Blinktopia

http://roshibobsays.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/something-nothing-anything/

http://roshibobsays.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/something-nothing-anything/

In an example of how things can turn —not on a dime maybe, but on a fat silver dollar at least— it could be Karl Marx was right after all.

Having been dismissed by the mullahs of capitalism as an evil crank, Marx’s assessment of capitalism’s tendency to ultimately and  inevitably suck the marrow of most of us, may be turning out just as he predicted. If your patriot heart recoils at this, just think “austerity” for the masses simultaneous with a metastasizing  wealthy elite, a tumor growing faster and fatter.

Wall Street has gloated over the global demise of Communism because it has laid the planet wide open to its financial strip-mining; wide open to the same rapaciousness shown by communist corruption, as if capitalist corruption was a form of decadence closer to God. To hear some ministers of American religion tell it, this is in fact the case: capitalism’s corruptions are somehow favored by the Lord over that of evil communism because capitalism must be part of God’s plan.

For Evangelicals, for instance, “… it was unthinkable that capitalism led to class conflict, for that would mean that God had created a world at war with itself. The evangelicals believed in a providential God, one who built a logical and orderly universe, and they saw the new industrial economy as a fulfillment of God’s plan. The free market, they believed, was a perfectly designed instrument to reward good Christian behavior and to punish and humiliate the unrepentant.” —theocracywatch.org

If this is so— if God is in his heaven blushing with fatherly pride at the likes of Mitt Romney, or Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers, Lucifer may have had it right —hope would demand that not be so. Whatever God’s plan may be, unbridled capitalism may not be any more a part of it than was unbridled communism. Class warfare is class warfare no matter who’s lobbing mortars.

Michael Shumann (Time Magazine) gives us the latest in class news and throws in Marx’s prediction concerning future life under capitalism. It has an eerily real ring.

“With the global economy in a protracted crisis,” Schumann writes, ”and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes.

” ‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole,’ Marx wrote.”

There’s an insidiousness in the tactics of the rich and their mouthpieces, such as apparent sociopaths like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), that makes it possible to imagine them turning over their own mothers to the Koch Machine to be water-boarded until they divulge where mom hid her last social security check so it could be turned over to Goldman Sachs to be voucherized at 1/4 of its pre-privatization value. The conspiracy of lies that seethes from the mouths of these characters is blatant in its shamelessness. Their moral compasses are tuned always to the magnetism of excess and power. Thier smug arrogance is a symptom of their sociopathy.

Take this by Cruz: [The Democrats’ budget] does nothing to solve the enormous challenges facing Social Security and Medicare. Every one of us would like to see those critical bulwarks of our society strengthened, and right now those programs are careening toward bankruptcy.”

Is there anyone within broadcast distance of Republicans who believes that Cruz really means they’d like to see SS strengthened? You’d have to have had your head up Sean Hannity’s think tank for the past ten years to buy that one.

“Republicans do not want them ‘strengthened’. This is not just a matter of semantics. You only have to look at what these people have been saying since these programs were enacted to understand that they do not believe that the government should administer these programs at all. In fact, Ted Cruz has called SS a ponzi scheme. He basically supports the Ryan dystopian nightmare plan.” —Digby at Hullabaloo

I’d rather dine with an honest petty crook than spend an evening too close to the sleaze of Cruz —even Jesus seemed to prefer the virtue of Mary Magdalene to the likes of King Herod’s wife.

So Ted Cruz and those who live by his values would not shrink from having unregulated capitalism permanently established as the final solution —the most efficient and effective way to strip not only the nation, but the planet, naked in order to line their closets with thousand dollar suits.

The flip side of Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” (a prediction which did not pan out), it may be argued, is the “hegemony of lootn’carryit” —which is to say the hoarding of riches by looters of the commonwealth who haul it off to the Cayman Islands for safekeeping, i.e. to protect it from the governments of common people who might use it to revitalize infrastructures, improve public education, or simply to provide the means to keep the larger part of the world population out of a life in gutters, jails or homeless shelters.

It’s a mean morality that elevates acquisitiveness to a national virtue.

