The tyranny of conscience

The tyranny of conscience


Taught to each of us in turn

The well being of justice better served


Learned and taught in sequence by

Ephebe protectors and childhood victims.


On automatic pilot in human majorities

The common fire of our kind.


The sweetest constraint since

The most appreciated.


In volcanic reply

To psychopath threats.


Media amplified

The rest marginalized in comparison.


Our dicks swing out there in the wind

Our wife and kids safe and tight.


No need for many books and laws

Everyone understands ahead of time.


Will it please God?

Else slippery slope to psychopath tyranny?


Grant us antediluvian millions of years

We mere primates à la AK47.


Most psychopaths grosso modo appeased

Most often silent in council.


Mustn’t they tame themselves,

To never again turn hornet unwisely?


Is it from vision-corrected empathy?

To get a clearer picture through each pair of eyes?


Or could empathy just come drifting into view,

As from the clearing lift of a pea soup fog?


Not because we are any more empathic

But because the empathy fog has cleared?


Civilizing us once and for all

Home to both the earth and its children.


Gentling the land into Eden

The heavens our flea market.


A bobbing dinghy thumps the homeward hull

Brought brother fisherman back to see his mum.


Everyone carries the straight bearing of freedom

Walks tall and talks straight talk.


It rings out everywhere at once

This imperative of conscience.


This nascent conscience

Barely awake now.


Of spontaneous wakening

And tectonic uplift, once invoked.


Phantom Druid power

Jesus' sermon on the mount.


What more need I recommend to you

The solitary dictation of Our Father.


Fill in your moral blank

That it take on your body and soul.


Devote your body and soul to it

The survival of the kids depends upon it.


Of conscience

Conscience


conscience tyranny

Repeat after me.


Weak and broken anywhere

Learners could fix.


Are we once again ready

Have we never been?


I run out of words in service to

My tyranny of conscience.

Islam and moral conscience

As usual, Islam offers less confusion, compared to Judaism and Christianity, in separating the requirements and the ultimate validity of weapons mentality versus peace mentality.

Islam offers the House of Peace on the one hand, and on the other, the House of War.  If you require additional clarification as to the nature of these two and their differences, then I give up on ever touching your innermost soul.  Either you understand and there is no need to clarify, or you will never and there is no use for it.

On the one hand, there is the Umma, the community of those who agree to submit in peace to the will of Allah.  On the other, there is the Caliphate, the psychopath-inspired, weapons interpretation of that submission, at perpetual war with everyone it cannot kill or subdue militarily.

There is no such segregation in Judaism or Christianity, neither of which makes any distinction between those who would submit to their natural conscience and those who have none of it within their minds to submit to.

Psychopaths will fight until everyone, themselves included, is dead.  Nuclear and or bio/nanotech annihilation is their technological masterpiece.  Those driven by conscience would not fight against anyone short of ultimate self-defense, for which degradation they will pay in triplicate to their conscience of good and ill.  Psychopaths have no such conscience to torment them if they commit evil.

Every tyranny, jihad, war and revolution has been suggested, carried out by and lost to psychopaths.  Written history is merely the long narration of their self-justification and trivialization of the dictates of conscience (“bleeding hearts”).  Current governments -- disgusting liars, hypocrites and bloody murderers all -- are their ultimate masterworks.

World Peace is merely a question of substituting their tyranny with that of normal human conscience, effortless on our part.  World peace would much less expensive, morally compromised and difficult to enforce than the current, psychopath-inspired perpetual world war.  The rule of conscience would be much more profitable, sustainable, morally acceptable and stable than the psychopath variety on current display. 

Which would you choose of your own accord?  Wake up!

Christian and Muslim Democracy

Just as Christ’s Sermon of the Mount calls all Christians to submit to the equality of condition of every human being; Allah, through Mohammed’s recitation, calls all Muslims to submit to their equality of condition before God.  Political democracy is obligatory in both cases, since it alone can satisfy the equality of the human condition.  There can be no dispute between Muslims and Christians as to this requirement, except by the lies of their respective psychopaths.

2012 for real?

