24 May 2011

The Constitution With No Name

The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflexion. Without law, without government, without any other mode of power than what is founded on, and granted by courtesy. Held together by an unexampled concurrence of sentiment, which, is nevertheless subject to change, and which, every secret enemy is endeavouring to dissolve. Our present condition, is, Legislation without law; wisdom without a plan; a constitution without a name; and, what is strangely astonishing, perfect Independance contending for dependance. The instance is without a precedent; the case never existed before; and who can tell what may be the event? The property of no man is secure in the present unbraced system of things. The mind of the multitude is left at random, and seeing no fixed object before them, they pursue such as fancy or opinion starts. Nothing is criminal; there is no such thing as treason; wherefore, every one thinks himself at liberty to act as he pleases. The Tories dared not have assembled offensively, had they known that their lives, by that act, were forfeited to the laws of the state. A line of distinction should be drawn, between, English soldiers taken in battle, and inhabitants of America taken in arms. The first are prisoners, but the latter traitors. The one forfeits his liberty, the other his head. 

- Common Sense, Thomas Paine, 1776.

What is the Constitution With No Name?

Have Americans seen it before?

Is it coming again or is it always there?

Does it require you to have Belief or to have Faith?

To any who have read this blog off and on over the years, these are questions that lay under everything that I have written, and not only in this blog but my others and in my fictional writing, also.  I come at this from many different angles, yet it always boils down to the simple things, and it is those simple things, described by many, that have been masked by imposed complexity.

Ah, what is 'imposed complexity'?

Imposed complexity are those things that we create as complex from the start.  Imposed complexity is our will upon our ourselves to create order.  It is the belief that complexity will give us order.  It is the belief in the expansion of cumulative or collective power will create a better world when that is channeled and guided by complexity.  Yet complex things tend to fail.  To paraphrase Montgomery Scott from Star Trek: 'The more they overhaul the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drains.'

Created complexity falls apart to simplicity.

Thus regulatory regimes cause chaos because they attempt to impose order on the human spirit, on human nature.  Belief in regulation falls apart when it is imposed on those that have Faith in themselves and their fellow man.  Complexity creates chaos because it cannot rule Simplicity.

Belief in God is not enough to have Faith.

Most provocatively, to have Faith in human nature does not require Belief in God, but the simple observation that Man is a part of Nature.  Thus my other writings examining the difference between Moral Law, Civil Law and Natural Law (via the examination of Pufendorf, for all his pluses and minuses) put into play that Moral Law, God given Law, is not enough for man to rule himself.  The creation of society, which man does by Natural Law, is a pre-requisite for instituting Moral Law.  Man as animal creates society which then puts in play Moral Law as those two come together to create Civil Law.  Thus if you have Faith in yourself and God, you can create a civil self, a civil person, that then partakes of creating Civil Law.

When man creates society and accepts that there is Moral Law necessary to regulate himself within society, then there is the basis for Civil Law.  Natural Law creates society, Moral Law allows us to self-govern, and we then join with these other self-governing individuals in society to create Civil Law.  It is an order that has a precedent order in that if you do not get the first part you cannot get to the other parts.  For us, as individuals, to enact Moral Law we must first come together to form a society under Natural Law.  So long as there is Nature and that we accept the drives of Nature to form society, the basis for enacting Moral Law is present.

Together these two create The Constitution With No Name.

That construct is more formally called The Law of Nations, which is unwritten law that can be discovered by creating society under Natural Law to accept Moral Law and then create the Nation.  In man this has a particular instance where it is founded: in marriage.

Marriage is that time that we accede that for our children to survive we must no longer exercise all of our Natural Liberties with our Natural Rights so as to create society and then have self-order under Moral Law.  With that acceptance The Law of Nations is created and re-created over and over and over again, so long as man and woman may live to have families.

The act of marriage is an act of Faith in the one that you marry.  With that individual you are taking the primary Leap of Faith that they will put aside the savage order of Natural Law and self-govern so as to accept Moral Law.

Faith begins at home, doesn't it?

Kindness also begins there and begats Charity.

Charity is the kindness of helping your fellow man in a selfless fashion so as to make society better for all involved so that your progeny can survive and learn to self-govern.

Notice where Civil Law comes into that?

Oh, that's right, it doesn't.  Governments which are organs of society are not organs of Charity nor are they enactors of Charity: only people can do that.

Belief cannot drive this Faith.

