Wednesday, November 30, 2005

The Beginning of the End

EXTREME WARNING
Key warming ocean current slowing down


By Jeremy Lovell

The Atlantic Conveyor, a life-giving ocean current that keeps northern Europe warm, is slowing down, scientists said on Wednesday.

If the 30 percent slowdown seen over the past 12 years is not just a blip, temperatures in northern Europe could drop significantly, despite global warming, they added.

Scientists have long forecast that the Atlantic Conveyor that carries warm surface water north and cold deep water back to the equator could break down because of global warming.

According to the theory, rising air temperatures cause ice caps to melt, making the water less salty and therefore less dense so it can't sink and flow back south.

The scientists on Wednesday said this was the first time that observations had put flesh on the bones of the theory.

"This is the first time we have observed a change in the current on a human timescale," oceanographer Harry Bryden said, noting that it had completely shut down during the ice ages.

But he said the latest figures were far from proving a trend and that constant and long-term monitoring was needed.

"It is like a radiator heating the atmosphere and is too important to leave to periodic observations," Bryden told a news conference to flesh out a paper he co-authored in Nature science journal.

FROM MOROCCO TO MIAMI

The Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research has calculated that if the current stopped, temperatures in northern Europe could drop by up to six degrees centigrade in 20 years.

The latest figures, collated last year, are from a string of monitoring devices at various depths in the Atlantic from Morocco to Miami.

It was the fifth snapshot since 1957 taken in the same area of the temperatures and currents in shallow, mid and deep ocean.

While measurements in 1981 and 1992 had shown little change, those in 1998 and 2004 had shown a major shift, with less of the warming Gulf Stream getting up to Greenland and less of the cold, deep returning current coming back.

The so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current is known as the Atlantic Conveyor, of which the Gulf Stream is the surface component.

"This is tantalizing evidence that there may be a large change in ocean circulation under way that paradoxically could cause regional cooling," said Phil Newton of Britain's independent Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

However, the scientists stressed that they could not be completely sure what was driving the change or how it might alter or be compensated for by winds that pick up the radiated heat and circulate it.
******

They know!.....and it isn't nice...beware of extreme changes starting NOW!

Listen...children.....listen.....
the Long Emergency


Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America.

Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work.

Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale.

The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work.

The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream.

These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy.

The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century.

Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now.

The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.

The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous.

In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.

Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss.

The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage.

The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.

Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.


Listen......children...listen....
...

UPDATE:

Climate Has ‘Exceeded Crucial Threshold’
Earth's climate is undergoing an abrupt change, with the warming around Earth's tropical belt suggesting that the "climate system has exceeded a critical threshold", according to Lonnie Thompson, a scientist who has been taking core samples from the ice of glaciers for 23 years. As a result, Thompson says, the world may have to adapt more quickly than expected to rising temperatures, higher sea levels, and severe storms.

Reality Isn't What It Used to Be

Reality Isn't What It Used to Be
by Michael Mendizza

As Merlin was to young King Arthur, so every adult must become to every child. Intimate connection and authentic play are the teachers and the subject to be mastered.

Sitting across the table were three large natives, Maori from New Zealand, traditional healers. I asked about their roots, where they came from, about their ancestors, how they were trained, what spirit and soul meant to them. The oldest pointed to the stars, described a particular constellation. His roots were there, he said, and he has carried the essence of that constellation long before he was born. The actual place in the sky, I asked, or was he using this heavenly body as a metaphor, and if he was using metaphor, what was the metaphor pointing to? What was the essence or state of being that the metaphor represented?

He smiled.

Six months earlier I sat with a Celt from Brittany. He, like the Maori, talked of multiple realities. What you and I think of as reality is just one of many, perhaps an infinite spectrum of realities, each very real while in them. Sane or healthy in one reality may be mad or dis-eased in another. Documented cases of multiple personalities have shown the body of one covered in hives. When the other personality takes over the rash disappears.
We might rename this phenomena a multiple-reality disorder.
Why a disorder?
Because the switch from one personality or reality to the other did not appear to happen by choice. But what if it did?
Would we consider this ability to switch realities a disorder or enlightenment?

Imagine having poor eyesight in one reality, but 20/20 in another. Imagine being afraid of public speaking in one personality or reality but in another you were brilliant in front of a group. Switching from one reality to another would be a spontaneous remission. It may be that our real disorder is not being sufficiently aware of the operating system of our spaceship, body and mind, to consciously and creatively surf realities.

Beliefs are realities.

Beliefs predispose and organize the body and mind in predictable ways.
In the Christian tradition being born again implies, does it not, shifting from one reality to another.
Racial prejudice is a reality.
The Nazis lived in a unique reality.
Urban ghetto children have their reality.

Politicians have theirs. All the categories we live our lives in are realities.
In The Biology of Transcendence friend and mentor Joseph Chilton Pearce describes how enculturation, parenting, religion, schooling, competition and other forces limit and constrain our vast potential into a tiny anxious self-centered cube we call ME, our self-image, what I call "the box." The box is a belief system. The category called ME, male, female, mother, father, black, brown, white, smart, PhD, dumb, CEO, are all realities, and while in them very real indeed. All realities are relative and each reality is real. After all, dreams are real while we are dreaming.

Reality appears in consciousness the way the northern lights dance in the evening sky. The difference between what we call dreaming and waking consciousness is the quality of awareness and attention present as our dreams splash in and out of the body and mind. Each memory is a mini-reality. We have ecstatic experiences, pure pleasure, beyond orgasmic. And we have suffered excruciating sorrow. Each, the pleasure and the pain, imprint their pattern or state in the cells of our body, in our DNA and perhaps more deeply in the energetic ocean that surrounds us. The patterns of the pleasure and the pain are there, in the cells and in the energy.

Some associative trigger, a sight, smell, that song on the radio, causes a re-membering (a reconstruction) of the original experience, which was, at one point in time-space, very real. If we gave complete attention to that memory it would reincarnate in the present moment and again be real. But we don't usually give this complete attention. Most often our body and mind is preoccupied with the present reality while ghosts of projected past and futures ebb and flow throughout the system.

What we call normal reality is a composite of multiple realities, physical coming in through our senses, resonate feelings of present or past experiences, thoughts, stored memories and perhaps, if we have retained our childlike nature, we may still connect with realities beyond our personal conditioning, the transpersonal realm physicists and philosophers call insight and shamans call spirit.

The human brain evolved over billions of years.

As different brain systems developed so did corresponding realities unique to each brain structure. The sensory motor brain came first, providing inner images of the outer environment, so we could eat it, run away from it or mate with it. Let's call the inner images provided by the sensory-motor brain reality number one. Millions and million of years later grew another reality, number two, generated by the limbic or mammalian brain. This brain system monitors inner state, how we feel about chasing after, running away from or mating. Millions and millions of years later emerged a symbolic and metaphoric reality created by the neocortex, allowing us to represent the chase and the mate in symbols.

All three brain systems create images, realities, or more precisely "resonate representations" unique to its slice of the experiential pie. Each system creates images but the images created by each are different in form, as different as painting is to music and music is to sculpture.
What we call reality is a stream of resonate representations generated by the unique constitution of our different brain systems. Reality to a cat is very real and very different from that of a bat or fish. There are many realities, perhaps infinite variety, all relative and all very real.

Physicist David Bohm observed that complex systems imply or embody less complex systems. The more complex the brain the wider the spectrum of resonate representations or different realities that brain system may produce.

Recall how Merlin, in the Shamanic tradition, taught young King Arthur to soar with the falcon, not as an observer, but to share the falcon's reality and in that sharing cultivate deep empathic rapport with the spectrum of life we call falcon. Much of Merlin's magic involved surfing realities and historically all of the realities were grounded in nature, plants, animals, human beings, rivers, the stars, but not any more. Fish can't experience the rich diversity of human perception but human beings embody the stage of evolution called fish and because of this embodiment can experience that stage, now. It was from this perspective that J. Krishnamurti observed that "we are the world."

Fast forward to today's young Kings Arthurs.

Who are their Merlins?

And what realities are they sharing - animal, mineral, or technology? It took nature billions of years to create the sensory motor system, and what a marvel it is. Only with a firm and clear grasp of our sensory-motor reality can proper functioning of reality two, emotional intelligence, emerge. Improper development of the primary system distorts the reality generated by that system causing false or misleading messages to flow upstream. Responding to often misinformation, the mid-brain gets all excited and sends its distorted reality to the neocortex. How can we possibly expect thought, belief, society and culture to operate sanely if our physical and emotional systems are poorly developed or confused by their own processes?

The Buddhists proclaim an absolute, transpersonal reality uncontaminated by individual conditioning. They also describe a relative reality filled with all the images produced by past experience, memory and thought. In low states of attention the automatic, reflexive nature of the conditioned relative reality occupies our awareness.

The critical question is: are we completely taken in by this conditioned reality or is there some energy, some awareness and attention that abides beyond the dream, what many traditions call "the witness" or mindfulness?

Without this extra energy and attention we are enchanted, lost in an endless stream of dreams, floating in a bucket, heading for the Niagara Falls of our own creation, unaware that we are the river, the falls and the bucket. Our normal state is to be completely taken in by the image. It is quite another state to be aware that the image or reality we are responding to is of our own creation.

The message is very old, "Know thy self." The self referred to is not the nervous egocentric self-image we have accepted. Using computer terms we might say "knowing our self" means gaining an understanding of the basic operating system, as a skilled car mechanic might know the design of an engine.

Many of us have skilled knowledge about our physical bodies. Eating vegetables is good. Smoking is bad. Regular vigorous exercise is good. Sitting too long in front of a video or computer screen is bad. So we walk, job, ride bicycles, play golf or at least know we should. But what about emotional fitness? In what ways are we nurturing and developing our emotional capacity?

What does the emotional gymnasium look like? What experiences do we find there? And what about imagination, reason, ratio, the critical and abstract capacities of the neocortex? We expect that school is the gymnasium for developing symbolic and metaphoric processes. But is this really what is taking place in our schools? More abstract yet is attention. Attention is the critical capacity upon which all other capacities depend. Without attention our physical, emotional, and intellectual engines have no juice, no energy, no power.

We have different grades of gasoline for our cars. The same is true of attention, very low, low, medium, above average, high, premium and turbo. The quality of attention we bring to the present moment provides fuel for our physical, emotional and intellectual systems. The development of each system plus the quality of attention or fuel we deliver to that system, moment by moment, produces the ever changing display of resonate representations we call reality.
So called spiritual traditions have known this for centuries. In these traditions are found all sorts of exercises for gathering attention, using imagination, understanding the emotions and moving the body. Most people, however, are so enchanted by the images they are producing that they walk by gigantic billboards like the sphinx, obelisks, pyramids, temples, churches, all forms of sacred geometry, completely unaware that these are invitations and gymnasiums for cultivating attention. Certainly not invitations to get lost in the imagery painted on their walls.

For regular folk the images on the walls, mythology and story (all images) were ancient ways of helping us to know ourselves. Being stuck in images, sages used images to help us out. The field of psychology, of which I am no expert, gave this important task a new, often confusing, twist. Myth, story and very often psychology dealt with the images generated by the system. Rarely did these traditions deal with the image making process. Contemplation, meditation and a few other practices came close.

The developmental goal of these practices is first to have an insight into the various ways our brains create images and second, to cultivate a quality of attention that is not totally consumed by these images. Only then do we have the capacity to see beyond our own images and experience directly the face of God, as was so beautifully described in the 15th century by St. John of the Cross.

The Latin root of the word intelligence is to "read or see between the lines." The lines to read between are images, thoughts, concepts, beliefs generated by the body and brain. Intelligence is a state of energy and attention which abides outside the lines created by these images.

The closer we focus on the present moment the less attention we give to images and the more our attention focuses on the state of the body and mind creating the image.
We begin to see that images are resonate representations of "states of being" this present moment.

This shift from image to state opens us to a breathtaking new reality.

Our disorder is a lack of development. We have not cultivated the attention and awareness needed to understand our own mental and physical process. And then to creatively use our vast innate creative power to surf image-realities and manifest in our lives health, wholeness and deep empathy for all of nature.
How do we, and by implication our children, cultivate this energy and attention, especially in an era flooded by commercial images, a formidable challenge indeed?

