The White Rose Society

Getting Downsized Was My Reward

2011-04-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Anyone who pursues a liberal arts education wonders what the ultimate pay off for their sacrifice will look like. Mine was losing my job.

Allow me to explain.

I'm Not A Risk-Taker

Five years ago I took the one of the biggest gambles of my life.

Within the space of 6 months, I resigned from two full-time radio jobs, moved my family to Cedar City, Utah and enrolled as a full time student at an unaccredited school.

Plenty of family and friends tried to gently warn me about the risk I was taking.

To them, my walking away from secure employment with benefits to pursue a liberal arts education made about as much sense as bathing in gasoline and drying off next to an open fire.

I'm certain that had I bought a Harley or a grown a ponytail, my choices could have been written off as a mid-life crisis. But in reality, I felt an overwhelming sense of personal mission steering me in pursuit of this type of education.

Deep in my core, I recognized a call to do more with my life than I had done. I felt an intuitive understanding that if I were to fulfill my life's purpose, a world class education would be necessary.

The great souls who have shaped human history have always paid a dear price to become better individuals.

There is no high road or shortcut to realizing one's potential.

In late December of 2005, I took a deep breath and stepped into the unknown.

What On Earth Have I Done?

Trying to support my growing family on a third of our former income was only the first of many challenges. At first, I was only able to secure part time radio work. Eventually my hours became full time but my pay stubbornly kept its part time proportions.

Our savings quickly dwindled and financial worry dogged my thoughts relentlessly as debts mounted.

School required a heavy commitment of personal study time which narrowed my choices to focusing on supporting my family or doing justice to my studies. I chose the latter as my figurative wolves howled at our doorstep.

Household and automotive repairs and maintenance began to accumulate, adding to the stress. Our ability to pay our mortgage on time was becoming difficult.

We added two more children to our family and subsequently outgrew and had to replace 2 vehicles.

A stress-related condition called Alopecia areata caused large bald patches to appear on my face and scalp eventually leading me to shave my head to avoid the appearance of having mange.

In my heart I knew I was doing the right thing, but a nagging question would pop into my head every so often asking, "Are you sure this is worth it?"

I finished my undergraduate work in spring of 2008 and continued on in pursuit of my graduate degree. By fall of 2009, economics dictated that I adjust my focus to providing for my family and my classroom studies ended.

My personal studies, however, continued. They were supplemented by teaching opportunities that included professional speaking, writing, and teaching online classes. Even my radio duties afforded me a chance to continue to learn and teach.

As the economy continued to worsen and unemployment continued to climb, I clung to my radio job with a mixture of gratitude and frustration. I was grateful to be employed, but seemed trapped in a dead end, low-paying job--that I happened to love doing.

I wanted to do more but was unwilling to give up the security of known employment for the risk of seeking greater opportunity.

"When will this education pay off?" I wondered.

I Get My Answer

The answer to that question came on the last day of February when I was informed that my position with the radio station had been eliminated as part of a reduction in force.

As the chill that accompanies bad news wore off, I sensed something very different was taking place in my life. I had just lost my job in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Why on earth did I feel at peace?

As I prayerfully examined my options, I realized that two remarkable things had changed since I had committed to pursuing my education. First, my view of the world had expanded.

Instead of radio being my sole means of income, I saw innumerable opportunities before me. Not just to earn a paycheck, but to use my understanding and talents in ways that had a positive impact on those around me. I could now write, speak and teach effectively to diverse audiences in widely varied settings.

Secondly, my education had created fruitful relationships with others who were likewise engaged in paying the price to fulfill their personal missions.

Those relationships, forged in the fires of personal sacrifice and intense study, produce individuals whose goal is to create rather than copy. They develop leaders who prize the value of others and who labor to have impact instead of simply comparing themselves to the rest of the world.

Such leaders understand the need for teamwork in magnifying their own efforts. They are connectors.

With this change in my worldview, I marveled as opportunity after opportunity gravitated to me as the word spread that I'd been downsized. Amazingly, many of these opportunities not only aligned with my personal mission but also allowed me to continue to develop my talents and knowledge.

For the first time in my life, I was free to choose which opportunities best fit my purpose and my family's needs. There was abundance in every direction I looked. The stress of not having a job was threatening to give way to having more blessings than I was capable of receiving.

Now that's a problem I wish everyone could face.

I am now focusing on three highly promising ventures with more waiting in the wings.

It's no exaggeration to say that my job loss was a huge blessing disguised as a minor setback. It was a blessing that required a combination of Divine Providence and a liberal arts education to truly appreciate.

Perhaps you've pondered making the deep sacrifice of gaining a world class education in pursuit of your life's mission. As one who has just experienced the difference it can make, I can attest that it's worth it.

Food Safety at Any Cost?

2011-02-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Sitting down to our daily meals is such a commonplace occurrence for most of us that we scarcely give it a second thought. But the safety of the food we eat is becoming the focal point of an increasingly intense tug of war between federal regulators and food growers and producers at every level-- right down to our own gardens. The issue of food safety is closely tied to other issues that affect how and what we eat. To better understand what's at stake when it comes to feeding ourselves, a bit of historical perspective is in order.

One of the most significant advancements in human history was the shift that moved mankind from the Nomadic age to the Agrarian age in which planting and harvesting largely replaced hunting and gathering as the principal means of obtaining food. By creating permanent settlements, usually near a reliable source of water, societies found they could eat better, live better and enjoy far greater comfort than was possible within a nomadic existence.

Historian Will Durant in his series The Story of Civilization claims that the Agrarian Age may well be what made civilization possible since the growing, harvesting and storing of crops allowed mankind an unprecedented amount of leisure time to pursue education, art and culture. Food was produced locally and wealth was measured by land ownership. Even with the advent of civilization, a large percentage of people still produced roughly half of the food on their table, through gardening, and keeping a milk cow or chickens. This changed drastically with the arrival of the Industrial Age.

The industrial age greatly changed the entire landscape of how most people lived their lives. People became more concentrated in larger cities and goods were primarily purchased at central locations. Mass production and distribution created a huge disconnect in how the masses obtained their food. Though food was plentiful, and available in greater variety than ever before, many people became completely out of touch with the means of producing food and, in turn, became almost entirely dependent upon others for their daily sustenance. Purchasing our food at the supermarket became the norm and even a person who lived next door to a farmer or a dairy was far more likely to buy their produce or milk at the store rather than from their neighbor.

Mass production of food led to the creation of agri-business giants like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland who along with other large food corporations have become major players in supplying our food. These companies have also pioneered the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) including plants, seeds and animals in order to produce larger yields. This practice has raised concerns ranging from the implications of allowing the companies' control of seeds as intellectual property to the impact of genetically modified food upon human nutrition.

Now the Information Age is overtaking the Industrial Age and we are seeing a trend that steers away from the mass production approach that typified the pinnacle of the Industrial Age. In the U.S., increasing numbers of people are choosing to "downshift" their lifestyles by leaving large cities and six figure incomes for a more modest, rural existence that, more often than not, includes having some land and producing a portion of their own food. Community Supported Agriculture cooperatives (CSA) are catching on in many areas where residents can purchase shares in a small, locally operated farms that provide them with food produced in their own communities. Farmers markets and private gardening are also becoming popular means of obtaining locally grown, organically non-genetically modified food within one's community.

While these local sources of food are gaining acceptance, they are still far from commonplace.

Few of us have encountered the specter of empty store shelves in our grocery stores and yet the system by which those shelves are kept filled is dependent upon carefully timed resupply and distribution that takes place every couple of days. A truckers strike, bad weather or any number of other factors can prevent those store shelves from being replenished and at that point the learning curve then becomes incredibly steep for those who must now figure out how to feed themselves.

The bottom line is that today a vast amount of our population no longer has any concept of what is required to grow, harvest and transport their food from the field to their table. And in regards to the safeguarding the quality of our food, we have placed that responsibility in the hands of a few state and federal regulatory agencies. But these agencies are now beginning to focus their attention beyond the mass producers of food products and to exercise greater control over small growers and local producers.

Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that roughly 5,000 people die from food-borne illness in America annually. But most cases of food contamination are traced to large scale operations and not the small local producers. So why the increased focus on the local producers?

When the Food Safety Modernization Act was passed by Congress last December and signed into law earlier this year, it was billed by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as the "most significant safety law of the law 100 years". But the law has also become a flashpoint of concern for agriculture groups, small food producers and organic farmers who see the law as an unprecedented expansion of federal regulatory power over the ability of people to produce their own food.

In a nation where we always seem to be just one more law away from safety, the enforcement of current food safety regulations have resulted in SWAT teams raiding Amish farmers and organic farmers co-ops over allegations of selling products that haven't been properly regulated. The further expansion of federal power in this arena raises the question: Is there such a thing as too much safety?

The 80 page Food Safety Modernization Act moves the Food and Drug Administration out of the realm of mere inspection and into the realm of proactive prevention of food-borne illness. It expands the enforcement powers for the FDA to where in the event of a food "emergency" or "major contamination" the FDA could place all food and farms under the the Department of Homeland Security; an agency which is mentioned no less than 41 times in the law's text. The FDA will have the power to conduct warrant-less searches of the business records of even small growers and producer even if there is no clear evidence that a law has been broken.

Depending upon how the regulations are interpreted and applied, all food production facilities within the U.S may be required to register with the federal government and pay an annual registration fee. Fines for paperwork infractions can go as high as $500,000 for a single offense. Producers who sell or distribute food outside of government control could be prosecuted as smugglers. To handle the increase of mandated inspections of food processing facilities and other provisions of the new law, the FDA will be required to hire more inspectors at greater taxpayer expense.

In fairness, the Act contains a number of exemptions (under certain conditions) for small farms and very small food producers who sell their wares within a certain geographical radius and have less than $500,000 in annual sales. But the problem remaining is that the law is written broadly and vaguely enough to give the FDA a great deal of discretion. Can we trust that the FDA will not expand its enforcement efforts to small growers and producers? How many other regulatory agencies have experienced mission creep as time goes on? It is much easier to prevent abuse of power by limiting government than it is to correct abuses made possible by ambiguity in the laws.

Concerns over the law have prompted Utah lawmakers, among others, to consider legislation that would exempt agriculture produced and purchased within the state of Utah from federal regulations. Rep. Bill Wright's HB365 seeks to exempt Utah growers, both large and small, from federal agricultural regulations on products cultivated and sold within the state. The Utah Intrastate Commerce Project was launched as a means to protect small farmers who engage in farmers markets or Community Supported Agriculture cooperatives from a harsh federal regulatory climate that places unreasonable costs and mandates on them. This food sovereignty approach has been also pursued, with varying degrees of success, in Georgia, Wyoming, Vermont, Kentucky and Florida.

Defenders of the Food Safety Modernization Act have expressed reactions ranging from puzzlement to scorn over those who would question the wisdom of the law, but it's not a matter of having intensive, inflexible regulation of every aspect of the food supply or having to watch our children die from eating tainted, dangerous food. Local growers are easily recognizable within their local markets and have no incentive to produce tainted goods. This is an issue where the correct answer is more likely to be found somewhere in between the two extremes.

Economist and author Tom E. Woods offers a tongue-in-cheek characterization of the regulatory mindset as follows:

"Without [federal regulation], America would be populated by illiterates, half of us would be dead from quack medicine or exploding consumer products, and the other half would lead a feudal existence under the iron fist of private firms that worked them to the bone for a dollar a week."

The truth, of course, it that even with minimal regulatory oversight, people will not devolve back to cave-dwelling savages by default.

No one wishes to eat unsafe food, but there is much more to this law than simply providing safeguards to the food supply. Whatever actual safety benefits may be found in the law, there is a corresponding economic impact and effect upon personal liberty that must be considered as well. Even as food prices are steadily rising for American consumers, the prospect of growing more of one's own food is becoming increasingly more risky due to regulatory concerns. Food is what sustains life and any law that complicates or exerts control over a person's access to or ability to produce food must be weighed against the likelihood for abuse by those in power.

Original Intent - An Essay You Must Read

2011-02-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

We hear a lot of talk about "Original Intent" these days, but years of judicial sophistry have muddied the waters to the point that few of us are certain what the phrase even means.

Please take a look at how my friend Kyle Roberts explains the Original Intent Scam and the often overlooked sources we should be examining. As the 10th Amendment movement is gaining steam in numerous states seeking to check out of control federal power, a clear understanding of original intent is absolutely vital.

Tragedy Spells Opportunity for the State

2011-01-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

In Tom Clancy's 1986 WWIII novel Red Storm Rising, the Soviet Union's leadership finds itself in desperate need of a pretext to justify the invasion of West Germany in order to neutralize NATO. To this end, the Politburo creates a fiendish maskirovka or deception for the purpose of rousing the support of their people while simultaneously galvanizing public opinion against West Germany. The deception consists of a bomb planted in the Kremlin which kills a number of visiting schoolchildren. Soviet state television deliberately plays up the images of the dead children and in short order the Soviet citizens are screaming for war.

I was reminded of this story following the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. After the photograph of the firefighter carrying the bloodied body of tiny Baylee Almon had tugged at my heart strings for the 5th or 6th time, the thought occurred to me that perhaps someone might be using her image for the purpose of inflaming and polarizing public opinion. But the question remained: against whom would that outrage be directed?

The target, of course, was anyone who had spoken out against the Clinton administration's statist expansion of gun control laws, attempts to nationalize health care, and other government excesses. In a classic example of guilt-by-association, Timothy McVeigh, who was later convicted and executed for his role in the bombing, was held up as an archetype of anyone who expressed dissatisfaction with the increasingly heavy-handed, parasitic behavior of their federal government. Two weeks later, then President Clinton famously remarked in a commencement address at Michigan State University, "There is nothing patriotic about hating your government, or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."

As writer Will Grigg pointed out, certain government officials and their enablers in the press went so far as to assign meteorological significance to the voices of dissent by accusing them of creating a "climate of fear" and an "atmosphere of hate." The officials' goal, which was largely accomplished, was to silence critics of government policy by equating dissent--of any sort--with extremist and violent activism. It was also a craven and shameless effort to capitalize on the tragedy of an act of madness for the purpose of expanding government power to an even greater degree. Tragically, it's a method that works.

Blogger Milo Nickels sums up the tried and true formula as follows:

Step 1 - wait for tragedy to occur, or actually create the tragedy.
Step 2 - spread propaganda through the media, so everyone believes your story about the tragedy
Step 3 - pass laws, or institute policies, that take away people's freedoms.
Step 4 - justify the increased Tyranny by citing the propaganda in step 2.

Which brings us to the events of the past few days.

The police hadn't even finished stringing up the yellow tape at the crime scene of the mass shooting in Tucson before power-hungry statists were predictably seeking a way to spin the bloodshed in such a way as to gain advantage over their political opposition. The left was quick to try to link the shooter's politics to the right and vice versa. A great deal of sound and fury has raged over the past few days as each side has desperately sought to hang Jared Loughner like an albatross around the other's neck. And while this exercise in futility continues, the real exploitation is taking place under our noses.

Contrary to the artificial left/right paradigm under which so many Americans currently labor, the true opposing sides in this struggle are the state vs. the people. And the state is currently exploiting this latest event in order to glorify itself and to expand its powers even further.

Proof of this dynamic can be shown in a number of ways. For instance, the shooting rampage killed 6 and wounded 14, but where has the media focused its attention? We know of the Congresswoman who was wounded; we know of her staffer and of the federal judge who was killed; we even know about the nine year old girl who was born on 9/11. But what do we know of the others who were killed and wounded? The honest answer is: next to nothing. Why is that?

Surely their lives mattered, but since they cannot be linked, either directly or indirectly, to the state and its purposes, it's curious that they remain largely nameless and faceless to us. Further proof of this bias can be found in the charges that have been filed against the alleged shooter. The full might of the federal government has been brought to bear and it has filed charges attempted assassination in the case of the Congresswoman and federal murder charges in the case of her aide and the judge who were killed. The other victims of the shooting are apparently considered less sanctified beings and the state of Arizona's prosecution of Mr. Loughner will have to suffice.

Even the language of federal officials has portrayed one man's act of insanity as a grave threat to the entire federal leviathan. In the words of House majority leader John Boehner: “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Such acts of violence have no place in our society.” FBI Director Robert Muller described the shootings as, "an attack on our institutions and our way of life." In the meantime, blogger Jim Wallis ratcheted up the hyperbole factor by calling the shootings, "an attack on the soul of the nation." Where is that same sense of outrage when innocent people die at the hands of those in the employ of the federal government?

As journalist Bill Anderson so aptly puts it, Wallis, among others, is one "who sees literally everything in political symbolism. So, the rule of thumb is that if he cannot find a way to put an incident into his worship of the State, it simply doesn’t happen."

But the state's biggest tell that it believes it is holding a winning hand in this tragedy is found the various bits of legislation being proposed that are intended to build yet another layer of legal separation between the federal government and the citizens it claims to represent. One set of laws for the rulers, and another for the people. It's a textbook example of what aristocracy looks like.