Has anyone taken a serious look at the potential for continental subsidence and oceanic flooding on a scale similar to that prophesied by Edgar Cayce and fantasized in the movie 2012?

The triggering combination, pragmatically speaking, each accelerating on its own and synergistic with the others:

• Climate change-induced, mass "permanent" ice melt on land; redistribution of that mass away from prior, high-altitude/latitude caches
• Aquifer depletion
• Oil/Gas deposit depletion
• Fraking
• Widespread desiccation of lands relatively well-watered in the past
• Greater flooding of well-watered regions, including Bengali-style submergence
• Accelerating bursts of exotic earthquakes both low and high Richter scale (What is going on between the earthquake cluster on the Oregon/Nevada border and that offshore Northern California?)

Are these activities and phenomena not combining to exponentially increase the likelihood of massive seismic chaos events?

I am also interested in mass deposits of water or hydrous-equivalent chemicals suspended in deep-Earth magma. Could these serve as mega-volcanic “accelerants” and be the source of historic oceanic top-offs and transient planetary flooding, once a certain portion of them emerged from the Earth?

The Drudge = Fukushima

Fukushima was the real manifestation of psychic and collective ones revealed by the The Drudge movies.

A force for civilization?

Will history find twenty-first century America a spineless bully on the way out, or a force for civilization on the upswing?

Here is how these two polities differ both in outlook and results achieved: 

A force for civilization is humbly proud and pragmatically confident of its power.  It has taught itself the lessons of history.  It can afford to compromise on foreign interests of tertiary consequence to itself but primary importance to the interested party, increasing its influence and strategic reach by this seeming sacrifice.  It cannot be sucked into foreign alliances destructive of its own interests – it laughs at them.  It suppresses international evildoers, confident that their eventual replacements will do a better job regardless.  Its strength grows by improving the life circumstances of everyone it can, and this Golden Rule is its default position.  It always pursues peace and stability, even at what appears to be its own expense.  If its policies stray into wholesale brutality and retribution, its lean and mean intelligence -- service, honest, acute and diligent -- warns the leadership, which takes heed and reverses its course.  It promotes the righteous, the brave and the charismatic to positions of responsibility.  It suppresses psychopathic subordinates by providing them with minimal rewards in exchange for minimal damage and maximum punishment for anything else.  It invites rational discourse in the resolution of its problems both internal and external, and real transparency (left unsaid but very real) in its policy outcomes.  It funds with near-extravagance infrastructure, learning and real democracy both at home and abroad; looking forward to increasing rewards by means of rational investment.  It measures its success in terms of the good will it has recruited by its actions.  Its vision of the future is broad ranging and seeks the benefit of all, which fact it publicizes honestly to its own advantage.  Its internal policies and procedures proceed from its utmost constitutional ideals.  The most powerful miscreants, internal and external, are punished swiftly and with exemplary vigor: very few exceptions are permitted.  Military and other “hard” solutions are reserved for none but the most intransigent problems.  It is not afraid to apply them, merely made prudent by a long study of the disasters of the past.  It is admired abroad, credited with social gains it may or may not have contributed to.  At home, its intelligencia is proud of it and proud to serve it.  Almost everyone welcomes its influence toward the good.  It is on its way up in the world.  Quietly proud of it by popular acclamation, the Earth awaits its next pronouncement and policy decision.

