We don't know all there is to know, sometimes even when the truth is standing right there before us like a mighty impregnable fortress. And at other times we find ourselves walking around blindly, unable to see the brightest light, simply because our eyes are closed. The world we permit ourselves to see is composed of known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns.
Any great orator can tell us that words are much like the numbers used in mathematical laws. They can be configured into equations, in constants and in variables, and their effects can be more devastating to our friends and enemies alike than all the weapons arrayed in mortal physical combat. I see the world as the canvas, words and numbers as the paint, the freedom to express our ideas without fear of censorship-or reprisal as the most fundamental basis of all human rights.
This is a long rant under the fold...
"Peace is indeed the protector of genius. And aggressive wars not in self-defense, are the mortal enemies of both peace and genius".
Words, numbers and knowledge, and their potential use for the betterment of mankind are virtually unlimited in scope, breadth and depth. The more acute the brightest minds are among us, the more numbers and knowledge gravitates to those by default. The duller our cognitive situational awareness is, the lesser the intensity of anyone's understanding of the world around us.
Einstein said that we use only about 3% of our working brains, but this doesn't limit the vast potential for greatness or excellence that each individual has within their own grasp, if we would only apply our natural gifts to learn and to teach others the way of peace and reason. We are only deterred by the prisons of fears and self-doubts we have made within our own minds.
A prism divides the light into seven distinct colors, but when combined together we see what we know to be light! Divided, each color is limited, but in coming together as one, we find the potential for brilliance to be virtually and forever unlimited! Look at the speed at which light travels!
Einstein sat for hours thinking and postulating, and he calculated until he perfected his General Theory of Relativity. Unknowingly to everyone else-and maybe even to himself, he hit upon the truth of the ages, proving empirically that light bends without breaking! And so it is easily extrapolated in the abstract, the absolute that it is in the power of our own minds, except when we deceive ourselves, to bend the truth without ever breaking it, as well. It is only by closing our eyes to a painful truth that we find ourselves falling for every pretty lie.
Einstein is one of my fondest heroes. He was a genius who understood the world of his times".
He spoke-out against nationalism and war. But he's got it all wrong about the importance nationalism in today's 21st Century world. It doesn't take a gifted physicist, mathematician or orator to realize that this present world political and economic system is collapsing all around us. Globalization masquerading as the false economy "free trade" is the next greatest threat to our national sovereignty, our Constitution and all of our rights and freedoms today. This Trojan Horse has single-handedly led to a class war between the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised, between "the haves" and "the have mores", and is illustrative of the American middle working class' death by a thousand cuts.
"Being forewarned is being forearmed".
Under globalization and the resulting nullification of our national sovereignty, the dissolution of national borders by edict, and individual monetary currencies being combined by region, i.e. the Euro; it naturally follows that the most ominous concomitant effect is the dissolution of, and the subordination of all the power of individual governments to the hands of a global government or entity. This concept is diametrically opposed to Thomas Jefferson's observation that "all power belongs to the people".
A corporate-controlled America: "Le etat cest moi"!
But the first and greatest threat to this republic is the rise of --not proto or rebirth but-- pre-fascist corporatism. Or if you like, a new and improved bastard son: the 4th Reich of global and farther reaching proportions, and one which is potentially much more of a threat to our survival than the 3rd Reich ever was. Where the 3rd Reich demanded loyalty to the state, Adolf Hitler himself was the personal embodiment of the German Reich(state) and the picture-perfect textbook example of a homegrown terrorism: "Hitler ist Deutschland, Deutschland ist Hitler".
The coming new world political and economic order of fascist corporatism will succeed where Hitler failed in his dream of imposing a thousand year Reich, if we fail to comprehend the handwriting on the wall, and act in time to stop it. The bottom line for us is we'll all die chained and shackled to these new bonds of tyranny, if we fail to stop it while we still have a nation, a Constitution, and a democracy left to defend. Unanswered tyranny is tyranny like a cancer that has metastacised and spread throughout our republic. And left to its own devices will soon kill its host.
True nationalism or patriotism towards our nation --not to any controlling entity which by definition is fascism--is not to be confused with our corporate-controlled elected leaders' definition of it on both the left and the right, which is "whomever has the most gold makes the rules".