Rep. Robert Brady of Pennsylvania is seeking to introduce highly ambiguous legislation that would stifle even peaceful free speech by outlawing "language or symbols" that could be perceived as threatening to federal officials or lawmakers.

Image courtesy of deathby1000papercuts.com

Not to be outdone, Rep. Peter King of New York is floating a proposed law that would prohibit possession of a firearm within 1000 feet of any "high profile" government official.

Other leaders like Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) suggested the Federal Communications Commission was “not working anymore,” adding she would look at ways to better police language (thought) on the airwaves.

Add to these proposed laws the various gun control proposals now being forwarded by various special interests and professional alarmists who've long been waiting for a bloody shirt to wave, and it should be abundantly clear that tragedy spells o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y to many among the ruling class. None of these proposed remedies would have stopped Jared Loughner from carrying out his gruesome task. But it should be clear to all but the most deliberately obtuse thinkers that his attack merely provided the justification for the imposition of solutions that have long been searching for a problem.

So what exactly is the end game that these political opportunists have in mind? No one can say for certain. But it appears that greater restrictions on our ability to speak freely, further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms and expanded government power to further insulate itself against the citizenry it purportedly represents all play a role in the desired end result. How that could be portrayed as a positive development for the cause of liberty requires a curious combination of Orwellian double-think and slavish devotion to the state. Don't fall for it.

Opting Out of Tyranny

2010-11-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

[Note: My personal experiences with individual TSA employees over the past 4 years have been uniformly positive. Having been a passenger on roughly a dozen flights over that time period, I have never been mistreated, nor have I been subjected to the body scanner or had an enhanced pat-down. My opposition to the TSA's current actions is rooted in the belief that their policies are totalitarian in nature and therefore anathema to the proper role of government.]

Last summer one of my children was sexually assaulted in broad daylight at a public park. At the time of the assault there were scores of people nearby, but no one recognized that the assailant was unlawfully detaining my child while groping the child's body inappropriately. It is particularly difficult for me that I was less than 100 feet from my child while this assault occurred. Had I seen what was taking place I would have intervened without a second of hesitation, but it was only after my child informed me of the man's actions that the police were notified and the assailant was arrested. He will be sentenced next month for felony sexual abuse. To say that this incident has been stressful for my entire family is an understatement akin to suggesting that the North Pole can be a bit chilly this time of year.

I share this sad experience to illustrate a similar affront to decency that is occurring daily across this nation, in full view of scores of people, who, while clearly seeing what's happening to their children and loved ones, dare not lift a finger to stop the groping. I refer to the so-called "enhanced pat-down" now being employed by Transportation Security Administration employees at airports around the country. If there is a more clear example of oppressive government behavior in our day, I don't know what it could be.

If you or your family wish to fly on a commercial airliner, the TSA gives you the option (for now) of either submitting to being irradiated and having naked images taken of your body or to being thoroughly groped over every inch of your body by security officers who demand complete submission to their will. Roll your eyes or utter the most minute protest to their actions and you are virtually guaranteed to be pulled aside, interrogated, browbeaten and threatened with missing your flight or even with arrest for failing to acknowledge their absolute authority over you.

Let me put it like this: If you take a photograph of your child in the bathtub, you could be charged with child pornography. If a TSA employee creates a nude image of your child electronically, he or she is simply "doing their job." If a stranger gropes your child's body he or she could go to prison for sexual assault. But if a stranger wearing a TSA uniform gropes your child's body, the act is sanctified by the state and you as a parent are forbidden to intercede.

How on earth did a nation that prides itself on being the freest country on the planet come to accept the kind of surly police state behavior usually reserved for third world dictatorships? Worse still, how did an American people whose ancestors tamed a continent and stared down some of the most tyrannical governments mankind has known become so timid that they have chosen to voluntarily geld themselves of their rights in the name of promised security? If we are willing to silently suffer the indignity of ourselves or our loved ones being electronically strip-searched and to allow our private parts to be physically groped by strangers acting under the color of law, where exactly would we draw the line regarding government demands that we submit?

The use of nudity and humiliation as a means of breaking an individual's resistance to authority is a well-documented fact of human history. From the way the Nazis systematically stripped the Jews of their identities and their dignity prior to their liquidation, to the way that captured U.S. pilots shot down in Vietnam were paraded naked through streets of the villages, to the treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq war, those wishing to exercise dominion over others have consistently used forced nudity as a psychological tool to subjugate individuals.

The fact that the airport security scanners are using ionizing backscatter radiation to peer beneath the clothing of airline passengers and crew doesn't make the procedure any less intrusive. Contrary to the mild and foggy images used to sell the scanners to the public, the actual digital images are graphic enough to enable the viewer to discern if a man is circumcised or if a woman is having her period.

Furthermore, assurances that the images would never be stored or disseminated have already been proven false with the case of an Indian film star whose naked images were made available after a trip through London's Heathrow airport. The TSA's own documents make clear that the machines possess the capability to store and transmit the images of scanned passengers.

Even the stance the traveler is required to assume while in the body scanner is reminiscent of one who is surrendering with their hands in the air.

The new enhanced and invasive pat-down being used at airports across the nation appears to be a not-so-subtle punitive measure that is being used to punish those who choose to opt out of baring themselves before the state. Upon stating your intention to opt out of the scanner, you can expect the TSA employee to announce loudly "We have an OPT OUT!", at which point you will be directed to a screening area where the so-called enhanced pat-down will occur. This may or may not be in full view of other passengers. The pat-down itself has been described by a number of recipients as ranging between vigorous and rough with clear and deliberate contact with the breasts and genitals through the clothing. Any protestation, any tears or recoiling from the screener's fondling fingers and the pat-down has to start all over again. Make a big enough fuss and you'll be detained while law enforcement comes over to escort you out of the airport.

Many TSA workers appear to be providing credence to the findings of the Stanford prison experiment that showed that in a situation with prisoners and guards, some of those placed in a position of authority over others will gravitate toward sadistic and abusive behavior toward those over whom they have power. As in the Milgram Experiment in which individuals ignored their own consciences when prompted by an authority figure to inflict (what they believed was actual) harm via electrical shock upon another person, TSA employees have shown a clear tendency excuse the distress of those they're screening by claiming that they are only following policy.

With 450 body scanner machines expected to be in operation by the end of this year and another 500 expected to be installed next year, an even more disturbing thought is the prospect of such scanners being utilized for screening people at courthouses, bus & train stations or even outside sporting venues. If we meekly submit and allow body scanners to become the norm for travel now, it's reasonable to expect that the state will find excuses for the use of them to become even more widespread in the future. What then?

Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation notes:

“Many of us grow up believing that government reflects the will of the people. But skeptics know better. Government has assumed more and more control over private life not because the people demanded it, but because power-seekers and privilege-seekers sought outlets for their ambitions. They then propagandized the public until a sufficient number of people came to believe government control was good for them."

Of course, the justification for what too many Americans meekly accept as necessary government misbehavior stems from the successful fear-mongering that predictably followed the 9/11 terror attacks. 9/11 "changed everything" we are told ad nauseam as the government scrambles to deal with the threat of terrorism by treating all of us as potential terrorists. The folly of the TSA's current see-you-naked/feel-you-up approach to thwarting terrorism is best illustrated by the fact that the Israelis, who have a stellar record for terror-free airline flights, don't use the body scanners because they are considered nothing more than security theater.

Now some good news. The overbearing state, which tends to act as if the only choices are between security and terrorism, is finally experiencing serious backlash to its latest ramping up of invasive security policies. A revolt is brewing--not among the timid passengers--but among the airline crews who are also being subjected to unreasonable demands upon their dignity. Flight attendants have filed a grievance with their union over the enhanced pat-down procedure that they are being forced to endure just like the passengers. And a particularly courageous airline pilot named Michael Roberts has chosen to put his career on the line by saying "enough" to TSA functionaries who sought to run him through the same gauntlet of nuclear nudity and physical groping. These are but two examples of fighting back, but they should serve to inspire those of us who prefer independent thought and liberty over timid groupthink to seriously question how we can make a similar principled stand for the freedoms we cherish.

We still have much for which to be grateful in terms of our freedoms and opportunities in this nation, however, it is a foolish belief that any government will keep cherished freedoms perpetually secure without first being checked and balanced to define its proper role. Ignorance of this principle has produced a dangerous complacency in which far too many Americans mistake merely giving lip service to liberty for the positive action required to defend it.

For my part, I cannot stand by while strangers in uniform molest me or my family members, therefore, I will no longer patronize any airline nor will I subject my family to the demands of the security apparatus until such time as the TSA ceases treating all airline passengers as terror suspects or worse. If enough people refuse to lend legitimacy to a system that systematically abuses them, it will have no power over them and eventually fade into obscurity.

Love of Liberty is Considered a Mental Illness

2010-10-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

Just a few generations ago, if a person needed a credible witness to establish their personal character in a court of law, they would bring in a member of the clergy. Today when a credible witness is needed to testify regarding another person's character, we bring in a psychiatrist. While this may appear to be a natural consequence of the progression of modern science, medicine and law, there is a very real danger that accompanies this shift. When psychiatry becomes an arm of the state, it enables the abusers of state power to marginalize and to get rid of unwanted people.

This is not as recent a trend as many would believe, but according to Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, since it's development nearly 300 years ago, psychiatry has consistently served as an arm of the law and has provided a means of dealing with those deemed inconvenient by the state. But what the state considers a nuisance isn't strictly limited to deviants, or those with true mental defects. It also applies to those who, for a variety of reasons, refuse to submit unconditionally to the state's authority or demands.

Let that sink in for a moment.

You don't have to be schizophrenic, or anti-social or criminally insane for state experts to pronounce you mentally ill and therefore a ward of the state. If you are a free thinker, a constitutionalist, an Oath Keeper, a non-conformist, a peaceful activist or resistor, or if you practice any degree of civil disobedience or question authority--it's official--your disorder is now listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition.

Courtesy: UWSGO.com

Modern psychiatry calls your illness Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and it's not just for kids who won't eat their broccoli. Take a few minutes and read for yourself this 3 page excerpt from the DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition describing ODD and its diagnostic features.

UWSGO.com highlights some of the key ideas from the excerpt that should get the attention of anyone who considers it their duty to stand for correct principles even if it requires swimming against the tide of public opinion:

The essential feature of Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient. and hostile behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least 6 months...

Negativistic and defiant behaviors are expressed by persistent Stubbornness, resistance to directions, and unwillingness to compromise, give in, or negotiate with adults or peers. Defiance may also include deliberate or persistent testing of limits, usually by ignoring orders, arguing, and failing to accept blame for misdeeds. Hostility can be directed at adults or peers and is shown by deliberately annoying others or by verbal aggression (usually without the more serious physical aggression seen in Conduct Disorder)...

Defiance may also include deliberate or persistent testing of limits, usually by ignoring orders, arguing, and failing to accept blame for misdeeds...

I may be oversimplifying what the psych manual is saying but it sounds a lot like if you're not willing to shut up, compromise, conform and go along with those who are exercising (state) authority over you, then you may be diagnosed as the ODD man out. Pun intended.

Question the wisdom of being electronically strip searched and/or physically groped in order to board a commercial airline flight and you will be singled out for "special attention." Refuse an order to confiscate lawfully owned firearms from private citizens who have committed no crime and you are a prime candidate for deep scrutiny of your mental health. Engage in any form of civil disobedience, free thinking or non-conformity (sorry, Rosa Parks) and you will be treated as a direct threat to the authority of those in power.

When medicine and the state become bedfellows, there is a tendency for newly "discovered" diseases to have political implications. This is especially true when it comes to the American Psychiatric Association and its tendency to vote disorders and diseases in or out of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual by a simple show of hands. A classic example of this was the vote in 1973 by the APA to remove homosexuality as an abnormal behavior from DSM II after intense lobbying by pro-homosexual activists. Scientific research was not the basis for this vote, it was a purely political move and it has provided a toehold for the homosexual lobby to achieve a surprising amount of political power since then.

Note how often those who refuse to call homosexual behavior normal and acceptable are "diagnosed" as homophobic by their opponents. They are accused, using the language of psychiatry, of suffering from an irrational, clinical fear of homosexuals. In other words, disagreement equals a mental disorder.

How many children sit in a drug-induced stupor in government schools because their teacher or school counselor, in conjunction with health officials, became annoyed at their "hyperactive" behavior and followed the psychiatric playbook of drugging them into submission?

Even gun owners are finding themselves increasingly painted into a corner where among the criteria by which the state dictates whether one may legally possess or purchase a firearm is the question of whether the individual has ever been "adjudicated as mentally defective or committed to a mental institution." How difficult would it be to expand the definitions of what makes one "mentally defective" to include ODD? Again, the concern here is that when government and Psychiatry team up to establish what constitutes acceptable attitudes and what is considered "anti-social", the conclusions always seem to miraculously fall in favor of desired government result. Purely by coincidence, of course.

Under the brutal leadership of Joseph Stalin, millions of Russians found themselves in the gulag for what was ambiguously referred to as "anti-Soviet" thinking or activities. The use of Psychiatry as a tool of oppression has been used by countless dictators whose experts eagerly labeled dissidents as mentally ill as a means of discouraging those who might be tempted to challenge the regime's authority. There is a reason why despotic governments have favored some form of so-called re-education as a means of helping their subjects get their thinking right. The problem with the dissidents, you see, is all in their heads.

Involuntary commitment and coerced or drugging non-conformists to solve their mental problems is a handy way to keep those who would make trouble for the regime under the state's control and effectively marginalized from society. After all, who are you going to believe, the government and its experts, or that free-thinking lunatic in the straitjacket?

Here's something to consider from Dr. Szasz on the separation of Psychiatry & the state:

If we recognize that "mental illness" is a metaphor for disapproved thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we are compelled to recognize as well that the primary function of Psychiatry is to control thought, mood, and behavior. Hence, like Church and State, Psychiatry and the State ought to be separated by a "wall." At the same time, the State ought not to interfere with mental health practices between consenting adults. The role of psychiatrists and mental health experts with regard to law, the school system, and other organizations ought to be similar to the role of clergymen in those situations.

The battle for free agency is being fought on many levels. It's critically important to know your opponent and his methods; especially those tactics that have been artfully concealed in plain sight.

Guest Commentary from Casey Anderson: Juan Williams, NPR & Free Speech

2010-10-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

Last week, as you have undoubtedly heard in the media, Juan Williams was fired from his position as National Public Radio news analyst. NPR claimed that it was not his proper role as a new analyst to communicate his personal opinions on air. It is important to note that Williams is also a Fox News Contributor and it was during a Fox News Show, not an NPR broadcast, that Williams communicated his beliefs.

Blasphemer in the Temple of State

Williams stated he gets "nervous" whenever he sees someone in "Muslim garb" boarding a plane. He went on to further communicate issues related to prejudice amongst other minorities. Williams is a left-leaning Fox News Contributor who was making an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor news program when the comment was made.

What you are hearing in the media is mostly how it is unfair that somebody be fired for making known their conservative beliefs and being honest. While this is a good discussion to be having. There are two points that are missing from this national discussion. The first discussion is whether or not the operator of a company should have the authority to fire an employee who they feel is not working under the guide of their role and responsibility or is negatively effecting the business at hand. The second issue that is being avoiding is whether or not tax-payer dollars should be going to the National Public Radio.

National Proletariat Radio?

The choice is clear for limited government advocates: The government has no business managing the airwaves or managing a business that operates within those airwaves what-so-ever. National Public Radio should be immediately defunded and property rights returned to citizens of this country. It seems to this author that this should be an argument of the vast majority of citizens if you realize the underlying principle of avoiding government hindrance to the free-market. If we have NPR functioning as a pseudo-propaganda arm of whichever socialist or fascist president happens to be in office in that term, it will surely promote an unfair playing field when comparing it to other media sources whether they be liberal or conservative. How are radio hosts who actually have to earn their support ever going to compete with those who simply steal it through taxation? I will also support the hard working Americans who grow their business through hard work and perseverance despite their political affiliations or ideologies.

The underlying principle is that government should not be in the business of convincing voters to support its failed policies. Medicare and HHS recently announced a $30 million project to promote the benefits of the new Obamacare legislation in hopes of garnishing more support. This is the biggest issue currently with Washington D.C., they feel we just are not educated enough on the issues. So, when 70% of Americans oppose Obamacare, they pass it anyway and then spend your money (and your children's future) to convince you otherwise. They also fire news analyst who offer contrary opinions.

However, with NPR being a largely publicly funded entity, it makes this issue more complicated. Just as this administration has the authority to fire an employee they feel is not performing their duties appropriately, the next one will as well, and the following. So, if Barack Obama is subsequently fired in 2012 and voters express a clear choice in the direction they want the administration and NPR to go - I expect we will not hear much bickering from the left when NPR is and rightly should be defunded. Although I highly expect there will be rioting in the streets when the liberal left-leaning media does not have their way.