A force for self-destruction is boastfully uncertain and panicked about its loss of power and influence.  Supremely arrogant, it ignores the lessons of history; it is “outside the norms of history.”  It thwarts foreign interests for no better reason than that it can, even at its own strategic disadvantage.  It woos partners indifferent to its interests as long as their own are optimized -- and becomes addicted to those alliances.  It permits mass evildoers their transgressions, afraid of the ultimate upshot of their downfall.  It nurtures opponents of growing strength, sophistication and coordination by making their families suffer for more and more trivial reasons.  This set of dragon’s teeth: “Grow more enemies by hurting them more” is its default position.  Its bloated intelligence service is geared to accelerate and worsen this spiral into genocide.  It seems to thrive on discord and conflict, and does nothing to reduce those things, to its own eventual demise.  It promotes idiots and stooges to positions of internal power.  It assassinates its own best leaders, and places psychopaths in positions of increasing responsibility, until those guided by their conscience have been removed from every position of responsibility.  It endorses dogma, reaction and anti-thought.  Its decisions are cloaked in unnecessary secrecy and punitive suppression, even though declared to be “transparent.”  It skimps on internal necessities of infrastructure, learning, and honest democracy, feeding off its own flesh and that of its neighbors, in favor of exponential rewards for a minority of social parasites neither creative, conscientious nor humane.  It measures success in terms of dollars spent and accumulated by an incestuous elite.  Its internal policies and procedures admit and permit more and more corruption with bureaucratic sanction.  The most powerful miscreants are declared “Too big (or powerful) to fail,” on lower and lower rungs of power as time goes on – until everyone in power, with the very rare, out of favor exception, may get away with anything he pleases.  It holds no vision of the future, merely “profit for the few at the expense of the many,” which fact it hides behind the illusion of “freedom” to misrule.  It often defaults to military and other “hard” solutions because it has become too stupid to map out better ones: afraid to apply them, uncertain of ill-defined measures applied prematurely and results therefrom, and panicked by its own fears.  It ignores the lessons of history in favor of its investment returns.  It is a sick joke abroad: accused of every social ill whether of its own devising or not.  Its at-home intelligencia is relentlessly embarrassed by its consistent misrule and the self-confirmation of its stupidity, shunning any responsibility for it and involvement with it.  Everyone on Earth with any sagacity despises it (with good cause) for one reason or another.  Regardless of its current firepower and wealth, it is past its prime and on its slide into historical obscurity.  The louder its paid mouthpieces bay its exceptionalism and merit to rule, the more mediocre and forgettable it becomes.

Pick.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

Some years ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of Foreign Policy, discussing the difference between raiding and occupation strategies and their results.  In those days, that insufferable boob, Bush the Lesser, had mired America in a war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, screwing up both campaigns because the military assets required to win the one were being squandered on the other, until both became intractable tar babies.  Foreign Policy was at the time a little more relaxed publication; all its articles were freely available online and it accepted letters from non-subscribers, as it refuses to do now.  Cut off your nose to spite your face.

I advocated a policy of hit and run raids against pinpoint terrorist targets across the globe, taking advantage of America’s obvious advantages of strategic mobility and distributed intelligence; instead of presenting the enemy with the fat, clumsy and static targets offered by masses of occupation troops, their militarized collaborators and their huge logistical supports on the ground.  Quoting Mohammad Ali: “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” instead of sitting there and taking everything the enemy could throw at you from up close.

Whether on their own initiative or on mine, Obama’s military took this advice to heart.  Unfortunately, they also pushed it to its of logical extreme.  They entwined the world with an all-seeing and all-hearing of electronic and human surveillance network of monstrous proportion, enormous expense and unconstitutional sway.  Every year for nearly a decade, their far-reaching robot drones launched Hellfire missiles by the thousand through the kitchen window of every opposition squad leader they could find, along with harmless neighbors whose survivors formed next assault wave against the United States.  No doubt the mushrooming Special Forces elements of the American military have kicked in thousands more doors than Ben Ladden’s and dropped many more of his kind across the planet.

 

If you identity everyone on Earth who disagrees with you as a terrorist, and declare war against anywhere and everywhere, what can you expect but an endless multiplication of enemies who only grow better coordinated, armed and lethal over time ?  The other day, I heard the Secretary of State, Jim Kerry, boast that the United States had killed nearly half the ISIL leadership.  He failed to mention the fact that those same policies had multiplied the manpower, wealth and armament of terrorism by hundreds of times over the same period.

Hold on, there.  I had in mind a much more judicious application of violence, carefully crafted both in space and in time.  Much more circumspect.  There is a basic problem fighting terror: do you view the challenge as a military matter or a police one?  Currently, the USA is pushing the military model:  maximum firepower and enemy casualties everywhere and at all times – the random killing of innocents be damned. 

