Trayvon & the Pre-emptive Strike

From the 911 tapes a scenario emerges that I have not heard anyone suggest.    As I understand it, Trayvon called his girlfriend because he observed someone following him, and he was concerned for his safety.  (It is generally unwise for young black males to call 911.) After this call, Trayvon's girlfriend called 911 to relay Trayvon's concern.  It is likely Trayvon was killed while his girlfriend was talking to 911, although she would not know this at the time.  It is those phone calls that suggest a scenario:

Trayvon was profiled and followed by a "block watch" busybody whom Trayvon perceived and mistook for a predator.  When Zimmerman presented himself Trayvon, Trayvon attacked Zimmerman in what Trayvon would believe to be self-defense against Zimmerman-as-mugger.  This would explain both Zimmerman being struck and falling down and Trayvon being shot.  In this case, Zimmerman would be guilty, it seems to me, of manslaughter for provoking Trayvon to assault.

In this scenario, what do we see?  We see the new standard, introduced by the neocons and theocons, of "pre-emptive strike."  Zimmerman, with no reason to do so, profiled and pre-emptively invaded Trayvon's space.  Trayvon, perceiving a threat, struck out pre-emptively at Zimmerman.  If so, it is an example of "unjust cause" in the conflict, but Zimmerman started it.

People who believe they have a right to lethal self-defense certainly have a right to arm themselves, but they also have a responsibility to train to use it, and certainly not go looking for trouble.

I Love Government

I really do.

I love to play chess, which is governed by rules thousands of years old.  About the only rule in debate is whether you can castle after being in check or not.  It is the rules that make it possible to play the game everywhere on earth, and the rules governing chess that make it fun.

I love to ski, and because of the rules governing skiing it is fun and enjoyable.

I love to visit aikido clubs and practice.  Because of the rules governing every dojo in the world, I can go any where in the world and practice and know how to behave and have a beneficial time.

I love having parties, and everyone knows how to behave because of the rules governing polite society.

Two of the most important sets of rules governing international trade are the law merchant and Uniform Commercial Practices, both promulgated by market players, not and state.

As for money, I like gold, because it has its own rules that can be relied upon.

There is plenty of government to which I consent.

I could go on, but have you noticed anything?  None of the rules that I submit to, which make my life enjoyable, are state rules.  I love government, it is just the state that is objectionable.  I wish to withdraw my consent to be governed by the state.  The state agrees on a case by case basis, such as I was exempt from Obamacare, from the military draft, and I pretty much have avoided paying into social security and federal taxes.  All legally, and one of the geniuses of the USA system is it allows for withdrawing consent, if nothing else to silence any dissent.

Where the state intervenes mightily, such as medicine, education and food, I follow none of their rules, because in time we find those rules pointless or worse.

I can find no state function either necessary or beneficial.  It can all be replaced by free market government, with such advantage I am sorry more people do not realize this.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

NorCom and Oath Keepers

USA "prosperity" is built on the capitalist system of debt and borrowing.  The system will continue as long as we can borrow from China.  As long as the powers that be can sustain their credibility on being able to tax farm USA Citizens, it will continue.  The most fundamental element in credibility is to be able to bring violence to bear on resistance.

Of the minimum 50 million people murdered in the last century, almost all of them were done by people in uniform under some sort of constitution.

There are some people in uniform that take their oath seriously, and will not violate the constitution.  In USA they have an orgainization called "oath keepers."  Of the millions of people in uniform who have sworn to uphold the constitution, only a few thousand have joined this group.

Nonetheless, these few could be a problem.  What if protestors in New York pose a threat to the powers that be?  Tea partiers in Iowa?  Occupiers in LA, and the police or national guard declines to maim and kill on orders?

China can bring in Mongolian soldiers to effect a Tian An Men disaster.  USA has no such means, yet.  Comes along with the NDAA now something called NorCom.  And here is a US Department of Defense Memo which prefers Canadian spelling and nomenclature.

So when the citizens of Denver or Toronto decide they have had enough and want to assembly to petition the government, a regiment of the Michoacan Lancers will come in with free reign to put down the protests.

We have already arrived at the point where US generals refuse to execute the war plans of our rogue presidents.  Every Bush war was preceded by the general in charge of that theatre being dismissed.

We need to return to no standing army.

Who Threatens Whom?

Here is a map of USA Bases in the Middle East.  We are told Iran is a threat to USA. Those bases support acts of war against the Iranian people.

Here is Rick Steves' best work, on the people of that country.