Casey Anderson-Campaign for Liberty Regional Coordinator

The Tyrant Next Door

2010-10-10T19:09:00.000-07:00

What makes a community a great place to live? The answer will vary from person to person but most of us would agree on qualities like cleanliness, order and low crime. Notably missing from those terms we use to describe a livable community is the word “freedom”. In fact, occasionally the concept of freedom is found to be somewhat at odds with what some community leaders consider the proper function of local government. A clean, orderly community and personal freedom shouldn’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. But there is an increasing rift between the two.

The unnecessary arrest and jailing of Betty Perry of Orem after a local code enforcement officer confronted her about her dying lawn in 2007 made headlines throughout the state of Utah and elsewhere. Some blamed the police officer who apparently placed more emphasis on the enforcement part of his job than on his peace officer training. Others place the blame on the septuagenarian grandmother who refused to cooperate by signing a ticket or giving her name until she could talk to her lawyer. Both participants share a portion of the blame, but the needless situation actually finds its genesis in the zoning ordinance that elevates bad yard keeping to criminal status.

She should have submitted more quickly, right?

Orem is one of many municipalities across the country that has zoning ordinances which were put in place to address so-called nuisance properties that may be considered an eyesore by their neighbors. Though it may seem innocuous to some, it’s important to remember that every law and every ordinance carries a potential death sentence if one fails to submit to the authority of the state. Thus when a widow finds herself unable to afford the extravagance of watering her lawn, the ordinance regarding neglected yards may set the stage for her to end up bleeding, face-down on the ground in handcuffs, in jail or even dead if she were to resist vigorously enough.

Implicit in every law, ordinance, statute, and code is a mechanism for enforcement which, taken to its logical end, allows the state or municipality to use increasing amounts of coercion up to and including lethal force, if necessary, against the non-compliant. This is worth remembering when government at any level seeks to “protect” us from nuisances that could and should be handled civilly. Force is how government accomplishes its goals and too many people have become conditioned to believe that government force cannot be applied in an unrighteous fashion.

Thankfully, Orem City officials recognized the officer’s overreaction and released Perry from custody with a heartfelt apology. The officer was sent him home for the day while public safety officials reviewed the way the incident was handled. They’ve made the best of a bad situation, but wouldn’t it have been better to have never happened?

Was it you or your freedom?

This is precisely the reason that laws and ordinances must be carefully considered before their passage, to ensure that overkill is not the result.

As has been noted on this blog previously, there are essentially two types of law. Mala in se are laws forbidding an act that would be considered evil by its very nature such as rape, murder, arson, etc. Mala prohibita refers to a prohibited act that is considered a crime only by statute such as not keeping one’s yard neat and tidy. The fact that so many of our municipal ordinances are mala prohibitum shows a couple of things about our society in general.

First of all, it demonstrates an unhealthy reliance upon the state to act as the final arbiter of what is right and what is wrong. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his address to the Harvard graduating class of 1978 observed that Western societies were becoming civic cowards in that we tended to solve our conflicts by appealing to the letter of the law as the ultimate source of moral authority.

A man who saw despotism firsthand

Solzhenitsyn noted that, “The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man's noblest impulses.”

Secondly, those noblest impulses we’re ignoring include a degree of neighborly behavior that could solve many of the problems without having to resort to a legal action. In the case of Betty Perry, how differently might things have gone had an offended neighbor approached her personally and expressed concern instead of phoning in an anonymous complaint to the authorities? With just a bit of teamwork and a desire to seek a win-win outcome, the problem could have been corrected and the debacle of her arrest would have been avoided.

Perhaps our quest for better living could rely less on zoning ordinances and more on simply being good neighbors. But this is only one of the potential drawbacks of vigorous code enforcement. A more insidious problem is that of creating new classes of crimes for the dual purposes of generating revenue and exerting greater control over the citizenry at the local level.

In Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” one of the characters famously remarks, “Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone?” Looking at the headlines lately, it appears that this concept of turning laws into revenue generators is finding favor among municipalities across the nation.

In Las Vegas, 51 year old Delinda Epstein recently was slapped with a $3800 fine and the impoundment of her car after posting an ad on Craigslist offering to do errands and chores for a negotiated fee. After picking up a client who had hired her to provide a ride from the airport, Delinda was arrested and charged with the crime of “providing unlicensed transportation” in her duly registered and licensed vehicle.

A new breed of criminals requires a new breed of revenue collectors

Her arrest was far less traumatic than the ones experienced by unemployed construction workers in Broward County, Florida who got the full guns-in-the-face, thrown-to-the-ground, hut-hut-hut treatment served up by Broward County deputies during their arrests. What did these law-breakers do to merit the full tactical response? They had responded to ads seeking workers for minor construction or repair jobs but had failed to secure the state’s permission first by paying the appropriate tribute via licensing fees.

Many folks tend to excuse such actions on the part of the state by claiming that “These measures are to protect people from predatory, unlicensed workers.” But please note that in each of the above examples, the law was used to punish pre-emptively; where no actual harm had occurred. Such stories are glaring examples of how preventative laws are finding favor in our society and they further illustrate how many of our laws, ordinances and statutes are being crafted and applied to further the interests of government rather than to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When cities send out swarms of code enforcement officers to ensure that our landscaping is within code, that our lawns are the right color, that any parked vehicles (inside or outside) are licensed and running and that we don’t have asphalt shingles or other dangerous items stored on our property, are they seeking to secure the interests of the property owner or the city? When authorities prefer to threaten fines, confiscation, or the filing of liens against property owners rather than seeking to negotiate variances, conditional use permits or other civil means of remedy it appears that they are cashing in on Rand’s point that it’s impossible to “rule innocent men.”

Creating new crimes is providing states, cities and counties with a ready mechanism of collectivist control coupled with a means of generating revenue at the expense of the citizens they claim to be protecting. Punishing people pre-emptively where no harm has taken place flies in the face of our traditions that the state exists to serve the citizens by ensuring justice and fairness through protection of individual rights.

By contrast, protective laws are those that come into play civilly or legally only after an actual injury to person or property has occurred. Real freedom hinges upon our ability to distinguish between preventative and protective laws. Two excellent resources for gaining insight to this difference are The Law by 19th Century French economist Frederic Bastiat and The Proper Role of Government by former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra T. Benson.

A citizenry that understands the correct role of government and is willing to shoulder a greater degree of personal responsibility in maintaining and governing their community will find that they can enjoy a livable community and greater freedom as well. That’s what motivational author Steven R. Covey would describe as a win-win situation for all.

Questions You Should Be Asking Candidates

2010-10-05T20:03:00.000-07:00

Less than a month remains before the first Tuesday in November and the current election cycle is finally beginning to peak. Many self-identified conservative commentators are breathlessly reminding us that "This is the most important election of our lifetimes" while they're busy helping set up the Republican Koolaid stand.

Democrats seem to be keeping a fairly low profile this year, perhaps conscious at last of the mounting frustration of an electorate that has had a bellyful of government imposition in the form of a health care law that was enacted over the protests of many Americans. The memory of November 1994 and the house cleaning that took place in Congress that year is still causing sleepless nights for many politicians.

I'm certain that many voters, across the spectrum, are determined to make their voices heard this election, but if they allow themselves to be shepherded into the voting booth along party lines, they are playing a loser's game. The real issue for this and for every election is determining which candidate best understands and supports the proper role of government.

The trouble is, most candidates have a tendency to become rather chameleon-like when running for office and can endlessly spout heart-warming platitudes about their love of liberty, patriotism, and the Constitution. In other words, they're very good at telling us what we want to hear if we don't ask the right questions.

So how can we accurately determine a candidate's stand on the proper role of government without giving them a chance to showcase their tap-dancing skills? It's all in asking the right questions.

Many years ago, I stumbled across a questionnaire created by syndicated columnist and Las Vegas Review Journal writer Vin Suprynowicz and later polished by freedom activist Alan Korwin that enables the questioner to effectively analyze a given candidate's true understanding of the proper role of government. I've actually used these questions on numerous local, state and national candidates on my talk show and I can attest to the fact that these questions--and their follow up--allow candidates virtually no wiggle room for escape.

Try them on those lucky candidates with whom you have the opportunity to chat and watch them either shine or slink away in shame depending upon their knowledge and understanding of the Constitution which they will swear to uphold in their oath of office. CAUTION: This is powerful stuff; use it carefully.

1) Can lawmakers enact legislation for any purpose "in the public interest," or are they limited to those functions for which they've been delegated specific powers? Can you name some areas where government could probably do some good, but where it has no delegated power to act? If you can't name any such areas, is it still accurate to say Americans have a "government of limited powers"? Does this matter?

2) Can you name any departments or programs not specifically authorized in the state's (or the nation's) founding documents? Should someone who has sworn an oath to protect the Constitution, but who then votes to allocate tax funds to programs or departments not authorized by that Constitution, be punished? If not, why not?

3) Can you name a current tax that you would repeal? A fee?

4) Are residents of our state free to engage in any business they choose? Is operating any local business for profit a privilege, for which a citizen should apply for a permit, paying a fee or tax? Would you favor any changes in this regard?

5) Do residents of this state have a right to buy and keep machine guns? Why or why not?

6) Do residents of this state have a right to carry handguns openly on their hips without applying for or receiving a "permit"? Why or why not? Would you change current law enforcement in this area? In what way?

7) Should judges tell jurors they have a right to decide whether the law in question is constitutional? Is it a fair trial if the judge tells the jurors they do NOT have a right to decide the constitutionality of the law? Should judges be allowed to prevent defendants from presenting any defense they choose? If not, what is the proper recourse in the case of a judge who refuses to let the defendant do so?

8) Should judges exclude prospective jurors after questioning them and determining they do not favor the law which the prosecution seeks to enforce? If so, why do we still call them "random juries"? Does that mean the John Peter Zenger jury should have been stacked with crown sympathizers? Should juries have been stacked in the 1850s to guarantee convictions under the Fugitive Slave Act? Should judges be punished for thus excluding jurors based on "voir dire" questioning? Alfred the Great summarily executed judges who replaced jurors who refused to convict. Would this be a good solution for us to adopt, today? Why not?

9) Should it be legal for police to search automobiles without a warrant? Is it OK for police to tell drivers they have to consent to such a search? If a police officer searches a car without a warrant, should the police officer be arrested and put on trial? If not, why not?

10) If a police officer stops a car in which the driver is carrying a legal pistol, with a permit, should the officer disarm the driver before proceeding to write a ticket? Why or why not?

11) If police serve a search warrant which does not list any firearms, but they find firearms in the house being searched, is it OK for them to seize the firearms anyway? Why or why not? Would you favor a law to alter current practice in this regard? If so, specify.

12) Do we need more "gun control" (victim disarmament) laws? If so, name one new "gun control" law you would favor. If not, can you name a current "gun control" law you would repeal?

13) Can a tax rate be so high that it's not acceptable? If so, name a tax rate so high that citizens would be under no moral obligation to pay it. If you can't name such a rate, are you saying the government has a right to take 100 percent of what we earn and what we own?

14) Is the war on drugs succeeding? Can it succeed? Should all drugs be legalized? If not, why not? Should recreational drug users be committed for psychiatric treatment?

15) Whose powers are limited by the 10th Amendment? Can you think of any ways to improve enforcement of the 10th Amendment? No, you can't look it up.

A Likely Reaction

Not many candidates can endure more than a couple of these questions before suddenly remembering an overdue appointment or excusing themselves to visit with someone who's more interested in what pork they can provide for the electorate. But this isn't just a sophomoric game of Gotcha for those voters who are serious about moving the cause of liberty. It's an opportunity to exercise the kind of stewardship we should be exercising every day of every year as we participate in governing ourselves.

Asking these types of questions requires a sweet boldness, a dose of diplomacy and a willingness to suffer the slings and arrows of those who are unaccustomed to being held to account. You won't make many friends among the political class, but then again, you've probably already recognized that their interests and your interests aren't exactly the same thing, haven't you?

And should you decide to step up and run for office yourself, you'll already know what someone who stands for liberty and the proper role of government must understand.

RIP: Joseph Sobran

2010-10-01T06:35:00.000-07:00

My decision 13 years ago to sit down in front of a keyboard and to pay the price to become a writer was greatly influenced by a number of key mentors who paved the way before me. Some of those mentors, like my dear departed friend Jerry Askeroth, I knew personally and others exercised a profound influence upon me through their writings. Joseph Sobran was one of those influential writers to whom I owe a tremendous debt for his inspiration. His passing yesterday at age 64 due to complications of diabetes marks the end of an extraordinary and principled life spent in defense of the cause of liberty.

Joseph Sobran

Joe Sobran was a brilliant writer and thinker, but the thing that most exemplified his personal character was his willingness to remain true to his principles even if it came at the price of great personal sacrifice. His promising career at National Review was cut short when he refused to endorse the neoconservative agenda of the U.S. warfare state that has brought so much (ahem) good to the world in recent decades.

For this act of defiance, Sobran endured numerous unjust smears accusing him of anti-Semitism without returning railing for railing. His defense of God, family, and country--in that order--was a ray of guiding light in an increasingly darkening culture that worships self, power and dominion over others.

His essay How Tyranny Came to America should be considered required reading for anyone who wishes to better understand how our nation came off its Constitutional rails. Much more needs to be said about this man but for now I'd like to share some of my favorite Sobran quotes as examples of his willingness to stand for truths that some consider unpopular. Be warned; there are a lot of quotes here, but they offer a great deal of insight into many of the hot-button issues of our time.

Why should a government that increasingly limits the sphere of freedom, privacy, and choice in every other area show such consistent favor to sexual libertarianism alone? Because the traditional code is designed to support the family as the basic unit of society, and the family, like religion and private property, is one of the foundations of liberty and resistance to monolithic state power.

Without religion, the state faces no rival moral authority. Without property, freedom has no material basis, and everyone becomes dependent on the state for support. And without the family, the individual belongs almost wholly to the state, with no stable competing loyalty.

The sexual revolution is really an attack on the cellular structure of society. Under communism, “free love,” including abortion, was the only freedom left, because it’s the only freedom the total state finds congenial. Citizenship ceases to be just one aspect of identity and becomes your only identity. In short order, citizenship is reduced to total subjection to the state.

“Sexual freedom” is what we used to have: the freedom to choose one’s mate and to build a family. But the term has been redefined to mean sexual anomie and irresponsibility.

There is no real paradox here. The state continually releases us from our duties to our families as it increases our obligations to itself. You can leave your spouse, abort your children, abandon your parents. But you can’t divorce the state.

The state gives you two options. If you won’t be its dependent, you must pay taxes to support those who are. Living off others’ taxes is legitimate; refusing to pay those taxes is criminal.

It’s a tangled situation, the sort of mess that results when civil rights comes to mean not freedom of association, but the reverse: compulsory association. When we hear the term civil rights nowadays, we instantly know we are in for more, not less, government power over our private lives. Civil rights has become shorthand for state coercion.  Homosexuals are rapidly being added to the roster of victim categories who may use state power to force others to accept them. “Civil rights,” in this baneful sense, trumps all religious, moral, and other personal reservations. And militant homosexuals have targeted the Boy Scouts for punishment because the Scouts’ code of behavior upholds traditional Christian sexual morality.

There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It’s the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves.

If the tyrants had really “betrayed” Marx, you’d expect the true-blue Marxists to be nervously vigilant against pseudo-Marxist despots. But they never are. They are always willing to trust every new ruler who acts in the holy name of Marxism.

The most successful ideology of the 20th century denied any divine element in man or the universe warranting modesty in the state. That meant the end of privacy. People were punished for their thoughts — even thoughts they hadn’t had yet, but which the Marxist rulers could predict they would have because of their class membership. (“Scientific” socialism didn’t have to wait until they had really committed crimes, not even thought-crimes.)

We are indebted to Marx for the general assumption that everything is the state’s business, and that even privacy is something that can exist only by the grace of the state’s rather suspicious permission.

An idea has really triumphed when people are no longer aware that there is any alternative to it.

Cultural liberals are scornful of “old taboos,” but they’re always eager to establish and enforce new taboos. Disapproval of homosexuality is rapidly becoming one of the new ones. If you say it’s a perversion, you will be accused of “hate,” as if you were targeting people rather than evaluating practices. Liberals never acknowledge their own hatred of Western traditions; they merely ascribe their hostility to their “idealism,” a motive their self-congratulation won’t allow them to ascribe to conservatives. (They also claim to be on the side of science, while holding that science is “value-free.”)

So, as usual when liberals control the discussion, the debate quickly turns into a test of motives. If your motives are generous, you will approve of same-sex marriage; if you withhold approval, your motives must be nasty, and the difference between you and the Ku Klux Klan is only a matter of degree.

This isn’t debate; it’s accusation and intimidation. You can’t have a real debate when one side is stigmatized in advance as bigoted and, heaven help us, “homophobic” — a suitably perverse coinage, which basically means “not sufficiently progressive.”

In the case of same-sex marriage, conservatives are also under special inhibitions. They believe in public reticence about sex and excretion, so they are accordingly reluctant to discuss rather obvious clinical distinctions — reproductive, sanitary, and olfactory — between orifices. The best comment I have heard on same-sex marriage can’t be printed in a family newspaper (and I guess I wouldn’t want it to be).