Faith must drive Belief for this system to work, any other system will quickly become unhinged as simple Belief can fail, but Faith in what you see, hear, and understand can never be shaken as your eyes and ears will continue to beat reality into your head until you finally recognize that YOU must deal with it.

You.

Not your neighbor.

Not the police.

Not any part of government.

You are the basis for all the rest of that working, and when you deny what is going on around you, then all the rest begins to fail.

This is how you create Order from Chaos, and Chaos gains Order from similar means.

What?  Did you think you were just an unimportant member of society to be ruled over?  You are a moral actor.  Unfortunately, in a realm of Chaos, you have to make up your role as you go along.  You don't get a script or even a plot outline as there are no set ends, just destinations you can determine on your own.  Individuals do that.  Animals cannot.  We have a braced order of self-government as individuals, not an un-braced one of animals requiring herding.

The answer to all of those trying to impose a civil order from the top, downwards?

From The Prisoner: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or NUMBERED.  I am not a Number, I am a free man."

You are born free.

It takes government to enslave you.

To close with Paine, again:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

03 May 2011

Why I am not celebrating the death of bin Laden

This one is pretty simple: he was a terrorist, a scourge of mankind, a threat to all Nations, a would-be warlord, and a pretty canny operative. He had renounced his allegiance to civilized life and had reverted back to that of Natural Law as his only credo. The religious trappings were an excuse, perhaps a cause to start with but by the end he had no real affinity to any meaning of that religion save only what he could recognize that would benefit his organization and him. By doing that he had reduced himself to a state of savagery, befitting Nature, and become man the animal entire.

That was conscious on his part, voluntary, no one forced him to do it, not one single claim of his nor all of them combined forced him to leave civil life as we have seen millions in that region with those same conditions not revert to savagery like his. Thousands in those regions have reverted to that state of Nature, yes, and that speaks ill of their societies to not inculcate a civilized outlook for citizens and for those citizens to create Nations that properly reflect them. After this next round of revolutions in the region, I expect that the next set of leaders will be as oppressive, if not more so, than the last. The goal of al Qaeda is put forward in their strategic doctrine text The Management of Savagery, and in it the text describes how to make Nations descend into chaos, come into power and then exploit the now dysfunctional Nation so as to spread the disease of disorder and savagery. Unfortunately this leads to those doing the creation of the turmoil, overturning order, putting in an exploitative government that then uses the people as cattle to spread the savagery to being savages themselves. You cannot manage savagery if you are a savage, yourself.

Am I glad that Osama bin Laden is dead? Of course!

But, I was also glad that Imad Mugniyah was taken from this mortal realm in 2008 by the Israeli's, and he was the greatest killer of US servicemen and civilians until bin Laden and al Qaeda got on the scene. As the Presidential cycle was in swing at that time, here is how I closed out my review of Mugniyah:

Removing Imad Mugniyah is a very good thing.

It is, unfortunately, not even starting to get at the problem itself.

As a society and a Nation if we cannot get away from the 'sound-bite' culture driving our view of the world, then this will slowly erode us until it will be too late to address it. It is *already* here. And I have yet to hear any substantial proposals on how to roll it back and address it from either the Left or the Right. The Left wishes to give up to it and society with it, by wishing there just weren't such nasty people in the world. The Right is just looking for a lovely economy and doesn't want to put that at risk doing the things necessary to defend it.

Neither one of these is realistic nor sustainable in even the short term. Both are lethal in the long term because neither address the threat nor deal with it.

Too bad our Presidential candidates won't address these things.

We may not get the leadership we need, but we will get the one we *deserve* at this rate.

We still have this problem, in case any one has missed it.

To work against Private War in the modern age, this thing known as Piracy and Terrorism, means that we must uphold a law abiding society not only at home, but amongst Nations. That means respect between Nations for such things as borders, not interfering in other Nations militarily save via a declared war system, not allowing those who seek destabilize the order amongst Nations a safe-haven, and going after those who seek to wage war on their own and hounding them to the ends of the Earth and depriving them of suppliers and friends until they are friendless and understand that they are savages for what they have done.

Doing so via civil means is absolutely available to any Nation on this planet as it is the way that Nations must act to protect themselves from Private harm to which there is no normal civil recourse. Treaties only work where they are upheld and Nations held to account to each other, and if you don't have a treaty and harm comes from those hiding in such Nations where you have no treaty, then a Nation can still deploy means to go after those attackers. Not just normal military means, but openly sanctioned private operators that are known and who will risk their life for no pay save to liquidate those items attached to our enemies and held in Private hands. We flinch away from such means at our peril, as it is a necessary way to protect our societies, our Nations, our homes and our families to get such sanction and visit upon savages the only law they understand: the Law of Nature.