Is the experience of watching an animated fantasy of Merlin pulsing on a plasma screen the same as the experience of a living mentor?
Are Disney's computer images of a soaring falcon's reality the same as holding a falcon, watching it fly?
What perceptual systems are involved sitting by the stream, holding the falcon, listening to Merlin weave a story that evokes a deep resonate representation of that amazing bird as it soars?
What perceptual systems are involved watching a computer image of the same?

As wonderful and real as the counterfeit is, it is a counterfeit designed to produce the illusion of being real and in this act, by design, is stunting and retarding, on a mass scale, the development of true capacity.

Flooding the many brain systems with counterfeit realities, especially those delivered through concrete imagery, is like feeding a developing body junk food, sugar filled sodas, empty calories. Empty calories create the illusion of nurturing nutrition when in truth the experience is empty of exactly what the brain and body need to grow whole, sane, holy.

In the film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a native, pretending to be retarded, breaks his silence and describes his father, an alcoholic. It appeared to most that the father was sucking life out of the bottle. The Indian flipped the image and described how the bottle was sucking life out of his father. The same is true of video based technology, especially for young children. Image based technologies deliver pre-fabricated substitutes or counterfeits of images the child would naturally create internally.

Failing to develop fully their own image making capacity children become addicted to image producing technologies. What we fail to appreciate is that the act of generating and playing with mental images, realities really, matures into an insight of the image making structure and function of the brain. And it is this insight, knowing ourselves, free of any image, that the Buddhists speak of as liberation, true freedom of the mind.

Adding insult to injury these same image producing technologies displace intimate empathic connection with living mentors, like Merlin, falcons, plants, rivers, and celestial constellations, the ancestral home of the Maori sitting across the table. Lacking intimate contact with the resonate representations shimmering in these living mentors the child's emotional intelligence remains undeveloped, often retarded.

In place of this intimate empathic sensory and emotional foundation we drill and test young children in premature intellectual constructs like the A, B, Cs. What use are abstract symbols if what they represent is powered by retarded physical and emotional systems? Isn't this what, in 1813, Marry Shelly prophesized in her classic tale of the mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein?

Each of our reality centers, sensory, emotional, symbolic, and others, require different experiences to grow and develop. The sensory system needs physical sensations to grow. The emotional system needs to experience safe playful intimate relationships to grow. The intellectual system needs a rich diet of symbols and metaphors to grow. Lifting weights, riding a bicycle or Pilates are great for the sensory-motor system but do little for the emotional and symbolic systems. Math drills or even great literature does little for the biceps or cardio vascular system. We all know that the physical body needs a balanced diet to grow. What we fail to realize is that a rich diet of emotional relationships, symbols and metaphors are essential nutrients for mid brain development and the neocortex.

Each brain system must be nurtured and nourished by the appropriate experience unique to that system. If this balanced experiential diet is not maintained, the reality produced by the various systems will be unbalanced, distorted by the malformed structures that give rise to the images we call reality. When the forces of change blow we will wobble and rattle like an unbalanced washing machine rather than spin like a gyroscope.

A new mind is emerging and with it a new reality. Our challenge is to recognize that balanced nutrition implies nurturing each perceptual system with developmentally appropriate experiences, physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual, the unseen aspects of being alive and sentient.

This can only take place when we as adults cultivate a quality of attention that lies beyond the images we produce.

If adults don't have this intelligent attention, how will children recognize and value it in themselves? We can't solve problems at the level of the problem.

If a problem is being created by a misuse of our image making structures, we can't use those structures to solve the problems these structures create.

Something beyond the image is required to bring the system to order.

And this precious something, the attention Merlin cultivated in Arthur and the Maori elders evoked by their incantations will never be found gazing at a video or computer screen.

It will be found looking into the eyes and feeling the hearts of people who see beyond the images and then we, like learning how to ride a bicycle, will discover this mindful attention in ourselves, moment by moment, as we live our daily life in relationship.


...

War on Terror: The Police State Agenda

Leaping time and space: clues to life after death?


Leaping time and space can provide clues to life after death

The ultimate space travel at least as much as we can perceive, will be traveling out of this Universe into a parallel Universe though a black hole.
Black holes are dense and absorb even light. According to scientists and engineers, black holes cannot stop objects traveling much faster than light. At that speed, time and space are manipulated and travel can become all on a sudden immediate.


The biggest challenge is going near a black hole, surviving there and finally accelerate heavily into a black hole to another universe. No human being will ever dare it for the first time since we do not know how to come back.
But a probe can be sent that can continuously send us back information on its position, photos and mass spectrometer data. What may happen is that all on a sudden it will send data that will never reach us because of disappearance of current time and space.

Some researchers believe that parallel universe exists even in our immediate vicinity. And the extraterrestrial UFOs travel from one parallel universe to another without traveling through a black hole.
According to these scientists, the biggest problem is finding these parallel universe entry points in out vicinity.

According to them we are literally “blind” and need special vision devices that can reveal parallel dimensions.


Human mind has multidimensional viewing power that is not just our superficial vision system. It can communicate, locate and realize parallel universes in our vicinity. But that happens in a way that we cannot control the same. Some of us have more of that and in that case it is called extraordinary psychic power.


Based on this theory, it is possible that after death we move into one of these parallel universes through an opening in the immediate vicinity.
Some also believe that there are seven parallel universes including our own. And the soul recycles into the same universe till it can “qualify” to move to the higher-level parallel universe.


eFFLUX

Defense scientists and engineers all over the world are finding that electromagnetic flux (eFlux) when used appropriately does not only provide effective stealth but also effective armor.

The cloud of electromagnetic flux always surrounds any extraterrestrial UFOs. These clouds of eFlux have low intensity glow and when used with high intensity can protect an object from most severe penetration force. Even gravity driven electron pulsating devices cannot penetrate the flux. Gravity is neutralized by an accelerating counter wave.

There are classified projects in many countries especially those with space exploration programs to use these technologies to build next generation armors for military installations, vehicles, aircrafts and space satellite.

Engineers are looking into creating the eFlux variation that can also provide the stealth. That is exactly what UFOs have. They use it for armor as well as stealth.

According to some, military central command and control posts can be hidden under the influence of eFlux . Some UFO researchers believe, there are underground tectonic UFO bases under the ocean and in many parts of the world. These are hidden under the tectonic plates and are especially large in numbers where one plate moves above another plate. But such bases cannot be seen easily – as a matter of with our vision or even IR night vision systems because eFlux provides the stealth.

It is also possible that there are planets that are artificially hidden from terrestrial “eyes” with these technologies.

According to many in the world, there is a concept of Planet X – a hidden planet that may cause havoc for earth in 2012.

No one knows its validity. But there are scientific reasons for not being able to see the planet or planets.

Using efflux for stealth and armor can be effective means of building impenetrable space station hidden from all knowledge.


...

The taxpayer tab for Iraq is a "monstrous" $250 billion -- and rising.

Congress Helps Self to $3,100 Pay Raise
The Republican-controlled Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation.

House votes to cut $700 mln in food stamps
The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to cut $700 million from the food stamp program, despite objections from antihunger groups complaining that estimates show some 235,000 people would lose benefits.

Senate approves $60 billion tax-cut bill
The U.S. Senate on Friday voted to extend $60 billion in tax cuts for individuals and businesses but added a $5 billion tax on big oil companies, drawing a veto threat from the White House.


House rejects Iraq pullout
In a maneuver to strike at Iraq war critics, the Republican-led House of Representatives engineered a vote on Friday on a resolution to pull U.S. troops immediately from Iraq, which was defeated nearly unanimously.

Democrats denounced it as a political stunt and an attack on Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania, a leading Democratic military hawk who stunned his colleagues by calling for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq as quickly as possible.

The action by House Republicans was the latest volley in an offensive launched by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney last week to attack war critics as unpatriotic and hypocritical.


Crooks and Liars John Amato's new On-Line, Virtual Magazine. C&L is averaging more than 135,000 hits a day via Blogads.



When Did the World Bank Become the Home for Wayward Architects of War?

Arianna Huffington

That must be one helluva of a guardian angel Paul Wolfowitz has looking out for him.

While his former bosses Bush and Cheney are paying the price in public disapproval for leading us into the debacle in Iraq, Wolfowitz, one of the key architects of the war, has been successfully repackaged as the warm and fuzzy poverty-fighting president of the World Bank, and treated like an elder statesman.

There he was weighing in on fighting poverty around the globe at Bill Clinton's Global Initiative summit and at Teddy Forstmann's Aspen Weekend gathering of movers and shakers (where, I hear, he said not one word about Iraq).

Talk about your Extreme Political Makeover. Wolfie has gone from war hawk to the second coming of Mother Teresa -- all without having to make any kind of redemptive pit stop in political purgatory or having to apologize for being so wrong about Iraq. I guess, these days, love means never having to say you're sorry for helping launch an unnecessary and disastrous war.

And isn't it interesting how the World Bank has now become the go-to nesting spot for the architects of such wars? Back in 1968, fresh off leading America deep into Vietnam, Robert McNamara resigned from the Pentagon and headed to the World Bank, where he served as president for the next 13 years (often weeping while delivering his annual reports about the world's poor).

No tears yet from Wolfie, but he has begun saying things like "Nothing is more gratifying than being able to help people in need" and "A clear message from modern history is that this is a small world... and that leaving people behind is a formula for failure for us all."

Is this the same neocon zealot who, under the direction of Cheney, oversaw the drafting of the 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" -- a bellicose blueprint for establishing "world order" under American authority that included the toppling of Saddam Hussein (and which became the intellectual foundation for the preemptive invasion of Iraq)?

Yes it is. But apparently Wolfowitz would prefer to keep all that messy Iraq business locked away in his past. A source tells me that his official bio at the Forstmann event skipped right over his role in the war. How convenient.

Soon after taking office, he said, "I had quite honestly hoped to leave the Pentagon behind me in this job." And, at an appearance in Japan last month, he told reporters: "I'm not here any longer as a Bush administration official and I don't have to defend their record." Oh, so it's "their" record now, is it?

Well, World Bank Wolfie may want to forget all about Wartime Wolfie -- but we shouldn't, we can't, and we won't.

We remember that it was Wolfowitz who, in the run up to the war, mocked Gen. Shinseki as "wildly off the mark" for saying the U.S. would need at least 200,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. "It's hard to conceive," Wolfowitz told Congress three weeks before the invasion, "that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." That failure of imagination has led to the death and mutilation of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

And we remember how Wolfowitz pooh-poohed the idea that the U.S. would be saddled with the bill for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. "The idea that [cost of war estimates are] going to be eclipsed by these monstrous future costs ignores the nature of the country we're dealing with," he lectured Congress, going on to explain that Iraq had "$10 to $20 billion in frozen assets from the Gulf War," and generated "on the order of $15 billion to $20 billion a year in oil exports." "There's a lot of money there," he insisted, "and to assume that we're going to pay for it is just wrong."

"Just wrong," indeed. The taxpayer tab for Iraq is a "monstrous" $250 billion -- and rising.

No wonder World Bank Wolfie wants to leave Wartime Wolfie in the past and move on -- without being held accountable.

We mustn't let it happeen.

LINK: Engineered Extinction

Government policies threaten our jobs, economy and national security by destroying America’s basic resource industries — mining, forestry, farming and ranching.



...

Monday, November 28, 2005

Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours

For my soul sister Wiyoheyapa Win

"The World of Illumination will bring a millennia of perfect peace for those who have come to know and use thier talents to aid all of the Planetary Family. The Two-leggeds will be called the Rainbow Tribe, for they are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of melding among the five original races. These Children of Earth have been called together to open their hearts and to move beyond the barriers of disconnection. The Medicine they carry is the Whirling Rainbow of Peace, which will mark the union of the five races as one. "

"The Stone Tribe has watched these Rainbow Warriors of the Two-legged Clan throughtout time, and we have found them among the faithful. These Warriors of the Rainbow are both male and female and are from every walk of life.