A few years ago liberalism’s bulletin-board orthodoxy (it changes weekly) held, under the sway of feminism, that marriage was an evil, outmoded, patriarchal institution. Besides, what did a “piece of paper” have to do with love?

Now, it seems, marriage is such a vital institution that it’s cruel to exclude anyone from its joys. And you exclude people merely by declining to redefine this ancient institution to suit their tastes. The “right” to marry means the right to overturn not only tradition, but common sense.

This position is not just wrong; it’s also — and this is what makes it somewhat awkward to argue with — stunningly whimsical. You hardly know whether to refute it or just wait it out, hoping it will blow over, giving place to the next morally imperative fad.

I’ve noticed that the more you evolve, the further left you seem to go. That’s why I try to resist the evolutionary process. By its logic, the most highly evolved being of recent times was Mao Zedong. To my way of thinking, it behooves one to keep in touch with one’s cave-man roots.

[Peter] Jennings shares with the president a view of the American people as a sort of gigantic kindergarten class waiting for their tutelage. Their notion of enlightenment is to have the whole class chanting in unison, “Diversity is good! Diversity is good!”

After all, as the president reminded us, “diversity” is our greatest strength. That must be why he wants the federal government to make sure all children get the same kind and degree of education.

G.K. Chesterton said that the purpose of an open mind, like that of an open mouth, is to close on something. If you still doubt O.J. Simpson’s guilt, for example, are you really open-minded in any commendable sense? Or is your mind simply closed against the evidence?

In fact it’s nonsense to say flatly that a mind should be “open” or “closed.” The real question is when, not whether, to close it. Of course it’s wrong to close it prematurely. But at some point you have to make a commitment about the truth of things.

The very idea of abolishing slavery is a modern one, which arose in Christian civilization. The pagan world never produced an abolitionist movement, though individual slaves often gained their liberty

Can it be an accident that back when people were more judgmental, they didn’t shoot each other quite so often? It may seem paradoxical, but it’s quite natural. Simple, even. When you have commonly accepted moral standards, you don’t usually need to resort to force. But when moral rebuke no longer exerts its restraining influence, there is a human temptation to blow the offending party away, as it were.

I realize that to say that things keep getting worse is highly judgmental. So maybe I should say that they keep getting worse from a judgmental point of view. From a nonjudgmental perspective, of course, everything is fine.

It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that he was the lesser evil. And they weren’t too sure about that.

Too often today, the high and holy cause of unbelief is threatened by the smug sanctimony of the atheists.

Consider Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, whose title is perhaps self-explanatory. Religion poisons everything? Everything? Bach and Mozart? Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman?

And what about atheists like Stalin? Hitchens is ready for that one, citing Orwell: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.” Besides, we may note, Stalin went to a seminary, where maybe he picked some bad thinking habits, which he couldn’t shake off when he stopped believing in God. Even bad atheists, it seems, can be chalked up to religion.

Now Hitchens himself, born English and naturalized American, is a learned and eloquent man. (I’ve debated him on politics, and I have the scars to prove it.) But when he gets on the subject of religion — any and all religion, mind you — he turns plain silly. Like so many of his breed, he seems to think he can settle an argument with a combination of British suavity and British snot. After reading him, I’m always surer I know whom he hates (or, less often, loves) than what he thinks.

Mean old nuns whacked my knuckles with a ruler, ergo God does not exist. This is less inductive reasoning than simple free association with a grudge. Religion reminds Christopher Hitchens of a lot of bad memories, even if they are historical rather than autobiographical. That is, they are bad things he’s read about, not necessarily experienced himself. Somehow I’d expected a more rigorous argument.

If you really think belief in God or gods has always caused so much suffering (such as the Trojan War, a quagmire which I, as a Catholic, would have opposed from the start), then it seems to me that you ought to propagate atheism seriously — not just out of vanity to show how clever you are, but out of those same humanitarian motives to which you say religion is repugnant, and by which you claim to be driven. No need to humiliate the poor believers, is there?

What it comes to is that your conception of human nature may be not merely wrong, but impolite. If you think God or nature had a purpose in making two sexes, so that sodomy isn’t quite on a par with making babies, please — keep it to yourself!

In Washington, sodomy isn’t disapproved; but the word sodomy is, and you can damage your career by using it in public. You are expected to let on that you’d be horrified to learn that your son smokes Camels, but proud to learn that he’s gay. Would these be the reactions of any parent you know?

What hypocrisy! But such is sophistication. We display our refinement by pretending not to have natural feelings. In the space of a few years, the tradition of millennia is repudiated. What’s more, the repudiation is mandatory for everyone. You might think that a liberal, tolerant society would leave a little room for what, until recently, everyone assumed, but no! — no trace of the old attitude is permitted.

The one thing liberalism has “zero tolerance” for is the past. We live in a pluralistic society now, where everyone must think and talk alike, in keeping with the latest federal diversity guidelines.

But atheists are also typically indignant that some people believe in God rather than Darwin, even though belief in God, however irrational, may deter some people from killing others. Granted, from an atheistic point of view this is often a disappointing universe, but if a bit of superstition makes it marginally more bearable at times, why complain? Out in the jungle, the lower animals, as we used to call them before Darwin abolished the distinction between “higher” and “lower,” kill each other all the time, with a refreshing lack of moral outrage. Why should man take it so hard? Isn’t what we call morality, in the end, a mere matter of taste?

But people who don’t believe in damnation have an odd way of believing in diagnosis. If they can’t say you belong in hell, they usually say you belong in a loony bin. It’s as if they hate God for not existing, and for consequently failing to damn people who need damning. At the same time, they think the whole idea of hell shows how cruel religion is. Go figure.

Because we need nutrition, we feel hunger. What does it tell us that all men have spiritual hungers? Only that they are all deluded? Or is it that they all crave the “poison” of religion? If the spiritual is a mere delusion, of which our animal nature has no real need, how odd that it should be a universal delusion, rather than a local cultural eccentricity.

Even a Darwinian materialist, after all, might concede that piety can have its bright side, just as the love of truth or beauty does. For that matter, how does belief in evolution itself conduce to survival? If it’s necessary, why did it take mankind so long to think of it? If it’s not necessary, what purpose is really served by advocating it?

According to liberals, if you think marriage makes sense only as an objective relation between people of opposite sexes — for the practical purpose of establishing and regulating paternity — you must hate gay people. And hate, after all, is the essence, if anything is, of what it means to be right-wing. It goes hand in hand with logic and defining things, and is but a short step from outright popery. (Let us not forget that the Catholic Church has always persecuted science.) A liberal God, if such existed, would want everyone to have the right to marry, even — or especially — gay people. He would also accept gay and lesbian bishops.

Consider homosexuality. Everyone knows it’s a serious disorder; nobody wishes it on anyone he loves; a parent who tried to turn a child homosexual would be considered monstrous. But the new hypocrisy requires us to pretend that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality except “society’s attitude” toward it, which of course we are supposed to correct.

In fact the new hypocrisy is a necessary aspect of the “new morality.” There is no “new” morality. There is only the systematic pretense that sexual vice is not vice.

Under the new rules, you can be called a hypocrite for upholding old standards of virtue that you don’t exemplify perfectly; but you can’t be called a hypocrite for sinking into utter moral squalor, as long as you profess to believe there’s nothing wrong with it. So the defender of traditional morality is kept constantly on the defensive, since only he can be accused of hypocrisy.

It’s quite a clever system, because it works entirely to the advantage of one side, while the other side has been slow to figure it out. But it boils down to something simple and obvious.

If you set high standards, there is the danger that you’ll create an embarrassing gap between what you believe and what you do. The actual may fall short of the ideal; in fact it’s almost certain to do so, and you may look hypocritical when you’re only human.

But if you profess low standards, there’s no danger of such a gap. Your behavior is all too likely to meet your standards. If you openly advocate pedophilia, then the one thing you can’t be accused of when you’re caught in bed with a little child is hypocrisy.

To hear the gay version, you’d think that marriage was created to endow heterosexuals with special “rights” that were denied to homosexuals — a total, and lugubrious, misconception. The institution is prior to the rights attached to it.

Nearly every society has some version of marriage, simply because the institution is necessary for the care of women and children and for the orderly distribution of property. This social necessity isn’t a matter of creating rights, but of defining pretty basic obligations. The people on whom these obligations must be imposed are, obviously, those who are capable of having children.

The people most apt to want the pleasures of marriage without the obligations are, as you may have observed, young men. Men complain about marriage. Women don’t complain about marriage; they complain about men.

The relation between marriage and “rights” is much more complicated than the gay version suggests. In most societies marriage is less a right than a duty, and the failure or refusal to marry can bring shame and other penalties on the unmarried. In many societies parents choose spouses for their children or, even more commonly, reserve the power to veto their children’s choices. The notion that marriage is merely the natural and proper conclusion of romantic love is a recent and dubious Western idea.

[T]he conception of marriage as an individual “right” is by no means the only view of the matter. At any rate marriage didn’t originate with the idea of the individual’s pursuit of happiness — an idea that, in fact, has proved subversive of the institution and its obligations.

The simplest refutation of the gay version is that some societies have been very tolerant of homosexuality and pederasty, like ancient Greece and Rome, without feeling any need to institute same-sex marriage. In fact, it apparently never occurred to Greco-Roman homosexuals and pederasts to demand such a thing. They seem to have been content with their informal arrangements, since procreation wasn’t involved.

Institutions have their own purposes and inner logic. That is what makes them institutions. Their definitions make them more or less exclusive; a Baptist can hardly complain if he is rejected by a Catholic seminary. To say that Baptists ought to be accepted is really to say that Catholic seminaries shouldn’t exist. You can argue that they shouldn’t exist in the first place; but you can’t argue that if they accept non-Catholics they remain Catholic.

Marriage means a permanent union between people of opposite sexes. That’s the whole idea. The advocates of same-sex marriage aren’t really complaining about discrimination; they’re complaining about marriage.

We ought to think of our great writers as a perpetually endangered species. Preservation isn’t passive; like maintaining an old house, it demands a lot of work and, sometimes, hard choices. We can’t save everything; we have to know what is worth saving. Surely that includes the core vocabulary of classical English.

If that language goes to waste, the aesthetic loss alone is tremendous. But there is a further danger. Modern tyranny has made a specialty of perverting language, reducing it to an instrument of propaganda and control. It thrives on a populace without long memories and traditions, which provide anchorage and the ability to measure the present against the past.

One of the masterstrokes of Chinese communism has been to replace the ancient Chinese ideogram with a modern phonetic alphabet, thereby reducing the entire population to pseudoliteracy. The people are taught to read, but forbidden to remember. The whole Chinese past has been erased.

The current vocabulary of hypocrisy includes such words as gay, lifestyle, and the ludicrous homophobia, which systematically deny the obvious. We’re talking about an ugly and unsanitary perversion as well as an immoral way of living, the sadness of which should excite our pity as well as our censure.

Why should we pretend otherwise? Only because of new taboos — social pressures against candor — that are as perverse as sodomy itself. We are to make believe that “marriage” can mean something it has never meant before, that the rectum is as suitable a receptacle for the male seed as the womb, that a filthy and fruitless union is equal in dignity to one that produces human life? And all this with a straight face?

Oh, Lord. Victorian hypocrisy had nothing on the liberal kind, which insists that all the generations before us were wrong. Overnight we must repudiate what everyone always knew and still knows. We have seen the same obligatory amnesia with fornication and abortion; evils have suddenly become “rights.”

And this is what our children grow up being taught in state schools and the mass media. Democratic values, you know. Equality. Tolerance. Constitutional rights. Raising public awareness.

But the lies, being lies, don’t work too well. For some reason, kids still love real love — the fruitful mutual love of men and women. They refuse to accept gay as something positive; they use it as a term of abuse and ridicule. They recognize it as a joke, no matter what their elders try to tell them. Reality is insistent. Humor remains, as ever, the final revenge of the normal on the official.

The enormous official effort to normalize the abnormal is doomed. Note the root word norm: G.K. Chesterton long ago observed “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.”

Contrary to a popular impression, conservatism isn’t passive. It can actually be a frantic activity, like rescuing possessions from a burning house. In this world of flux, most things are always perishing, and you have to decide what’s worth saving.

-Joseph Sobran 1946-2010

The Pro-Freedom Conspiracy

2010-09-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

When a friend offered to lend me his copy of Claire Wolfe’s book The Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, I eagerly accepted. I had long read her articles in Backwoods Home magazine and on World Net Daily and I enjoyed her no-holds-barred approach to remaining free in an increasingly unfree world. Wolfe is likely best known for making the eyebrow raising observation that, “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”

Her sentiment is a bit strong for some folks, but it carries a definite ring of truth to those who are determined to maintain their freedom in the face of ever expanding governmental efforts to rein it in.

Wolfe openly admits that the ideas portrayed in her book are not for everyone, even among the freedom movement. But she provides some powerful food for thought regarding the erosion of freedom and simple effective steps that we as individuals can undertake to shore up our personal liberties.

Two of her better suggestions are:

1. Don’t give in to the fear. 2. Don’t assume an expert is an expert.

For the first one Wolfe writes that, “Fear is the most potent of the power-mongers. They spook us with some threat—which may be real or illusory. Then they promise to save us from it—as long as we give up just a few more billion dollars, a few rights, a little of our privacy, a lot of our independence, and ultimately all of our freedom.” An occasional fast from the fear-hyping media works wonders in recalibrating our senses to the world around us. After just a few days without our poisonous dread supplement, the world starts to look pretty normal.

On the second suggestion, Wolfe addresses a leading source of confusion in our society today; the reflexive deference to anyone cloaked in supposed “authority”. She cautions against the conditioned response that most of us have been programmed to give since we were schoolchildren.

Wolfe wisely counsels:

“Never presume anyone is right—or has more rights than you do—just because he or she is standing in front of a classroom, wearing a uniform, talking legalese, shouting from a pulpit, appearing in the media, or carrying a government badge.”

This is a tough habit to shake, but a person who is truly determined to live freely will never blindly defer to someone merely because of the position they hold. Far too many experts are simply functionaries of the bureaucracies they serve and their allegiance is not to the public at large, but to the system they represent. When those “experts” are defending the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, seatbelt checkpoints, gun control, warrant-less wiretaps or anything else that diminishes our freedoms and expands the power of the state over us, it’s in their interest that we offer our silent obeisance. Thinking people, on the other hand, know better than to hand over their cherished freedoms without so much as asking why.

Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau, who literally wrote the book On Civil Disobedience, puts it this way:

“The state is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe air after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

Tyranny thrives on cooperation and many of us have unwittingly cooperated our way into what may well become a full-fledged police state. Claire Wolfe’s Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook offers down-to-earth, practical and often humorous suggestions for those freedom lovers who see the wisdom in maintaining one’s privacy, self-reliance and freedom.

Being part of the pro-freedom conspiracy has never been an easy endeavor. If it were, far more people would be willing to actively seek their own freedom instead of simply following the herd. Freedom appears to be on the ropes worldwide thanks to the seemingly untiring efforts of power-hungry bureaucrats and politically correct kommissars seeking to control the public’s thoughts and actions. Even the prospect of abandoning society’s population centers to seek a more peaceful life with simple values is no guarantee of achieving a measure of political freedom.

Those pro-freedom conspirators who are feeling the weight of the challenge before them would do well to read a timely pep talk from Claire Wolfe titled “Finding your own freedom” published in Backwoods Home Magazine some years ago. In her essay Wolfe makes a powerful case that the personal freedom we seek will not arrive like an ambulance to save us nor will it be delivered by a UPS truck or found by renting a moving van. Personal freedom, like self-sufficiency, is a do-it-yourself proposition that requires the same kind of daily tireless effort exhibited by those trying to separate us from our freedom.

She points out that a person who is incapable of acting and thinking like a free person will be unable to find freedom no matter where they live. Wolfe notes that someone who thinks and acts like a free person can still find a degree of personal empowerment, even in a jail cell-- a concept explored by concentration camp survivor Dr. Victor Frankel in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”.

Personal freedom requires those who seek it to figure out what we want most in life and then actively pursue it. It requires a willingness to expect obstacles and to either find away around them or to change course if necessary instead of waiting for a bailout. Freedom-seekers must also be cautious not to stubbornly sacrifice the good for the perfect when it seems that our goal is always just out of reach. Being truly grateful for the freedoms we have is not always an easy thing to do but as Wolfe puts it, “If you must have total freedom or nothing…you’ll end up with nothing.”

In charting a course toward greater personal freedom, Wolfe recommends that we start by first establishing what we really want and then set realistic goals and deadlines within the limits of our time, money, skills and outside restrictions for accomplishing our dream. This is followed by researching and making adjustments as necessary since we are 100% guaranteed to encounter challenges along the way.

One of my favorite freedom-minded writers by the name of Boston T. Party once opined that to be free one must value liberty more than comfort since, “liberty and comfort are somewhat mutually exclusive.” However, he does go on to note that “liberty possesses a comfort all its own.” There’s never been a better time to seek greater personal freedom by becoming part of the pro-freedom conspiracy.