Here is one of our most revered politicians, John McCain, singing a version of the Beach Boys hit:

Bad Medicine

When you have a standing army, you have plenty of people with time and money looking for things to do. They get into mischief.  By any standard, what is described here is criminal.   

Bombing Cambodia

Thanks to the US invasion of Vietnam, Cambodia became the most bombed country in history.  Cambodia?  See here a map of the destruction, with some other commentary.  Bombing to this degree is a war crime.

Darwin and Killing

A internet sensation is a young woman of African descent who goes off in a class teaching Darwinism.  Although in her anger she makes no clear case, it is no secret that Darwinism is raw racism.  There are many versions of Darwinism, but later in his career,  Darwin emphasized

This is often explained away as being misunderstood, or boys will be boys, or Darwin being a creature of his times.

Charles Darwin (1871) The Descent of Man, 1st edition, pages 168 -169:

The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals. But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Here is how the wikipedia entry tries to explain it away...

According to talk.origins, this is a common creationist quote mine.  

Noncreationists find this passage racist too, but do you notice the slight of hand: the wikipedia essayist argues in essence “ignorant people find this passage objectionable.  If you do, you join the ignorant.”

When Darwin referred to "race" he meant "varieties," not human races.(For example, in Chapter 1 of On the Origin of Species, Darwin writes "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage".) In the passage "there is nothing in Darwin's words to support (and much in his life to contradict) any claim that Darwin wanted the "lower" or "savage races" to be exterminated. He was merely noting what appeared to him to be factual, based in no small part on the evidence of a European binge of imperialism and colonial conquest during his lifetime."

Wow.  In the quote of Darwin above, he is speaking of savage races, not savage cabbages.  he does mention in his list to make his case lmurs, but moved up the food chain in this quote to specifically mention man.  There is no way to argue out of the position Darwin takes above: The civilized will extermintate the savags, and the savages are blacks.

Few people acrually read Darwin, but apparently this young woman did.  She no longer cared for an education, if it is designed to inculcate that people of her race are to be exterminated.

Revenge Killings In Afghanistan

When I was growing up, the bad nazis engaged in revenge killings, and this was a very bad thing, especially when visited on civilians.  It looks like our soldiers are doing it.

From Lew Rockwell:

Writes Brian Wilson:

Okay....

SSG Robert Bales plotted and executed an attack that killed innocent Afghan civilians.

SSG Robert Bales is being sheltered in another nation.

Afghan authorities have demanded he be given to them for punishment.

The sheltering nation has refused.

Seems to me that Afghanistan is now justified, based on precedent established in international law, in bombing the living crap out of Washington DC and the entire East Coast and then landing troops to shoot the snot out of whatever's left.

I wonder if they can assemble a Coalition of the Willing to make it happen.

This of course, precisely mirrors the reason we invaded Afghanistan to begin with...

How The Draft Works

The draft was revived in 1969 and ended in 1976.

A draft dodger is one who tries to avoid being drafted.  People would flee to Canada or Sweden, or hide out in Mexico, or try some scam like pretend to be homosexual, starve themselves to get below weight, feign being insane, or lie about being able to type 120 words a minute so they would not put you in combat, they would put you in an office some where, say Germany.  You could get a student deferment, meaning as long as you were in school, you could delay being drafted until you finished college, but then you had to go. Some people were exempt from the draft, such as anyone with an oil engineering degree, because in the United States, since our wars are about controlling oil, we do not risk people with oil-related skills in war.  The Vietnam war was about controlling the oil reserves in the Paracel and Spratly Islands.  As US forces fled Vietnam, Vietnam was obliged to defend the islands against the Chinese.

Elvis Presley was drafted into the military, so his career had to be put on hold.  Muhammed Ali was drafted and refused to serve, so he was imprisoned.

We had to carry draft cards to if we were stopped by police or military police would could prove we were not obliged to be in the military.  In those years military police and Shore Patrol (Navy MPs) also patrolled the streets of major cities, to back up the police when it can to trouble with military personnel.

Conscientious Objectors are not draft dodgers.  The Selective Service i in charge of randomly selecting people to be subject to the military draft.  Conscientious Objectors are not subject to the draft, so there is no draft to dodge.  Some draft dodgers pretend to be conscientious objectors, but conscientious objection is fairly easy to determine, and s it is one of the least likely means to avoid the draft.

Conscientious objectors do not avoid the draft, because they are not subject to the draft.

The way the draft worked is they pull birthdays of a given year out of a drum (like a lottery) and the sequence of birthdays pulled are assigned numbers 1-365.  If May 10 is the first day pulled out, your draft number is 1.  This continues for all dates. Now they pull a number between 1-365 out of one drum and a birthday out of another to make it doubly random.