 

A more useful solution would be the police model: an absolute minimum of violence, just enough to repress the opposition and no more.  Otherwise, violence would be carefully suppressed and forbidden under most circumstances, to the limit of our tolerance.  Let the violence of our enemies contain them through global and local rejection; not our excessive displays of violence, multiply their numbers.

We also need greater judiciousness in selecting targets and timing strikes.  Locally within a certain region and temporally along its political timeline, there is a golden window of opportunity for armed interference.  The opposition will have cohered sufficiently to identify its highest leadership yet not enough to crystallize second and third tiers.  Lower order leaders will not have had enough time to develop their own reputation and consolidate their power base sufficiently to replace the first tier with ease and fluidity.  It is at that point and at that point alone that a carefully staged decapitating strike against the first tier of tyrant leadership may be allowed, provided it can pledge zero innocent casualties.  Strikes before that point in time cannot pinpoint key leaders with sufficient certainty; strikes after cannot decapitate an enemy organization, merely rearrange its leadership and perhaps intensify its lethality.  We have been landed in this intractable mess by too many strikes carried out opportunistically and more or less randomly for years.

A good illustration can be found in Syria.  At a certain point, President Bashar al-Assad identified himself in no uncertain terms as the enemy of his own people and of humanity.  His friends only stuck together because of his leadership, and his opponents, both those friendly towards the West and hostile to it, were fragmented and powerless for the time being.  It was at that nexus of time and place that the West might have struck effectively.  True, there was the likelihood of a bloodbath as a result of this strike (brayed by moral cowards throughout the West); but look at the unrelenting bloodbath our inaction produced.

At that time, Assad’s enormous park of main battle tanks should have been carpet bombed, canceling his opportunity and that of his replacements to sustain the massacre.  The same went for the enormous arsenals in Libya, immediately after the downfall of the Gaddafi regime.  They should have been destroyed that week, instead of passing into the hands of regional Jihad. 

The military measures criticized and advocated above will almost never work alone.  The point is not to practice massive and continuous violence, but a very few key pinpricks minutely planned; executed at precisely the right moment; preceded and followed up with the best, most forceful soft power measures practicable.  In the end, it is only those “soft” measures, extending from top-down diplomacy to shameless bribery of foreign middle management to non-governmental and democratic action from the grass roots up, likely to resolve these problems dependably. 

INTERSTELLAR: Why I hate it

Why do I hate Interstellar -- besides the fact that Matthew McConaughey makes my skin crawl ?  (All the male actors these days are pastel shadows of the twentieth century giants of Hollywood.  Another aspect of the same problem).  I’ll tell you why, in more detail than you would find comfortable.

Interstellar is a paean to the managerial incompetence that has become an industrial standard across the modern world.

Background.  The selective assassination of the Kennedys, MLK, MalcomX and uncounted progressive leaders worldwide at the hands of Communist and Capitalist Cold War psychopaths (practically interchangeable), was followed by that demento Ronald Reagan and his institutionalization of homelessness in the richest country in human history, and terminally worsened by 9/11 and the feeding frenzy of institutional stupidity ever since.  One political party has taken institutional stupidity to the level of genius; another, the Independents, can’t decide whether that is always good policy or not; the third gets paid royally to look the other way.  There can be no more stupid people than panic-mongered stupid people.

Regardless of the field of endeavor or professional credentials, it has become professional suicide to advocate or practice competent, wise or even honest management.  Everyone in power today is by definition and peer-constraint corrupt, incompetent, dumbed-down, know-nothing, and morally compromised.  Not only that, but they’re PROUD of the uniformity of their shit.  No other alternative is permitted, and no other alternative is portrayed across the corporate media.  Good management has become taboo.  And you love that message, because, aw, it’s got Dad and daughter feel-good moments, culminated by the ultimate parental abandonment.  Wake up!

Interstellar should have been called Stellar-to-Black Hole – where is the local sun shining so cinematically over all these exotic planets, in all the over-elaborate but kindergarten explanations and diagrams? Interstellar is actually a succession of unacknowledged, privilege-rewarded managerial and scientific face-plants.