Dante , on the fourth circle of the Inferno of his Divine Comedy introduces us to the avaricious. They toil eternally pushing boulders around in much the same way as their hoarding of wealth while they we alive left the rest of the world’s population to struggle under the daily weight of their poverty:

The goods committed into fortune’s hands,
For which the human race keeps such a heap!
Not all the gold, that is beneath the moon,
Or ever hath been, of these toil-worn souls
Might purchase rest for one.”
……………………………. —Dante Alighieri

But poets can throw out cautionary tales until the sacred cows come home without making a dent in the gold-plated skulls of bankers or the buck-bound heads of corporations.

And so, ”…the consequence of (the) widening inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20th century.” —Shumann
.

by Jim Culleny
for the West County Independent
Shelburne Falls, MA.
3/28/13

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I’ve been preoccupied lately by the term, inertia, which most of us probably first became aware of in a school science lesson.

A classic definition of inertia might be: Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion. So, if you set a marble down on a table it will not move unless you impart energy to it (give it a shove or tip the table and let gravity infuse it with juice) and it won’t stop rolling unless something stops it (it hits a wall or friction sucks its energy, slowing it until it’s left with nothing but the will to do nothing forever but sleep).

What I’ve been thinking, looking over our plutocratic capitalist landscape, is that inertia applies not only to physical objects in space, but to psychic ones as well, such as ideas that cannot move or have ceased to move after bouncing against one political wall after another (call it elite friction); or ideas that roll on like giant snowballs raging downhill picking up detritus and speed until they hit a wall.

Inertia, in fact, has as much to do with politics as physics.

We have monstrous environmental problems as plain as rising mean temperatures, Manhattan plus-sized calving glaciers in Antarctica and prolonged drought in the central and southwest, but are unable to remedy them. Why? Inertia.

We have huge problems resulting from global and national financial inequity: a chronic gap in wealth distribution, but don’t deal with them. Why? Inertia.

We’re facing-down food calamities: pesticide and GMO contamination and tsunamis of sickness-producing junk-food, among others, but seem powerless to intervene. Why? Inertia.

And, most sadly, there are remedies  (and here and here) for all of these things, but which remain unimplemented. Ideas that sit there inert as we are catatonic, or move excruciatingly slowly, waiting for the destruction of obstruction and bursts of energy required to move them forward. Why? National ideological inertia enough to suck energy out of a black hole —you betcha’.

If you guessed my use of the term “you betcha’” was calculated you’re right. It’s there to call attention to the kind of thinking that has stopped a government in its tracks from doing anything useful, practical or redeemable in a world that needs, first, a good (intelligent) talking to and, next, a powerful kick in the ass to send it down the road to (intelligent) action. The kind of thinking (or, actually, thoughtlessness) that propelled Sarah Palin to the status of super-stupid talking head for the willfully ignorant.

Simple historical fact: capitalism won the argument it had with socialism and communism. Capitalism has been running things for a long time. It ran them even before the Soviet Union folded in 1991 and has been running them in spades ever since. Even the last big “communist” state, China, is nothing but top-down capitalism writ large. In fact, there would not be much difference between a government run exclusively by the Koch brothers and one run by Li Keqiang, Premier of China —we’re almost there now! So, I’d love to have stone capitalists stop dancing around what’s causing the earth to warm, our seas to become sewers, our fish stocks to diminish, our food supply to be monopolized and made unhealthful by fewer and fewer huge agribusinesses, our electoral system to be bought and paid for by the richest among us, to have news sources vital to a functioning democracy owned by fewer and fewer of the richest Americans, to have our basic right to healthcare equity controlled by profit-making organizations —the beat and social crimes go on.

Dear USA, it’s not socialism, but capitalism (or what passes for it) seeded with the worst of human nature that’s responsible for these present dangers. Despite that right-wing red herring —the one Sarah Palin loves to throw out at rallies to smell up the room for watchers of info-free Fox news— socialism has not been responsible for most of this. Capitalism has rolled amok through the world for decades making money hand over fist, adding to its bottom line, skimming off the top, cutting corners, buying politicians, creating housing bubbles and recessions just like that snowball mentioned earlier, flattening or corrupting everything in its path. Once set off it has become implacable: an object of inertia without a countervailing force because it is not run by empathic humans, but by bottom-line, acquisitive and ruthless automatons.

