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Of course, a serious bomb-chucker (hypothetical) would not want to leave even faint tracks on the internet. Only a fellow-traveler or a nascent revolutionary -- an amateur -- would do that.  (Which puts a big fat sticker on my forehead, I guess.)

As far as printing a pamphlet goes, that's fine, but be aware of fingerprints and tracebacks. In one future we're lined up with our backs to a bullet-pocked wall. If-and-when, they will come for the fellow-travelers and amateurs first. A lot of innocents will get swept up too, if it's a typical police state purge. Could be thou and I.

Hard for me to say just where the USA is on that path right now. Using foreign prisons to provide torture facilities -- as is the current CIA practice -- is not how it's done in proper police states. But I believe I heard that the CIA has held and probably tortured a few US citizens stateside (the argument being, I think, that it was a "reasonable" domestic analogue for the camp at Guantanamo Bay). That's troubling. And the passage of the anti-sedition bill shows that the requisite mixture of cowards and bullies exists in Washington.

Anyway. I kind of wanted to check in on the forum, it's an interesting place. Thanks for the smidge of attention; as a newbie I am not worthy.

~~ Jack

Ah. I have just realized my post was probably illegal under US law.

Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

So, to those who are monitoring this (Hi, CIA! Hope your day is going just swimmingly!) I must emphasize that anything I post here is -- of course! -- satirical in nature. Much like that comical passage in the US Constitution which says all people have the right to "alter or abolish" their own government. I just know that old Jimmy Madison had his tongue in his cheek on that one.

And to those forum members who are US citizens: remember to wipe, and flush twice afterwards. The law is on the books.

~~ Jack

All things having been said, and repeated, and repeated again until the bile rises in the throat...now the only sensible action is to destroy the government.

The Capitol should be ruins, a grassy rock-scattered place where children go and their parents tell them, "This was where the bigwigs approved torture, this is where the fat men legislated their robberies, this is where they voted for war and left the poor and sick to die. This is where the ones in power proclaimed that all the money will go to the rich and everyone else can eat dirt." That's what the parents, those who knew and who put the dynamite under the foundations, that's what they will say.

And the children will pick dandelions in the ruins of Washington, DC.

Yeah, America's dead. She has been dead for fifty years now. Nationalists still love her, still kiss her dead lips; they are making love to her corpse even as you read this. But she's dead. Get over it.

Your allegiance must be elsewhere. Your allegiance must be to a new life. It is 07:30 and the October sun bursts in a flood of orange light through the window. What the hell are you going to do about it? Get the guitars and the djembes, the harmonicas and the fiddles; get your crazy trousers and your hat with the ribbons; walk on stilts and let the dogs run free. Dance for your life, you bastards. Dance and sing and work and fuck like you mean it. It's all that's left.

For fifty years money has been lavished on corporate barons while legislators deny food and basic medical care to the poor. For fifty years America has used lies to wage wars of aggression. The killings -- Vietnam to Iraq -- number in the hundreds of millions, a holocaust. A murderous American holocaust. For fifty years the US secret police have operated without restraint of law, and they have been set loose to imprison and torture at will. America's Constitution is a joke, ignored in practice and mocked daily by the actions of the government.

Dance like you mean it, brothers. Spit on everyone in power. I heard there was a man who said that no matter whether McCain or Obama gets elected the inauguration should be the same: a hollow-point bullet to the forehead. To be immediately followed by the execution of each and every congressman and senator. I did not say that, I don't know who did. It is illegal to say that, illegal to write it, illegal for an American to think it. (Just as it was illegal for a Soviet in Stalin's day.) I don't know who would say that.

Spit on everyone in power.