An Indian drone (Native American?  South Asian?  Equally absurd and off-topic alternatives) inspects Mid-Western corn crops?  Why?  Don’t they have better things to waste their money on?  There is no Marine Corps any longer?  And that doesn’t rate another line of explanation?  How?  That would have made a LOT more interesting movie.

The science luminary’s calculations are based on his failure (undetected by the rest of the academic world) and his lies about it.  NASA cannot keep track of its best astronaut who lives fifty miles down the road.  That astronaut becomes a farmer: a high-prestige job he hates.  Reports back from the first wave of explorers are so poorly analyzed that a continuous loop message lasting less than five minutes is mistaken for years of consecutive transmissions.  Explorers cannot be dispatched alone for months and years on end because healthy human beings are obligate social animals wired to go crazy under such stresses.  Mythomaniac clichés about heroics and cowardice are as irrelevant in this instance as everything else in this movie.  Both plan A & B consign the entire world population to a slow and painful death; only a privileged elite may benefit (as usual).  Our collective ass is pulled out of this self-managed bonfire of the vanities by some disembodied , future tense deus ex machina because no-one in real-time could problem-solve their way out of a wet paper bag.  Much like the modern version of The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Self-worshiping management incompetence all around.

All this crap is accepted as normal, promoted as acceptable, praised as customary.  In truth, none of it is any of those things.  That includes this basically empty movie hyped to the sky by the same overpaid, analytically challenged and cosmically-self-satisfied bunch of mediocrity junkies.

Got it, now?

So you think you’re living in a democracy?

In the West, everyone praises democracy.  It seems to offer the best guideline that a populace can adopt, or according to Churchill, the least bad one compared to every other.  Any nation that had not yet experienced it would benefit from its effects.  It is alleged to offer the only real cure for the ills of Capitalism or any other Ism for that matter.  It can be republican and representative-based, or proportional and based on the direct vote universally applied.  The latter is preferable for everyone but the very rich, the former detrimental to everyone including the rich.  No matter how many crooked cops they recruit, laws they flout, and judges they buy to guard themselves and their hoard of riches, they eventually wind up attending revolutionary firing parties due to all the undeserved benefits they’ve extracted from a resentful proletariat, thanks to sold out, “democratic” bureaucracies.

There are many definitions of democracy.  Most of them include a to-do list of necessary services (in no particular order), insofar possible:

·          A national Constitution whose functionaries must swear allegiance to it, including a Bill of Rights, each subject to improvement by national plebiscite

·          Separate Church and State

·          Elections based on the concept of one-adult, one vote

·          Universal, free, high-quality education

·          An independent and impartial press

·          An independent and impartial judiciary

·          Carefully shielded personal privacy and property rights

·          A Regular Army based on universal conscription and the hatred of war as inspired by this Draft

·          Etc., etc.

The nation may boast all of these institutions, yet still fail to be a democracy.  You see, democracy’s mainstay is the Rule of Law, pursued regardless of status, race and riches; the Rule of Law as a political actuality rather than a propaganda puff pastry.

In 2014 America, for example:

·          High functionaries swear allegiance to the Constitution yet violate it and personal rights routinely

·          Church and State are distinct, each group doing its best to appropriate the other’s responsibilities

·          Elections are gerrymandered and overturned with the shameless connivance of the Supreme Court

·          Quality education is no longer free but offered more and more in exchange for family riches or debt bondage

·          What tatters are left of a gutted Press and lobotomized broadcast news have plainly been dedicated to serve the rich

·          More and more judicial decisions are corrupted by political bias

·          70,000 Beltway intelligence bureaucrats, equally sworn to uphold the Constitution, make it their only business to spy on everyone and everything, in direct violation of their oath.  Yet they are still unable to foretell with any accuracy foreign wars impending within weeks, serial revolutions snowballing into chaos, not even an accurate forecast of next five day’s weather.

·          A Regular Army at first based on selective service and general recruitment without regard to class, then primarily from the lower class and less favored races, then on mercenaries hired by the government from the same pool of recruits and, worse yet, contracted out to serve it.  This army has less and less political contact and personal identification with its civilian population.  Thus it is more and more amenable to national garrisoning and suppression (again, forbidden by the Constitution) for bogus security reasons.

