Waste Contest

Which do you like better: the glorious UK government's 3 to 4 million pounds to put a police blockade around the Ecuadorian embassy to prevent the escape of deadly truthteller Julian Assange, or 60 to 100 million dollars for the First Murderer and family to do an African safari trip?

Each has its merits, I suppose.  The O'Bomber trip has an order-of-magnitude higher cost, but there's always a faint chance that Commander Drone will screw up and drink the water or try to pet a black mamba or something.  And for our British cousins, they're getting off relatively cheap, and I suppose that every law-enforcer standing around an embassy is one fewer to annoy and harass normal people.

You pays your money and you takes your choice, I guess.  For sure, you pays your money; not doing so isn't among your choices.

Wag the What?

Glancing at CNN, I'm thinking that the Albanians are probably glad that Barry Levinson made the film that he did, back in 1997.  Of course it hasn't stopped American administrations from using their default change-the-subject maneuver, but at least the target won't be Albania.  The government probably thinks that would just be too obvious.  Given the attention span of the Uh-murrican public, however, I think they're being unnecessarily cautious.

Secrets

Mr. Snowden tells us that "our" government inhales every single bit of data that travels over the internet, and also every single bit of our phone records.  Obviously, this is completely impossible, since we're protected by our famous dead constitution, but somehow he says it's happening anyway.  Who'd-a thunk it?  Well, no one who's been even marginally awake during the entirety of this not-quite-so-new-anymore century is going to be particularly surprised ... but surprise is a little bit beside the point, I think.

Lots of Americans -- most, perhaps -- haven't figured out yet that "if you aren't doing anything wrong, if you don't have anything to hide, why should you care about surveillance?" is actually supposed to be an embarrassing thing to say ... the English translation, more or less, of baaaa, baaaa, baaaa.  But let us suppose, for the momentary purposes of discussion, that this bit of sheepthink actually represents a valid principle.  The government, along with its apologists, is greatly enthused -- obsessive, in fact -- about keeping its millions of secrets.  Why?  Government, if you aren't doing anything wrong, if you don't have bad things to hide, why do you object to exposure?  Let us see every single thing -- without exception! -- that you're doing.  In real time.  After all, this is the Information Age, when technology makes it all possible, no?  Let's go for it!

In keeping with the modern principle that everything has to be upside-down, we see that individuals aren't permitted to have privacy, while the ruling class seeks to enjoy total and absolute privacy.  It should, of course, be exactly the other way around.  There should be, on principle, no such thing as a government secret.  Not one.  Never-never-never.

I haven't come up with an individual response to the phone-records thing.  But PRISM, on the other hand ... bear with me a moment while I compose my new email signature file, optimized for the enjoyment of the screening software that our masters are no doubt employing.  Let's see ...

The above email is actually not related to terror, bombs, hijackings, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, radical Islam, jihad, or any of that stuff.  It does not concern itself with anthrax or ricin or sarin or improvised explosive devices.  It expresses no particular opinion about whether Allah is the only God and Muhammad is his prophet (which, by the way, is not the case).  It is not aimed at bringing about Death to America.  On the other hand, it may well uselessly attract some special attention from one organ or another of the Security State.  It might make such an organ marginally less efficient by wasting a tiny bit of its time.  That would be a real shame.  And if most would-be free Americans were to do something similar with all their email ... wouldn't that be a pity?

I'm Easy

In last Friday's post by Arthur Silber, he talks about using the widespread anger over the current IRS "scandal" to achieve some meaningful protest against the national government's evil practices.  He specifically talks about two things: people refusing to file income-tax returns in numbers too large for the government to handle; and truly large numbers of people occupying places like Washington, DC and shutting them down for indefinite amounts of time.  He writes, in part,

Start with a series of ads that are seen and mentioned everywhere: on television, on millions of blogs, Tumblr posts, and tweets. The call to arms can be very simple and direct: NO MORE TAXES -- UNTIL YOU CHANGE! Perhaps it is structured around the no-more-taxes pledge -- and perhaps the day of arrival in Washington, D.C. (and other cities) is Tuesday, April 15, 2014. We have lots of lead time. It could be the story of the century -- and for once, that empty phrase might actually be true.