We will learn this or die: the only tribe is the human tribe. The streets and parks and fields belong to us. We own the sunlight on the grass, a bottle of warm wine in our hands and a cheap guitar hung 'round our necks. We own life. Late at night, alone: frost forming on the windows, a 40-watt bulb in the bedside lamp -- the one without a lampshade -- and a thin book by Jim:

"The bullet tumbled toward the girl's head at 1250 feet
per second. She wasn't the president, you say,
too young for politics. Despite theological gooseshit
the gods don't keep time in light years. We're slowed
to the brutality of clocks. Listen to the alarm.
Wake up."

That's it, then: wake up. Every one of us will die, but we will continue. We can't go on, but we will go on. The chain of souls sings in our blood, in the only tribe there is, the human tribe. There is a reason the officials are on top: it is because scum floats. And therefore be no respecter of government. Subvert the powerful. Mail your congressman an envelope of spit. Your allegiance is to humankind, not to the corpse of America or the stinking remains of a nationalist fantasy. Grow up. And learn to sing.

In the USA some trials are now decided by the fact that the evidence must remain secret.

In other words, the state can defeat you in court just by invoking secrecy.

The next step is to make knowing about the secrecy laws illegal. That will follow from the already-established logic that knowing that something exists threatens the state by allowing opponents to develop effective counter-strategies.

Then you will be convicted not only on secret evidence, but on the basis of laws which you are legally prohibited from knowing about.

That is the same thing as totalitarianism. The state has total control. Challenging the state is impossible.

~~ Jack of Turnips

The opinion of Dr. Ernst Durrnacker:

"...You speak of the quantum...The great Wolfgang Pauli once asked his students, 'Why did the electron tunnel across the voltage potential?' And he answered, 'Because it had a 1.4559% chance of doing so!' Ha-ha! No, wait, I have that wrong...it should be 'Because the turnpike was closed.'"

"At all events, it is never enough to examine only the specific and the particular. No, for the universal whole is greater than the sum of its particulars. Echoes of the past coexist with echoes from the future. They are like waves; they intersect and form interference patterns. Tell me, do you have black thoughts, or do you fear the dark?"

(We do not know what to say to Dr. Duurnacker. We are embarrassed by his question, and so we do not answer.)

"Well, then, all right. Very well: imagine that time is a duckpond. A pebble falls into the water at one end -- the past -- and another at the far end, which is the future. The ripples from these events propagate throughout time, and where they intersect and interfere strange patterns form. These patterns, they persist, they grow and change. But they are not real things, not ab-original! No, not at all. They arise only from the interactions of disturbances in time, in the Ur-field."

"These patterns, they are you and me. Now I will show you an interesting thing. Put your hand in front of the reading-lamp -- close, close to the bulb. But not so close that you burn yourself!"

"See the light glowing through? The light, even the feeble artificial light, it goes through your skin and your muscle, and through all your tissues. Even through bone! When you are walking down the city pavements in the bright sunshine, the light goes everywhere inside you. There are no areas of absolute darkness inside the human being. None! Time, too, is like that. See how it is? The existence-patterns, they are not apart from the light. They are not apart from time. The universal metempsychosis [meant here in the sense of temporal psychosis]means that past and future permeate us. Permeate and create us. And so there is no cause for alarm! No catastrophe can occur!"

"No, indeed. Within the universal metempsychosis the catastrophes of little pink shoes and thoughtless children mean nothing. See? I am smiling. I smile, and my hands do not tremble."

Of course, I would assert that God's Army in the Congo does wrong things. That is because I am human. If you are an asteroid, say, or a seafloor volcanic vent, then of course there is no wrong. And I -- if I were a shelf of granite gradually eroding away in Patagonia, or, perhaps, a 3-billion-year-old lump of ice laying on the side of a small crater on Pluto's moon Charon -- why, certainly I would agree with you!

However, as a sea-cucumber, I assert that things which hurt me are wrong. I especially hate those steely hook thingies that one sometimes ingests by accident, and which get embedded in one's hindgut. Those things are just wrong!. Bad and wrong.

So it goes.