They will live in every location on the Earth Mother and they have one common characteristic: their ability to live in peace with who they are, with each other, and with All Our Relations. They are not Wanna-be Chiefs.

These Children of Earth do not want to leave the Earth for another home.

They are here to dance the Sacred Dance of Life on their Mother Planet, so they do not run from themselves or their chosen paths." Sheena smiled to herself , recalling the faithful human friends she had known, and then continued.

" At the end of the Fourth World, many Sky People of the Two-legged Earth Tribe will leave the Mother Planet when the Great Medicine Wheel turns, bringing the rebirth of Earth. The Sky People who will choose to leave our Planetary Family have not yet mastered the limitation of being physical.

They miss the abilities of limitless creation they once carried in their previous non physical forms and want to return to the Great Star Nation.

Others in the Earth Tribe will perish in the planetary changes that will occur at the end of the Fourth World of Seperation, as they have done in every preceding purification between worlds. Those who will perish have not honored the planet, her people, her creatures, or themsleves.

" The Earth Mother's new form will be the realized visions of the artists and Dreamers who have nutured the dream into being. The Faithful who will remain to create the Fifth World, here on Earth, will be rewarded with new abilities based in strong Medicine that will be used for the good of all." Our wise leader had become excited as she read the previous statements.

Then, as she read further, her voice took on the timber of a mountain brook, bubbling with happy harmonies.

"The community of the Fifth World will include All Our Relations in the Planetary Family.

"These ancient varieties of plant life have many healing qualities and will support a more natural way of life for the Rainbow Tribe."

Let Love Rule

A quote from the book
"Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours" by Jamie Sams(granddaughter) and Twylah Nitsch, Seneca Elder of the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge(grandmother).

***

My Answer to Sister-HIR-Brother; Atta Boy N Atta Grrl

Bushit thought has won thought-power, but, it cannot penetrate into the Realm of Imageless Consciousness.

I-maji-Nation - WaveLand

So, Now, once it is realized how much has been accomplished in this direction in the field of higher compassion, it is easy to see what a powerful instrument in the practice of Hir-Dhyana y'all have forged. **Three thumbs up***

In my own experience, thought on the level of Imageless Consciousness was possible by employing the intellectual capacities unfolded during the years of mathematical discipline. The Real Eyes of number, the super formula, the quantum fractal, the gamma ray Lives!

The demand made upon the imagination was a close replica of that required in the study of the higher analysis and the non-Euclidian systems of geometry/high energy astrophysics.

I believe that the purified western intellect at its highest state of development can carry thought further into the Realm of Profundity than has been possible up to this time.

Feeling no longer has the "edge" upon thought.

I angry, I hate, I force.

What I have said so far applies to but one wing of Enlightenment.

Full Enlightenment requires the development of Eros as well as Logos.
It is just in the dimension of Eros that the West is peculiarly weak.
The strong emphasis of Love in the Christian discipline is psychological proof of this.

It is only a people weak in love who have to give the Eros-principle strong emphasis. Grok?

Speaking to eachother

In this we have the compensating action of the psycho­logic unconscious.
Our love is weak and, when developed, often only sentimental.
Otherwise the development of our intellect would not have been so destructive, a characteristic well illustrated by the world-situa­tion since 1914. As a result of our weakness in the dimension of Eros, practical Hir-Dhyana will have to stress the appropriate compensating discipline. For the one-sided Enlightenment through the understanding is weak in Compassion, and thus falls short of the highest possibility. How­ever, it is possible from the perspective of the one-sided Enlightenment to arouse the complementary phase through the action of the will upon the latent seed-Hir of Love.

Seed-Hir of Love

Leaping The culture of the Higher Love is difficult.

For it is much harder for feeling to win detachment from the object than it is for thought.

It is a lofty achievement to be able to radiate Compassion without thought of return AND! with FULL willingness to grant complete freedom to the object.

Yet until Love has reached this height, it remains sentimental.
And to the merely sentimental lover, Compassion may seem cold, though in reality It is the warmth of the Real-SUN.

HIR-SUN

Just because thought is the highest cultured occidental function, I believe that the intellect must lead in western Dhyana.
But it must be trained not to abandon the weaker Eros.

Here is where the West faces its greatest trial. For a race-horse and a donkey do not make a good team.

In such a set-up there is bound to be much conflict, with the race­horse trying to get away and the donkey becoming stubborn.

Yes, right here is where the West will have its troubles.

I perceive that this conflict is just the place where the Analytic Psychologists will render us the greatest help, provided they are sufficiently spiritualized themselves. However, presently, The bushit donkey suffers from Barbara bushitis. :>)

Grokking RealEyes

To the devoted followers of traditional realeyes disciplines, it may appear pre­sumptuous that I should question old techniques and substitute a new symbolic interpretation.

But in answer to any who feel this way, I need only quote the words of acknowledged Sages.
All clinging to traditional method and interpretation is but a subtle form of attachment and, therefore, a barrier to Enlightenment.

Any method that works is pragmatically justified, and no method as such is a sacred object.
Then with respect to interpretation, I need but recall the fact that there is no such thing as an exclusively true symbolic representation of an unthinkable Reality.

The Superformula evolves infinite symbols

All too easily a valid symbol may through the power of attachment acquire the force of an heretical dogma.
Further, the validity of a symbol is a relative matter.

Though the unthinkable Reality is eternal, yet every symbol is a HIR-time-existence and subject to the process of aging.

Hir-Content within knowingness

The power of every symbol is relative to the peculiar psychical complex of an age and a people. Grok?

Just that symbol is most effective which serves as the best corrective of the psychical complex of the given situation.
Symbols are not designed for the benefit of Those who have Awakened WITHIN hir, but for those others who are in need of a corrective Guid-Dance of their present states of psi-consciousness.

But while there are many valid symbols having quite different appearance in form, yet all these have certain features in common.

The most important common feature can be given very easily in abstract terms.

For this purpose I call attention to a simple logical principle.

Everything that can be experienced or thought exists through contrast with its contradictory, otherwise no particular element of consciousness can be isolated from the totality of all consciousness.

The whole universe of all possible experience or thought can be divided into any particular object, state, or function, and its contradictory.
Let the letter "A" stand for any such object, state, or function, then the whole universe of possible experience or thought is either "A" or "Not-A."

But the ultimate Reality of Hir Enlightened Consciousness lies in neither of these compartments, and thus we say that IT is neither "A" nor "not-A."

A whole life-time could be devoted to listing all possible values of "A" and applying the principle in each individual case, yet all the meaning that would be conveyed by such laborious effort would be contained in the preceding two sentences.

Such is the power of abstract thought.

As one reads the more philosophic Buddhist Sutras, hir finds large numbers of pages devoted to the detailed application of the above principle with almost endless repetition. Undoubtedly the repetition builds a psychological effect that is potent, but the essence of all this can be given logically in a sentence or two.

Now, just what is THAT which is neither "A" nor "not-A," when "A" is given any thinkable or experienceable value?

To the pure thinker IT seems like nothing at all. Thus IT is called "Voidness," for thus IT appears to the consciousness bound to relativity. But through the Door of Hir-Dhyana, IT is found to be substantial Fullness, quite beyond the comprehension of all possible experience or thought.

Modern sub-atomic physics affords us an illustration which is as beautiful as any that I grok.

When two material entities of which the one is just the negation of the other,- such as a positron and an electron, are brought into conjunction, the result is mutual destruction.

Annihilation, which gives birth to a gamma ray

In their place is a flash of radiation that spreads indefinitely throughout all space.

If, now, our capacity for physical observation were limited to the field of the electron and the positron, we might conclude that the result of the conjunction was absolute annihilation.

But we are now able to see that this is not so, but rather that the destruction of matter in one state has resulted in its continuation in a
totally different state. Grok?

Ah so! Follow the Gamma Ray

So, also, is the effect of the mutual cancellation of all dichotomies of experience and thought.

The flash of radiation that spreads indefinitely throughout all space is the symbol of the Enlightened Hir-Consciousness.

By keeping in mind what has been said in the last two paragraphs, the rationale of the various methods of practicing Hir-Dhyana, as well as the basis of the various symbols for Noble Wisdom, become clear.
But while the rationale is simple, the practice is generally very difficult.

Follow your dream

To achieve the mutual cancellation practically is to effect the mystic Death, and this always requires faith and courage.

It is also possible that success will result in individual unconsciousness.
Hence, the actual practice of Hir-Dhyana is to be recommended only for those who are prepared.

Chance favors the prepared mind

The essence of the preparation is the building of the capacity to maintain Hir-consciousness apart from all objects.

This kind of HU-myn Consciousness is present all the time surrounding the functioning of the relative consciousness.

It can be isolated through Hir-Self-analysis while observing the phantasmagoria of the appearing and disappearing of the objects in the stream of time.

HIR-IS-THAT-IS-HIR-IS

It is THAT which remains unaltered through all change.

When awareness has learned to turn Hir-focus upon this ever-present Matrix of Consciousness so that Consciousness becomes HIR own object, the power to remain lividually conscious through the mutual cancellation has been achieved.

Then the time has come for the Transition from the embodied to the Radiant State.

There is nothing simpler than all this, and yet there is nothing more difficult.
And, Yes! children, confusing as hell. :>)

GrokkingLeapingrealeyes



The SuperFormula

"This equation will unveil new aspects of nature and will lead to a large number of new technological applications."

The superformula expresses the determination of form.

My friend , Johan Gielis, who discovered this formula asked me what was missing.
I replied that "content" was the missing piece.
What I real eyes is that form has knowingness.
Knowingness is the content in form.
When I pick up a sea shell and look upon the form, I&I attempt to grok Hir-knowingness.
But if I&I really grok the knowingness of this shell I would have to be that shell Hir-Self.
But I am that I am, and I am the shell THAT IS part of me THAT IS THAT!

So, I always in all ways know the knowingness of the shell, I simply do not have the tuned kieu of mind to "allow" me the I&I&I to Know-to-Grok! Ah So!
In the peaceful gaze of fluttering sunset light one finds THAT!

BOOK REVIEW

PS: Time storms are like woodpeckers pecking at ripe fruit till hir drops from the tree.

grokking this.......till the morrow...



...

Friday, November 25, 2005

Ne Plus Ultra

Humyn and Hir Government

I was a graduate student in the 80's and subject to the general delusion that held literary criticism to be the ne plus ultra of intellectual thrill, I owned one of these: an oversize paperback with an austere cover and small-type title that, grouped with three or more of its kind on your bookshelf, confirmed your status as an avatar of predoctoral chic.
Here is one of those books…
Robert LeFevre's classic argument (1959) for a purely free society, the essay that made him a leading, if controversial, spokesman for the libertarian position on government and society in the 2nd half of the twentieth century.

He argues that government is in its essence a violation of rights, one that makes life brutal, poor, and short.

He demonstrates that no government anywhere has lived up to its basic promises, and calls on all people to contribute to building a new kind of freedom.

1. HU-myn and His Government

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is HU-myn.

HU-myn is a conglomerate of many things. Hir distinctive characteristic, above all others, is hir ability to create tools. In this department hir is unique. No other animated entity of all creation, so far as we can tell, has this ability, at least to the extent that humyn has it.

HU-myn has learned, because of his remarkable toolmaking facility, to extend hir-Self into all kinds of worlds and situations which would be beyond hir except for hir tools. It is the use of tools which gives humyn mastery over this planet. If humyn plunges beyond this planet, it will be hir tools which take him there.

*** OK,OK! I’ll not (almost not) edit any farther the MAN-Hir , HIS-Hir , I really dislike the MAN-HIS crap!! For those of you True Humyns who can still read with quantum mind persistence and comprehension just make the necessary adjustments. Thaung-Kieu ***

One of the principal characteristics of the toolmaker is his ability not only to devise the original tool but to improve upon that tool which he has devised. It could be argued that a failure to improve a given tool, while other tools were being improved, might seriously handicap man's progress. In other words, if man found himself addicted to the use of, let us say, the hand axe as the only tool for cutting wood, to such a degree that he would not consider a better method, the development of power saws would have been meaningless and impossible.