Capitalism can’t help itself . When the acquisition of wealth becomes a system’s most widespread ultimate virtue and when wealth has been given legal permission to buy anything at any cost, what should we expect?

Mother Teresas do not run banks. They don’t sit on the Supreme Court. The managers of soup kitchens do not call the shots at Monsanto or Arthur Daniels Midland. And no Jesus has risen through the political ranks of either Democrats or Republicans to multiply and re-distribute the wealth of loaves and fishes. He is always cut down by the priests of acquisition among us.

In fact, the inertia we live with today is the same inertia Jesus faced in years running up to AD 1: the tendency of the rich and powerful to remain rich and powerful regardless of everything else and to stop any movement to the contrary with lies, repression and violence —whatever it takes.

Still, champions —the more courageous among us— occasionally arise to get the counter-ball rolling despite being vilified and scourged.

But (big but), to paraphrase 1960s free-speech activist Jack Weinberger, who said, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” a wise rule of thumb for those hoping to overcome the will to do nothing but sleep forever might be: never trust anyone with over thirty million in take-home pay. Whatever they say should be taken with a full shaker of salt whenever it comes to doing what needs to be done in the best inertial interests of the people.

by Jim Culleny
3/16/13
for The West County Independent

A State Senator in Michigan calls out lame-duck Republicans on their right-to-work-for-less bill:

.
I was recently reminded of a nasty piece of twisted self-serving logic that rivals anything concocted by Republicans at the height of the voter suppression movement during last election: i.e. a report issued by the Phillip Morris in 2001. It was a glimpse into the shadows of corporation-think.

The Phillip Morris report was intended to counter efforts to raise tobacco taxes in the Czech Republic and “…touted the ‘positive effects’ that early mortality due to smoking had on the country’s economy.”  Even though its action was later exposed, and Phillip Morris issued a public apology out of one side of its mouth, out of the other it was saying similar things to Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia (www.tobaccofreecenter.org).

In the best of circumstances a human thinks with his or her heart and brain and filters thoughts through a conscience, but don’t forget that corporations have no hearts or brains. They’re not like natural people. Corporations think with their Accounting Department and operate without conscience —unless you want to call their Legal and Public Relations Departments their conscience. The logic of corporations is of a more primitive sort and has no shame component.

The argument Phillip Morris made was that smokers, by dying early, saved the Czech government 30 million dollars due to reduced health-care costs in 1999 —savings not just in actual medical costs but also in reductions in pensions and housing costs for the elderly. The report called this “… an indirect positive effect of smoking”.

Phillip Morris’ logic was that reducing the average life span by 5.23 years helped offset higher health-care costs related to nicotine addiction. The corporation used statistical info in the report to influence Czech politicians and officials —but this should sound familiar since US oil and arms corporations, among others, stupefy politicians with whacked stats while beating them into submission using clubs fashioned of thousand dollar bills.

But why did Phillip Morris stop there? Following its reasoning all governments could reap billions in health care benefit costs by mandating that everyone but a selected few be subject to nicotine addiction with a shot in the butt of nicotine concentrate as we slip from the womb.  This would have the added boon to tobacco corporations of not requiring huge expenditures for ads to snag greenhorns barely out of Huggies. Earlier addiction would mean that at five we’d be weaned from pure nicotine to Malboros and spend our early years hacking, coughing and contributing to the retirement of tobacco execs. At twenty it’s off to an oncologist to be dead as doornails by 45 thereby reducing the nation’s health care costs by billions and billions as carl Sagan liked to say.

Or how about eliminating hypocrisy entirely?  Cut to the chase.  Just make infanticide legal; an integral part of state health programs. Think of the reduced health care costs then.

What is it with these people —have they no self-respect? But this is how corporations corrupt.