Then the military decides how many people it needs that year, and a decision is made how many birthdays need to be drafted to meet the needs of the war machine.  Say they decide taking the first 103 birthdays will give them enough people for the year, then announce with a birthday lottery number of 1 through 103 gets drafted into the military.  Now just because you are drafted does not mean you will be assigned to combat, but just about everyone in combat was drafted to be there.

Each year they run a lottery to make available however many draftees are needed for the year.

As to timing, the way it works is the numbers they pull in say 1972 is for the people they will take in 1973.   In essence at that time you got drafted at 18 and put into the military at 19.  The people drafted for the war in 1972 were fighting in 1973.  Now it is 19 to go into the military at 20.

In the Vietnam era draft I was 18 in 1973.    You do not wait until the draft you to get out of the draft (you cannot get out of the selection process, only the draft.) I informed the Selective Service of my conscientious objector scruples in 1973, at the time I was obliged to register for the draft.  In a 1973 lottery, I would be drafted in 1974 if my number was low, and as it turned out, I did get a very low number (023).  Some people did nothing and hoped for the best.

A happy surprise in 1973 is the military did not take any of the drafted, but the lottery continued.  And with defeat of the United States forces in Vietnam in 1975, another surprising event, the draft was ended in 1976

Presently it is an all volunteer military, in the sense you can volunteer to go in, but once you are in you cannot get out, like a gang.  And those that tend to volunteer tend to be people with few other options.

Witnesses On Conscientious Objection

Tragedy... and words...

How come when a soldier kills a dozen or more people he is rogue and it is a tragedy?  Well of course he had no orders to do so, so he is rogue.

When he has orders to kill innocent people, he is not rogue.  When drones kill innocent people, it is not called a tragedy.  In this article, it is clear innocent people are killed, by USA forces, in a country not at war with us.  Near the Chinese border.

But what the rogue soldier did was murder.  Tragedy is not what happened.  Tragedy is when a hero had a fatal flaw and experiences a downfall.  People executed by a rogue soldier is not the downfall.  The person doing the murdering was a rogue, not experiencing a downfall in a heroic effort.

Invading a country of no threat to USA is no heroic action.

Our drones kill a dozen or so innocents with each hit.  We don't even bother to call it tragedy when orders are involved.  It is "collateral damage."

It is almost as though where once they had "collateral damage" from a sloppy targeted bomb, now that they precisely target the bombs, they are due at least that much leeway when inflicting collateral damage.
Hey, we don't kill as many innocents as we used to.

Note BBC has suppressed comments on this article...  there was a point when the public gets sick of it and the war is over.

After Israeli terrorists hanged a couple of kidnapped British sergeants, the British people turned against the occupation of Palestine.

After our general whacked a Viet Cong prisoner, USA turned on the American War in Viet Nam.

Maybe this rogue soldier knew what he was doing.  Getting the USA out of Afghanistan, the only way he knew how, by murder.

Evil ebbs and flow, and a clear indication evil is on the ebb is humor.  Here is the former Soviet, now Russian Army Mens Chorus, providing back-up to the Leningrad Cowboys, a Finnish band.

And although this is not quite the People's Republic of China rendition, it is out of China, and for one who was there for the original, it is amazing to see the permission.

I was at an American War in Vietnam protest once in which on one side was a line of riot clad police, the other outraged college students who might be sent to the war.  Tensions were rising, both sides were itching for a fight.  A old fat longhaired fellow, probably a WWII combat veteran, stepping out between the two sides with a guitar.  He strummed a few cords to get everyones attention, and in a clear commanding voice he announced he was "going to play music, everyone take a partner...  (hahaha)... pig's choice.."  hahahah on both sides (although "pig" was the insulting word for "cops," even the cops thought it was funny.  Tension broke, crowds filtered, no violence.)

The powers that be put agent provocateurs into such crowds to incite police to violence, so the police can crack down.  The non-violent can do the same thing, insert humor provocateurs to incite laughter.  It is always worth a shot.  (Wait, bad choice of words...)  Worth a try....

By making war "volunteer" the powers that be eliminated any war resistance in the USA.

What Is the Difference?

As a conscientious objector, I am trying to comply with the command "Thou Shalt Not Kill."  To me this includes the yet born since so far every one of them is born a human.  As a liberal, I give them the benefit of the doubt and judge them human.  

The church does not condemn a decision to go to war, if under certain conditions and after careful moral reflection. It is a case of prudential judgment.

The church does not condemn a decision to take the life of a child, if under certain conditions and after careful moral reflection. It is a case of prudential judgment.