If man wants to use an axe, and if his desires in this connection are buttressed by superstitious fear, by religious conviction, by stubborn willfulness or mental inertia, so that he believes the use of the axe is right whereas any tool other than the axe would be wrong, then man would never be able to go beyond the use of the axe.

To convince him that the use of the axe in the midst of far more effective tools in other categories is no longer desirable, would require a virtual revolution of thought. Mankind would have to examine its habits, its thought patterns, its moral convictions, the very mores of the race itself before it would consider anything else.

Therefore, man's use of a particular tool beyond the date of its obsolescence, though it admittedly had served a purpose at one time, might actually become a harmful usage. An insistence upon the use of an archaic instrument could hold back man's progress, perhaps indefinitely. Further, if the tool were basic, a dedication to its employment could become actually destructive.

For it might be that this one tool was of such a nature that it could and would interfere with the development or the improvement of virtually all other tools.

HU-myn could be bound and limited by the very device which once was, perhaps, one of his chief aids.

If we can begin to understand the tools men make, we may begin to understand more about man's true nature. The nature of the creator is discernible in his works.

One of the most curious and one of the most useful toolmaking facilities which man has is his ability to organize. Any organization made by man can be classed as a tool.

HU-myn begins his organizational efforts by classifying things in groupings according to his understanding of those things.
He learns to make associations on the basis of identity and similarity.
He then learns to make disassociations on the basis of differences and, finally, opposites.
Man organizes his thoughts, his time, his physical possessions.
Finally, he organizes his neighbors and politics is born.

Hu-myn have made hundreds of thousands of organizations. Each one has a purpose. Men have learned to combine their energies around a specific objective; harness the energies of diverse and sometimes even conflicting personalities; and concentrate upon a program, project, or product, to the exclusion of all other things. If you look at this process objectively, you cannot help but be amazed.

During the long and bloody history of human progress, the most prolific and fertile efforts have been put forth by men to create an organization which is called "government." Government has been deemed by primitive and semicivilized men as the single most important tool ever to be devised.

Government is important because it is a tool designed to multiply the strength and power of individuals. If one man is strong, two men would he stronger. From earliest times man has desired strength. If government, the invention of man, could be so formed that it multiplied man's strength, then man would have an important device of power to use against his enemies. This is the reason for government. It was the answer to the search made by primitive men for collective strength in place of individual lack of strength.

For us to understand the nature of man, a good beginning could be made by attempting to understand the nature of this tremendous tool of man's devising.

What is government?

Clearly, all governments are simply groups of men or women which are put together for the purpose of finding strength, of providing protection. Every possible combination of rules, codes, laws, charters, constitutions, regencies, protectorates, treaties, contracts, specifications, and customs has gone into the tens of thousands of governments which have been devised during history's meteoric course. But however the framework is made, however the structure is built, the fact remains that government is a tool of man's devising, neither better nor worse than the men who devise and use it, and calculated to make man stronger and better able to protect himself in his weaknesses, by the use of force, exerted by some over others. That is all.

The understanding of what government is, and what government is not, is of paramount importance. The importance of understanding government lies not in the importance of government itself, but in the importance men place upon their beliefs respecting government. The importance of understanding government lies in the importance of the security and protection which governments have been devised to provide. Thus, while men may believe that a government is important in itself, beneath this belief is the fact that government is a means to an end, not an end in itself. So we must not only examine this means, this tool of protection, but we must also explore protection, and the necessity for it if it exists.

2. A Reasonable Viewpoint

Men have many viewpoints respecting the functions and the purposes of government. Let us explore some of them in turn.

It has been noted that men are weak and that government is a device aimed at helping men to overcome their weakness.

Physically, mentally, and even morally, men appear to be weak. As we look at man's physical nature, we recognize immediately that he is no match for many other living things. Lacking tools, modern man would survive with difficulty if at all. Tools multiply his energies, making him more than a match for other living things. In a hand-to-claw combat man could be bested by almost any other living creature relatively near his own size.

Man cannot outrun the four-footed animals, but his tools can. Man cannot outfight the wild beasts, but his tools can. Man cannot tame the domesticable animals, but his tools of fences, ropes, cages, special foods, and knowledge can.

Looking at man's mental stature, again we are prone to discover his weakness. Men have lived in error. What progress man has made has been made haltingly, as he rubbed superstition and fear from his eyes, studied the true nature of matter and learned to rise, by means of the tools of books, research, test tube and model, into a better world.

Compared to what man does not know, even all modern mental achievement is but a single candle flame flickering in darkness. Yet by means of his tools, man is overcoming this darkness. Where would man be without, let us say, the alphabet; the numerals 1 to 10; the printing press; paper, ink, and glue? Eliminate the tools and within a few generations man would be engulfed once more by superstition, fear, and ignorance.

And what of morality? Here is, perhaps, the greatest frontier yet to be crossed by humankind. What does man know and understand about morals?

Very little.

In centuries, he has learned that the Golden Rule is good, and has less than a dozen basic rules of conduct embodied in the Decalogue.

Here, the church and religion itself have been man's most useful tools. But today, even as man's technology improves, as his mechanical genius unfolds and his knowledge of matter increases by leaps and bounds, his ability to govern himself and to master the precepts of morality approaches a yawning chasm. It could be said that the area of man's basic goodness has been too little shored up by effective tools. While man's material tools improve, man's moral tools are neglected and remain largely static. It would not be too harsh to say that man's morality has gone into a decline.

Here, then, is humyn — a moral, mental, and physical entity having life. And here, also, are man's weaknesses, embodied in his very nature.

But as we have shown, man has, from his earliest beginnings, turned to government to bolster hir weaknesses. Government is man's chief organizational tool to be employed against hir weaknesses.

Thus, when men turn to government in an effort to overcome weakness and to obtain protection, the strength desired is found in compulsive unity. Government, inherently, places individualism at a low point on any scale of values.

Individuals are the enemies of government.
Government is inescapably concerned with unity.
Individuals are the necessary victims.

It is true that some governments have proclaimed a contrary doctrine. Some have said that the individual is important and the government is merely the servant of the individual. But let the evidence be presented and we discover that this assertion is only a pleasant fiction. The servant has the power and the strength. The individual bows before the might of the servant, who is, despite the platitudes, a master, not a slave to men.

Governments rule. Individuals are ruled.

Any individual must give way to the violent cohesion of government.

If the individual is physically, mentally, or morally in error, that is to say, if the individual is physically a criminal, mentally unbalanced, or morally degenerated, the combined and powerful action of a government may provide an amelioration. And it is in this area where actions taken by government are deemed to be not only proper in a moral sense, but highly practical and desirable.

Since it is true that an individual who refuses to practice self-discipline and practices theft, for example, can be opposed, apprehended, and even punished by government, the employment of this tool by human beings has long been upheld as a prime necessity.

This would seem to be, then, a reasonable function for the government to have. What we must explore are some of the other functions which government has assumed. Also, we must look into this same function — that of apprehending and punishing criminals — to determine the actual necessity of the function and also to discover whether the function could be performed more practically, more morally, more economically and more certainly by some tool other than government.

Man's progress has come largely of his ability not only to discover tools, but to improve tools. Can the thief-taking ability of government be improved upon by providing a better tool?

3. Aggressive Power

As we look at government we find that men have organized for the purpose of protecting themselves and their property.

Government is the tool of this protection.

Also, since government is always an agency which plans to use and, indeed, must use force, we have noted that government derives its power from a compulsory unification. All persons under the jurisdiction of a particular government are compelled to agree with whatever that government does. The agreement can be enthusiastic, tacit, or reluctant. But the agreement must be there. Government's power to protect is based upon that agreement, however secured. Power, to be effective, cannot permit exceptions.

Thus, the government is inevitably opposed to individuals. The individual is the natural prey of the organizational tool. And we have shown that when the individual is immoral, mentally retarded, or physically aggressive against others, the government can employ its cohesive power in a manner which is pleasing to people in general.

In short, it can act defensively, taking a position against the one on behalf of the many.

So long as the matter is simple, the case clear-cut, the individual obviously out of order, and the protection of the people generally the paramount issue, government is fulfilling what people generally expect of it.

But matters are rarely simple and cases have a way of being complicated and fogged over with a combination of motives, behavior patterns, backgrounds, and prejudice.

Thus, more times than not, an individual will object to some particular government action only to find himself, by reason of his objection, the object and the victim of governmentalism.

A peaceful and law-abiding citizen, for example, may have perfectly sound and moral reasons why he does not wish to share his money with the government or the politicians of Yugoslavia. His conviction can be logically derived, morally certain, and sincerely maintained. In holding to his conviction, the individual is harming no one. His belief is not inimical to the welfare of other people. Actions which might spring from his belief are not aggressive. In other words, physically, mentally, and morally, such a citizen can be above reproach.

Yet, when the government adopts a policy which prescribes the sharing of his earnings with a foreign government, the man who objects to this can be treated in precisely the same manner as a bank robber could be treated and for the same reason.

The government cannot brook a deviationist.

If the government decrees against bank robbing, it can permit of no exception. It will use its full force of unified power to prevent bank robbing, or, at worst, to apprehend and punish the robber should one appear. And if the government decrees a universal sharing of its citizens' wealth with the politicians of another country, it can permit of no exception here. It can and it will use its full force of unified power to collect whatever sums it deems advisable and will punish any person refusing to provide those sums, with arrest, fine, or imprisonment, and in the event of resistance, with death.

Thus, in practice, the tool of protection, which men have devised out of their weaknesses, can be employed and is employed with equal vigor and ferocity against both the criminal and the good and harmless citizen.

Here the bank robber and the patriot who loves his country are equated.

Government has but a single standard: obedience. Its decrees, good, bad, or indifferent, are enforceable.

And the men in government cannot recognize a law which need not be enforced.

If the government has adopted a policy, the policy must be carried out, even though one policy may be aimed at social stability and the other at social injustice.

This is one of the characteristics of weakness contained in man's nearly universal tool of strength.

The device of protection can be employed as a weapon both defensively and aggressively.

4. The Law Factory

Having granted that a government can perform a defensive function by apprehending and punishing the criminal, we must look at government on a broader scale.

It is immediately apparent that there is no government in all the world, saving only extremely small and local constabularies, which reserves for itself solely this simple and at least partially constructive function. The prevention of crime and the punishment of the criminal have become, in most instances, subsidiary departments of government. In the main, governments have gone far beyond this field of activity.

Today governments concern themselves in general not with criminals, but with law-abiding citizens. Every citizen is a victim of the aggressive tactics of government. Government begins by seizing the arbitrary and total power of deciding how much money it wants. Then it collects the money without a care or concern for the plight of the individual who must pay or be punished like a criminal.

Next, the government establishes hundreds and thousands of regulations which prescribe particular practices and proscribe others. Almost every action of every citizen has its legal "do" and "don't."

The list of prohibitions and compulsions is too lengthy for cataloguing here. But it pertains to business operations, licenses, building regulations, zoning, hours of employment, prices, trade, quotas, embargoes, subsidies, grants-in-aid, traffic, assembly, slander, libel, trespass, health, cleanliness, quality, quantity, method, education, indoctrination, propaganda, news, pictures, morals, food, drink, clothing, housing, sanitation, roads, farm products, transportation, search, seizure, mental outlook, exchange of parcels by post, and so on.

It can truthfully be said that there is almost no activity in which human beings engage which is free of legality. Think what you will, do what you will, there is a law somewhere which either compels, limits, or prohibits.

Try to think of something that people do. With the possible exception of breathing, laws bristle from the activity like quills from a porcupine. And the result of all these laws is to make any individual who does not conform in every respect, a lawbreaker.

Thus, the average person today, buttressed in by government, surrounded and overshadowed by government, finds himself a lawbreaker several times during an avenge day. And this fact turns him from being a law-abiding citizen into a lawbreaking citizen and equates him with any criminal who, in fact, breaks a law with aggressive intent.