~~ Jack of Turnips

Every member of the Senate or Congress who voted for the authorization of force should be ejected from government office in disgrace. Before the war I read the CIA assessments of Iraq's strategic capabilities, and only a sludge-brained political herd-animal could have read the facts and believed Iraq posed any threat at all to the USA.

Not ONE of them should be left in office.

(I wrote a lot of letters in that era. Several to Colin Powell, as he seemed the one most likely to have the sense to see what madness was being proposed and be able to do something about it. After Robert Byrd's speech in the Senate I wrote him one, too. Something like "If I may say so, Senator, you have balls. And you have my undying respect.")

Sadly, I have no way to force the political herd-animals from office. And you can't pry off leeches if you have no way to force them...

The only time people are executed for war crimes is if they lose the war. And fall into the hands of their enemies. So Bush is safe as houses.

Should he be prosecuted for war crimes? In a perfect world?

In a perfect world aggressive war would be universally prosecutable. Would Bush the First have invaded Panama if he knew he would spend hard time in the federal pen for it? Probably not. Would LBJ and Nixon have pursued Vietnam to the horrible ends they did if they had to keep the war going from a prison cell? Probably not.

So hell yes, Bush and every other son of a bitch who invades and kills should be prosecuted and sentenced and hove into a small cell for many years. That would be a good thing.

A good thing, but as realistic as turning turds to gold.

~~ Jack of Turnips

If I think this is true -- and I give it good odds of being so -- then my personal reaction would be, never trust any government or nation.

Never make an  established government stronger. Seek to weaken it. Undermine, subvert, and sap its power in any (morally acceptable) way possible. Mockery is good and proper. Ridicule is a moral imperative. If politics is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then subversion is the best response to politics.

(I hope that, on this forum, I am preaching to the choir.)

For instance, I think everyone should send live insects to their political representatives. The scrabbling, scurrying little creatures would benefit from a change; their miniscule brains -- little more than a knot of ganglions, really -- would be stimulated; and their pathetically limited worldview enlarged. Not only that, but the insects might find some benefit as well.

~~ Jack of Turnips

Very nice posts, Cain.

I'm not sure but what all governments tend toward authoritarianism over time. Honest governance and relatively honest democracy may be unstable -- not in the sense of an unstable society, but in the sense that a pencil balanced on its point is unstable.

They may tend to collapse toward authoritarianism, by way of manipulative politics and dishonesty.

My thought run thus:

1. A party or clique thinks that it has the best grasp of how to run the country correctly.

2. But it cannot put its ideas into practice unless it can get and maintain power.

3. Therefore the first aim is to get its people into power. And once there, the primary aim is to keep them in power so that the party's "good ideas" can be put into practice.

Once a clique is in power they have more tools for maintaining power than the minority party...barring grievous mistakes and the attendant voter disenchantment, that is. So the main thing become to use the majority position to consolidate power, to hide mistakes, and to spin missteps.

It seems to me -- and I may be misunderstanding your gist, or just plain being foolish -- it seems to me that once you have political parties competing on such terms you get a Darwinian situation which will, in the long run, favor the most efficient power-grabbers and truth-twisters.

It will not favor open and honest democracy. Hence open and honest democracy is likely to be the exception in society, and not likely to persist over the long run.

Is that possibly part of what you are seeing in GB? (And is it happening in Oz?)

Or have I gone off on a nonsensical tangent?

~~ Jack of Turnips

"He had over 1000 other residents, including women and children, imprisoned and tortured."

*shrugs* The USA put more than that through Abu Ghraib. Not many women, but plenty of young boys and men.

"Beginning in 2004, accounts of abuse, torture, sodomy and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (also known as Baghdad Correctional Facility) came to public attention. The acts were committed by some personnel of the 372nd Military Police Company of the United States, and possibly additional American governmental agencies."

Afghanistan too.

"Two inmates [at Bagram] in December 2002 were tortured and beaten to death in cells down the hall from [Captain Carolyn Wood's] office. Hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten so severely that, according to a report by Army investigators later leaked to the Baltimore Sun, their legs would have needed to be amputated had they lived."