·          Etc., etc.  For each benefit democracy promises, a way has been found (what a coincidence!) to corrupt it.

Yet America still dares call itself a “democracy.”

The one thing that a real democracy can enforce, rejected by the American pseudo-version, is the Rule of Law.  If we enforced it in all honesty, most of these contradictions -- between what we should be doing and what we have turned out to do -- would resolve themselves almost automatically.

So what do I mean by this famous “Rule of Law”?

It’s very simple, actually.  No-one, no matter how highly placed, rich or well-connected, may commit a public infraction without being brought before an independent court and tried for it without bias, favor or mercy.  At the latest, this would happen immediately after the expiration of their latest tour of duty.  No fancy pants exceptions: war, emergency or otherwise. 

Do the crime, if you deem it necessary, and do the time.  How deep is your devotion to the nation? Or is it so shallow as to render you unfit to make such significant decisions?

That means an American President cannot institutionalize torture or commit other crimes and misdemeanors (even in wartime) without being impeached.  His subordinates, high and low, must be subject to the same level of scrutiny and/or summary dismissal.  Presidents who fail to indict their erring predecessor, with the exception of an official pardon documenting his crime, should be tried for conspiracy in the original crime and subjected to the same constraints.  A long series of such pardons, symptomatic of recurrent treason against democracy, would trigger an official revision of the whole process.

A Federal or State Legislature cannot rubber stamp unconstitutional decrees (examples: conspiracy to rape, by means of involuntary, medically unnecessary vaginal probes, women who seek an abortion; or conspiracy to violate the 14^th Amendment by legislated voter suppression) without calling to account the members who vote in their favor and relieving them of their duties since, once convicted, they would be felons unfit for public office.

Bank and corporate officers cannot commit a massive white-collar crime without suffering serious prosecution and, once found guilty, prohibitive fines and/or exemplary prison sentences.  If they belong to an organization “too big to fail” then judicial decimation up and down the line.

No military or diplomatic agent can commit a crime against humanity without being dispatched to stand before an international, therefore more or less independent, court.

I am not speaking of personal crimes that would be punished automatically, or about those committed in spite of the intent and orders of superiors.  To a great extent, these judicial disposals would not be a problem unless superiors multiplied these lesser crimes to cover their own malfeasance.  Nor am I speaking of unique and exemplary show trials for petty functionaries, while mighty dignitaries institutionalize the same criminal activity across a broad range of times and places, then gravitate to their next promotion (Mylai, Abu Grahib). 

I am referring to powerful individuals, traitors to their democratic oath, who commit, command, institutionalize and normalize serious crime (whether for reasons good or bad, motives of personal gain or disinterested paternalism).  Powerful people who can pressure, sweet-talk, legalspeak, bribe or blackmail their peers into giving them a pass.  In a real democracy, all those wrongdoers would be brought before justice.  The more of these traitors were brought before the court, the truer the democracy.

This kind of prosecution of powerful miscreants is not needed to uphold an empty principle or some bureaucratic ideal of perfection.  It should be done to avoid the fate of the Roman, indeed of every Empire of the past. 

Young empires punished their elites and proletariats with more or less balanced ferocity.  The rewards of high rank were paid for with equivalent military sacrifice, personal abnegation, public expenditure, cultural and infrastructure embellishment as well as devotion to public duty. 

Mature empires replace the elite’s conspicuous altruism with a combination of conspicuous consumption, ever more daring banditry and boastful impunity.   As power and wealth get sucked to the top, they facilitate upper class crime while making life harder for the lower.  As elite crime grows alongside elite impunity, they wind up rotting the fish of Empire from the head down. 

Sooner or later, this form of social collapse becomes unavoidable.  If you’re suicidal enough to want that fate to befall us, keep applauding this crooked square dance.  If you’re too smart (and emotionally invested in the children’s future) to disregard the fate this bad karma must impose on us, rouse everyone you know to do what I recommend with all your might.