The Terror Vacuum

2010-09-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

Note to the reader: This is a departure from the usual serious tone of my blog. Unless you know me personally, you might not realize that I have a playful side and love a good laugh. Especially at the expense of one of my siblings.

Throughout the history of mankind, some of the most fertile ground for pranks and practical jokes has taken the form of sibling rivalry. Long before TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle raised such things to an art form, youngsters living under the same roof have continually sought unique and creative ways to torment their fellow travelers. Such mischief can take the form of simple pranks like short-sheeting someone’s bed to more elaborate schemes such as immersing a sleeping sibling’s hand in a bowl of warm water to set them back a few years in the bedwetting department. The victim’s reactions can vary from having a good laugh at oneself, to mild annoyance with the prankster to murderous rage that can only be conquered through intensive therapy and pharmaceutical intervention.

But occasionally a practical joke is conceived and hatched that serves to raise the bar of prankdom within a particular family line. This is the tale of one such prank.

In the summer that I was seventeen, I had the misfortune of coming down with a case of full-blown mononucleosis. What started as a sore throat quickly turned into a massive systemic infection that left me, for the only time I can remember, feeling so sick that I wondered if I might actually die. It took me weeks to recover my strength to where I could resume my normal activities and that left a prankster minded 17 year old boy with a lot of time on his hands.

At one point of my recovery I was sleeping somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen hours a day with my waking hours taking place literally around the clock. Late one night as I was trying to get back to sleep, I heard my sister Julie trip over the vacuum cleaner that had been left in the darkened hallway just outside of our respective bedrooms. The noise of her knocking over the vacuum cleaner was to me the equivalent of an apple falling on Sir Isaac Newton’s head and the idea for a particularly innovative prank popped into my head at that moment. I smiled to myself as I went back to sleep and allowed the idea to germinate overnight.

The next day while the rest of my family was going about their daily business at work or at play, I hauled the vacuum cleaner into Julie’s room and making sure that it was switched on but unplugged, I carefully placed it underneath her bed. At this point I should explain that we were dealing with no ordinary vacuum cleaner. This was my mother’s 25 year old Kirby upright and was not only one of the sturdiest vacuums ever built, but it was also one of the loudest vacuum cleaners I’d ever heard. It would fire up with a roaring whine that could spook even seasoned flight deck crewman on an aircraft carrier. For years it had terrified our family pets and had even frightened me as a young boy when I somehow got the notion that it could suck up small children if it chose.

Loud doesn't even begin to describe it

Once the vacuum was securely hidden under Julie’s bed, I carefully strung the cord behind her nightstand, out the door, along the hallway and into my bedroom. It took a bit of trickery to camouflage the cord so Julie wouldn’t see it, but by unscrewing the light in our downstairs hallway the resulting darkness made it pretty tough to spot. The cord stretched to just inside the doorway of my room where an electrical outlet was located. Now all I had to do was bide my time and wait for Julie to go to sleep. Because of my weird sleeping hours, it was fitting that I found myself wide awake at 2am; long after everyone had gone to bed.

It was go time.

I slipped from my bed, turned on the light and knelt down by the electrical outlet with the vacuum cord in my hand. I was already giggling uncontrollably with the anticipation of what was about to happen. I plugged in the cord and left it plugged in for a couple of seconds then quickly unplugged it. In the other room I could hear the Kirby come alive with its characteristic roar and then just as quickly fade back into silence. In my mind’s eye I could imagine Julie’s eyes fluttering open and her heart pounding as it would when one is suddenly startled from a deep sleep.

At this point I waited. I wanted to give her just enough time to convince herself that whatever had woken her up was simply a figment of her imagination; a weird dream involving some unexplained sound. I was shaking so hard with suppressed laughter that it took great effort to plug the vacuum back in again for the grand finale. So about the time I figured her heartbeat had begun to slow down to normal, I plugged the vacuum in and let it run for a good long spell occasionally unplugging it and plugging it back in again for added effect.

It should be noted that the Kirby upright had a large fabric bag that ran the length of its handle and as the vacuum cleaner ran the bag would inflate. What this meant to my sister was that in addition to the horrendous noise underneath her bed, it felt as though there was something alive moving around down there as the bag inflated and deflated while pushing up against her box springs. She was absolutely paralyzed with fear.

After about 30 seconds of sheer terror, Julie overcame her paralysis and dashed into my room sobbing, “There’s something under my bed!!” I was so weak with laughter that I couldn’t even stand up let alone speak clearly, so I simply handed her the cord for the vacuum as if to say, “Here, this should fix it.” With that, I turned off my light and crawled back into bed where I giggled myself to sleep secure in the knowledge that I’d just given Cain a run for his money as the world’s worst brother.

To Julie’s credit, I found the vacuum cleaner under my bed a few days later in an obvious attempt to exact an eye for an eye. But as anyone who has pulled off a serious caper can attest; part of the price of success is learning to sleep with one eye open.

Though it will have been 28 years next summer since the night of the vacuum terror, I still sleep with one eye open. You see, I have children who love pranks. And it’s entirely possible that some of them might just try to best me. After all, history does have a tendency to repeat itself.

A Propaganda-Proof People

2010-08-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

The blowback from last Friday's Forum hit earlier this week in the form of an e-mail from a friend:

Hi Bryan,
How are you doing?
Just wondering, a friend of mine at work was pretty ticked off at you for a show of yours she listened to this weekend. She said that you were saying that Fox [N]ews fans are delusional, and that you didn't reference what people should be watching or listening to instead. Just curious if you have time, could you further explain??

Uh-oh. Looks like I might have some 'splainin' to do. All right, let's get to it.

Yep. I said that people who rely SOLELY on Fox News for their information, thinking that they're no longer being propagandized are, in fact, deluding themselves. Of course the same is also true for those who depend entirely upon CNN or NPR or any other single source of information. The problem is that there is no unbiased source of mass communication and the single greatest challenge for anyone who wishes to be informed today is to be capable of sifting through all the spin and propaganda to clearly comprehend the way things really are.

It's not so much a matter of which information source we use as a matter of developing our ability to use critical thinking skills in order to correctly interpret that information. As citizens, our greatest responsibility during times of crisis is to think clearly and independently.

My biggest beef with Fox News is that too many people think they're getting all the information they need when, in fact, the information is just as spun and the debate is just as controlled as anything they'd get from the mainstream media. Too often we forget that information isn't always the same thing as truth.

Talk radio listeners exacerbate the problem when they become content to simply repeat whatever talking points they hear Beck, Rush or Hannity saying. Parroting someone else's words creates a dependency that tends to make a person dogmatic in their viewpoints. Dogma coupled with an inability to articulate one's own thoughts is a perfect recipe for defensiveness when one encounters a differing viewpoint.

Before retiring a few years ago, Charley Reese was a writer of unusual clarity. Here's what he had to say about thinking we know it all:

But since our means of learning are limited so that we can never learn everything about anything, we should avoid being dogmatic. I don't mean living in a constant state of uncertainty, but we should at least always concede the possibility that what we think is so isn't so. I have trouble understanding people who get emotionally upset when they bump into an opinion they disagree with.

Does that last sentence not describe the scorched earth approach taken by many of the top names in talk radio who feel they must shout down, marginalize or hang up on anyone whose opinion differs from their own?

If you dare deviate from what the talking heads of ANY of the mass media sources consider the acceptable parameters of debate on a given issue, prepare to have disapproval heaped upon your head. And the rancor won't just be from the commentators, but also from those faithful viewers or listeners who have hitched their ideological wagon to a particular star. Whether it's the person who just knows that "our news media" would never lie or the one bearing their testimony of "Brother Beck" to you, your dissent, however mild, represents a threat to their worldview.

Charley Reese

Charley Reese made a recommendation years ago that I took to heart and I offer it now to you:

Take this little test: Pick out any national issue or any national political figure and ask yourself, What do I really know about this issue or this person? The honest answer in most cases will be not much that hasn't been spoon-fed to you by liars and propagandists.

Once this realization occurs a person can begin to actually study the issues for themselves and take responsibility for their own viewpoint. The beauty of this approach is that it is much more based in reality than simply taking talking points from a professional propagandist. There is real effort involved in thinking for yourself, but the payoff is that you will never be at the mercy of another in knowing what to think about a given issue.

One last quote from Charley Reese to drive the point home:

Remembering and imagining are not thinking. Emotional reactions or ideological reactions are not thinking. Belief in the "word magic" of labels is not thinking. Faith is not thinking.

Thinking is the use of reason to determine the truth as best we can. To do that, we have to shuck emotions, desires and wishes and look at the world in its nakedness as it is, not as we wish it were or as someone else has told us it is.

Reality is not affected by our desires or by our comprehension. We glean data from our senses of that world outside our bodies and use our brains to draw inferences from the data. We have to conform to it; reality will not conform to us.

My point on Friday was that we need a propaganda-proof citizenry now more than ever but few Fox News viewers or talk radio listeners would ever admit they were being bamboozled.

Sorry, folks, that includes Fox News too

This is where there is simply no substitute for a true blue liberal arts education.

It’s been nearly 60 years since Mortimer Adler and then-president of the University of Chicago Robert Hutchins set about publishing the Great Book series containing the greatest works of Western thought spanning a period of nearly three millennia. The published collection is a remarkable achievement in and of itself, but the purpose for which Adler & Hutchins set about compiling the Great Books of the Western World is as timely today as it was in 1952.

The Great Books series

The first volume of the 54 book set is titled The Great Conversation and in it the editors make a powerful case that the disappearance of the great canon of Western Thought from education portends a calamity rather than progress. They clearly saw that while America’s standards of living were continually rising in terms of material comforts, a majority of adults were becoming impoverished morally, intellectually and spiritually. The predictable result of this type of educational malnutrition is a trend where each successive generation is further impaired in its ability to think for itself.

In Hutchins’s words:

We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers to democracy. A prevalent notion is that the great mass of the people cannot understand and cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter; they cannot be educated, in the sense of developing their intellectual powers, but they can be bamboozled. The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.

Hutchins understood that study of the great books provides one with a more well-rounded grasp of humanity, history, politics, morals and economics that enable the reader to effectively exercise their own mental abilities rather than waiting for experts to tell them what to think.

It's been nearly 60 years since Hutchins made the following prescient observation:

“The trials of the citizen now surpass anything that previous generations ever knew. Private and public propaganda beats upon him from morning till night all his life long. If independent judgment is the sine qua non of effective citizenship in a democracy, then it must be admitted that such judgment is harder to maintain now than it ever has been before. It is too much to hope that a strong dose of education in childhood and youth can inoculate a man to withstand the onslaughts of his independent judgment that society conducts, or allows to be conducted, against him every day. For this, constant mental alertness and mental growth are required.”

The editors of the Great Books in no way pretended that the series was a panacea by which all of our problems could be answered. Instead they recommended them as tools to further one’s self-education by allowing the reader to come face to face with what the greatest thinkers of the past 3,000 years had to offer. Only those who have actively put in the effort of studying great thinkers like Herodotus, Plato, Descartes, Machiavelli, or the many others whose works comprise the Great Books can accurately attest to the insight such study provides to better understanding the current issues and crises of our own time.

It was once considered self evident that a liberal education (meaning a well-rounded one) was how a person gained the necessary thinking skills to be capable of perpetuating liberty. Today, in ideological circles, the very word “liberal” causes some to have palpitations and others to reflexively genuflect to the state as their master and savior.

The Great Books won't teach a person what to think, but by studying the great ideas (even the ones that were wrong) our minds become trained in how to think and how to ask the right questions. This type of education doesn't even require a formal classroom setting. Most liberally educated people got that way by diligently spending a bit of time reading and studying daily in the privacy of their own study or bedroom. There are no shortcuts to self education and that's why the concept is such a tough sell to generations that prefer to plop down in front of the TV or computer and be entertained.

Mortimer Adler said it best:

Anyone who has done any thinking, even a little bit, knows that it is painful. It is hard work-in fact the very hardest that human beings are ever called upon to do. It is fatiguing, not refreshing. If allowed to follow the path of least resistance, no one would ever think...Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles.

What real learning feels like

Instead of waiting for someone to tell us what sources to tap for information, we need to develop our thinking skills to the point that we can avail ourselves of many sources and accurately sift truth from error. This type of independent thought is what inoculates a citizenry against the effects of propaganda from any side of the political spectrum.

Parallels

2010-08-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

The practice of invoking a comparison between your opponent's argument and Nazi ideology is such a common occurrence in internet discussions that, years ago, an author and attorney named Mike Godwin coined a tongue-in-cheek adage known as "Godwin's Law."

This is you when you disagree with me

Strictly speaking, this tactic constitutes an informal fallacy in that it relies upon hyperbole in an attempt to derail a person's arguments via guilt by association. I'll be the first to admit that it is overused. A case in point is how the president of any nation that refuses to submit to the demands of our own national policy makers is invariably labeled as "the next Hitler." As the political ramp up to a war with Iran continues, we'll all have plenty of opportunity to see this practice in action.

The sad thing about Godwin's Law is that legitimate comparisons can be drawn between 1930's Germany and the American populace today. That's not the same thing as saying that our government is led by Nazis or that our leaders are rounding up the undesirables to be systematically exterminated.

It simply means that the same types of trends that blinded Germans to the potential of Adolf Hitler can be found within our society today. Too many Americans believe that Germans as a whole were arrogant and evil and knew what Hitler was capable of from the very beginning. But that's not the case at all.

We forget that Germany in the 1930's was a turbulent place economically and politically. With hyper-inflation ravaging the value of the German mark, a wheelbarrow full of money was required to purchase a mere loaf of bread. On top of the financial unrest was the fear of takeover by the Bolsheviks who had recently succeeded in turning Russia into a giant Soviet prison camp. In 1933, a terrorist firebombing of the German Reichstag building added another dimension to the panic felt by many German citizens.

Burning of the Reichstag

On top of all this fear of economic distress, communism and terrorism, were the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles which was still punishing the Germans for their part in the First World War. With their dignity in tatters and encompassed by trouble on every side, it is understandable that a charismatic leader might come forward, especially if that leader offered strong solutions to the problems vexing Germany. But in order to accomplish the monumental task of fixing the problems and leading Germany to what many Germans considered its proper status among the nations, that leader would require that the German people trust him with absolute power.

By playing upon their fears, Hitler persuaded the German people to grant him unprecedented power and the long downhill slide to their well documented destruction began.

So where are the parallels in our society?

Our economy is--to put it mildly--on shaky ground thanks to a dollar that has lost over 95% of its purchasing power since 1913 and mounting public and private debts have our markets as twitchy as a tightrope walker juggling hornet nests. The solution pursued by those who make our nation's monetary policy is to sell more bonds (go further in debt) to the Federal Reserve and have it print more money which will, in turn, further reduce the buying power of the dollar through inflation. Those industries that have stronger political connections than others (read fascism) are treated to taxpayer-funded bailouts for being "too big to fail."

Since September 11th of 2001, the American people have lived in an unending cycle of fear and a corresponding expansion of government powers to address terrorism abroad while building a garrison state here at home. Consider that in 2001, we lost just under 3,000 U.S. citizens in the 9/11 attacks, but during that same year homegrown American criminals murdered FOUR TIMES that number. Statistically your likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack is about the same as that of dying of a spider bite.

A blank check for expanding government power

But when our leaders tell us that they need to spy on our phone calls, e-mails, bank accounts and library transactions, a surprising number of modern Americans fall into line just as their German counterparts did during the ascendency of the Third Reich. When our government claims power to kidnap, torture, detain indefinitely or even murder American citizens without due process--in the name of fighting terror--many consider it their patriotic duty to support these actions just as the Germans of the 1930's did.

Just as Hitler justified his aggression against other nations as acting in Germany's self defense, too many Americans view any use of military force as automatically righteous and justified without measuring such actions against the standards of Just War. And just as patriotic Germans shouted down those who questioned Hitler's aggression, self-styled "great Americans" consider it their patriotic duty to silence those who question our leaders' actions.

One of the most telling similarities between Nazi Germany and modern America is a growing acceptance of the practice of marginalizing and dehumanizing a targeted group of people who are blamed for the ills of our nation. In Germany it was the Jews who bore the brunt of this treatment as German society methodically marked them for destruction, first by innuendo, next by legal sanction and finally by the direct action of rounding them up and exterminating them. Other groups including gypsies, communists, homosexuals and those with permanent disabilities were labeled as being a danger to the Fatherland and likewise targeted for elimination.

We must remember that the process by which the Final Solution was implemented was as gradual as it was deliberate. Had Hitler started rounding up the Jews in the spring of 1933 the German people could have quickly discerned what he was doing and withheld their support. By first carefully sowing seeds of distrust for the Jews and then implementing laws that forbade them to be a legitimate part of German society, the Nazis were able to convince enough Germans that Jews were somehow not really people at all.