Imprisonment, torture, and murder. Best of intentions, sure. Right. Beaten so severely their legs would have needed to be amputated had they lived. Best of intentions. Right. Sorry about that, guys.

Extrapolations from pre- and post-war mortality rates suggest that the destruction of public services infrastructure in Iraq probably resulted in 600,000 more deaths than would have occurred if Saddam Hussein had been left in power. (By 2006, I believe. The figure is probably larger now.)

*shrugs again* A disinterested but compassionate Being would probably see no moral difference between President Bush and Saddam Hussein. I don't.

With regards to Iraq itself, the greatest difference is that before the American invasion Hussein had been rendered mostly powerless to commit the kinds of genocidal murders that won him infamy in the 1980s. One effect of the Bush invasion was to re-introduce those horrors without the mitigation of preserving an orderly society with a survivable infrastructure.

Interestingly, if Saddam had been asked why he did what he did I bet he would have said, "I did it for the good of my country, for the good of my people."

Same as George Bush.

Best of intentions. Right. Sure. Sorry about that, guys.

~~ Jack of Turnips

Things are uncertain at the most fundamental level

The universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose (John Haldane)

If you think you understand, then you do not

Don't eat all the berries that birds eat or you will die (Jim Harrison)

Time is a thing. It bites. ("Wreckage of Agathon")

We are just trees that produce turds instead of apples. Your high horse is dead meat. (Jim Harrison again)

----

We could collaborate on a satirical book of aphorisms.

~~ Jack of Turnips

Thanks guys. But now I have performance anxiety.


~~ Jack of Turnips

Of course Marines are depressed and suicidal. They've been told they are fighting to "save American freedom" when it's plain fact that no Marine has fought for any such cause in 50 years or more. American freedom has not been seriously threatened since WWII. And it's arguable whether Japanese imperialism in the Pacific threatened the American homeland even then.

I've watched American military adventures for 50 years, and I can find no other explanation: every few years an American president gets an uncontrollable urge to jerk a wad of blood into his monogrammed silk handkerchief. Korea. Vietnam. Grenada. Lebanon. Somalia. Iraq. Even Afghanistan is a mostly masturbatory, mostly narcissistic power-orgasm without solid justification. Naturally it's always other peoples' blood that gets the president's dirty rocks off.

Of course military personnel are suicidal. They've been lied to, but their extensive mind-indoctrination demands that they believe the lie. Fight for the lie. Kill and die for it. In their hearts they know damn' well that American freedom is not threatened. They know that in theaters back home movies are playing, cars are cruising the streets, people are partying and raving and getting down, and American freedom is not threatened in the least.

They are overseas only so a few politicians can reach power-orgasm.

And that's it.

Drunk driving kills five times as many people every year as died in that never-repeated attack on September 11, 2001. The Marines would do America more good if they deployed on US highways instead of fucking around overseas. But presidents seem to need to use America's military as a surrogate penis now and then. Hundreds of thousands of people have died to satisfy American presidents' masturbatory military urges.

An enlightened and compassionate being would see these bloody spasms as crimes against humanity, plain and simple

Mindfuck? Sorry, the whole American notion of mass-murder-as-foreign-policy is a mindfuck. Get over it.

~~ Jack of Turnips

All roads lead to the grave, too, but most have toilet stops along the way.

Statistically I suppose that roads lead to the toilet more often than to either Discordia or to death.

However, as far as time spent goes, in an average lifetime you will spend 25 years asleep but only about 6 months on the crapper. Everything is dwarfed by the fact that you will be dead forever. Crap, sleep, die.

On a positive note... Um...

Oh well.

~~ Jack of Turnips.

["As long as we rely on The System to fix The System, we are all going to systematically be worked further and further out of the equation."]