The most recent example of corporate-think in the news today is that of the arms industry, which will lobby to its last breath (if corporate persons had lungs) to put guns in the hands of as many people as possible. They will fight tooth and nail using front organizations like the NRA to hold the line against background checks and the banning of automatic weapons and high capacity magazines. They will spend millions to pay-off representatives (who also seem devoid of brains, hearts, and consciences) to stave off such things as public health research into studies of the widespread effects of gun violence on our society. Arms corporations fear that widespread knowledge may  lead to …uh,  bad action.

Case in point:  ”In 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

Why would they do this?

Of course there may be more reasons than the intent to keep us stupid, but I don’t think so. Coincidentally, although pro-gun members failed to actually defund the center they were clever.  Subsequently ”…the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year.” (Silencing the Science on Gun Research, by Arthur Kellerman, MD, MPH and Frederick Rivera, MD, MPH, 2012)

In the way the tobacco industry’s European solution to high health care costs is more sickness leading to more early deaths, the NRA/Arms Industry’s solution to gun violence is: more ignorance and more guns regardless of more deaths.

This is the nut of corporate-think.

Arm everybody! they say, putting forth solutions to the Newtown massacre such as arming teachers, arming janitors, having armed security guards at school and finally, as suggested by SC State Senator Lee Bright: arm kids.

“I believe the more guns we have the safer we are,” said Bright.

Yes, Bright wants to arm children too. And, just as the tobacco industry includes in its business model the enticement of children to become addicted to nicotine, the arms industry is more aggressively marketing its product to the youngest among us: “… the (arms) industry’s efforts (through the NRA) have taken shape and gathered momentum in schools across the country, with rifle teams and hunter’s education classes enticing record numbers of younguns to take up the sport”. (Jessica Pupovac, Alternet)

While more gun knowledge may lead to more responsible use of a single weapon, more weapons are not the way to fewer gun deaths. Let’s remember that the Newtown shooter’s mother’s arsenal was the source of the gun that killed Newtown’s children. One less gun in that household and there probably would be 20 fewer dead children in the USA.

Add to the increased number of  automatic massacres the obscene number of “ordinary” gun deaths across the USA (31,572 in 2010) and you have daily Armageddon —by the way the 2010 gun deaths equal a fully loaded 747 crashing once a week for a year. You have to wonder how long the Airline Industry could remain un-scrutinized and un-regulated with that statistic)

In the case of tobacco more is less (life, that is) In the case of guns, less is more.

Jim Culleny
2/2/13

‘Where were they? Why didn’t the United States of America lead in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community was sure would come?”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders asked that question as he and California Senator Barbara Boxer proposed Sanders climate-change bill: the most comprehensive legislation ever to stop global warming. Sanders was imagining an indictment by future generations of the fools who lived in the 20th and early 21st century —those who refused to take action against certain environmental catastrophe, but were embroiled instead in squabbles about contraception, same-sex marriage, questions of “legitimate rape”, and the introduction of bills to make even the accidental exposure of the female nipple a felony unless that offensive body part had previously been protected by pasties or patches of duct tape.

Yes, as if things could not get more absurd in the prurient world of the conservative mind, that latter proposition was introduced in a bill by North Carolina State Senator Rayne Brown. Brown’s bill would make it a Class H felony to expose “… the nipple, or any portion of the areola, of the human female breast.” Male nipples are exempt.

North Carolina’s Nipple-exposure Committee Chairwoman Rep. Sarah Stevens, R-Surry. said “…using pasties or other nipple coverings would protect those women against prosecution (in the event of a wardrobe malfunction),” which Republican Tim Moore of Cleveland suggests might be yet one more use of America’s universal fix-it, duct tape.

No, really.

In light of the real imminent crises that face us North Carolina’s attention to the female nipple indicates a malfunction more serious than accidental, or even intentional toplessness. Yet Republicans press on.

But Bernie Sanders is not from North Carolina, he’s from the only state in the union that recognizes that a socialist may be more clear thinking and intellectually aware than a congress full of Tea Party troglodytes.