From The Boy In the Striped Pajamas

It's easy to picture a majority of German people as possessing a fanatical hatred for the Jews, but in reality it was primarily their calloused indifference that allowed the atrocities of the Third Reich to move forward virtually unopposed. Too few Germans took the time to give serious thought to the official propaganda they'd been fed regarding the Jews and Hitler's efforts to "defend" the Fatherland. By the time some Germans realized what was being done in their names, it was too dangerous to speak out.

The current hysteria in America over Muslims in general is disturbingly familiar to those who have studied the methods used to dehumanize the so-called undesirables in 1930's Germany. The propaganda flows daily from various media sources who are vigorously trying to inflame public opinion against Muslims everywhere, not just those in America. Thus far the propaganda campaign to convince Americans that Muslims are an existential threat to our nation has succeeded in rousing the right wing through its highly contrived tale of a so-called "Victory Mosque to be built at Ground Zero" of the 9/11 attacks.

If only there were some way to check the facts

Given the vast amounts of information that are readily available to most of us in a matter of milliseconds via our computers or even our cell phones, it's astonishing that so few Americans are willing to challenge the outrageous claims and do even the most rudimentary fact-checking. Never has information been so easy to come by, and yet the tried and true methods of sowing seeds of distrust, and the urging of legal disenfranchisement are being employed at this moment.

Britt Combs is one of the few who is willing to speak out against the rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that is becoming the acid test of who supports liberty and who does not:

I shudder for my country. We're a hair's breadth from a new national socialist republic of America. It sounds absurd, but what can you say when the majority of Americans are absolutely zealous about depriving the basic human rights of their fellow Americans?
You can object; you can say that denying them the right to build mosques on their private property is not the same as rounding them up into camps and gassing them. But how far removed is it? The majority of Germans in the late 1930s had no problem seeing Jews barred from commerce and run out of their homes. They probably wouldn't have approved of the camps and the gassings, but once government learned that the people approved stripping the Jews of their rights, the camps and the killings were a natural progression. All it took was a general contempt among the masses for the Jews' humanity, and government handles the rest. There is a general disregard for the humanity of Muslims in America today.
That's an extreme scenario, granted, but I submit that you cannot use the dehumanizing, exclusionary rhetoric these Republicans have been invoking recently, whipping the uncivilized, unschooled and unsophisticated masses into a vengeful frenzy, without inviting bloodshed.

Surely there were some Germans who, in the early 1930's, refused to fall for the propaganda and the demagoguery and sought to warn their fellow citizens of the long term ramifications of the path their nation was taking. But too many failed to recognize the emotional manipulation being practiced on them until it was too late for them and for their nation.

When you hear someone opine that Islam is a violent religion bent on overthrowing the world and converting it by the sword, be prepared to ask some follow up questions; even if only to yourself. Ask yourself, "Who has killed more people in the last 100 years, governments or Islamic terrorists?" Before you answer, check the numbers provided by political scientist R.J. Rummel in his studies on Democide-or death by government. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but it's surprisingly lopsided with the winner out in front by nearly a quarter of a billion people.

When someone breathlessly informs you that by allowing any mosque to be built in America we are hastening the day that we are all placed under Sharia Law and our Constitution is destroyed. Be sure to ask "How is a group that comprises less than 1% of the U.S. population is going to pull that off without us realizing it until it's too late?"

If there was ever a time in our nation's history where a propaganda-proof citizenry was needed, this is it.

The greatest danger of making the same mistakes that loyal Germans did during the rise of the Third Reich stems from our arrogant insistence that "it could never happen here."

It is happening here. And it will happen to us if we don't start thinking instead of looking for an enemy to blame.

Conditioning Us For the Next War

2010-08-17T09:36:00.000-07:00

Just this morning I received an e-mail from a friend breathlessly warning of the dangers of impending Sharia law in America. The e-mail contained a series of photos of an Iranian boy whose arm was being crushed beneath a car's tire for the crime of stealing.

This is one of them:

Why aren't we bombing them already?

Wow. I guess everything we've heard about Islam and the Iranians is true. They are nothing more than barbarians that must be bombed into submission by our brave...[cue the Toby Keith song]. But just a minute. This looks like the exact same photographs that were circulated around the time of the invasion of Iraq that were supposed to whip us into a frenzy of loathing for the cruel, implacable Iraqis who would break a boy's arm for stealing.

The problem is that the photos are actually of a young street performer who along with his father stage this stunt for money. The boy's arm is not broken and subsequent photos show the boy sitting amidst the crowd afterward with no physical harm whatsoever. But an alarmingly small percentage of people are willing to look beyond the initial emotional reaction to do some fact-checking. And this is how wars are sold to a gullible populace.

Snopes.com is your friend

Just as a certain amount of shameless propaganda and conditioning was necessary to get Americans to believe the fiction that the invasion of Iraq was necessary, it increasingly appears that the stage is being set for a military confrontation with Iran. With tough sanctions already in place, our leaders are disingenuously claiming that all other options have been exhausted and (as with Iraq) that war is the only recourse that remains. What this means in plain English is that every time Iran has met the demands of the U.S. or the U.N., we've simply issued more demands. The prime reasons being given for our nation's supposedly inevitable collision course with Iran have centered on two emotion-laden talking points:

Iran is working on a nuclear weapon to use against Israel
Iran has said that they'll "wipe Israel off the map."

Let's take a closer look at each of these claims to see--like in the above photographs--if the reality matches the emotional hype.

Conventional wisdom, by which I mean whatever our modern day Ministry of Truth is telling us, holds that Iran's burgeoning nuclear program cannot possibly be what Iran has claimed it is; namely for peaceful purposes including nuclear power and medicine. Over and over we are told that Iran is pursuing its nuclear program for the purpose of creating a nuclear bomb to use against Israel or the United States. "They could have a bomb within the next 6 months!" read the headlines for the past few years. And every time another 6 months go by without this dire prediction coming to pass, another breathless headline is issued to stir our fears anew.

Please take a few minutes to listen to Scott Horton of Antiwar radio as he thoroughly and calmly debunks the most prevalent myths:

Strange how the details that Scott Horton shares somehow don't make it into our media coverage of the alleged Iranian nuclear "crisis." Almost as if our media serves more as a parrot than a watchdog to our government's activities.

As to the second assertion that Iran is planning to "wipe Israel off the map", we're going to have to use our noggins for a few minutes.

The first brutal reality we must face is that the statement in question never happened. It is an example of how a lie can be repeated often enough that it takes on the appearance of truth and, in this case, how governments will attempt to con their people into supporting unwarranted and unjust wars.

In October of 2005, Iranian president Ahmadinejad made a speech titled "The World Without Zionism" where he is purported to have threatened to wipe Israel off the map. Ahmadinejad, though clearly no graduate of Dale Carnegie, was actually quoting the former Ayatollah Khomeini when he made a statement about the Israeli regime vanishing from the pages of time. Like most statements, it must be examined in context for one to discern what Ahmadinejad was actually saying.

Here is a detailed explanation of the Rumor of the Century from Arash Norouzi:

The Actual Quote:

So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:

"Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad."

That passage will mean nothing to most people, but one word might ring a bell: rezhim-e. It is the word "regime." pronounced just like the English word with an extra "eh" sound at the end. Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the land mass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map. Ahmadinejad does not even refer to Israel by name, he instead uses the specific phrase "rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods" (regime occupying Jerusalem).

So this raises the question.. what exactly did he want "wiped from the map"? The answer is: nothing. That's because the word "map" was never used. The Persian word for map, "nagsheh" is not contained anywhere in his original Farsi quote, or, for that matter, anywhere in his entire speech. Nor was the western phrase "wipe out" ever said. Yet we are led to believe that Iran's president threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." despite never having uttered the words "map." "wipe out" or even "Israel."

The Proof:

The full quote translated directly to English:

"The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

Word by word translation:

Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).

Rather a different story when one takes the time to look beyond the hype, isn't it?

Ahmadinejad clearly has a bone to pick with the current Israeli government which he sees as as the West's tool for politically oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. But when his speech is examined in context, he is pointing out that other firmly entrenched regimes in the region have vanished from their former positions of dominance including the former Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein's regime, and the former Soviet Union. They are now relegated to the pages of history books.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad

Taken in proper context, Ahmadinejad is calling for regime change and not war against Israel though as Norouzi points out, the first distortion of the Iranian president's comments was by Iran's own news agency. Numerous other world news agencies picked up on the misquote and without verifying or checking it against its original source began to spread the misquote which has become a key slogan for those who wish to wage war against the Persians.

I'm not suggesting that Iran's leadership is as pure as the driven snow, but having an unlikeable leader or having leaders with a bad attitude is simply not proper justification for launching yet another pre-emptive war against a nation that has neither harmed us nor possesses the material capability to do so. And a nuclear-armed Israel is fully capable of defending itself against any nation or coalition of nations who would be foolish enough to actually threaten it.

A just war is one that is fought as a necessary, though regrettable, last resort--after all other means have been exhausted. It was never intended to be a method of hammering recalcitrant nations into submission.

Iran doesn't pose an imminent, unavoidable threat to the U.S. or to Israel, but our policy makers are doing all they can to convince the American public that military force is the only solution. Of course, like we're learning in Afghanistan and Iraq, what starts out as a proverbial "cakewalk" seldom turns out as projected. Hence the importance of exhausting all other options before loosing the "dogs of war."

The invasion of Iraq was sold to an unsuspecting American public still under the emotional influence of the 9/11 attacks. The rationale for that war has changed many times over the past 7 years, from non-existent WMD's to false allegations of Saddam's ties to Al Qeda, to the patently false concept of bringing stability to the Middle East. Too many good Americans swallowed the lies hook, line and sinker when our leaders and their ministers of propaganda beat the war drums to justify aggression against a nation that had never harmed us.

Fool me once, shame on you

Hopefully some of those who were fooled last time will have learned enough wisdom from their mistake to recognize that we are being played for fools into supporting another undeclared, unconstitutional war--albeit this time against Iran. The first step to resisting the current conditioning for war with Iran is to recognize it for the manipulation that it is.

It's Everyone Else's Fault

2010-08-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

Last night's (ahem) debate on Southern Utah Forum started out as a discussion on the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque"--a textbook example of Joseph Goebbel's "repeat a lie often enough" dictum--but quickly deteriorated into what amounted to a trial of the Islamic faith.

I claim no expertise on the subject of Islam, but I've encountered enough anti-religious screeds in my life to recognize that far too many of those who claim "expertise" on this particular faith simply have an axe to grind and are looking for an audience. A few cherry-picked passages from a particular faith's scriptures, a handful of questioned motives or minds read, generous hints without providing actual substance, and a vocabulary of emotionally-laden words are all that's needed to create a blanket condemnation of a worldwide faith shared by over a billion adherents.

Apparently the concept of enquiring of someone who is a living, breathing, current practitioner of a particular faith regarding what they actually believe is considered a loser's game.

An "expert" on Jews, Blacks & Catholics

I strongly encourage intellectually honest individuals to visit Hugh Nibley's rules for How to Write an Anti-Mormon Book and substitute the word "Muslim" for the word "Mormon" to illustrate how these techniques can be used to denigrate any religion.

On last night's forum, one self-appointed watchdog went so far as to suggest that the root problem was found in the teachings of Islam and that Muslims needed to kneel before the world and disavow any aspects of violence that may be found in their scriptures. There are a couple of major problems with this solution:

Islam is not a monolithic faith. Unlike Catholics for whom the Pope is their world leader or Mormons for whom Thomas S. Monson is their prophet, Muslims rely primarily upon their local Imams to set the tone for the faithful. They have no central authority other than the Koran and even with that there are still Sunnis, Shia and Sufi sects among whom there is disagreement.
Even if all Muslims were on the same page doctrinally, why should all Islamic people be equated with a tiny handful of marginalized radicals who have hidden behind their faith to commit atrocities? Do we hold all Catholics responsible for child sex abuse or all Mormons to blame for the Mountain Meadow Massacre?

Furthermore, the prospect of telling a worldwide religion that it must literally bow to the demands of those who themselves have had atrocities committed in their names sounds a lot like the pot calling the kettle black. Especially when that same self-appointed watchdog is accusing Islam of seeking to convert the world by force. The tortured logic runs something along the lines of "the only way to prevent Muslims from discriminating against other religions is for the rest of us to discriminate against Muslims."

Is it safe to persecute those who haven't actually harmed anyone?

The vast majority of Muslims have given no offense to anyone; in fact, the Imam behind the effort to build the Islamic community center several blocks from ground zero has openly condemned the 9/11 terror attacks. As have numerous other Muslim leaders. To the Islamaphobic religion-baiter, however, no amount of condemnation of terrorism seems sufficient to quiet their irrational fears about people who use terror to achieve their objectives.

Speaking of which, is it possible that some of the Muslim people in the two nations our military is currently occupying without benefit of a declared war or even provocation (especially in the case of Iraq), might feel something other than breathless gratitude toward the United States? I understand that our military goes to great lengths to spare the lives of noncombatants. But when a nation chooses to engage in warfare to achieve its stated goals, there is a 100% likelihood that innocent lives will be lost in the process. We refer to such unfortunates as "collateral damage"in the sterile language that seeks to keep such things in abstract form without actual details that could provide a more complete picture.

"But we got some bad guys too"

Far too many Americans have a dangerous blind spot that renders them largely incapable of putting themselves in the other guy's shoes. Things that would generate years of howling outrage if they happened to innocent Americans seem remarkably excusable when they happen to someone else--especially someone from a Muslim country. Such cavalier attitudes coupled with a tendency to confuse respect for the military for the idolatrous worship of the arm of the flesh have created something resembling hard feelings in much of the rest of the world, no matter how pure our stated intentions.

Of course the typical belligerent answer to this problem usually sounds something like, "Good. It's better to be feared than respected." Or "Fear is the only thing these people (meaning Muslims in particular) understand." Worse still, is the absolutely sociopathic tendency to blame the victims for their bad fortune of being "collateral damage" by claiming that "It's their own fault for not rooting out the bad apples among them themselves." Like the drunken man who tells his beaten wife, "You made me do this", there is never a shred of consideration about whether those who have less than warm fuzzy feelings about what America has been doing abroad might actually have a point. Meanwhile those who dare to point out any actual wrongs that have occurred through our nation's increasingly imperial foreign policy are informed that they "Hate America" or simply don't understand the "real threat" facing our nation.

John Quincy Adams

President John Quincy Adams in 1821 warned those who were willing to listen, that America's greatness was not found in naked force alone:

[S]he goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....

[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty

Let those last few words sink in. There are those out there who would wish harm upon our nation. Some may even possess a small degree of capability to inflict harm. But a greater threat still is found in our own desires to exercise domination over others. Freedom cannot survive in a state of perpetual warfare; a fact recognized and echoed by James Madison when he said:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

I urge you to read his remarks in full context.

Nowhere did he or John Quincy Adams suggest that our only alternatives in regards to the rest of the world were either passive submission or all out aggression. But that is the false dichotomy under which many Americans labor today. "If we don't do unto [insert name of enemy du jour here] before they do unto us, we're doomed!" Such fearful thinking has paved the way for some of humanity's most inhumane deeds and has led to the deaths and sufferings of untold millions.

When wisdom fails & emotion prevails

But not everyone has succumbed to this particular siren song with its two part harmony of fear and nationalism. There is a growing remnant of those who have sought a better way that relies upon wisdom--meaning knowledge properly applied--rather than fear as its dynamic. One such example is The Fearless Path blog. The Center for Social Leadership is another. Revalue America is a third. These are the tip of a growing iceberg. The common thread they all share is a principle-based approach to the issues and challenges facing our nation and our world. Political slogans and knee-jerk reactions work great for the unthinking mob, but do little to bring about real solutions.

The sooner a majority of Americans is capable of understanding this difference, the more peaceful all of our lives will become.

Making Muslims Into the New Negroes

2010-08-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

Talk radio is to nuance what an atomic bomb is to a fly swatter. I state this from a position of mild authority, having been a talk radio host for the past 15 years.

Any host who throws large quantities of red meat to his audience will quickly find that it is very simple to generate an emotional feeding frenzy that lights up the telephone lines. As commentator Joseph Sobran noted some years ago, one curious quality of many talk radio listeners is that they tend to adore the person who gives them demons to wrestle with. This mindset coupled with imbuing the audience with a false sense of being a part of the only group that "really understands what's going on" creates a fertile environment for Identity Politics (where one's rights depend upon one's group identity) at its worst.

I are a "great American"

There is a definite formula for generating an approving and loyal audience in this medium and I speak from first-hand experience when I say that it works like a charm.

The formula itself is fairly straightforward:

Identify a particular group or people.
Ascribe only the most evil intentions and near superhuman powers to them.
Claim that they seek to destroy our way of life.
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

This phenomenon, of course, predates talk radio by many millennia but it's an interesting quirk of human nature that we tend to embrace those who make us most comfortable with our fears.