Nationalism is the only thing standing between us and our extinction as free-thinking individuals, the collateral damage of this class war being the freedom and liberty to control our own lives and determine our own destinies. Nationalism ensures the sustainability of America as a free republic. Pre-fascist corporatism rips out the hearts and souls of a free people, turning them into subjects-not citizens, and resurrects the dead bones of monarchy without firing a shot!
It had been better for them that our Founding Fathers had never left England and never lived to write the Constitution and our Bill of Rights, they seeing that they shed their blood in vain. If we must live our lives out as slaves, serfs, and corporate lapdogs, it is better for us that they were never born.
America's role as the world's policeman, its emperor and "judge, jury and executioner".
This administration, for example, has accused Israel of using strong-arm tactics in its relationships with its proven sworn enemies, that the fact it has just as much right to exist as we or any other nation, has somehow threatened our national security interests, the administration essentially contending by extension, that Israel's right to exist has endangered our troops in the region. This rationale exposes some glaring logical-and fatal fallacies in our own thinking.
If Israel is endangering our troops in the region, it begs the questions what the effect is of us fighting three wars simultaneously, how that makes our troops safe, what these wars do to enhance our national security interests?
I seem to recall that the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war --which are both aggressive war and prosecutorial war crimes under international laws and long-held protocols that are still the Supreme laws of this land-- is directly responsible for the wanton slaughter of over 1.4 million Iraqis! If another nation committed such needless slaughter under false pretenses and over 935 well-documented outright lies, any other nation but us committing such atrocities, war crimes, and crimes aqainst humanity, the US would be, at best, calling for War Crimes trials for them at the Hague! We might seek to impose economic sanctions against them, or worse yet, we might choose to pre-emptively invoke the Bush Doctrine. But, we would most certainly not take it across the chin and let them escape the same rules of justice that we have conveniently forgotten applies equally to us, not just to the rest of civilization.
"America uber alles"!
No, the Iraq war, as stated throughout the campaign by Senator John Kerry in the '04 elections, had the net-cumulative direct effect of placing a bulls-eye on the backs of our troops; him saying time after time, it was the best recruitment poster for fresh terrorists, and was the single most significant cause of the growth of al-Qaeda in the region and the rest of the world! This notion of "America uber alles", that the voters ratified in re-electing Bush to a second term will prove to be our undoing.
Additionally, there's the next generation of "insurgents" waiting for us to turn our backs now, the over 4 million widows, orphans, and refugees that Bush created, who will never forget as long as they breathe Iraqi air, the incalculable damage we did to their nation and the lifes-blood and national spirit we crushed out of them with our tanks in the name of freedom!
If our "free press" was really free to do its job, the "before and after" pictures alone would inflame even the most reasonable people among us. We razed their towns and cities to the ground. We strafed, bombed and gunned them down like dogs! We used depleted uranium munitions, which will have untold deleterious effects on their people, causing countless birth defects, and contaminating their environment and land for the next FOUR centuries!
And we stole their nation's natural resources, namely their $25 trillion in oil. In Bush's skewed vision he had an inalienable, undissolvable Divine Right of Kings. In Bush's brain, the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive, perpetual wars is untouchable, just as long as he brought us home the spoils of his wars and as long as no other nation dared to stop his unstated surreptitious goals of regional and world hegemony."
"The chickens are finally coming home to roost"!
And this doesn't even begin to count the chickens that will come home to roost in our own land. Over 4,300 US troops sacrificed on his altar of war, and tens of thousands of returning vets with PTSD, their brains permanently scrambled from the Iraqi "insurgents" IEDs and roadside bombs, limbs blown right off their bodies, lost businesses and broken families due to "stop-loss" and four and five back-to-back tours.
And need I mention the trillion dollars added to our national debt, because Bush charged it all via "emergency supplementals" to our Bank of China credit card, that our Congress was all too willing to oblige him? But we continue to call the Iraqis who still oppose our un-matched brutality usually reserved for foreign invaders on our own shores, both "terrorists" and "insurgents".
It is Bush's own blitzkreig that he personally launched against them without any moral justification-or legal grounds whatsoever--no matter how many letters Yoo and Bybee wrote giving him "legal" cover-- to shed innocent blood without so much as an official declaration of war, that has terrorized them beyond measure, fast and furiously, and with an Attilla the Hun-style brutal efficiency.