California’s Barbara Boxer (a female with nipples herself) is not one to be distracted by inanities  and signed onto Sanders bill saying she did so because it’s “the gold standard.” Boxer, like Sanders can read a CO2 sequestration graph, and understands that melting glaciers and hugely calving Antarctic ice sheets have more profound implications that need to be immediately addressed.

As one poet wryly notes: Pull up a chair / and watch the glacier melt / but put it on pontoons / or wear a speedo, ’cause / the glacier is becoming svelte / and oceans will be rising soon.

Rayne Brown’s bill may be a laughing matter but Bernie Sanders’ is not. In fact, as Sanders pointed out in his news conference explaining the bill, “The leading scientists in the world who study climate change now tell us that their projections in the past were wrong; that, in fact, the crisis facing our planet is much more serious than they had previously believed,” —and more serious by far than the breast bill of North Carolina or most of the “issues” Congress (especially congressional Republicans) has its head buried in.

Bill McKibben, noted environmentalist, said of the bill’s creators: “Sens. Sanders and Boxer actually understand the depth of the climate problem we face … We hope and trust that they won’t have to be a lone voice.”

McKibben said this just one day after his arrest at a White House protest on a controversial oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico which is itself another potential ecological catastrophe being foisted on us by giant energy corporations and a government that’s supposed to be of, by, and for us.

Politicians wander around DC bumping into doors, being stupid, fretful and duplicitous about fiscal cliffs, debt limits, and budget sequestration without an apparent clue or concern about the environmental cliff, planetary absorption limits, and atmospheric CO2 sequestration that will sooner rather than later eclipse their self-serving blathering and make it moot.

Sometimes I think we’re victims of inertia. That having begun our long trek from Eden (or primordial ooze as some suspect) and having picked up implacable speed, we’re whizzing to the end-times in a machine of our own making unable to apply the brakes because we’ve preferred to not build them in. And, although some, like Bernie Sanders, would like to get to work on brake disks and shoes, we dismiss them as do-gooder renegades that have fallen off the mechanism.

So, what about that question Sanders asked on behalf of our grandchildren?

“Where were they (meaning us)?”

Where we are is out to lunch being fatally obsessed with apprehensions about female rather than planetary anatomy —among other sensational, politically motivated, non-issues.

Where we are is into self-serving disregard of our children’s future.

by Jim Culleny
for The West County Independent, Shelburne Falls, MA
2/16/13

Climate Change Denial (CCD) is a virulent strain delusion. Its symptoms are a shut-down of the brain’s reasoning center associated with a closing of the doors of perception and the simultaneous inclination to make stuff up. 
 
While the causes of CCD are not fully understood the spread of infection seems to have political, religious, and economic components. CCD’s pathology appears to be affected by how inextricably a victim’s politics and religion have become intertwined with ideologies of consumption and profit. As might be expected the pathogen proliferates in areas known to be hotbeds of money, miracles and mischief; for example Wall Street, the Bible belt, and anywhere laws are written.

In places where these three conditions are found, such as Washington DC, rates of CCD soar. Cesspools of all types are well known to be sources of disease —some fatal (plague, for instance, and the impulse to war).

Since funding for research has been hard to come by (sources have been devastated by the disease) only slow progress has been made in our understanding of CCD.

The major difficulty theo-neuro-econo biologists have had in studying CCD is in determining if the disease pathogen closes first the doors of perception or attacks the brain’s prefrontal cortex —its reasoning center. The answer they’ve been chasing is what comes first, see-no-evil hear-no-evil or simple irrationality? Whichever, the introduction of sectarianism appears to have a radical effect on CCD’s course —and when politics is factored in … well, you can see the problem.

*Note: since it’s already well-know that, in normal development, the brain’s reasoning and problem-solving center is the last to mature researchers are looking into the possibility that arrested, or delayed maturity may be a factor. They are calling this the “Reverse Paul Effect” (RPE) after the New Testament’s epistle writer, St. Paul, who said, “When I was a child I reasoned as a child. When I became a man I put childish things behind me.”