Hannitized

A current example of this tactic is found in the wild-eyed hysteria over the so-called "Ground Zero Victory Mosque" that has been proposed to be built in New York City. For days now, talk radio has been ablaze with righteous indignation over the construction of an Islamic community center known as the Cordoba House. Those who are "really in the know" are fanning the flames of outrage among their listeners that Muslims are building a shrine to celebrate success of the 9/11 attacks and are naming it after a city in Spain that was once conquered by a Muslim army 1300 years ago.

Can't you see?

"They're sticking their finger in our eye and laughing at us!"

"Next thing you know, they'll install Sharia Law in the place of our Constitution and force us to either convert or die."

"They're turning the whole planet into a worldwide caliphate!"

"It's impossible to be a good Muslim and a good American!"

Lest the reader think I'm simply resorting to hyperbole to make a point, I plucked each of the above lines from e-mails I've received in the past week.

The sad thing is that all that hysteria is being stirred up over a non-issue.

The Cordoba House would be the equivalent of a Muslim YMCA located 4 (New York City) blocks from ground zero. The property has been legally purchased and the developers are jumping through all the necessary bureaucratic hoops to make the project a reality. But these facts haven't stopped the angry mob from demanding that the project be deep-sixed even if it requires the City of New York to exercise eminent domain to seize the property. Ironically, this is from the same self-identified conservatives who regularly decry the abuse of government power but are more than willing to make an exception if that power is being directed at someone else.

In fact, let's politicize it

The imperative for government to deny the Muslim community center is supposedly out of sensitivity for what happened on 9/11. But hold on a second. Was it Muslims in general that attacked the World Trade Center?

As Justin Raimondo from antiwar.com points out:

...it wasn’t Islam that attacked and demolished the World Trade Center, but a marginal group of fanatics who used religion as a cover for their blood lust...

Raimondo points out that it would have been equally outrageous to seek a ban on synagogues near Arlington National Cemetery following the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty out of sensitivity for the U.S. servicemen who lost their lives in that attack. Reasonable people would call such a reaction ridiculous and rightly so. So why the disconnect when Muslims are being painted with collective guilt?

Should we blame all Jews?

This is where talk radio has proven remarkably successful in persuading its audience that Muslims are murderous, deceptive religious fanatics with worldwide conquest in mind. Fear is the prime mover in promoting this concept; fear of what may happen, fear of the unknown, fear of those who are different. Let's face it, fear works when it comes to shaping public perceptions and it is the coin of the realm in talk radio. It's worth considering a quote on fear from George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania:

"Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures . . . . They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities."

The global war on terror has served as proof for many talk radio listeners that our own government's attempts to project imperial power globally is the only thing currently preventing Islam from ruling the world. Islam is viewed as a monolithic religion with a singular purpose of reducing the world to either converts or slaves.

Another dangerous fanatic?

Well, not to be dramatic, but years ago when I wore the uniform of God's Army, we had the tacit understanding that our mission was, in fact, to overthrow the world and replace it with the kingdom of God. Believe me, we encountered plenty of opposition that was fueled by lies and misinformation repeated without benefit of fact-checking. In fact, much of the anti-Islamic information we hear today bears a striking resemblance to the out-of-context scriptural quotes, distortion of beliefs, and broad-brush tarring of all Mormons that was the hallmark of our anti-Mormon crusaders.

There was a time when my Mormon forebears were disenfranchised due to fear and hysteria on the part of their fellow Americans. It's happened to other groups including, but not limited to, Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and Blacks, just to name a few.

I'm not real keen on the idea of it happening to Muslims either. Because what we're willing to allow government to do to others can just as easily be done to us when someone else is calling the shots.

[In interest of full disclosure I must confess that I currently have a Saudi Arabian Muslim living under my roof. Saleh hasn't tried to convert me at sword point or to reduce me to dhimmitude, but he is a very devout young man whom my family loves dearly. Please understand that this may have swayed my view of Muslims somewhat.]

Truth or Treason?

2010-08-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

In addition to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it appears that the Pentagon is launching yet another offensive; this one aimed at Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his whistleblower website.

Julian Assange

For the sake of those who may have spent the last few months in a cave with their eyes tightly shut and their hands over their ears, Wikileaks has become an international phenomenon of late for its willingness to publish documents leaked by whistleblowers around the world. Since its first appearance on the internet in 2007, the website claims to have received over a million documents from government and corporate whistleblowers.

The site's founders claim that it was a collaborative effort between "Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa" Though the creators of Wikileaks have chosen to remain unidentified, an Australian internet activist and journalist named Julian Assange has been the official (unpaid) spokesman of the site.

Over the past 3 years, the site has shone the light of day on everything from Guantanamo Bay operational procedures to Climategate to internet censorship lists.

So long as those documents were exposing exposing the plight of Chinese dissidents or extra-judicial police killings in Kenya--you know, what other countries are doing wrong--U.S. officials seemed less than concerned about what Wikileaks was doing. But that all changed earlier this year with the release of a video titled "Collateral Murder".

The video consisted of 39 minutes of unedited gun camera footage from U.S. helicopter gunships that showed the killing of two Reuters journalists along with a number of Iraqi civilians (some of whom were armed though clearly not attacking U.S. forces) as they walked along a Baghdad street. The video also showed what appeared to be the indiscriminate killing of individuals who tried to come the aid of the wounded including two small children who were severely wounded as they sat in a minivan that was targeted by the pilots.

As unsettling as the video is in its graphic record of an unprovoked attack on mostly unarmed men, an even more disturbing aspect is found in the calloused commentary and laughter of the two pilots who are annihilating the Iraqis from a safe distance. The video had previously been kept out of the view of the public by Pentagon officials who feared that it might cast American forces in a bad light.

Traitor or Hero?

Earlier this year a 22 year old Army Intelligence Specialist named Bradley Manning leaked the video along with a large number of classified diplomatic cables that provided insight into a side of the Afghanistan War that Pentagon officials preferred not see the light of day. Among the inconvenient truths that emerged were documentation of incidents of a July 2008 U.S. air raid on an Afghan bridal party near the Pakistan border that killed at least 70 women and an August 2008 air strike on a memorial service that killed at least 90 civilians. These and other incidents are the tip of an iceberg that make the Collateral Murder video body count seem tame by comparison.

Even more damaging to the Pentagon were the revelations that our supposed ally Pakistan was actually providing material support to the Taliban forces our troops are fighting in Afghanistan. This and other revelations in the 90,000 pages of leaked documents are threatening to clear away the official Pentagon smokescreen that invariably paints the Afghan war in only the most complimentary terms.

Britain's Guardian newspaper sums up the leak like this:

a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.

In an act of hypocrisy that would rival Larry Flynt lecturing the clergy about the dangers of pornography, the Pentagon has admonished Julian Assange that he and his source "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." After all, it's not like Pentagon officials have any innocent blood to account for, right? In the words of Tom Englehardt:

[we] might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the Wikileaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from [Joint Chiefs] Chairman Mullen

Now the Pentagon has also issued a not so veiled threat to Assange and his support team that they want back whatever data he has and that they'd like to know his whereabouts and that they'd "like his cooperation."

Is this what they have in mind?

This much is clear: The Pentagon doesn't fear the combined armies of the world. It fears something far more powerful: The approval of the American public. No war can hope to continue in the face of a public that has withdrawn its (even tacit) support. For this reason, a certain amount of propaganda and covering up is required to keep the flags waving and the lip service flowing. Seeing too much of the stark reality of what is actually happening--to our troops and those whom we refer to as "collateral damage"--causes the public to start asking dangerous questions like,"Why are our troops over there, again?"

To this end, Julian Assange and Wikileaks have performed a valuable, if not heroic, service to truth-seekers everywhere. The information contained in the leaked documents doesn't imperil our armed forces, but it certainly imperils those policy makers who require a degree of darkness and secrecy in order protect their own interests. Things like even unintended atrocities and suffering that cause the public to think are considered "dangerous" and "irresponsible" by those whose power depends upon keeping them hidden.

What frightens the power brokers most of all is the prospect of enough people becoming informed and subsequently withholding their approval through the power of the word "No!"

Underlying Principles in the Immigration Debate

2010-08-04T08:24:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I shared an exchange between myself and a friend who took me to task on my talk show over my stance on the illegal immigration issue. I received a reply from him last night and I'm posting it along with my responses. Craig's responses are in BLUE and mine are in GREEN.

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Craig S------- wrote:

Bryan,

Thank You for the reply.

I have added some thoughts and questions...

..., I and others are scared to death, that we are allowing America to be destroyed. You contend that we, the over-reacting, are falling prey to the conservative hate mongers... The Sarah Palins, the Rush Limbaughs, the Glen Becks.... people who talk with America every day...I do believe there is a great deal of over-reaction to illegal immigration, Muslims, and other "enemies-at-the-gate" that are used to keep us fearful and our attention focused on something other than the underlying principles. Please note that I never named names or called the above listed individuals hate-mongers, those are your words. It is interesting that you would name the people you did. (These are the people the elite and media tell us to shun like the plague. I am suspicious of the elite's every action, suggestion and motive. ...But I use their terms as a badge of achievement, like the LDS use the term "Mormon" which was intended as a slight.) Craig, the people you name as being shunned by the media and the "elite" are themselves a part of the the media elite. They serve the purpose of loyal populist opposition to the political left, all the while helping to artificially define the "acceptable" parameters of debate for any given issue. This fact is lost on too many conservatives who honestly, if not naively, choose to believe that the struggle for freedom is a battle of Left vs. Right. But it's not. The real battle is the State vs. the People.

These people do talk to America every day and on some matters they speak truth, on others they lack sound principles. (Limbaugh and Hannity shoot from the hip, because they were schooled to not have principle, but it is amazing how much they have figured out... You would have them silent????) Please show me exactly where I, in any way shape or form, have advocated censoring anyone. Trying to put words in my mouth by throwing out a red herring is entirely unacceptable. You need to re-read my earlier comments about how these individuals occasionally promote sound principles, but often they do not. The real question that remains is how does a national audience of people who largely don't understand principles of proper government discern the difference between what is sound and what is not?

How many Americans know the difference and how many just parrot what is being said? (I respect men like Thomas Jefferson and Cleon Skousen who figured out much of it... some by parroting what they learned and some on their own. I doubt there is anyone who really understands it all, but God. Yet you and I haven't done much of the figuring out. We too parrot the things we have learned from greater men than ourselves. And along the way we may get some of our own inspiration.
Speak for yourself, Craig. I don't have all the answers, but I've paid a very real price to learn to think critically and to understand what I do. Yet I'm still very much a work in progress.

My education will be a lifelong experience and as I encounter new truth, I will change my point of view accordingly. There's a world of difference between simply parroting someone else and actually applying acquired truth and light in our lives. Thank God for greater men than ourselves who took the time to learn, live and teach these principles rather than simply live on borrowed light from someone else.

But where would we be today without the the lesser lights like the Palins (well intentioned, but perhaps somewhat principle-weak politicians), the Limbaugh's (outspoken gadflies, that just happen to have acquired some wisdom and influence for good), and the tin-foil-hatted crazies like Glenn Beck (people who have come back from the abyss and are trying to help their neighbors piece the puzzle together, before it eats them for lunch.) Without them, we would already be wearing the chains! An error of as little as one degree in navigation can result in an airliner missing its destination entirely. How do you suppose the cumulative effect of little errors of principle-weak politicians and public figures might affect the ultimate destination of an populace that is almost completely disconnected from its heritage? Take the good that people have to offer, but remember that ultimately your mind is your own and don't become enslaved to a particular flavor of populism.

Thesis: Illegal aliens: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

Rush, Is That You?

The present administration acts like there is absolutely no threat from illegal aliens.  You too talk like you agree with that stance. (Is that what you wished to convey?) Hmmm, are you going to try the guilt by association fallacy now? If I don't endorse your point of view wholeheartedly then I must be in lockstep with the Obama administration? Again, I'm going to challenge you to back up this assertion with any proof that I have ever stated that illegal immigration is no threat whatsoever. What I've said is that it's simply not the greatest threat we face and I stand by that statement. Likewise, where has the Obama administration ever opined that the State poses a threat to our freedoms? No comparison whatsoever, so let's stick to the subject at hand.

OK, so you say there is no victim to such immigration so why penalize them? Then why didn't they apply for entry through valid means? It takes too long?   (This is our morality problem to solve, not theirs.) But, you argue, they must cross our border, without permission, Once again you're attempting to put words in my mouth, Craig. I'm not arguing that anybody MUST cross our border either with or without permission. They choose to cross the border because there is opportunity here that is not available in their homeland and no amount of posturing on our part is going to convince everyone that has chosen to vote with their feet. That we have erected an expensive, complicated bureaucratic jungle of red tape in order for one to gain permission to be here shouldn't be enough to discourage people from availing themselves of it, right?

...because we owe them sanctuary? Do we??? Do we owe them a vote too? Do we owe them an education? Do we owe them a job? Do we owe them medical services?   Do we owe them deference to their customs? Do we owe them their land again? When they outnumber us, do we owe them the right to change America to Mexico again?  Where does it stop?   How's your Spanish? ...and would you care for some Napoleonic law? Now we enter the realm of the slippery slope fallacy where if we don't treat all those who lack official permission as dangerous criminals then we will become Mexican territory again. Again, Craig, I urge you to return to the principles that are at stake. Under the proper role of government, no one would have claim to what rightfully belongs to another through entitlement programs and coercive redistribution. But the collectivist entitlement systems we have in our nation were put there by US, not the Mexicans.

How about we get that beam out of our own eye before getting so worked up over the mote in theirs?

Mixed Messages Much?

...and those were the harmless immigrants that we allowed to flood our nation because of our sense of guilt... I don't feel any guilt, do you? (I do feel pity, and would like to do something for them, but not to the point of devastating my own house.) It may not be right that we are saddled with the demands of growing socialism, but until we solve that problem, adding more burdens to the systems, is courting disaster! No guilt here, but plenty of shame that my fellow Americans are more interested in fixing blame for our nation's troubles on anyone but themselves.

Anti-Thesis: (Every stimulus tends to evoke a response, good or bad.)

Now, how about the truly criminals? Are you advocating that we allow criminals and terrorists to take refuge in the US without the slightest effort to keep them out? Again, Craig, I challenge you to back up this assertion with anything I've stated that in anyway advocates open arms for terrorists and criminals. This is plain old lazy argumentation to keep throwing out red herrings. Please stick to the issue at hand.

Not The Issue at Hand

My home is my castle! None shall pass but by my permission. (How quaint of me.) My state is my free land to roam in safety and tranquility. I pay taxes and delegate authority in concert with my fellow citizens so that safety and tranquility will reign in that land. (Obama notwithstanding!) Anyone who would enter that land and hurt or make afraid is to be admonished, corrected, incarcerated, expelled, or otherwise eliminated. (How like Satan, that I expect to be surrounded by order?) You seem to strain at the suggestion that we would exercise the prerogative to screen visitors at the door. I don't understand how you can say that...??? (Is it that we travel freely between states that hold similar standards? Does Mexico share our standards?) How exactly do you propose that the State screen every person who sets foot on American soil? For those who enter through the approved portals that's fine and dandy, but we have many thousands of miles of borders and coastlines that offer access to those who do not wish to go through official channels. The bottom line is that not everyone who enters this country will be screened to your satisfaction. So what do we do? Fences, drones and hundreds of thousands of troops on our borders will make us more like North Korea, but will not stop those who are determined to sneak in. Which brings us back to the proper role of government; instead of treating everyone as a potential criminal and terrorist, focus on those whose behavior is criminal and hold them accountable. Freedom is preferable to the "safety' of an all-powerful government.

All In The Name of Safety

That we are so adamant (over-reactive) about this is because people (like you?) and the administration act like this is the last thing that should ever be considered! (sigh) guilt by association fallacy

Synthesis: (We're off to the new world order.)

I see the current administration trying to dilute the average American's influence, by making this country awash with balkanized, ignorant, poor. In so doing, they will likewise relegate the legitimate citizens to a state of balkanized, ignorant poverty. Do I seem too paranoid? (I'm not planning to wait for the chains and shackles.) You are correct, but the Balkanization of America didn't start nor will it end with this administration. Our reduction to economic slaves has been in the making for many generations and it has nothing to do with the illegal immigration problems that are currently keeping far too many good Americans hyper-fixated on a symptom rather than the problem.

Is There Something We're Missing?

Tutorial Time:

I'm in a quandary as to what freedoms we are sacrificing... Loss of Anonymity? (We have sacrificed that already, for the sake of commerce.) Loss of the freedom to run away across the border? (The country on the other side is less forgiving, both to the north and south.) Have we made ourselves crass knaves, like the other nations that protect their borders? What is this horrible price we would pay to protect our tranquility, as you see it? It always comes back to the proper role of government, Craig. Freedom and free markets are preferable to the central planning and economic intervention that are part and parcel of strict immigration controls. Are you really willing to submit to socialist intervention in the area of immigration while decrying it in other areas of our lives? Are you ready to discard your remaining freedom of privacy in order to have the illusion of safety from a government that promises security even as it's fitting you for a straitjacket? What you and others are demanding is an expansion of the state's power, not just over immigration, but generally. Such expansion always comes with an accompanying decrease of liberty. Bastiat's essay "That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen" provides great insight to this concept.