In both cases, the realm of prudential moral judgment is so rare as to be the modern version of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But when Catholics step outside of cases of prudential judgment and clearly violate Catholic moral teaching, why do the bishops condone one and condemn the other?

Since the bishops are reviewing matters regarding their errors in managing relations with the state, they ought to consider this mater as well.

It is possible to take the life of a child legitimately.

But those who call for universal unrestricted abortion are scandalously rejecting church teaching. The church presses catholic politicians who proclaim a universal right to abortion any time and any place.

It is possible to wage war legitimately. But the current catholic candiadtes make clear they are calling for war beyond prudential judgment, and well with in the realm of active crime. Those who call for unrestricted war find no such challenge from the US bishops.

The popes have in fact condemned USA agression in the Middle East.

To make clear, the last two popes have specifically condemned the USA occupation of Iraq.

http://catholicism.about.com/od/thechurchintheworld/f/popes_on_iraq.htm

But there has been no contradiction of the call for widespread war crimes by candidates claiming to be “pro-life” and catholics in good standing.

There was once one Catholic archbishop, a cardinal, Bernardin by name, who conemned both. He called his consistent teaching a seamless garment. He was accused of child molesting, of course, although his accuser eventually recanted, but not before much damage was done.

Many people of good will say the USA bishops are hypocritical, in condemning active violations of Church teaching in the area of reproduction, but giving committed warmongers a pass.

To call for unrestricted abortion invites excommunication. The bishops warn such politicians.

To call for unrestricted war invites excommunication. The bishops give American candidates a pass.

Policy Laundering

Policy laundering is introducing a bad idea overseas and then using it as a precedent and a good idea for USA.  This professor traces the surveillance state, and how it was tested and developed by USA in colonizing the Philippines and then brought to USA.  Not the comment "gentlemen do not read gentlemen's mail."  We've changed.  At University of Washington, about an hour...

A Congressman Who Obeys the Law on War?

Note how Senator Sessions is very careful with the General, who now, because of the NDAA, can arrest Sessions and have him disappeared.  So Sessions works on Panetta.  Both Panetta and General Dempsey have sworn to uphold the constitution, and both are shredding it as they testify.

Our Generals are unworthy of our soldiers. They are political appointees. As an example of unworthy generals, here is an example of what concerns a top general, in this Case David Patraeus.  Read how he grovels at the feet of a junior reporter.

In a free country, we would not have a standing military, our founders expected us not to have one. In a free country, our generals would suit up from industry when a threat arose.  With a standing army, you get very strange people indeed.

See his many medals, maybe one of which relates to a war.  He was shot once, on a firing range by his own soldier, an accident.

Did Anyone Think This Through?

The United States Government has declared yet again, for emphasis, that it can execute American citizens any where in the world without a trial, and in secret.  One of the very many problems with this policy:

It now becomes viable for our enemies to convince a non-threatening noncombatant that in fact the USGovernment has targeted said person for liquidation.  Since such a threat is credible by USA policy, there are countless people who can be convinced it is true.  Those convinced it is true may very well be encouraged, indeed motivated, to take pre-emptive action against USA.  (We introduced that as well.)

We are being unwise.

War On People By Medicine

Killing people is seen as necessary by some, and pre-emptive war is just in such people's mind.  The Nazi party led Germany against an abject fear of Bolshevism, not unfounded since while Hitler rose in power the Bolsheviks were starving to death 5 million Ukrainians in the Голодомор.  Germany was next.  Germany's error was violence, and pre-emptive strikes (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union).  This response turned out very bad for Germany.

National Socialism was a workers party, and admired by many in England.  Keynes recommended his economic plan to the nazi party in his foreword in the German language edition.  Here George Bernard Shaw, english playwrite (My Fair Lady) recommends the elimination of many in society, if they cannot justify their existence to people like him. Circa 1930.

He called for a gas to be made to kill the weak.  The Germans listened. Today a Secretary of Health in USA is calling for elimination of kids through abortion and abortifacients.  No person, no problem. The goal is to decide who lives and who dies, as decided by the State.  This 2012.

Video here...

This is nothing new in USA.  The reason it continues, it no one is ever prosecuted.  If you have a program in USA to kill or harm the weak or defenseless, you are safe.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment - 

USA Torture Continues

And continued after Abu Ghraib.  Unless perpetrators are brough to justice, it will never end.  Start with the lawyers Yoo, Graham, and so on...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/032607b.html

Passion of Christ - Political Prisoner

When Rome, I mean USA, tortures political prisoners, the officials in law enforcement do nothing.

Ashcroft - Failed to Enforce the Law