But the government, as has been shown, cannot concern itself with anything but the universal obedience it must enforce. Thus, any violation of law becomes in essence a punishable offense. And whereas the government does maintain certain classifications — civil, criminal, and the like — the fact remains that even in civil matters government can and will punish and apprehend with vigor. This is not the fault of government. This is the nature of government.

This is the major point which must be understood eventually. Government which passes and enforces endless rules and codes is not out of character when it does so. It is in character. That is the way any government operates. And the longer a given government endures, the more numerous will be the laws it enacts. It is the business of government to pass laws and to enforce them. These laws are the productive sum of all governmental effort. Therefore it is not to be wondered at when thousands and thousands of new laws come into existence every year. It would rather be a marvel if this did not happen.

Government is a law factory. It passes laws in the same manner that another type of factory extrudes metal molding. Government is a lawmaking tool.

But, whereas a factory which extrudes metal molding is providing a product which is useful to the citizens generally, and which certain citizens will purchase voluntarily; the government factory extrudes compulsion which is useful principally to the government, itself, but is purchased in advance by the people, who are never in a position to refuse to buy.

5. Government As Competitor

We have now shown that government has a single, possibly legitimate, function, that of apprehending and punishing the criminal. We have also shown that government has, in its manifold legal actions, gone far beyond its possible legitimacy by passing thousands upon thousands of laws and rules which tend to equate the avenge individual, who is peaceful and orderly, with the criminal who commits acts of aggression with willful intent.

Now, we must continue to look at government as it goes even beyond this limit. For within our own lifetimes, our own governments — national, state, and local — have gone beyond even the excessiveness of multiple legal prohibitions and compulsions.

One of the most serious incursions performed by the governments against their citizenry has occurred in those instances where the government has abandoned its position as arbiter and compulsionist, and has embarked in the role of entrepreneur. Today, not content with compelling and preventing citizens as they go about their daily routines, government has developed for itself an independent status as a business or industrial entity.

Our federal government has taken on this chore in more than nine hundred separate fields, ranging from corset making, rope manufacture, and candy-bar purveying to the distilling of low-grade rum. It has become a provider of electric power, gas, and water; it runs golf courses, zoos, and tourist attractions; it manages bus and railroad lines, radio and television stations, newspapers and periodicals. It manufactures nuts and bolts and copper wire, and engineers immense building projects. It builds roads and ships, runs hospitals and, even in the end, handles graveyards.

Yet all of these things also are done by private persons, managing their own affairs under government supervision and by permission — after taxes; whereas the government cannot supervise itself, pays no taxes, and consistently competes with the very persons who are compelled to provide the wherewithal for government enterprise. Nor have state or local governments been free of the general federal trespass. In point of fact, in many areas local governments are the principal offenders.

This is a very far cry, indeed, from the simple expedient of catching and punishing thieves and murderers. Nor is this the end of government's straying from its prescribed course.

In our own case, a new departure in governmentalism has arisen to plague every American. For in this country chiefly, although the offense also exists in other countries to a minor degree, our own taxpayers are compelled to pay taxes for the support of foreign governments. And this is tyranny of the worst order.

Yet it is not unknown in history. Weaker states have, from time immemorial, been compelled to pay tribute to stronger and more vigorous neighbors. The innovation, circa the 1930's, was that the United States of America, the then strongest and most vigorous nation in the world, began to pay tribute from a position of strength. And this was the great advance towards barbarism, made exclusively by American politicians.

Stripped of its humanitarian language and reduced to fundamentals, the payment of American tax money to foreign powers constituted international bribery of an order a degree worse than the payment of ransom money to the Barbary pirates. Fear was obviously at the bottom of the move.

With America the greatest and most productive nation on earth, her politicians became fearful of both the envy of others and the warmaking potentials of others. It was as though we lived in a glass house in a neighborhood of stone throwers. And to prevent the stones from being thrown, our government adopted a policy of rewarding our neighbors for the negative passivity of not throwing stones.

The claim was made that this would win us friends. The most simple and least informed psychologist could have revealed that this practice would only win us the contempt and hostility of others. For America was no glass house. It was a rich and productive reservoir of a high percentage of all the production on earth, including the production of the means to defend ourselves. And this our neighbors knew.

6. National Defense

We come at once to government's classic usage, that of making war upon government's enemies. Whether we begin our examination of government as a warmaker in tribe, clan, city, state, or nation, or even as a body of nations joined together, we find this the single most costly and terrible function that government can ever attempt. Aggressive warfare is always the exclusive prerogative of government. Mobs, groups, families, or individuals may fight. They may riot, destroy, pillage, and perform in any wanton way. But it takes a government to conduct a war. Only government has the capacity, extended through both time and space, to organize sufficient force and violence to sustain a war. And only government, in our age, can effectively amass sufficient wealth for such a nonproductive and destructive purpose.

Aggressive warfare can never be justified on any moral ground. The use of initiated violence is abhorrent to all persons. But what does fall under our gaze is the apparent occasional necessity for a government to perform in war as a defendant. It is true, governments being what they are, that certain governments will plot and plan an aggressive campaign of combat, however immoral or foolish such a campaign might be. And it must follow that if any government undertakes so violent a course, other governments, lying in the pathway of the deliberate predator, may with some justification inform their citizens of the danger.

What should be the nature of this information? Since government is merely a tool, and since it is always the citizens who face the hazards occasioned by a physical clash in battle, the alert should always be couched in terms acceptable to volunteers. Further, the call to arms should come from the people and not from their government.

If there is a real danger, the danger is one which the citizens will recognize. Having recognized it, they will do what they can to defend themselves. They are the actors of the drama.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible, and in many instances a proven fact, that the announced danger is fancied rather than real.

Governments tend to make trouble, in a great hubbub of concern for their own prerogatives.

The citizens are capable of discerning the difference between a scare drummed up by power-hungry politicians and a real threat to their safety and security.

In truth, the citizens are always in a better position to make this discernment than is their government.
Governments, as instruments of force and power, are far too prone to operate in an atmosphere of fear.
They tend to engender fear.
They end by believing their own engenderings.

One of the most serious mistakes the citizens can ever make is to grant to their government the power of a draft.

Governments which can forcefully enlist the citizens under them, can shoulder their way truculently among all foreign powers, confident that they can compel a final showdown to their liking.

Lacking this power, a government is constantly in review before its citizens. The citizens may, in such a case, refuse to accept their government's foreign policies and the errors perpetrated thereby. This would leave such a government in an untenable position. It must move warily and peacefully or risk an ultimate exposure before a hostile force.

From a practical point of view the volunteer in any war is a better soldier than the conscript. The nature of man being what it is, men will always seek to be in the place they wish to be, and they will attempt to get away from the place they do not wish to be.

If a man chooses to oppose an actual enemy in the field, it is because he would rather be in such a position than in any other. But if a man is compelled to take the field, and is uncertain as to the actual hostility in the breast of his supposed enemy, he must be driven and forced at every turn of the road. Such a man will only stay to fight because he fears his own government more than he fears the guns of his opponents. Under such compulsions he does not do his best.

Nor is his love of country encouraged by such outrage.

Our problem is not to find a way to compel men to defend themselves. This they will always do gladly and voluntarily if defense is truly needed.

Our problem is to prevent the evils of conscription which hamper true defense, create armed forces which contain aggressive potential, and create a drain of economic wealth beyond all other actions.

We must be vigilant that we are not lured into hostile poses by a fearful or belligerent government.

But here we run into a whole series of dilemmas.
The dilemmas are occasioned by the fact that historically the citizens have turned over to their government all power of decision respecting the preparing for and the waging of war.

How can a government, armed and capable of conducting an effective defensive campaign, be successfully prevented from the slightest act of aggressive war?

To this question, history gives us a discouraging answer.
Any government fully armed and ready for defense is all too prone to prove the point upon the field.

Alas, the human record proves another point.
Who is the aggressor in any war?
With absolute unanimity the answer is, the other fellow.
The bristling engines of war build up along each national boundary. The pressures mount behind the barricades. A rising tide, like a great wave, towers menacingly until sometime, somewhere, the laws of gravity take hold and the great wave topples, spilling out across the barriers like an onrushing flood.

This is aggression.
Who caused the spilling?
The science of tactics and of strategy gives us the official ruling.
"Each act of war is retaliatory." Even the first act of any conflict is in reprisal for some prior condition.

The prior condition in itself need not be hostile. Differences between nations and people abound. Wars have been waged For the flimsiest of reasons. Yet, when a government decides that warfare is "the only course," the slightest pretext, relating to color of skin, religious differences, tariffs, immigration laws, language differences, differences in philosophies, or even hostile words, has established at one time or another a cause for war.

Thus, even when one government hurls its legions across a boundary in an obvious attempt to amass land and plunder, the excuse is always given that the aggression occurred because the government on the other side of the boundary drove the government on the near side to this final deadly act of politics.

How can the ultimate in human foolishness be prevented?

Clearly, it is preposterous to assume that the tool capable of such a holocaust can also be relied upon to prevent the very thing it is uniquely designed to do.
This would be like supposing that fire will not burn, or that a fire once started can be extinguished by a larger fuel supply.
One does not call upon one's government to prevent war.
One calls upon one's government to wage it.
And it is here that the necessity for understanding man's own nature as well as the nature of his tool de main, becomes, in modern times, acute.

If we are to believe the tacticians, war is always a reaction against some prior act. But this is only saying what has been said all along, that war is the natural extension of politics. War is organized force employed by government against some other government which is under no constraint to give obedience to alien politicians. Governments wage wars against their individual citizens and it is called policing. But when a government wages war against another government, it is called by its right name.

But let us ask, in what way is a war against an opposing government different from government's eternal war against the individual?

The answer is that in principle it is the same; only the battlefields and the size and scope of the arena provide a distinction.
But it is a distinction without a difference in principle.
Governments back up their decrees by force of arms.
In the event the decree is leveled against a citizen, the force of arms required is moderate. In the event the decree is aimed at a foreign power, an army must be employed to compel obedience.

In the end we will see that only governments make war.
The people in all nations do the fighting and the dying.
But our quarrel is never truly with them.
Our quarrel is always with their government, which sets them upon us.

We are not suggesting a dismantling of the tool of our possible protection.

But we are suggesting that we examine this tool, recognizing that while it is capable of defensive action, it is also capable of so conducting itself at home or abroad that defensive action, in the end, becomes the only course open to us.

Here, as in every other case, that which was formed for our protection becomes, finally, the very reason we need to be protected.

This tool of defensive potential inevitably contains the seeds of aggressive force and violence. The larger and more powerful it becomes defensively, the more it is apt to use its vast ability in some aggressive manner.

7. A Government's Government

If we would understand why our government has so invaded private rights; if we would learn why our government has expanded so greatly during the past two and a half decades; if we would comprehend the thinking which has caused our government to resort to bribery in an effort to maintain friendly relations, and is even now considering the advisability of launching a war to prevent a war from breaking out — we must look to the nature of man, and not to the nature of government.

Government, as we have attempted to show, is merely a tool.

Man, the maker of government, is, in the final analysis, the master of government.
Yet man has made government to perform the opposite function and to master man.
And while all governments begin with the premise that they will protect the many peaceful from the few who are belligerent, it is in the nature of governments that the rules will be extended and expanded until the state itself becomes man's mortal foe.

We cannot blame a lever if, in our exercise of it across a fulcrum, it slips from our grasp and smashes a toe. We cannot blame a shovel if, in the hands of the wielder, it plunges into an ancient tomb and permanently damages a priceless relic.

The tool is blameless.
And thus, the government, within itself, is blameless.
It is simply a ravening monster, naturally, and will continue to grow, to expand, to pounce upon its victims and devour them in the normal course of its activity.
That is the kind of tool it is.
Man made the tool to perform in that fashion.

It is an instrument of force and coercion. And there can never be an instrument of force and coercion which will consciously restrain itself. It must be restrained. Yet there is no tool capable of such restraint. For any type of tool, whatever its nature, which is allegedly formed to restrain and contain government, would, by its own nature, simply become a government's government.

In other words, the restraining tool for a compulsive instrument would have to contain a greater accumulation of power than the compulsive instrument or it would be ineffective. But this, in essence, would also be a government. It would simply be a larger, more compulsive, more dangerous and more mischievous tool and less subject to restraint than the original instrument of coercion.