As a strategic matter, and to encourage as broad a coalition as possible, maybe the call to arms should remain that open-ended: UNTIL YOU CHANGE. I wouldn't presume to suggest a list of demands at any time, either now or months from now. And perhaps such a list isn't needed or advisable; that is how coalitions are splintered. That kind of open-endedness might also be a good idea with regard to the bastards running the government. If millions of people descended on Washington and other cities and actually shut them down indefinitely, if millions of people refused to file tax returns -- well, who knows what the bastards might offer. It might be more than anyone now thinks. In effect, the protesters would be demanding: STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING NOW -- where "what you're doing" refers to the oppressive, abusive, murderous policies of this government. (As I'm writing this, I think one demand that I would hope everyone could agree on would be that the government unequivocally renounce its claim of a "right" to murder anyone and everyone it chooses. But even that demand might be inadvisable.)

 For myself, I'm inclined to think Mr. Silber has greatly overestimated both the extent and degree of public anger over the IRS business.  But his post did -- as usual -- provoke some thoughts.  When he suggests that it would be a mistake to make a specific list of demands, I suppose he's thinking in terms of the standard left-right paradigm, in which a "liberal" might demand an end to the wars and an expansion of government-provided medicine, while a "conservative" would demand an end to regulation and entitlements, but a continuation and expansion of wars and police-type activity.  That's one of the nice things about having, loosely, an anarchist's political philosophy: I can't think of any government activity or "service," the elimination of which would be any kind of dealbreaker for me.  In the enormous catalog that stretches from the post office and the weather service to torture prisons and CIA murder-drone operations, of course I find some items much more objectionable than others.  But there's nothing so innocuous that I'd part company with another protestor over its elimination.

It may be that there's enough people out there who would be willing to refuse to file income taxes that such refusal would become a relatively safe thing to do.  But even if there are, I don't see how any large fraction of those people are going to trust that the others are there and will act enough to act themselves.  No one wants to be that one guy in Tianenmen Square, facing a column of tanks by himself.  And I don't know what the solution to that problem is.

Simple Solutions to Vexing Problems

It seems that The Greatest Drone Warrior Chieftain the World Has Ever Known, Barack O'Bomber, is unsatisfied with the conduct of his vast murder empire.  So here's a public service from the management of The Chestnut Tree Cafe:

Dear Supreme Death Commander,

A reduction in the size of your built-to-fail jobs program and "defense" contractor profits machine by a factor of about 10,000 would also reduce the incidence of sex crime therein by at least the same factor.  Probably more, since you could then be a little more, shall we say, selective about who participates.  Yes, it's true that the mission would have to be scaled back by the same factor.  A military establishment whose scale is reduced by four orders of magnitude would have to restrict itself to the actual defense of actual US territory against the actual (microscopic) threat of invasion of said territory.  Is that a bad thing?

Admittedly, it's very bad for your corporate masters at LockMart / Gen Dyn / GE and so on.  Again, though: how bad is that for actual American people, as opposed to the astronomically-overcompensated minions of Hell?


You're welcome,

   --- Your friends at the Chestnut Tree Cafe


P.S.  No, no -- no medals for us, please.  Service is its own reward.  Thanks anyway!

How the Ruling Class Lives

Yes, I know, playing golf is undoubtedly one of the least-harmful things these sociopaths ever do.  I suppose that if they spent every second of every day on the course, the flushing-away of our liberties would pretty much cease.  And lots of Muslims would have a better chance of getting through the day alive, and just maybe attending a wedding without being Hellfire'd abruptly out of existence.

Still ... doesn't this gall you, just a bit?  Prexy and a handful of lawfakers tee it up, and that's considered work.  That's their jobs.  Political fundraising and schmoozing each other for "deals" -- in which they win, and you and I lose -- that's their version of working fingers to bone.  These sons of bitches wouldn't know work if it rose up out of the fourteenth fairway and bit them on their well-upholstered asses, which sounds like a pretty good idea, really.