Researchers first became interested in what they later termed Climate Change Denial when reports of climate change began to become evident. History of climate change study began in the 19th century “when ice ages and other natural changes were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect first identified.” —Wikipedia.

Late in that century scientists first argued that human activity (most notably emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere) could change the climate. And, by the 1960s the “…warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing” —Ibid.

This “warming viewpoint” gained ground during the 1970s and, by the 1990s, “…as a result of improving fidelity of computer models and observational work confirming the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, a (scientific) consensus formed: greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes, and human emissions were bringing serious global warming. Since then most work has been oriented toward producing reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” —Ibid.

CCD researchers have now concluded this is exactly where and when Climate Change Denial became, itself, undeniable. The rub, they were sure, was in the term “intergovernmental panel”. And they determined further, that CCD had become increasingly most acute in the United States which ironically, and coincidentally, has a history of rationality freighted with a long tradition of irrationality —i.e. the nation’s founders were students of The Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason, or by folks like Pat Robertson, the Ague of Reason), while the country has prided itself on being a deeply religious people from its founding.

Now whatever can be said of reason and religion, reason is reason and religion is not. They are two distinct realms. They have different rules; therefore an “intergovernmental” panel is definitely going to present problems when dealing with CCD.

For example, it is not rational to continue to dump CO2 into the atmosphere when all reliable scientific data says that devastating climate change will be the result of doing so. Past and present data indicate this. Present experience is showing this: rising temperatures, glacial melt, rising sea levels, a-typical storms, drought, forest fires, shifting weather patterns. Under the circumstances, reason says let’s do something, while blindness or unreason says, “But what about my bottom line?” or “It’s God’s will” or “Who cares, The Rapture and the end of the world are nigh anyway.”

Under the cicumstances, the idea of expecting an “intergovernmental panel” to find ways to avoid ecological disaster while it itself itself is wracked with advanced CCD is proving to be as much of a hoax as that claimed by at least one US Senator.

James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma (a state which, not surprisingly, seethes with religion), has claimed that global warming is a hoax. He further argues that his belief in that hoax is biblically inspired and that ” only God can change the climate”.

Add Inhofe’s irrationality to that of other members of congress who rely on corporate donations for their future and fortunes, throw in a base of  religious fundamentalists to whom they pander for votes and you have the festering conditions of CCD: an epidemic of lies told by fossil fuel companies, temptations offered by lobbyists, the blind faith of those who count on miracles, and purveyors of  self-interested unreason who can’t perceive a cataclysm even when it’s flooding their attics, polluting their air and poisoning their wells.

When I was a child I thought as a child.  As I grow up I begin to use the Unknown’s great gift of intellect.  I begin to think   …responsibly.

That’s the hope, at least.

by Jim Culleny
1/20/13

Here’s what the Second Amendment says:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

This is the concise statement that has made it possible for the insane to orchestrate mass murders in the USA.

But how?

It is odd, but no odder than the manifestations of other philosophies. But hope springs eternal, so we typically set out to deal with fundamental inflexibility by resorting to attempts at understanding. We often do this in the face of futility.  Though it’s unlikely that any argument will lead the most ardent gun enthusiasts to betray their triggers, for the sake of less blood and fewer fatalities the rest of us might start a conversation here:

Just what is a militia?

Variously defined a militia is: a body of citizens enrolled for military service called out periodically but serving full time only in emergencies; a body of citizen soldiers; all able-bodied males eligible for military service; citizens organized in a paramilitary group regarding themselves as defenders of individual rights against the presumed interference of the federal government.

Regardless of these definitions, however, a simple reading of the amendment does not appear to authorize unregulated individuals to bear arms, it’s opening clause sets a condition and establishes the premise for what follows. That this premise and condition has been glossed over by gun-lovers, the arms industry and the NRA is not surprising, nor is it surprising that the history of the Second Amendment is not well known. Much of politics is based upon ignorance —counts on it. It’s how media conglomerates run by men like Rupert Murdoch make profits. It’s is how amoral incendiaries like Rush Limbaugh make fortunes.