The United Nations falls into this category, as does every other prior political organization aimed at universal peace. The United Nations is simply a government's government. The members of the United Nations are, by definition, not the peoples of the world, but the nations of the world, at present eighty-two in number.

Individual people cannot belong to the United Nations.
Only governments can belong.

The delegates to the United Nations are simply politicians who have been appointed by the member governments. And it is in the nature of the United Nations that it will look after the governmental interests of its members. Hence, the things that the member governments desire to do will become the policies of the United Nations.

But the thing all member governments desire to do is to rule their own people and to collect money from them. This is inherent in their natures. So the United Nations, perforce, will aid and abet the member governments in their universal desire to maintain a coercive hold over their individual subjects.

Thus, the United Nations is a government of the governments, by the governments, and for the governments. And it cannot and will not restrain these governments, for the members support the giant, looking to it for backing, even as the individual citizen supports his own government and looks to it for backing.

So much for the nature of government, and even for the nature of a government's government.

But at the root of all government stand the people. What is it in the nature of humyn beings which causes them to look to a government?

There is only one thing which causes Humyns to look for and to organize a tool which is an instrument of compulsion and prohibition. That thing is fear.

Men look to government to protect them because they fear. And virtually without exception, everything that human beings fear becomes a project for government.

8. The Product of Fear

Fear is one of the most interesting and one of the most basic of all human emotions.

And, as we have attempted to show, man, recognizing his weaknesses, which are many, is fearful of many things.
He fears his predatory neighbor, death, old age, poverty, loneliness, hunger, and cold.

In man's rise from the primitive to the relatively civilized status of modern times, man has been propelled by fear probably more than by any other facet of his heterogeneous nature.

His fear of hunger has caused him to search diligently for dependable food supplies. His fear of cold has caused him to erect buildings and to fashion clothing. His fear of death has caused him to study the nature of matter, to discover the germ theory, to guard his health and to provide as long as possible against the ultimate.

His fear of the supernatural, which led him first into a belief in a plurality of deities and created a world of superstition, led him ultimately toward morality and the Golden Rule.

He discovered that it was wise to fear the immoral act of others, and hence it was a matter of simple prudence for him to forbear when it came to committing an immoral act himself.

Probably no basic emotion of man has been so fruitful in its results. If men were not chronic worriers, they would take no thought of tomorrow. As it is, they have taken great thought of tomorrow and the result is that our todays are buttressed about with forethought, even though tomorrow always brings its problems which must still be solved.

It is this all-compelling emotion, fear, that has sired governments. Man is fearful of strength in others. Therefore, he has devised an organizational gadget, containing compulsory unification, and by means of which he hopes to offset, or even to overcome, the strength of others.

Governments, then, are not agencies of right, necessarily.
They are, necessarily, agencies of strength.
It could be said that man, feeling certain that he was surrounded by gangsters, has devised a gangster of his own, theoretically obedient to his own will, who will act with truculence against alien gangsters, while remaining docile and tractable towards his deviser.

History teaches us with much repetition that this is an enormous fallacy.

Governments begin with a soft side towards their own creators and a hard exterior exposed towards potential foes.

But as time passes, the hard exterior extends until it completely encompasses the government. Then, it develops that it has no "soft" side at all. It becomes equally hard and impervious towards every human being, since the nature of the gadget is that it must be strong against human beings.

Government's presumed selectivity, in knowing whom to favor and whom to oppose, is actually nonexistent.

This is because, as we have shown, the nature of government's strength is derived wholly from its compulsory unification.
Government can permit no exceptions to its rules, whether these rules are aimed at preventing an aggressive act against a citizen under its jurisdiction by another citizen similarly situated, or whether the rules are aimed at compelling uniform attendance at a government institution of indoctrination by every junior citizen from the age of six.

In the one case the government may act defensively, to protect the rights of an individual; in the other case, the government will act aggressively, protecting rio individual right but simply compelling universal obedience to its decrees.

In the one case the government acts as a friend, within the framework of its theoretical usefulness. In the other case the government is the predator, actively enacting the role of the foreign or alien gangster.

And it is apparent that men have so much fear concerning the imminence of gangsterism in their midst that they tend to bear the iniquities of government's predatory actions without a murmur, rather than to deprive themselves temporarily of their own gangster, however powerful and unruly he has become.

9. The Guillotine

Government's ability to bite the hand that feeds it has long been mourned by its principal progenitors.
Simple human beings for at least six thousand years have learned to put their faith in some governmental organization only to find, after the passage of a few years, that the agency they trusted has turned to rend them in their tracks.

They have long marveled at this phenomenon. And their wonder, during the unfolding of man's story, has taken two principal avenues towards a solution.

1. They have concluded that the particular men selected to head up and run a particular government have been evil. Hence, they have reasoned, if they can find better men, they will have nothing to fear.
2. They have concluded that the particular form of government they have devised has lacked certain safeguards. They have reasoned that if the government could have been organized along different lines, they would have escaped the evil their government was busily engaged in inflicting upon them.

We will take these two avenues in turn.

*** NOTE: We all are now (2005) infected with Barbara Bushitis. ***

First, what of the men in government?
Nowhere in all the world has such feverish activity attended the process of selecting good men to governmental office than in these United States. With us, it is a passion, nay, a mania.

In the United States an enfranchised citizenry is virtually the single untouchable institution of our time. If the people are free to vote and, thus, to select the men who will become the personnel manning our own gangster device, it is deemed that we have overcome barbarism and that security is certain. The right to vote is, in the public mind, prior to and superior to the right to liberty. It is by the process of polling that we secure for ourselves the best in the way of governmental servants. But is this really true, or is it rather a large superstition generally believed?

Could we timidly inquire if the voting process has always secured for us men of superior ability? And if our answer is affirmative, or we have raised our voices against a shibboleth … then how does it happen that so many administrations of good men have been able to do so many evil and harmful things to their subjects?

Let us assume that voting practices embody no superstition; that, in fact, the men selected by the voting public are inescapably the best that can be found at a given moment in our history.

Then, the resulting harm must come, not because of the good men but because the good men are powerless to prevent the harm. *(corrupt voting machines)

And surely we are mature enough in our deliberations at this crucial point in our history so that we can admit that our multitudinous governments, at every level — federal, state, and local — do considerable in the way of harm.
The harm is obvious.
We have less freedom than we used to have. We are more coerced. We are plundered repeatedly and in growing amounts for every conceivable scheme that the human mind can invent.

Nor does one act of plunder solve the problem for which the plunder was originally legalized. Rather, each act of plunder gives birth to the necessity for additional acts of plunder. And the number of laws curtailing us, regimenting us, restricting us, and punishing us grows hourly larger and more difficult of evasion.

So the harm continues, yet the men inflicting the harm are the best that can be obtained!
**(Well not the best, just the best zombies!)**

If this is the case, Isabel Paterson, in her monumental work, The God of the Machine, gives us one kind of answer. She establishes that government is a tool, and she defines the nature of the tool as that of a guillotine.
In effect she asks, what good does it do to have a saint of every conceivable virtue operating a guillotine?

Personally, the man may be above reproach. He may have the highest of morals and ethics. He may be imbued with a passion for doing good. But the mechanism he is hired to operate cuts off heads. (note: and like Bushit &co. They are NOT high in morals and ethics!!!!)

He may dislike to cut off heads.
He may weep with true sorrow whenever a head falls into the basket. But he was hired to pull the rope that lets the knife drop. And when it comes down, off comes the head. That is the way the tool works.

In her analysis, Miss Paterson is eminently correct.

Government is an agency of force which can and must be employed against every deviationist.

And this is only to say again that the government must oppose the individual.

Therefore the "good" man in government is like a priest with a machine gun.

The mechanism does the harm.

The man who operates it merely pulls the trigger.

10. Two-Party System

There is no other way of explaining the phenomenon. Good men do find their way into government. But having gotten there, they must either perform their function or resign. If they perform their function, they use the government, an agency of compulsively gathered coercive force, to accomplish that function. Inevitably, they hurt someone. This is undoubtedly the reason such a furore is maintained over the necessity for a two-party system. Nothing is said in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights about the necessity of a two-party system. Yet most Americans hold that two parties are necessary.

The reason is obvious. The party in power inevitably employs its friends and well-wishers, and passes laws and enforces proceedings against others not of the same political conviction.

Over a period of time these laws and enforcements build up a body of resistance. The oppression mounts. It may become a public scandal. Finally, the "ins" are ousted and the other party assumes power.

Immediately the process repeats but with alternate emphasis. Those who are "ins" become "outs." And the newly hired "ins" go to work to cut their friends free from oppression and to visit their vengeance upon those who subscribed to the beliefs of the former "ins." Then the same iniquities come to pass all over again. Those persecuted change places with the persecutors. And around and around goes the political wheel of chance, with the voting public spinning the wheel.

In our own time we have seen one curious variance occurring to this otherwise monotonous and easily predictable routine. The "ins" and the "outs" have performed a merger.

The party in power has now scarcely a discernible difference from the party out of power.

And the reason for this merger is self-evident. The government has in itself grown so large and so formidable that it tends to absorb any and all politically interested persons, regardless of party affiliation. And since, in the main, there is no real difference in political parties, each party desiring only to rule — each party adopts an advertising program consisting of those public statements which each party leader feels will win an election — the merger is that of blood brothers and constitutes no betrayal.

Of course there are those who have felt that elections were for the purpose of establishing policies, rather than for the purpose of selecting men. These persons, always a minority, vote for the statement made by certain politicians and against the statement made by others. But since all of these statements are nothing but window trimming, constituting a verbal display, and in all probability not representing either the thinking or the intention of the person making the statement, a vote secured by virtue of a statement does not establish policy but merely enhances the position of the man who made it. ** (and with corrupt voting machines, that position is now firmly achieved)

But again, this is simply the mechanics, the "advertising." The purpose of an election is to select men, not policies. And in the end, the men are selected, after which the policies are adopted.

But the policies, whether from party one or party two, are more nearly identical than opposite. For it is the business of government to employ force and to compel obedience. And it is the business of any politician within a government, regardless of his party, to employ government as an agency of force and coercion; to compel obedience and uniformity; and to punish any individual who does not go along with those mandates imagined as necessary by the men in power.

So, now we must ask the inevitable question. We have considered the situation that must ensue if we presume that the voting process always provides us with the best possible government employees. But, what if this is not true? What if the voting process does not guarantee the selection of superior men?

In this case, then, our preoccupation with the polls is simply a false reliance upon a majority. And since a majority is nothing but the amassing of power by virtue of superior numbers, are we not extolling the alleged virtue of might, instead of right?

Either the voting process will provide for us the best men in government, or it will not. Whichever way we choose to believe, we meet the inescapable result. The result is that government has the tendency of growing large and unmanageable and in the end of turning to rend and devour even its most devoted followers.

11. Superstitious Awe

We have now explored the first avenue. This is one of the paths taken by some men when they discover that their government has become predatory against themselves. They seek to alleviate the predation by changing the personnel within their agency of collective power.

The other avenue to be taken deals with the changing of the form of the government in an effort to prevent the predation in advance. From time immemorial, men have also concerned themselves with this process.

Let us explore this avenue.

We have shown that fear is the basic emotional drive which leads men towards the establishment of government.

Primitive governments have maintained their power largely by fostering fear.

Look where you will in the governments of our forebears and you will find men, clad with power, using terror and compulsion in order to maintain a hold over their followers. Thus, fear not only drives men to form governments but it is used within the government formed for the purpose of perpetuating that government.

Probably the most ancient form of government ever to come into existence amassed power and dealt with fear by claiming that the person in the government had been selected and appointed by divinity.

For centuries it was this belief that provided confidence in government and kept it there — so long as people believed that their gods had a hand in its formation.

Men do not mind being ruled by gods. ** (or royal bushits or queens)

They recognize their own weaknesses but, assured that divinity is actually conducting governmental affairs for them, they subside and become docile when they confront the politician clad in such glorious disguise.