My exuberance for another terrorist gone from this mortal realm, that of Zarqawi back in 2006, was about the same as that for getting Mugniyah or bin Laden. He got the Happy Hamster Hop, and that is about what he deserved in the way of celebration of his passing. If you are starting to get the idea that I see all terrorists as not worth celebrating their passing, then you are catching on: they are savages and I can no more take pleasure in the end of a terrorist than I can in putting down a rabid animal. It is a necessary cleansing operation, only, and should be treated with the same level of professionalism that goes into bringing down wild animals bent on destruction or spreading disease. For savagery is a form of disease, festering behind our patina of civilized behavior, and when the patina wears thin then the ugliness of Nature starts to show through and it isn't pleasant, at all.

Quite a few of these savages and savage suppliers have been taken in over the last few years, as I noted with the sudden passing via military means of Raul Reyes back in 2008. He was a long-time member of FARC and personally responsible for the deaths of American missionaries, engineers and teachers on humanitarian and civil missions in Colombia and elsewhere in South America. He helped to have FARC take over much of the drug operations of the old Colombian Cartels which meant that the Marxist spouting terrorists were in a for-profit drug running business. Lovely how those ideals go to the wayside so quickly when you turn away from civilization, isn't it? It's almost as if there is a connection there....

Bringing down individual terrorist or even their organizations isn't normal Nation State warfare: it is a sanitary mission that just happens to involve infected Nation States that are succumbing to the disease of moving away from civilized behavior.

Now if we could only convince those on the Anarchist-Socialist-Marxist-Unionist side of things that calling everything 'racism' or 'discrimination' or just trotting out death threats for those that want some fiscal sanity and to stop going into impoverishing debt that the act of trotting out those things is not just disingenuous but corrosive to civilized behavior. That their patina of civilization is wearing thin, and no amount of make-up on the 'good' of what a government can do can mask the creature under the patina. I would really prefer that such individuals step back from the brink of savagery and examine just what being civilized means not to others, not the the Nation, but to themselves, first and foremost. A man given handouts and beholden to them is not a citizen, but well on the path to becoming a trained animal. A savage. And that in calling for more of that sort of treatment and behavior is an endorsement of savagery over self-responsibility and self-government.

Because removing the disease is a sanitary operation, done without favor nor fervor but to uphold what it means to be civilized.

Osama bin Laden got Private War and its ends delivered to his doorstep.

That is where it ends if you endorse, sustain, exploit and spread savage behavior.

You get a bullet in the head as any dangerous animal gets that threatens us in our home and our society.

Not because the animal is evil, but because it is a threat to the order of society and Nations.

Turning from being civilized is evil and the result you get is a savage who has reduced himself to that state of savagery willingly. They are still the human animal, but they are no longer the civilized human willing to forego some Natural Liberties and Rights to have a civil society and order amongst men. No matter how 'good' or 'right' or 'just' the cause is, once you take war into your own hands and are not sanctioned by society to do so, then you have become a savage. And like FARC, your ideals, morals and ethics will fly out the window as you realize just how good it feels to be a savage and kill wantonly. That is the path laid out in The Management of Savagery and it is what you get when you try to impose your Private will on society. When you do that you can expect an end very similar to that of Zarqawi, Reyes, Mugniyah and bin Laden... and remember that the mass torturer and killer Che Guevara finally had those people he was abusing turn on him to protect themselves.

Not because he was evil, per se, although he was that, too.

But because he had reduced himself to savagery and was a threat to society as he believed he was above the law and was the law, entire.

02 May 2011

The end of Osama bin Laden

Announced last night by the President was the killing of Osama bin Laden and capture of his body during an operation in Pakistan, that took place at a mansion.

Congratulations, President Obama.

My thanks to the trigger man giving bin Laden a taste of war has he knew it coming for him.

 

Now, about these Private War organizations continuing to destabilize Nations around the globe, and the hearty help of countries interfering in unsanctioned ways in other Nations... no good end will come of Private War practiced by individuals, groups and Nations.  That is uncivilized behavior in the extreme.

That is what happens when standards are not kept up: you become uncivilized.

And you don't have to look very far, at all, to see that happening.