But another view of Second Amendment militias exists that’s more interesting than the typical observations about them; something that goes beyond interpretations by the gun lobby and people like James Yeager, CEO of a company he calls Tactical Response (Yeager, who famously responded to recent talk of gun control by saying in a video that, ” If it goes one inch further, I’m gonna start killing people,” which rationales, verbatim, are probably what explode in the skulls of the seriously deranged as they don camo, pack their semi-automatics and head out to set things right in their world).

Yeager, et al, like to say the constitutions framers intended that the rights to own guns and have militias were protected to save citizens from an out of control government. But in “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment”,  written in 1998 by law professor Karl Bogus (an unfortunate name for anyone writing a scholarly paper about anything) of Roger Williams University, sheds some interesting light on the origin of the Second Amendment. He said those militias and guns were intended to protect state governments from out of control slaves, which turns the traditional argument on its head.

Professor Bogus argues that “The Second Amendment was not enacted to provide a check on government tyranny; rather, it was written to assure the Southern states that Congress would not undermine the slave system by using its newly acquired constitutional authority over the militia to disarm the state militia and thereby destroy the south’s principal instrument of slave control.”

He explains, “The Second Amendment’s history has been hidden because neither James Madison, who was the principal author of the Second Amendment, nor those he was attempting to outmaneuver politically, laid their motives on the table.”

The professor is telling us that the militias referred to in the Second Amendment were militias created and regulated to protect white slave owners from slaves who might rise up and rebel against their oppression. He suggests that the amendment was written to assure the southern states that the new federal government would not upset the south’s economic applecart by doing away with the armed men they relied upon to protect them from uprisings of slaves. It was an amendment designed to convince slave-owning states that they could continue to suppress the hopes of their chattel.

Bogus’ well-documented paper notes that Virginia, in 1799, was on the cusp of its decision to ratify the constitution, or not, and the main question in the minds of Virginians was whether the new union would end slavery.

“Slavery was not only an economic and industrial system,” one scholar noted, “but more than that, it was a … police system.”

The South developed an elaborate means of slave control —a slave patrol of armed white groups, then called “militias”, who made regular rounds to assure that blacks were not where they did not belong or coming together in unauthorized gatherings. These militias —these patrols— also gave slaves a sense of the constant vigilance of their owners. The state, in fact, required plantation owners to participate in patrols and to provide their own arms and equipment.

Professor Bogus argues that it was clear that the Second Amendment was drafted to protect southern militias, not to authorize the general arming of individuals.

The irony that flows from this is that the defenses for, definitions of, and rationale explaining the Second Amendment, couched in arguments for “liberty” in the rantings of the NRA’s Wayne laPierre and embodied in men like James Yeager and Alex Jones are counter-factual.  The irony, according to Karl Bogus’ paper, is that the Second Amendment was a political expedient designed to maintain the enslavement of others. Talk about a bargain with the devil —should it come as a surprise that devilish bargains bring devilish results?

To make matters worse, even in the shadow of evil militias, Sandy Hook, men like James Yeager and Alex Jones and organizations like the NRA, we may not yet be learning our lesson  —we’re still dealing with the devil. We’re still arming demagogues and the deranged.
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by Jim Culleny
1/12/13

Related: The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
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I was raised a Roman Catholic but left the church when I could not sincerely defend its beliefs. Blame it on reading, blame it on college, blame it on science, it doesn’t matter, religious faith, whatever it is, eluded me.

And it eluded me from a young age. The questions I asked about mysterious things were never adequately answered by nuns, priest or parents. Even now I don’t understand how anyone could come to believe what is fundamentally unbelievable to them— to embrace the substance of ” things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” as the Bible says.

Can’t get there from here, I say; by God’s grace, say others, resorting to futility. In any case holiness and spirituality, and our path to and through them, have little to do with religion.  Religion is something else.

Part of my difficulty with religious faith is that faiths are as prolific and varied as the stuff in the cereal aisle of the local super-market, from old fashioned Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to faddish upstarts like Ralston’s Batman cereal.