The record is full of stories of men who have gladly gone to their deaths under the impression that their deaths served a divine purpose. And this, for centuries, was the ne plus ultra of every politician.

Cunning rulers went in league with priests — the one, the embodiment of force, the other the embodiment of propaganda and superstition. It was a telling combination.

In point of fact, so well did this combination work that there are traces of it still apparent in our modern world. The Russian government, as an example, today combines the function of despot and priest, by organizing army, civil offices, schools, and even churches with the same kind of dual leadership. The general is flanked by the political commissar. Military decisions are buttressed with the party line.

The government, in Russia, takes the place of God. To obey the Leader is to gain total approval. No contrary voice is permitted. Thought and action are blended into a consistent whole. Every action is made to follow the statist philosophy. And the statist philosophy is turned and twisted to match whatever actions are taken. History is rewritten after the fact, so that whatever occurs can be shown to be that which was predicted and planned.

There are evidences within our own government that the same process has much appeal in this country. This is especially true in the military, where the debacle of multiple defections during the Korean war has caused the ruling hierarchy to adopt a program of indoctrination which is calculated to make everything that the military attempts, correct, and everything that is correct, an action of the military.

There is also a general superstition among the voting groups that our political leadership cannot err. Whatever the leader decides is sanctified with general approval. The most banal and trivial decisions are exaggerated into being utterances of profundity. Even questionable policies are glossed over with the statement: "Our leadership is the best in the world. That leadership could not have come into being unless God had so willed it. Therefore, it is up to us, the citizens, to give immediate, unquestioned, and undeviating loyalty and obedience to every action of our political leadership."

This is the "God wills it" of the ancients, scarcely altered with the passage of time and the enlightenment of the people. The superstitions which plagued mankind for generations still ride upon its shoulders in the guise of a majority decision only God could sanction.

It is frightening and a discouraging spectacle.

12. Varying Forms of Government

Governments always come into being because men recognize their weaknesses as individuals. The very first government to be formed undoubtedly was that of a strong man, stronger than his fellows, who was called upon by his weaker followers to protect them against real and fancied dangers.

It was doubtless a dictatorship.

Then, because the dictator in time grew old and feeble, and because he dreamed of bequeathing his power and authority to his own offspring, the monarchial system was born. The dictator, while at the height of his power, had convinced his followers that his ascendancy over them was divinely ordained. He could have told them that he was a son of a god. Thousands of early politicians maintained this fiction. And not a few of them were deified, either during their reign or after their passing.

The next step was for the successful dictator to claim that his family, the descendants of his loins, were also divinely ordained. Royal families came into being.

Thus, God and government were intermixed in the general opinion, and theocracy, the oldest and perhaps the most frightening of all governments, held sway for more than a thousand years.

We have already described this system. It provides for the combination of despotic power in the hands of a king with the power of superstition wielded by a crafty priest. Disobedience to secular authority became at once a blasphemy as well as civil disobedience. One does not defy God, even when God is unapproachable and his only avenue is the king who rules you.

But wherever these despotic pretensions were maintained, the people suffered. And, in the end, we shall see that it is the people, and not the politician, who are supreme. For, even when people believed largely that a god or many gods had established their ruling politician in office, they revolted against his tyranny and oppression. This is the history of man.

Everywhere we see men setting up governments, submitting to them, growing tired of the mounting oppression, and finally throwing off that yoke, only to acquire another. And each successive yoke represented an effort to do away with the evils of the prior form by establishing a better form.

We can think of no better statement covering this phenomenon than that written by Rose Wilder Lane in her great book, Discovery of Freedom. Here is what she says:

They replace the priest by a king, the king by an oligarchy, the oligarchy by a despot, the despot by an aristocracy, the aristocrats by a majority, the majority by a tyrant, the tyrant by oligarchs, the oligarchs by aristocrats, the aristocrats by a king, the king by a parliament, the parliament by a dictator, the dictator by a king, the king by…. there's six thousand years of it, in every language.

Every imaginable kind of living Authority has been tried, and is still being tried somewhere on earth now.

All these kinds have been tried, too, in every possible combination; the priest and the king, the king who is God, the king and a senate, the king and the senate and a majority, the senate and a tyrant, the tyrant and the aristocrats, a king and a parliament…. Try to think of a combination; somewhere it has been tried.

Each of these efforts has been made with the most solemn and noble purpose. Always the aim has been to set up an organized collective which can and will use force against the enemies of a particular group, class, clan, nation, or family. Always the collective has amassed power and ended by using that power to harass and tax and oppress and regiment the very persons who set it up and gave it original obedience. There is no variation to this story. Nor is it possible to find a combination which has not been tried.

Let us now consider the American experiment, which was, without a doubt, the most noble and the most solemn ever undertaken.

13. The American Experiment

When the American pioneers found themselves the victors after a war with England, they decided they must undertake the establishment of a form of government which was to be impervious to inner tyranny.

It is probable that at no other time or place in history had so many men, so well informed, so nobly motivated, ever convened for such a purpose. Few of the founders of our Constitution were politically ambitious. With high purpose and deep sincerity, they set about the task of providing a form of government which would stand the assaults of the mean and selfish.

They labored diligently and well.
And when they finished, although they were far from unanimity, they had forged a document which was at once both wonderful and a political curiosity.

For the great distinction which set the American form apart from all others was that it was probably the most inefficient, cumbersome, and unwieldy government ever devised!

How well the founders knew that men with power could not be trusted.
They set up a conflicting and enigmatic mechanism which was more notable for what it could not do than for what it could do.

There was an executive branch; but its functions were limited and contained. There was a legislative branch, equally frustrating. And, finally, a judicial branch, which was to watch the fulminations of the other two.

But this was not all.

Having established three equal containers for power, they proclaimed that it was a federated government, with sovereignty residing both in the separate states and in the people generally.

In short, what they had devised was not a government but the antithesis of government as it was normally contrived.

European politicians chortled with glee when they first heard the news.
Here was an anti-rule rulership; a powerless powerhouse; a contradiction within an enigma.
They opined that it would never work.
However, a few elevated mentalities glimpsed the ideal our pioneers had striven to attain and gasped at its daring and immensity.

And in large measure the European politicians who ridiculed the form were right.

The American government did not perform with efficiency.
It wasn't intended to.
And the American people, finding themselves for the first time without a ruling despot, were hard pressed to know what to do.

Consequently, unable to call upon their government for aid or guidance, they set to work themselves.
Their energy, uncontrolled by living authority, changed the world.
Their achievements, in a few short years altered all of history.

For the first time, freedom was proclaimed as a national policy, individualism was given full sway, and government was reduced to puppeteering functions.

It was delightful, while it lasted. Never was so much accomplished by so few, under such adverse conditions.

Freedom was the big payoff.
Men who do not have to kneel come to recognize divinity within themselves as individuals.
Our ancestors were a stiff-necked lot.
They bowed to none but God.
Government could go hang for all of them.

We had done away with theocracy by delivering it a mortal blow. And even in our Bill of Rights it was ordained that the government could make no law affecting the practice of religion. Church and state were separated.

We had a republic which used a democratic process, which provided for a temporary aristocracy, which removed the priests, which put God into heaven and off the throne, which uncrowned the dictator or the king, which eliminated succession to power, and which generally disrupted every ordinary political practice.

For years it worked, because it didn't do too much.
Our power was in the hands of the people.

But our founding fathers had seen that what they had done, even though it was a mechanism shorn of much power, still contained the seeds of tyranny. Therefore they provided that as time passed, changes could occur. And at least some of them fondly hoped that, by permitting change, still further reductions in governmental protocol would come.

An informed populace could learn the fallacy of even this much power remaining. For if the people individually learned to overcome their weakness, what need had they for an instrument of force?

The changes, provided for, came in due course.

But the changes were not in the direction our most dedicated idealists had desired.

14. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

We honor the authors of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
We admire them and pay them homage.
More than any other group of men at a particular moment of history, did they comprehend the inherent dangers which inevitably come to the fore when men are clad with the robes of power and the insolence that office-holding breeds.

The founders of our government sought to nullify these dangers. They provided what we have called our system of checks and balances, which deprive an officeholder of supreme and perpetual power.

Yet our founders were humble. They knew they were fallible and, therefore, they wrote up the amendment clause and inserted it in the Constitution. They fondly hoped others coming after them would surpass them in high purpose and in penetrating wisdom. How vain those hopes have been is now demonstrated.

For, since the days of our government's origin, we have never equaled the character and purpose of those who set pen to paper to forge that basic charter. If there was one oversight of which our founders were guilty, this is it.
They had too much faith in man's ability to understand his own motives and principles.
They failed to comprehend the extent of the venality and lassitude of politicians and ordinary citizens.

Yet, even here were warnings.

Franklin said: "We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it."

And Jefferson, even in his first years in office, cried out against the mounting tendency of public and private citizens alike to look to the government to solve all problems.

In the end, the Constitution was overcome.

Instead of remaining a system of checks and balances, our government has become overbalanced and predatory.

The executive branch of the government is very largely ruling the land by means of bureaus and executive decrees.
Congress still passes laws.
But the decrees put out by the executive department, including treaties, outnumber congressional laws by more than four to one.

And the Supreme Court, instead of testing the validity of laws against the Constitution, has itself, in large measure, become a lawmaking body, enlarging its own functions and approving virtually every other action which enlarges government.

The policies expressed by the Chief Executive come into force and power either through Congressional enactment or via the backdoor route of the bureaus.
Yet the bureaus are filled with appointees, none of them elected to office, and hence all of them beyond responsiveness when it comes to following the wishes of the people. **(Katrina showed this to be true)

What we have yet to see in these United States is the fact that, in fine, the people will command.

For government is always nothing but a tool. It takes human energy to employ any tool, even with automation. Somewhere there must be human minds and human energies directing each operation. And the people will not forever support and use that tool which exploits and misuses them.

So much for the American experiment. It was magnificent.
But as a safeguard for human freedom and dignity it has been found wanting. Nor can we turn back to it with confidence that it will yet protect us.
A wall once breached is no longer a wall.
And with mounting political pressure all about us, the dyke with the hole has become a sieve.

Now we have explored both avenues of remedy taken by people who find their government no longer protecting them as individuals.
We have discovered that a change of personnel provides us with no certain guarantee of freedom.
And now we learn that even the greatest form of government ever devised has also proved inadequate.
The reasons in both cases are similar.

Government is a tool.
The nature of the tool is that of a weapon, a gun, a sword, a guillotine.

And when people, be they politicians or otherwise, call upon a gun, a sword, or a guillotine to protect them from others, the device, willy-nilly, works two ways.
It can be used defensively.
But it is always used aggressively.

15. Anti-Individual Device

Let us examine this idea.

Why is it that government, designed for protection, always ends up by attacking the very persons it was intended to protect?

The reason is basic.
Government's power, as we have shown, comes from a compulsive unification of all peoples. Government speaks and acts for everyone.

It cannot permit nonconformity.

The individual, at variance with governmental policy in any particular, becomes the target of government action, be he saint or sinner. Individualism is always opposed to collectivism. Any government is, by its nature, a collective.

"The best government," said Jefferson, "is the government which governs least." And following up on that thesis Thoreau exclaimed, "Then the very best government would govern not at all."

And here we come to the nature of human beings. For the inescapable fact of human life is that people are different. Their fear may sire governments for purposes of protection. But what they fear varies from person to person. One man may fear a thief, another the tax collector.
One man may shun canines and salesmen, another zoning regulations and the foreign-born.
Still another will have a veritable phobia about disease germs, whereas his opposite number will shudder principally over government questionnaires.

In the end, the government, seeking only to be a useful tool, will overreach itself and seek to protect both the unprotectable and those not wanting protection.

Its character is universal. If you do not fear disease, the government can, all the same, compel you to fear it. If you love canines and perhaps are yourself a salesman, the government can rule both out of order.

And thus we see the government is at once both protector and predator. It is not that governments begin in virtue only to end in sin. Government begins by protecting some against others and ends up protecting itself against everyone. This is the course of history.

