Wednesday, September 19, 2001

Remember the Fallen, Honor the Brave

You may be asking "What will replace World Trade Center?" IMHO a twin memorial. One section left in ruins, like the memorial in Hiroshima, and one section a park dedicated to the Fireman, Police, Paramedics and all other Emergency Personell who daily put themselves in harm's way.

Liberty Alert!

Like I said before, people, we are at war. Take your stand on the front lines:

I am so glad I'm not alone in my stance for a reasoned response and against the childish posturings of rhetoric and revenge.

Thursday, September 13, 2001

Eyewitness Accounts

A view from someone who was there.

Another view from Manhattan.

Warning Signs

You know, we were warned about this day. I'm not talking about Nostradamus, I'm talking about Thomas Jefferson:

The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this war [for independence] we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and thier rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for thier rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of theis war, will be heavier and heavier, till out rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.
--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Our liberty is under assault, both from without and within. Those who love liberty are constantly under attack, fighting a war of thoughts and words. Every day, every 24 hours, each one of us is called on to claim our individual responsibility for defending our personal liberty. Each one of us who faces the resposibility squarely, who asks the questions and challenges the authorities, brings the benefits of liberty closer to all of us.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
--Ephesians 6:12:: NKJV

The struggle for liberty is not against "flesh and blood," but against the irrational fears and the philosophies based on those fears that hold us in slavery. These are the shackles that Jefferson spoke of. We must face the fact that every day brings a new tyrant, a new prince, a new power, a new ruler of the darkness, with a new philososphy of fear, a new absolute authority, a new host of wickedness.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
--Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Speech May 15, 1951

We must not submit to fear. We must not submit to the philosphy of fear that demands obedience to an immaterial ultimate authority and calls for death to unbelievers. We must not submit to the propaganda of fear that demands obedience to a corporeal, temporal authority and calls for posturings of power and strength and unreasoning retribution.

Obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,
A mechanized automoton.
--Percy Bysshe Shelly, Queen Mab

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Why We Fight

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty

Yesterday I spoke against war, but the truth is, we are at war. This is not a new war. This war began when a human mind first conceived of liberty. Every human who desires to live with the benefits of liberty must stand as a warrior to defend that liberty. For liberty to survive this war, it must be liberty for all, and only when each one of us stands to defend our individual liberty will we truly have liberty for all.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Another Fallen Ally

Key Foe of Taliban Is Dead, U.S. Says
Ahmed Shah Masoud, a warrior-intellectual who beat back seven Soviet incursions into his home region in the 1980s, was the victim of a bomb hidden in a television camera or on the body of a man posing as a journalist that went off at the remote base of the Northern Alliance in Khodja Bahauddin, according to Masoud's aides.

Sounds familiar, anyone remember La Penca? Someone stole a page from the CIA playbook.

Johnny get your Gun!

Chronology of terror
1:04 p.m.: President Bush, speaking from an undisclosed location, says that all appropriate security measures are being taken, including putting the U.S. military on high alert worldwide. He asks for prayers for those killed or wounded in the attacks and says: "Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."

Same shit different day. You know, there are places in this world where the bombing of major buildings is business as usual. Terrorism is as old as the Bible. Terrorism is the rage of the underclass. Terrorism is the tool of those who have abandoned rationality and feel they have nothing else left to lose.

From home-grown terrorists like McVeigh to today's attacks, terrorism is what you get when the marginalized strike back at an indifferent elite. Terrorism is what you get when the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" grows too big and too fast. Terrorism is the knee-jerk backlash of the undeclared war on human rights that grinds us down day after day after day.

Already the war drums are sounding, listen:

"This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don't think that I overstate it,'' said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. The Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed nearly 2,400 people and drew the United States into World War II.

Johnny get your gun, America's going to war! Look, Pearl harbor was a military action taken by military units against a military target during a time of war. It is an insult to the memory of those who died, both in Pearl Harbor and Manhattan, to compare a military action to this criminal act of premeditated murder. An act not only criminal, but wholly immoral when viewed in the light of any rational philosophy. I have no illusions that these irrationally motivated attacks will be used as a pretext to war, but they are still in essence criminal acts. These acts call for justice, the rationally applied rule of law, not a vigilante mob.