeding the fetish, as it were.

It seems to be the only profession that everyone else thinks they know more than the professionals.  And for teachers, that sucks, out & out.  Seriously, try doing any other job with a thousand people standing over your shoulder, people who have never studied or worked in your field, all shouting at you & telling you exactly how to do the job that they have never done before.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of teachers that love private schools.  There are plenty of teachers that will tell you private schools will give you a better education.  That’s fair enough.  I can see why.  When you are a teacher, private schools are tempting, sure you get paid less, you don’t get the same or any benefits, but on the other hand, you also don’t have the local green grocer telling you how to do your job every day.  Private schools are nice, because you are only dealing with wealthy students that have parents that help them with their homework, parents that can afford to send them to private schools.  And these parents have more respect for you because they assume that you know what you’re doing because they are paying for you to teach their children out of their pocket rather than out of their taxes.  And you know what, they do tend to be better, even though they are hiring the cheaper teachers, they are better because teachers don’t have to worry about what the people say.  The people have no say.    The teachers don’t have democracy breathing down their necks, for good or ill.

But that is just my opinion, you know more about it than we do.

On to Cathay!!!!!!

I am moving to China. Well not now, but soon.  I am a background check & a health test away from China.  Truth be told, I’m scared shitless.  Honestly.  And it’s not the horror stories my buddy Magnus is sending me over the wire from Germany:  “Watch out for the toilets, you Americans don’t have the thigh properly power to properly hover.”   It’s really kind of a First Amendment thing.  I’m an American, you know, & unless you’re a right-wing nut job, it’s the First Amendment you worship.  I am a sane American, I can’t hide behind the Second Amendment, it’s not protecting me like the First is, I’m not the type of person that needs to wave the Second Amendment around in your face, I don’t bring a Glock-7 into the corner to buy a bag of chips.  I don’t even own a Glock-7, I’m a historian, historians are nearly exclusively 1911 guys.  You know, Browning made it, & he was a genius,  so it has that going for it, & then, you know, there’s the historian thing, as a race, we’re wimps, if I shoot you I don’t want you to get back up, because then you’re probably going to kick my ass.  A .9mm is not going to do the trick, but a .45 will drop your dead.

Don’t get me wrong, I support the 2nd Amendment, well, all ten of them actually.  I’m not a fake liberal, I’m in this shit for the long run.  I firmly believe that as a people, you can NEVER have too much freedom.   Hell, I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve been damn lucky I knew the Bill of Rights by heart.  I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve had to use Amendments other than the First to remain free, I went to college, after all, people smoke dope in college.  Sure, I’ll admit that too much freedom creates problems, but I’d rather deal with those problems than those other problems.  You know, those problems that you get when you don’t have enough freedom.

Being who I am–& my sister, father, & mother have all pointed it out–I’m a pilgrim about to travel to an unholy land.  I mean, if you read my blog, I’ve pissed all over America.  A little bit more than that actually.  In some of my posts, the ones back in the day before I realized that people stop reading your blog the moment they see a footnote, I sort of dropped trow and squeezed out a Cleveland Steamer on my country.  And if you have a problem with it, well then fuck you, its my right to do it.  And you know what?   If you don’t like it, thanks to the First Amendment, it’s also my right to tell you to go FUCK yourself.  Because I, like everyone else in America, have the First Amendment protecting my over-opinionated self-righteous ass.

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yeah, I know, I get way to hard when I read that.  It’s the most beautiful thing on earth.  Unlike so many other laws we have in America, this wasn’t created by a bunch of drooling Neanderthals, this was written by geniuses that had seen their printing presses smashed by, what was at the time, the freest country in the world.  They understood that words have power, that words would make or break their revolution.  And they also understood that words would keep their new world free, just look at Adams & Jefferson, it was words–& very harsh words–that won that election.  There’s a reason why they put words first.

Flag.  It could be an upbringing thing.  Flag.  It’s more than just a villain in a Stephen King novel.  My father thinks the American flag is the most beautiful flag in the world.  I’m going to have to play the bull shit card on that one.  I’m a historian, I’ve seen about every flag there is, & everyone knows that Alaska has the most beautiful flag on earth.  Followed closely by Canada & Japan.  I understand where my father is coming from, The American Flag is not just a tricolour,  every country has a tricolor.  Tricolors are not only dull, they are overdone.  The American Flag is like the Union Jack, you know, it has an actual design on it.  The Union Jack is a pretty cool looking flag, so is the Betsy Ross Flag, I like the circle thing more than the field, it’s a bit more pleasing to the eye.  But personally, I’m of the view that flags, like National Anthems, should be about something beautiful people can see when they visit you.  In that respect, America the Beautiful is a far better choice.  Trust me on this, I’ve been all over America, I’ve seen both the purple mountain majesty & the amber waves of grain, & you know what, they are both breath-taking.  Tricolors remind me too much of governments, nations should be first & foremost about the people.  That is what nation means, after all.