We need only to look at taxation to see the universal flaw in every government. There is no government on earth that, now or ever, sold protection only to those who would willingly pay for it. Nor is there now or ever has been a government which permitted the purchasers of its service to decide just where the protection was to begin and end.

On the contrary, all governments always have and probably always will decide:

1. who is to be protected against what, and
2. how much each is to pay for that protection, whether it is desired or not.

Taxation, by definition, is compulsory. Whether or not you approve of a particular policy, practice, or program, and even if the policy, practice, or program is personally injurious to you, the government can and will compel you to pay for it.

For example: There are few Americans today who are in love with communism. Yet every American, by means of both direct and indirect taxation, is helping to spread the teaching of communism. An exchange agreement with the Soviet Union provides that a slick magazine, published in the USSR, shall be made available to readers in this country. Your money pays the shipping charges and helps to underwrite the cost.

But, at least this particular practice is a two-way street. There is an American counterpart, another slick, shipped to Russia and made available there. And the Soviet taxpayer pays at least some of the cost for this exchange.

But the matter goes much further than this. Communism, in essence, is not a Russian program but an economic program. It calls for the elimination of private property and private ownership. Yet your money is being taken from you — try to prevent it, if you will — and is being used in most of our schools, both private and governmental, to promote the idea that capitalism is both decadent and immoral, and that a sharing of wealth is the new economic order.

This is communism.
And the dissemination of this doctrine is being subsidized by the free enterprisers of America who are compelled at the point of a tax gun to pay all charges.

You cannot successfully object. You cannot withhold that portion of your taxes which would be used to underwrite this practice. Thus, your own money, via the hands of the government, is being used to undermine the very device by which you earned your money in the first place.

16. Is There a Way Out?

When we are all through examining the logical and the illogical regarding government, we inescapably come up against an as yet insurmountable problem.

Governments may be intrinsically evil; clearly they operate on the basis of tax predation.
And with equal clarity we can discern that the collection of the tax money precedes the vaunted protection thus dearly bought.
But the fact remains that human nature being what it is, a certain amount of protection of our lives and property is desirable.

The world is not an ideal place.
The people who go to make up our world are, in the main, neither idealists nor saints.

(Political Zombies) Criminals do stalk our streets; viciousness, selfishness, inconsideration, stupidity and worse are all about us.
We cannot completely forego the right to protect one's life and property.

Would that we could. But the facts of life are bloody, and in altogether too many instances an inability to protect ourselves defensively would simply encourage the rise of organized aggression.

Therefore, we come to an impasse.
When government is employed as a protective device, immorality of necessity appears. But, should we forego protection, at least at this time and place, the immorality might conceivably be expanded by even more brutality and cruelty.

And though it may be true, and there are some who will argue the point valiantly, that we actually require far less protection than we think we do, the fact remains that something must be done, some tool provided, which will offset man's belligerency, at least in individual cases.

Let us, then, state with certainty that some tool of protection must be found. And if we can find nothing better than government, cruel, rapacious, immoral, and unjust though it has proved to be in all of history, then, we must still have government.

However, let us suppose that we are able, by virtue of our advanced knowledge and by virtue of a renewed belief in moral verities, to devise a tool of protection which is superior to government.

Ah, there is a thought to conjure with.

*** ( for me, its like national food poisoning, we need an antibiotic, to kill the bacteria, that is injecting a toxin into our living system; its not the politicians so much as it is the toxic activities that they do that turn a living America to a dead zombie like AMERIKKKA.) ***leapingrealeyes

We have shown that government is a tool.

But in this respect, though it may provide a necessary service, it is no more sacred than any other tool which also provides a necessary service.
Government's distinct character comes from the peculiar manner in which it attains to force and power. It derives this power from the compulsive unification of all persons below its exalted level. No other tool occupies this strange elevation.
Every other tool of man's devising is a tool which, if man can control himself, will become docile and tractable in his hands.

Government alone, of all man's inventions, is capable of independent life.
Government alone, like Mrs. Shelley's terrifying creation of the monster born in Frankenstein's mind, has the power and the ability to turn upon its creators and destroy them.

The question which must one day demand our finest intellectual efforts is: Can we invent or create a tool to protect ourselves from aggression without building into it so much power that ultimately it can turn against the very persons who create it and give it strength?

We cannot yet answer this question.
However, avenues of procedure already suggest themselves as offering at least a partial remedy.

Is government the only device we know of self-protection?
No, it is not. Voluntary insurance is another device.
So are private policemen, private organizations such as the American Legion, night watchmen, merchant police, the Triple A and perhaps a score of others.

We have found, for example, that we can protect ourselves from fire with fire insurance. This does not prevent the fire from occurring, but it can indemnify us from loss in the event the unwanted holocaust occurs. And, similarly, if we hire a private policeman, a private watchman, or a private detective, these men cannot prevent a criminal tendency in the mind of another, but they can and will prevent a crime in some cases, and in others they can and do track down the criminal.

But can government do more?
Quite frankly, it cannot.
We could pass a law, but fires will continue to occur.
We can establish expensive and expansive police departments, yet the criminal mind will still function in its own warped way.

17. The Voluntary Way

We must concern ourselves with morality.
**(You grok, the Nurtuting kind of morality)**

We have, for centuries, struggled to understand more about matter and more about technological things. We now know where to look for a reliable food supply. For ages this knowledge was not available.

We now know how to protect ourselves against extremes of temperature, both by shelter and by clothing. Additionally, we can, within limited areas, control the weather. We have deep freezes and we have roaring furnaces. Air conditioning is not new to us.

But as we look at the progress we have made as humankind, we find that chiefly we have concerned ourselves with material things.
Materially, we stand at an advanced position as we compare modern living with prior barbarism.

But we have yet to break the barrier of immorality which surrounds us.

We have yet to understand ourselves sufficiently so that we can protect ourselves from (Political Zombie) aggression in a wholly moral manner.

And, if we can devote ourselves to this frontier ever before us, we may yet learn how to cross this invisible boundary and move our society into a completely moral setting. And this would be a fitting climax to the drama of human progress.

If only people would govern themselves.
But, alas, they do not.
If only people would believe in and practice the Golden Rule and the basic prohibitions of the Decalogue.
But people, basically, neither believe nor practice.
And even those who devoutly assay these moral heights fall dismally by the wayside.

Yet we do hold certain clues to a better moral (nurturing, synergisyic) climate.

We know that men cannot be compelled to be good.
They can only be prevented from being bad — a negative condition. We know from bitter experience that men cannot be forced into doing the wise thing, for such a forcement is foolishness.

Therefore, dimly we see that men can be good, but only when they wish themselves to be good. And through the fog and smoke of friction we can make out the fact that wisdom is possible only when the individual has learned to control himself.

Great wisdom comes only with great self-discipline and great self-control.
And experience, we learn from experience, is the very best and surest of teachers, though the cost is high.

So the word "voluntary" becomes suddenly of inestimable importance.

Men cannot be driven up a slope. But individually, voluntarily, men can and will assay the climb. Further, if their training is proper, if their education is sound, they will long for a moral world with all their hearts. If the longing is born in their breasts, they will inevitably seek the light. And if they do, their seeking will be voluntary and their progress, so long as it is voluntarily conducted, will be certain.

Again we look at insurance and private protective agencies. Have we fully explored all that these devices can perform? We do not think so. This is an age in which both government and insurance ideas have gained great expansion.

But government leads the race, twenty to one.
This age will probably yet be called, not the age of reason, but the age of compulsion.
What reason we have found has led us, immorally, towards compulsion.

For example, we have two kinds of insurance, voluntary and involuntary.
The first is purchased willingly by the buyer, because he feels that it is a good buy for him.

The second is forced upon him by his government, whatever he thinks of it. The first is moral, the second is immoral. Yet the latter is gaining ground. Still, the very essence of immorality is found in the use some persons make of force in compelling others to do what some think they should.

And we have two kinds of police protection, voluntary and involuntary.
The first is paid for voluntarily because someone wants protection and is willing to pay for it.
The second is forced upon us all because some people feel we must have it.
The first is moral, the second is immoral. Yet the latter is gaining ground.

So there is the great question.

Can we yet establish a fully voluntary government … or, perhaps, to phrase it best, can we devise a tool for our protection which will be paid for only by those who want it, and in whatever amounts the payers deem best?

18. What Can You Do?

We come, finally, to you.

Individually, you are in difficulties, many of them probably not of your own making.

But, of course, in some way, you are responsible for all your difficulties, even when they have been thrust upon you. You, alone, can solve your own problems.

As a member of a community and as a member of a nation, you are in difficulties.

Your various governments have taken your energies in the form of frustrating regulations and in the form of mounting taxation (and war), until you stand today almost equated with the victim of a vampire.

You are being drained. Let's face it. You have been drained.

(AMERICA into AMERIKKKA)

The government, you say, has done this to you against your will. This is true. But it is only partially true. For the government is still nothing but a tool of man's devising and you, although you may deny it, have aided and abetted the condition in which you now find yourself.
In short, you have, yourself, employed the tool for your own use, only to find that with each use the tool grew stronger and you grew weaker.

Isn't it time you discovered this fact?
Isn't it time you learned that whenever you call upon the government to do something for you, the call you make is like food and drink for the bureaucracy?

On your calls and your demands, it is nourished.

Without that nourishment it would not grow. It could not.

It is an inescapable fact that what your attention is upon flourishes because of your attention. If you love your home and your family and devote yourself to these things, do they not flourish? And if you turn away and deprive them of your attention, do they not wither, and perhaps ultimately depart?

If you love your business and your work, and devote yourself here, does not your business expand and your work multiply?
And if you shirk your business and your work, will they not shrivel and perhaps ultimately turn to dust to be blown away by the winds of chance?

And if you look to the government as your great love, pouring your energies out upon it, coddling it, coaxing it, wheedling it, beseeching it, will it not blossom and wax fat and strong?

But in this latter case, because of its contradictory formation, the government never has anything of its own. It can only gain by your loss.

You can grow with the growth of your family and your home. You can grow with the growth of your business or your work. But you cannot grow with the growth of your government. You must shrink, and from the shrinkage the government grows.

You are on the threshold of a new world.

This is true every day of the year and every year of your life. Can you and will you discipline yourself so that you will not employ an agency of coercion and affliction to compel others to support you in your fondest hopes and dreams?

Can you be content with minding your own affairs and living your own life? Or must you inflict your views and your opinions on others by using your agency, government, to compel universal support to your ideas?

Can you and will you raise your head in pride and honor and refuse to receive the slightest governmental "aid," knowing that whatever it may be, it has been wrung from the energies of others?

Will you become a devotee of the American capitalistic system and give your energies to producing wealth and services on a voluntary basis? Will you turn your attention away from government, either as a big brother to help you, an employer to hire you, or a mailed fist to force others into your way of doing things?

The nature of man is such that he can rise to any height if he but will.

The nature of government is such that, whatever strength it has, it will be used to amass greater strength by draining away the strength of individuals.

You, alone, can decide where you will stand.
If you can and will be strong, the future is yours.
If you cannot and will not discipline yourself, the future belongs to the government.

Thus we are confronted with the necessity for most serious introspection. Government is a tool, made necessary by man's weakness. But in the passage of time man, through the employment of an enormous array of other tools, is no longer weak.
Yet man clings to government as the first and most important requisite of organized living.

Admittedly, the worthy functions which government can and does perform are necessary.

But it must be seen that government is not an end in itself, but a means whereby those functions of security and protection are vouchsafed to humankind.

The question which must be asked is this: Can man obtain the necessary mental objectivity to devise a modern tool, other than government, which will provide for his security and his protection without the evils which are inherent in any and every government ever devised?

In a word, can man improve his tool of protection so that its destructive character is eliminated?

Is man, through fear, already addicted to the use of compulsion beyond the possibility of change?

Or is it possible that man may now, in this century of much retooling, set up a protective device which will remain docile to his will; his servant, never his master?

Is modem man dedicated to the axe of force?

Or can he exercise his unparalleled skill in tool improvement so that the primitive and prehistoric use of coercion is no longer a necessary adjunct to his own concept of power?


War against Humanity

Americans Saving AmeriKKKa

...