More Is Not Necessarily Better

I will summon the greatest authority I know; that of God: His kingdom is by invitation only!!! He invites all, who would be righteous, and none else can come to corrupt. Are you seriously comparing our fallible and increasingly corrupted government to the all-knowing and all-powerful God of the universe?

==========================================================

There is something deeper, I suspect, that bothers you, about the proposition that we would defend a border... You seem to be so highly reactive against something that seems so obvious to me and many others. It's not simply a matter of defending the border, Craig. The implications go far beyond simply keeping Mexicans out of our nation. The underlying principle which you don't appear too eager to acknowledge is whether the solution you're calling for falls within the scope of the proper role of government.

Expanded police powers and more central planning are better suited to growing socialism than they are to protecting the God-given rights of the governed. Heads they win-tails you lose. What may seem highly obvious to you and others may not be as based in principle as you believe.

My Cell-Love It or Leave It

God in his wisdom employs a cell wall at the outer margin of that bastion of life that we call a living cell. Without that wall, the cell would lose form and coherence of function. Its resources would quickly dissipate. Foreign substances could freely interfere in the internal processes. Yet that Wall is highly permeable to the comings and goings of substances that pertain to life, as directed from within. Specifically, without a wall, life would not be conceivable! Let me see if I understand this correctly: the cell's life actually depends upon its ability to facilitate a two-way flow of essential materials through a permeable cell membrane?

Without that two-way flow, the cell would quickly die, correct?

It sounds to me like you've just disproved your own argument unless you're suggesting that American citizens are like those substances that pertain to life and Mexicans are like antibodies. I always thought they were God's children just like us. Perhaps we should differentiate between those who come to be life-sustaining and those who come with harmful intent?

Since you brought God into it, please consider a scripture from the Book of Mormon.

Helaman Chapter 6 verses 7-9:

And behold, there was peace in all the land, insomuch that the Nephites did go into whatsoever part of the land they would, whether among the Nephites or the Lamanites.

And it came to pass that the Lamanites did also go whithersoever they would, whether it were among the Lamanites or among the Nephites; and thus they did have free intercourse one with another, to buy and to sell, and to get gain, according to their desire.

And it came to pass that they became exceedingly rich, both the Lamanites and the Nephites; and they did have an exceeding plenty of gold, and of silver, and of all manner of precious metals, both in the land south and in the land north.

So, Craig, were the Nephites and Lamanites better off when they emphasized their differences and erected barriers between them or when they facilitated greater freedom and free markets between them? Note the lack of fear and hysteria in the above verses of scripture. What do you suppose motivated them in their attitudes toward one another? The Golden Rule perhaps?

Was This Guy Pro-Freedom or Not?

Ben Franklin observed that walls make good neighbors.... Think about it. Trust me when I tell you that I've done a lot of thinking about that concept. Walls also make fine prisons depending upon who sits atop them.

Illegal immigration is to what is actually destroying America as a nosebleed is to a heart attack. It's a messy problem to be sure, but if all of your attention is focused on stopping the nosebleed, how does that fundamentally help improve the patient's condition?

Tell me what I'm missing. It's simply a matter of priorities, Craig.

At the Risk of Offending My Friends

2010-08-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

.

Wow. What a dust up last night on my radio show! In spite of my better judgement, I touched the figurative third rail of discussion topics: Illegal Immigration. As a recovering former red meat thrower who is well acquainted with how easily talk radio audiences can be stirred up, I try not to relapse to the old (but highly effective) ways of generating an audience via controversy. But this is one of those topics on which very few people have lukewarm feelings.

I'd like to share an email that I received from my final caller on last night's show. Craig is one of the smartest people I know; a scientist in every sense of the word. But he was really taking me to the woodshed last night on my stance on illegal immigration. I'm sharing this email to help illustrate the divide that exists between people who are ostensibly on the SAME SIDE of the battle for freedom.

My responses appear in red:

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:56 AM, Craig S----- wrote:

Bryan,

First, thank you for hosting the forum!

I feel like I should apologize for my outburst at the end of the Forum Monday, but I can't, yet... You are right, I and others are scared to death, that we are allowing America to be destroyed. You contend that we, the over-reacting, are falling prey to the conservativehate mongers... The Sarah Palins, the Rush Limbaughs, the Glen Becks.... people who talk with America every day...

We can trust them, right?

Craig,

First of all let me apologize if I have treated you unfairly. I'd like to address the specific points you've made in this e-mail. I do believe there is a great deal of over-reaction to illegal immigration, Muslims, and other "enemies-at-the-gate" that are used to keep us fearful and our attention focused on something other than the underlying principles. Please note that I never named names or called the above listed individuals hate-mongers, those are your words. It is interesting that you would name the people you did. These people do talk to America every day and on some matters they speak truth, on others they lack sound principles. How many Americans know the difference and how many just parrot what is being said?

Some of us are so frustrated with the sophomoric arguments that we should be patient and tolerant, while all around us, America is being dismantled at warp speed! If our goal is to slow or stop the dismantling of America, then why would we seek solutions that further empower an out of control government and diminish the rule of law? Internal passports (national ID), impregnible walls, and inward-focused border security are the hallmarks of totalitarian states. Illegal immigration is but ONE symptom of a systematic dismantling that has been going on for 150 years.

National government or Federal Government?

Instead of helping us find real solutions, you chide us for trying... for expecting that we can do something. You effectively ask us todo nothing, as though the problem will solve itself.

I chide those who are seeking short-term gratification without considering the long-term consquences of their actions. Carelessly thought-out, hastily applied solutions that move us closer to a police state are not acceptable. To portray my misgivings about such actions as asking that nothing be done is a false dilemma logical fallacy. Our choices are not limited to "do this" or "do nothing at all." As I said last night, we cannot solve a problem that we do not understand and it's clear that many Americans do not understand the principles of good government that are at stake here.

When you speak in condemning tones of people wanting to close the door, to force foreigners, of unknown intent, to ask to get in, you talk as though you have the solution... Have you?, or are you just giving an excuse to not DO anything personally? You act as though we were profiling, for the sake of making someone's life miserable. When a criminal is found to be an illegal alien, we are simply asking his home country take care of the problem instead of us! Our jails are full of other people's problems. Our social services are full of other people's problems, and we are being forced, to our severe detriment, to deal with them. Are we helping criminals by jailing them here? Are we helping the poor by giving handouts here? You know the answer, so why do you tolerate an ever expanding round of the same insanity? The solution I've offered is one that those who are emotionally invested in this debate do not wish to hear. It's very simple: Prosecute those whose actual behavior has criminal ramifications. Whether that person is an American citizen or an illegal alien, they should be held to the law so long as there is an actual evil act involved (Mala en Se) where there is a clear victim rather than a breach of some administrative rule (Mala Prohibita). If convicted of a crime in Idaho, you'd serve your time in Idaho, so why shouldn't someone convicted of a crime in the U.S. serve their time here and then be deported?

But it's okay if it's for an American citizen?

Our social services problems far predate the current illegal immigration debate and are a great example of how we strain at the gnat of illegals availing themselves of our welfare state while swallowing the camel of generations of Americans remaining dependent upon that very same system. The bird feeder needs to be dismantled. Period.

Many of us are running out of resources to fight this onslaught. The Elitists, that you ask us to be patient with, have money and power and are crushing the middle class, by killing the economy and putting us out of work Soon we will join the ranks of the poor in a much expanded slave class, the elites are creating for us. It seems like you see yourself immune to this fate... Is it because you have walked in our shoes and have found the better way, or has your liberal education caused you to think that you have become part of the privileged elite, that can make pronouncements on the rest of us, and escape the whirlwind that this insane set of policies is bringing to us all? Nowhere will you find me defending the elitists who we have allowed to bring our nation to ruin. I'm surprised you would even make such an accusation, Craig. One thing the elitists have working in their favor is how easily the American public can be stirred up and misdirected to focus their anger upon people who have nothing to do with implementing the policies that are destroying America. And the illegal immigration fervor with its clamor for loosening the restrictions on government power in order to "solve" the problem is a perfect example of what Montesquieu referred to as a "tyranny that is self-administered by its victims." Don't accuse me of being one of "them" for not buying into this deception.

He honestly thought we'd stay informed

You talk of seeking the root problem? I think that it is the apathy, with which we allow America to be sold down the river, piece by piece. Thomas Jefferson enjoined vigilance, if we were to keep our liberty. I agree completely with you that apathy is a key component of the root problem, but it's not the root problem itself. The root problem is the general inability of a vast majority of Americans to articulate the principles of liberty, good government and what is required to perpetuate them. That's not the fault of the illegals either. It's the law of the harvest and we are reaping what we have sown in terms of ignorance as Jefferson predicted when he said "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

You suggest tolerance toward the bigoted and intolerant, that are rushing in. In war, as we now have (psychologically), the victory goes to the one with the better strategy. They bring weapons, and you suggest we do what? Let them come and do as they please, with absolutely no resistance? You are not living in the real world! (I guess you have never met a really twisted or evil person. You don't seem to comprehend how meaningless your life is to such people! History is filled with such individuals that would readily sacrifice all of humanity for their evil designs, without batting an eye. Often their "reasons" sound somehow logical or reasonable, but the results have always been mayhem!) Nowhere have I defended the bigoted or intolerant on either side of the illegal immigration issue, but I have clearly cautioned that we don't destroy our own liberties in an effort to vanquish our enemies. Is the "real world" one in which we can safely discard our morality and foundational principles to ensure that the means are justified by the ends?

The ultimate pragmatist

The recipe, you seem to purvey, is one of acquiescence, or total conquest for America! Perhaps you think that God will fight our battles? History proves that God helps none that will not help themselves. What does it profit a man (or a nation) if they lose their souls in order to gain a short term political victory? That's not the same thing as simply giving up; but it does recognize that there are eternal, not just temporal, principles at stake. God does help those who help themselves, but it's a long shot to expect him to help those who would violate or abandon correct principles deliberately.

I am sorry, that as fellow lovers of America, we don't see eye-to-eye on some things, but I am not ready to see people condemned for trying, unless you truly have a more effective way, while most of America just sits on their haunches and kibitz...Let's stick with keeping government in its proper role of administering protective law (which addresses actual crimes with victims) and not preventative law (which limits liberty pre-emptively) for starters. Let whatever reforms to immigration law are required flow from that foundational premise.

With enough fear, this becomes acceptable

Adolph Hitler got the upper hand, BECAUSE GOOD PEOPLE WERE NOT WILLING TO STAND UP FOR ANYTHING, until it was too late! Adolf Hitler used fear of certain groups and what he portrayed as defending the fatherland to stampede the German people in a direction that they willingly chose to run. The German people let fear and emotion cloud their judgment to the point that they reacted without thinking of the long term consequences of their actions. I recommend this two part essay by Jacob Hornberger about why the Germans supported Hitler. Here is part one. And here is part two.

It works on people too

Do you suggest this is a good strategy for us???? We are not against anybody with good intentions, but we must create a means to defend ourselves from the truly absurd and malevolent!!!!!!  Bad intentions do not equal capability. Those with bad intentions do not have the actual capability to destroy our freedoms, but our own government does. That's why we cannot allow the principles of good government to be abandoned out of fear of what others might do.

There is a side to life, that you seem to be refusing to see. Maybe you should go to some council meetings and see how the "rubber meets the road," for power people. ...Maybe work in a homeless shelter for a while , to see how other people cope, or don't? ...Maybe try to live behind an iron curtain.  Craig, what do you actually know of my personal life and personal efforts to move the cause of liberty? You've resorted to questioning my motives when you don't have any real first hand knowledge of what I'm doing, who I meet with or what meetings I attend.

We are so blessed in America, and we don't even comprehend what it is, that we are losing, or how to stop the loss!!!!  Spot on! But we don't stop the loss by abandoning essential principles of liberty. Anger isn't enough to turn the tide, Craig. Each of us bears an individual responsibility to develop the best personal character and understanding of liberty that we can. This is the route I've chosen to take and I believe it is far more impactful than the lower road of anger that too many prefer.

Your Friend,

- Craig S------

PS: WE are fighting principalities and powers... (Let us hope it is not wooden spears against cruise missiles! Satan never fought a fair battle.) Pray for America, and let us work as though it all dependes on us.

Just because we disagree on certain points doesn't mean that I esteem you as an enemy, but I will stand for what I believe to be right even if it offends people whom I respect. Thanks for taking the time to correspond with me.

Bryan

Defining Ourselves by Our Enemies

2010-07-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

When a federal judge earlier this week struck down portions of Arizona's attempt to crack down on illegal immigration it certainly riled up those who've chosen this issue as their figurative last stand. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a darling of the forces of so-called "law and order" (so long as it's being enforced against someone else), was quick to take a stand in defiance of the court's ruling by launching an immigration sweep timed to coincide with the law taking effect.

In the meantime the airwaves bristled with the outraged pronouncements of individuals who are utterly convinced that illegal immigration is the prime source of America's problems--followed closely by the Muslim question and Barack Obama's true nationality.

Not to be outdone, the more radicalized supporters of illegal immigration began staging noisy demonstrations of their own by taunting supporters of the law and demanding repeal of SB 1070.

The illegal immigration issue is quickly developing into a perfect storm of obnoxious ideologues eager to collide head-on at 100 miles per hour. Sadly, it appears both groups are likely to get their wish.

Let's suppose for a moment that we could wave a magic wand and effectively deport every person who is in this country without official government permission. Another wave of the wand would make our borders airtight thereby stanching the flow of illegals into the U.S. Now, take a deep breath and tell me what about our nation's situation will have fundamentally changed?

Will our nation still be drowning in public and private debt?

Will out-of-control taxation and government spending on entitlement programs at home and projecting imperial power abroad still continue unabated?

Will American society still be continuing its descent into a cultural cesspool of false education ideas, immorality and the worship of material things?

Will the expansion of government at every level continue to intrude further into our personal lives even as our liberties diminish in the name of security?

Be honest. Do the cries for a stronger crackdown on illegal immigration address the greatest problems facing our nation or do they simply address one symptom of a much larger problem?

Henry David Thoreau:

For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.

While illegal immigration and its attendant problems are a real concern, they are hardly the root of the what's destroying America. The real tragedy is that so many Americans have allowed themselves to be duped into being defined by who they are against rather than by the principles for which they stand.

It's easy to be against something and easier still to be against someone. All you need is a grudge and a convenient target against which to direct your outrage.

But to actually stand for something is a much more weighty matter.

Standing for something requires one to understand not only the problem at hand but also the principles at stake. This distinction is too often lost in the swell of emotion that is the hallmark of the angry mob.

Connor Boyack, a kindred spirit in the defense of liberty, puts it like this:

It is unproductive and pointless to debate an issue without analyzing the underlying principle. Practicality, logistics, feasibility, popularity, and all other secondary interests should be set aside until all parties understand the core of the issue.

Whether the discussion is about illegal immigrants, Muslims, home schoolers, polygamists or any other group, we cannot lose sight of the fact observed by Will Grigg when he noted that even our supposed enemies are created in God's image. With this principle as our baseline, we can begin to examine solutions that don't require us to reduce others to a caricature that, at best, downplays their humanity and, at worst, diminishes them to mere insects to be stomped on.

For those who are truly interested in making a difference, Shanon Brooks of ReValue America asks a question that is worth considering:

Do we have a reputation of community service and sacrifice or are we seen as the "angry radical" that can only point a finger and identify the flaws of others?

There are many good people who see the problems that must be addressed, but they remain uncertain as to how they can best "do something" that will have impact. Standing and shouting with the angry mob may be cathartic, but those who invest the necessary time and effort to quietly gain understanding and then to apply it through meaningful service to others will provide solutions that have far greater impact.

We sometimes forget that it only takes one person leading out correctly to inspire positive action in others.

Consider becoming that person.

Is it Time Again?

2010-07-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

If you're familiar with the story of Sophie Scholl and her fellow members of the White Rose Society, then the question asked in the title of this post will make perfect but chilling sense.

If you're not familiar with the story, please take a few moments and read this recounting of the White Rose Society by Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Jacob also does a masterful job of explaining why the Germans supported Hitler's rise to power in this two part essay: Here is part 1, and here is part two.

If the story of the White Rose Society strikes a familiar chord in your heart regarding the direction America appears to be headed today, then I encourage you to visit this blog often for the intellectual and moral ammunition that will hopefully inspire a new generation of men and women whose moral compasses will not allow them to willingly let their country and their culture make the same kind of mistakes that 1930's Germany made.

Sophie Scholl and other members of the White Rose possessed precisely the type of courage that is greatly needed in our day. In time, their countrymen came to recognize that the White Rose was, in fact, the remnant of the best that remained of German society during those dark years of the Third Reich. Their sacrifice was not in vain and should we find ourselves in similar circumstances, our efforts to preserve liberty will not be in vain either.

"When a man stands for freedom he stands with God. And as long as he stands for freedom he stands with God. And were he to stand alone he would still stand with God." - Ezra Taft Benson