So, how dare we even have the nerve to begin to preach to Israel-or any other so-called civilized nation! Bush stated once, that we could no longer depend on our oceans to buffer us, that 9/11 proved mere oceans could no longer protect us from the terrorists. Here in America, Bush didn't need any oceans when he passed his police state-enabling acts, threw our Constitution in the shredder, and the principles we lived and died by for the past 230 years in the toilet, and treated the American people no better than terrorists in our own country. He left the American people holding the bag for all the trillions in national treasure he squandered and the millions of American and Iraqi lives that will never be the same.
But Bush was right about one thing: All of the oceans of the world were not enough to protect Iraq from Bush's own form of terrorism! And what has this current administration done to enforce the rule of law against those Bush/Cheney war criminals? Has our president even bothered to read the page? No, he has insisted that we "look forward not backwards" and he has turned the page, thus fulfilling a murderer's wildest dreams. Yet, he continues to give them legal cover under Executive Privilege and the State Secrets doctrine!
But, I submit to you all, that the rest of the world has not turned the page! It's laughable that other nations like Spain, Germany, and Italy don't seem to need any of our so-called state secrets to find enough probable cause on their own to prosecute Yoo and Bybee, do they? And let us not forget about Bush's "Vice President of Waterboarding and Halliburton, Inc." Dick Cheney and his "Secretary of Pre-emption" Donald Rumsfeld.
"America is not exceptional".
So I would suggest, that before we even begin to presume to judge another man's house, we had better take care to make absolutely certain that we have our own house in order, lest we sitting comfortably on our emperor's throne in our judge's robes, become not the emperor and judge of the world, but the accused and the condemned by the very same judgement by which we indict others. It makes us look like hypocrites and fools, like we're the ones above the law and that we are the ones who can do no wrong!
The cemetaries of antiquity are over-flowing with the dead bones of other such indespensible men-and civilizations, who like Bush's warped vision of "America uber alles", were so presumptuous and arrogant that killing without mercy was their inalienable right. We have been sold a bill of goods, that "American exceptionalism" makes us so much better than the rest of the world, when we are standing there naked, our national reputation and honor all but vanished faster by the stroke of Bush's pen, than by an invading army lusting for our blood, our treasure and our land!
"Nobel Peace prizes do not absolve us from our own guilt for failing to hold our own war criminals accountable to justice".
We are neither the world's masters nor untouchable. And we aren't worthy to be compared with others who don't live by the sword, no matter how many Nobel Peace prizes are bestowed upon our leaders!
We who think it is most fitting and proper to impose our will upon others by threats and intimidation-or by pre-emptive military force, are really terrorists living in glass houses built on sand dunes. And when the waves of the world's anger come crashing into our shores, it will be "too little too late" to change our pernicious ways.
When we force our will, we are no better than the very terrorists that seek to kill and maim us. And no amount of suger-coating the truth will help make this cold, hard medicine any harder to go down. We are a nation of hypocrites, who has elected blind guides. And if our leaders are blind to the cold, hard truths and realities of the real world, then what does this mean for our own survival? "All past is prologue".
America's roots: "Coming full circle."
This rant is my own subjective opinion, my words, and penned by my own hands. And you all may do with it what you will. I am a blogger on this blog only as long as I'm still freely permitted to speak my mind without fearing the full weight of censorship, which I detest with every fiber of my soul. Reasonable and intelligent people who can think critically, oftentimes can disagree without resorting to violence or warfare. Some people claim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Still some, are willingly deceived into settling for a dream based on lies and false hopes, which ends in bitter defeat, slavery and death.
I'm a human being with a big heart who can-and has bled for this nation. I am a loyal citizen of the United States of America. Whether or not you agree or disagree with me, is not as important to me as it is that I have made you take pause, even for a moment, and weighed yourself in the balance and then assess the direction we're headed. If you're satisfied, this requires no action on your part. If however, you and I are like-minded, then we can reason together and discuss the best solution. I already have an idea that I've been writing for my next diary, where I am proposing the creation of a National Consumer Protection Union. If a nation of free-thinking people cannot think and act peacefully without fear of the firing squad, we are all better off dead. Indeed, if we don't act to save this nation from the corporatists, we are dead already.
So my only point here is to cause you to come to the starting place of change. And change begins with the power of your own mind and by the force of your own will! There's more power in knowledge and in our own minds than in all the weapons of war that ever existed-combined!