The Noble Ratatosk: "And therein lies the Freedom of Choice. Freedom doesn't mean Do As Thou Will with no consequences. Consequences must be weighed, choices must be considered."

Oho! But who defines the consequences of these choices, and why?

Let us say that a coal-fired powerplant trades pollution credits in order to avoid cleaning up its mercury emissions. (Perfectly legal.) Let us further say that children downwind of the plant show decreased IQ, slowness in walking and talking, and other health effects commonly associated with poisoning by methyl mercury.

Let us further say that parents protest outside the plant, breaking trespassing laws, obstructing access, and perhaps even blocking coal trains from reaching the plant.

Existing laws protect the corporation owning the powerplant, not the people damaged by its pollution, and certainly not the people who protest that damage.

Why are the consequences for actions stacked to favor big business over individuals? Who says the consequences for aggressive action in defense of human health are dire, while the consequences for damaging human health in the pursuit of profits are nil?

Something is wonky. Something is skewed. And who is responsible for rigging the game so nastily? Cui bono? Corporate America. Not individuals.

What if I do not accept that the determination of consequences for actions is fairly stacked? Certainly I can move to Iceland and hope for the best, but is it not also valid to subvert a system which has become skewed and wonky?

Why not sabotage the works? After all, the American Constitution says that it's  the right of the citizens to alter or abolish their government if that government has become destructive of their best interests.

Yeah, right. We all know that no government allows its own abolition. It's a pipe dream.

----

To argue the other side again: All actions which benefit some population have the possibility to harm someone else. In a wobbly, uncertain, imperfect world we can only make our best shot at the greatest good...and hope that not too many children fall under the wheels.

The laws are a compromise. America's law-order is not perfect, but it is the best shot at societal harmony. That American laws work is evidenced by the fact that one out of every hundred adults is behind bars. One out of every fifteen black adults is in jail. And the rate is increasing.

That's success, right? That's the profile of a just and reasonable law-order.

Well, maybe.

----

Rev What's-His-Name: "As long as we rely on The System to fix The System, we are all going to systematically be worked further and further out of the equation."

Did the good Rev write that because the holders of power know that they have already twisted the political order so that their grip cannot be dislodged by anything the common man does? The wise Rev's initial post seems to claim that the status quo is not really a fair compromise. That "lumbering beast" in America will go wherever the Republicrat symbiont tells it to go, and the Republicrat symbiont is itself only a leech on the money-machine.

Paine and Rousseau may be as obsolete as Marx and Engels.

What say the discordians to this?

~~ Jack of Turnips

Well, that's a realistic rejoinder, Ratatosk.

But of course one is "free to break every Law that the machine knows about" only as long as the machine does not notice you. Once it notices you breaking laws you will most definitely not be free.

Is the statement "[the Machine's] Will is really the Will of every good cog and screw that helps it run" really true? I tend to think that the will of the Machine is mostly the will of Phillip-Morris, Lockheed-Martin, Pepsico, Exxon-Mobil, and other corporations. Not to mention Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson.

In the United $tates, maybe 5% of legislation reflects the will of the people. Maybe less.

Ha, ha! OK, ok, ok. Let's flip-flop.

The people infesting the strange old mansion we call Western Civilization have never been so free.

We are free from having to stagger along behind a wooden plow and die at age 35 from abscessed teeth and/or starvation. We can read Tom Paine and the Principia Discordia and Cormac McCarthy, because we can fucking READ! In the year 1126 nearly nobody could do that.

We can shout and holler and bust a gut expressing our opinions, because nearly all Western nations put individual rights such as free speech at the forefront of their constitutions. Nearly all outlaw torture and imprisonment without charge or trial.

By the curious carbuncles of Cthulhu, the Machine grips us less tightly now than it ever has before! We may be winning!

If that's the case, why are we posting this gloomy System/Machine/Greyface horseshit? Why are we not celebrating the fact that we are freer than ever?

Feathers or lead?

~~ Jack of Turnips