But flags, at least in America, are a hot button issue.  I remember not to long ago under Bush, they tried to make it illegal to burn the flag.  My father was in a mad uproar & vowed to be the first person arrested, if they actually passed the bill.  Mind you, this is the man who will knock you flat if he ever caught you burning the flag.  He looks at it as the gravest insult to the American people.  Fuck the government, it’s the people he’s protecting when he attacks flag burners.  But then, it’s the First Amendment he’s defending when he gets all up in arms about the close-minded fascists that want to make it illegal to burn the flag.

Try burning the flag in China, and you end up in a forced labor camp.  China is not only lacking a First Amendment, they are also lacking an Eighth Amendment.  In America, our Eighth is slowly decaying, but China never even had an Eighth.  That is a frightening fucking thought for a Westerner–for an American Westerner that likes to shoot his mouth off.  I’m going to be living & working & teaching in a country that doesn’t have a First or an Eighth Amendment to protect my over-opinionated self-righteous ass.  I’ll bitch & moan all I want America–& I do, at length, if you want to hear it or not–but at least here in America, that’s my unalienable right.  Seriously, the moment you take away my right to say this nation is turning into a steaming pile of dog shit, the moment you take away my right to say that Hunter Thompson was right, & the American dream is fucked, that’s the moment you & I are no longer living in America.

So I’m going to China.  Facebook, youtube, WordPress, Skype, World of Warcraft, myspace, ISOhunt, twitter, google, wikipedia, banned in China.  In fact, here is a list of words you are not allowed to search in China, and here is a list of websites that are blocked by the Great Firewall of China.  Playboy is blocked in China.  In fact pornography is illegal in China.  China has one of the harshest anti-pornography laws in the world.  Obviously I am going to a world where logic is void.  Let’s face it, the very reason why it takes me so long to write these posts is because of pornography.  A nation that is so frightened it’s people will rise up & overthrow it should have long ago found the wonders of pornography.  Pornography is a distraction.  Pornography will keep many a potential revolutionary from accessing the information they need to really see through the haze China has created & start pushing for human rights.  Let’s face it, if you want to keep your people distracted from the truth, you want pornography & drugs to be legal.

So yes, I’m very frightened to be leaving the safety of the west for the authoritarianism of the east.  Especially at a time, where certain political parties in America want stricter morality laws, a time when the Tea Party wants to enter into the private lives of Americans & restrict just about every freedom save the Second Amendment.

I’m going from citizen to subject & that is a very frightening thing.

The Music Whore & Wikipedia

I don’t mean to complain & I do applaud Bono for actually using his celebrity to make the world a better place.  But if you look at the Wikipedia article about him, the man who will perform with anyone, you’ll find a few startling facts.

The first is that the article on him is pathetically short on music.

I’ll defend War.

I’ll defend The Unforgettable Fire.

I’ll defend The Joshua Tree & Rattle & Hum,  I might even defend Achtung Baby.

I’m NOT going to defend Zooropa.  You lost me there guys.

Sorry, Bono, but when I look you up on the inter-webs, I’m looking for music, not Humanitarian Work.

Keeping that in mind, it turns out the Bono article is locked, not because of vandalism spawned by the arguable fact that his recent shit, just, well, sucks really, really bad because U2 lost all the edge it was threatening to get back in the early 90s but never really came through on. No, that’s totally not the reason why the Bono page is locked.

Well, semi-locked.

The article about Bono is locked because of conservatives vandalizing his page because of his humanitarian work.

Seriously, some overly sensitive Tea-bagger vandalized Bono’s Wiki-article because somehow wanting to feed a bunch of starving kids in Africa is offensive to him & he feels the uncontrollable urge to continually label charity as “communist,” dude, whoever you are you suck.  Seriously, you suck more than No Line on the Horizon.

And all I wanted to do was find out if he ever actually did that thing with Mick Jagger.