Even monotheists have managed to split their god to smithereens. From the mono a mono three major amigos: Jews, Christians and Muslims, to their virtually infinite sub-variations.

Jews have segmented themselves into Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Hasidic, and Kabbalahists. Christian denominations meanwhile, are as numbered as the stars in the sky. The Eastern Roman Catholic Church alone, according to Wikipedia, has as many as twenty versions, each with its own theological tweak: the Armenian Catholic Church, the Belarusian, the Coptic, Byzantine of Croatia, Ethiopian, Georgian, Maronite, Slovak Greek, etc., etc., etc.

And wait, there’s more. The Eastern Orthodox Catholics are not to be outdone by Eastern Roman Catholics. Wiki lists over thirty variants; and, remember, we haven’t even gotten to Protestants.

Protestants have, from the days of Martin Luther to the present, protested Roman Catholic domination to the point of fractious fracture. Main-stream Protestant denominations may be grouped into nine families: Anabaptist, Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, Quaker, and Reformed, which are further divided into no less than one hundred sixty-one (give or take a sect) of an infinity of possibilities.

Finally, Islam too clearly wants variety. Muslims have worked out, among others, the following breakdowns: Abādites, Al-Ahbash, Al-Arquam, Böszörmény, Faizrakhmanist, Gedimu, and Haruriyyah —and that only covers the first eight letters of the alphabet.

If these figures are boggling remember we’ve only been talking about monotheists. When we throw in Buddhists, Hindus, Folk religions, Shinto, Sikism, Bahá’í,Cheondoism, Wicca, and so on we must be giving God data-base gridlock.

In fact, following the logic of numbers, we might conclude that this religious mincing will end in a quantity of religious divisions exactly equal to the population of the globe at any given moment.

With the difficulty of systemizing the ineffable, this possibility makes perfect sense. Who but we, individually, may know what resides in our hearts regarding the mystery of creation and how best to embrace it?

Frightening, isn’t it? With the amount of AK-47s floating around, and the historical record of religious war, you have to wonder where such creedal splintering in the land of the free and the world at large will end, if ever.

I only mention this because, politically speaking, in a country such as the USA, whose population has professed a belief in God reaching seventy-six percent, religion is becoming as dangerously problematic as it has been for centuries among other peoples. Not only is our polarization political, but it’s tainted with the variegated mythical beliefs of citizens who get their orders directly from God (think Michelle Bachmann).

Case in point: The Sovereigns.

The Sovereigns are yet one more twist on the millennial-long efforts of humans to come to terms with what they do not know (and probably will never know —in this life at least). The Sovereigns have come together to say “screw you” to anyone rational enough to know that if sectarianism has not brought humans together under God by now, it more than likely will not into the foreseeable future.

Sovereign Pastor Paul Revere (a nutcase formerly known Douglas Fleshman) declares he “… doesn’t recognize the authority of the State of Oregon, the United States of America, or anyone else that presumes to have some command over him. He answers only to God.”

The members of Pastor Revere’s congregation “… are becoming an increasing headache for cops, public defenders, prosecutors, bailiffs, and judges all over the U.S., because when they inevitably land in court for driving without a license or failing to pay taxes (they) clog up the system with reams of nonsensical paperwork.”

But that’s just the un-bloody part of the The Sovereigns problem. As we might expect with zealots, “Sometimes the battles get bloody … In 2010, 16-year-old sovereign Joseph Kane gunned down two police officers in West Memphis, Ark., after a routine traffic stop. The boy killed the officers with an AK-47 after his dad, 45-year-old sovereign Jerry Kane, got into a scuffle with one of the cops attempting to frisk him.”

Variety, they say, is the spice of life. I like it. I like diversity. What I don’t like is inviting religion into government and allowing its manifest variations to squabble between themselves and the rest of us to the point of religious war and state theocracy.

We have a constitution that does not once mention the word “god”. Not once. It does not for good reason —emphasis on reason.

Saying I get my orders directly from God is just another way of saying I get my orders from myself.  Who’s to argue?
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by Jim Culleny
12/30/12