7 Billion, That’s with a “B”

Try my best to keep this short.  There’s an old Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times.”  If you get a degree or so in history the curse has special meaning to it, generally speaking, you don’t spend much time studying the uninteresting times.    Even if you teach history you don’t spend much time teaching the uninteresting times, especially high school history where if you want to keep the student’s attention there’s really one rule,”carnage candy.”  Now you do have to be a little socially off to study history, you have to be able to say to yourself, “that’s disgusting, I have to learn more about it,”  & a fair few times you have to be able to look at a decayed corpse of your human brethren & be fascinated by it, not repulsed.  Yes it’s a dead body, yes it smells, but you know what, that body has a story to tell, & no matter how close it looks to the Crypt Keeper, you sort of have to be more focused on the potential story behind what Lindow Man has to tell you rather than how utterly disgusting he looks.  Besides mummies usually smell good, kind of like incense.

Despite the fascination with the morbid, unless you’re talking to a complete psychopath, if you ask a historian what time he or she would most like to live in, chances are, they aren’t going to answer with the time period they specialize in.  You won’t hear “Yes, I’d like to live in America during the Civil War,”  or, “I would love to be alive in Russia during Stalin’s Purges,” it’s probably not going to happen.  They are, more often than not, going to pick a time & place that they’ve never spent much time teaching about.  If you live in the interesting times, you’re likely to see your family slaughtered, brother pitted against brother, or just end up working yourself to death in Siberia.  Even if you keep your head down and your mouth shut.

It’s a wonder we’re still here at all, let alone now have 7 Billion people.

And that poor 7th Billion person was born into one of the most interesting times this world has ever seen.  Let’s recap.

1) There’s a protest on Wall Street that has spread to LA, & over seas to China, Germany, England, Spain, & so on.  This has never really happened before in the world, at least not the way it’s happening now, & the prospects for the future are ominous.    Generally, when these things happen, the powers that be are less than understanding about it, we’re probably lucky Obama is attempting to buy them off with trinkets, you know, rather than locking them away in a nameless prison & forcing them to work themselves to death in Siberia.

2) There was a very recent nuclear meltdown in Japan, & currently a protest requesting an end to nuclear power, & if not that, the Japanese government should at least move people out of the area & give them the medical attention they need.

3) There’s a global food shortage, especially in India where thousands of farmers are offing themselves in record numbers due to the debt that is causing the famine.  Famines, recently, are financial.  Black 47 was a year where Ireland was creating enough food to feed the Irish, but instead it was being sent over to England, at a mark-up, a country that already had enough food.  In this case, the cause is Monsanto.  Monsanto is a private company that controls our world’s food source, or at least the seed stock, India & a number of other countries can’t afford to buy the genetically altered seeds from the company, at least without out & out bankruptcy, & they can’t save seed either, because these seeds kill themselves.   So again we have famine, for profit.  There’s enough food out there, but you’re probably not going to eat any of it, number 7 Billion, in enough time, I probably won’t either, unless something drastic & utterly depressing happens to the world.

4) Let’s not forget about the Arab Spring.  The Eastern World, it is exploding, violence flaring, bullets loading, & all that & a bag of chips.  It’s not exactly a singular thing, it’s called the Arab Spring because it’s happening all over that part of the world.  No one in any type of authority, podium, press, or pulpit, can tell you the outcome, chaos & carnage, & Saudi Arabia is doing their best to oppress the spirit of the Arab Spring out of their people & using Blackwater to do it, which, usually backfires, horribly.

5) And of course there’s the global money shortage, strikes in Greece, all that manner of Global Feudal nastiness that brings us back to 1 through 4.  Let’s face facts here, number 7 Billion is born into a world that has grown sick & tired of being serfs to the upper-class.  It doesn’t bode well, at least to all of us with a long enough memory to remember the global spark of revolution, violence, & reigns of terror that brought the end to feudalism about 300-years-ago.

6)  And then there’s peace in Ireland.  Bono & Clinton forced Adams & Blair to sit down & talk things out, despite the snakes Patrick left in the north.  The Troubles could be essentially over.  Saint John the Divine added that little point as a harbinger of doom for the world, the first mark of the coming of the end times, & he wrote his little gem of misinterpreted gospel about 600 years before Henry II started that mess.  Not to mention the fact that the Stone of Scone is back in Scotland.

OK, maybe number 6 was a fairly dark joke, but just as Europe is getting it’s act together & has stopped killing each other over money & empire, they’ve hit the global economic block.  Thank God they have a social state-based safety net, otherwise they may be as hard up as we are here in the states.  But I don’t know, England is privatizing their medical system aren’t they?   Not a good idea.  Just ask how much my sister had to pay to give birth to my nephew.

So welcome to the World number 7 Billion, I hope you survive the experience.