Some Thoughts

Of course I've been paying attention to events, but there's such a level of chaos on so many fronts it's hard to know what's worth the time to explore more and what's just "entertainment."

1) Propaganda. We are immersed in propaganda, sales pitches, and false narratives from the media, politicians, commercial interests and others all the time. We know this, don't we? As a rule, the truth of things beyond our immediate reference point is rarely knowable to most of us. Yes, even science and scholarly research can produce false and misleading information.

Thus, it is always wise to be skeptical about what we are told by authority or somebody trying to sell us something. Not all of it is false, but much of everything we're told is framed to make us believe certain things in certain ways that may not have anything to do with reality.

The Russia Thing has been all about propaganda and the effective use of propaganda for political objectives. There's been an effort to blame-cast Russian propaganda for electing Trump -- which to me has always been simply stupid. Incomprehensibly stupid.

There was Russian propaganda at play, but there was lots and lots of other propaganda coming from many, many sources during the election campaign and afterwards. We used to joke about the Macedonian teenagers spreading false stories about Hillary on Facebook and Twitter and various websites. Yes? So? Apparently there were whole troll farms running internet propaganda campaigns from many locations in and out of the USofA, a good deal of it automated, and yes, they were effective among those particularly vulnerable to what they see, read, and hear on the internet.

I think far too much has been made of anti-Hillary, pro-Trump propaganda, however.Trump won the presidency not because the American people elected him -- far from it -- but because the Electoral College elected him based on 70,000-80,000 unverifiable votes in three states. The voters chose Hillary by more than 3,000,000 votes overall, so it's simply false to say that a majority of the  American People elected Trump. They didn't.

The propaganda of the campaign was effective in disparaging Hillary mostly among those already so inclined. There was no comprehensive or comparable propaganda effort to disparage Trump. That may seem strange given how over the top some of the denunciations of Trump have been since the election, but consider this:

Media gave him and still gives him nearly limitless coverage for anything he says or does or for pretty much anything anyone else says about him. The circus sells. So, they cover it obsessively. The internet has come to set the standard narrative about things such as Trump, and media falls into line. If Trump is trending, which he always is, the media covers him and everyone -- pretty much -- around him. It's a goon show and they love it. Can't get enough of it. It doesn't really matter what kind of coverage he gets, positive or negative, so long as he gets coverage. If that ever stopped, on the other hand...

There has never been any comparable level of coverage for Hillary or Democrats in general, something that once was noted regularly.

What this means is that Rs and now Trump are able to sell their product almost without impediment whereas in so many cases, Ds can't even come up with a product to sell. But even if they did, their sales technique, indeed, their product itself, wouldn't differ much from that of the Rs. The propaganda and the lies would be nearly indistinguishable. What foreign interests and internet meme generators, fake news purveyors, and what have you do or don't do don't really matter all that much -- they are all part of the game being played. Our rulers lie to us. All. The. Time. Some do it more subtly that others, but they all do it.

That Russian and other foreign and domestic interests exploited these characteristics of American politics to sow discord and "influence the election" should be taken for granted. That one or another campaign was entangled with these interests and activities should be seen as the way the game is played.

What should be clear by now, though, is that Americans are way too vulnerable to these tactics and too many of them lack the tools and skill to sort through the garbage. They believe what they believe and whoever/whatever confirms it. Thus, propaganda is more effective than it should be.

2) Gunz. The nightmare continues. I was impressed by the size of the crowds at Saturday's marches for Our Lives. Sadly, however, we know that marches per se, no matter their size, are routinely ignored by Our Rulers, simply because they can and they want to stick it to the Rabble one more time.

On top of the issue of school massacres, there is obviously still a problem with police executions and murders, street mayhem and murder in various cities, and the ridiculous and deadly insanity of the gun lobby's constant demands for more gunz no matter what.

The thing of it is, despite the absolute number of gunz in private hands, fewer and fewer Americans own them. Ponder: something like half the gunz are in the hands of 3% or so of the population. Only 30% or so of households have a gun, and the number is declining. The rest -- apparently -- are in private arsenals like the one maintained by the Las Vegas mass murderer, or... well, something is going on with those arsenals.

There are always so many gunz available in the black market. There are always so many gunz available on the legal market too. Dude in Florida could walk in to his neighborhood gun shop and buy anything he wanted as long as he had the bucks -- which he did somehow -- and could pass the so called "background check" which didn't pick up any of his sketchier behavior and threats. No problem. It's a puzzlement that all of the reports and calls and tips and so on about him were apparently ignored by layers of authorities who were informed and chose to do nothing. If he were Muslim or black or some other disfavored minority, who knows, he might have been tortured on the rack and thrown in the hole for the rest of his life, but apparently, he was a favored minority.

There is some dispute over whether he is an ethnic Hispanic. He was apparently adopted by a Hispanic family and was given a Hispanic name, but that he is not ethnically Hispanic. Most reports say he's "white." Beyond that, it's a muddle.

But despite being a double orphan, he had plenty of money to buy gunz and he did. This happens with some frequency among the mass murder contingent.

I think we can admit that gunz are far easier to get than they need to be, and that the failure of Our Rulers to do anything about it -- except make it easier -- represents policy. A policy of bloodshed as a corrective for the Rabble, keeping them in fear and thus relatively tame. It's not pleasant, but it works.

Thus the kids must fail in their crusade, and they must be seen to fail. We'll see. Even if/when they manage to expel the electeds who insist on the policy of practically unlimited gun access and periodic mass murder, there is more than a little suspicion that the policy won't change much. Because it is effective in keeping the Rabble in its place, fearful, powerless and under control.

We'll see.

3) Another bimbo eruption. Oh dear. The Storm(y) has hit. Of course no one is shocked -- least of all I imagine Melania. But trying to take out Trump over this sort of thing -- no matter how many women come forth (up to 27 at last count) -- seems somewhat silly. I think Clinton showed that you don't get rid of a president because of his sex life. You just don't. It's ridiculous. But here we are, going through nearly the same thing with Trump as with Clinton, and it's deja vu all over again.

Please.

The entertainment value is high, of course, other people's sex lives being endlessly entertaining, but that's about all it is. (Personally, it all makes me kind of ill; I really don't want to know and don't much care.)

But entertainment in these cases always has a purpose. The purpose is to keep you 'n' me distracted while something else, much more important to Our Rulers, is taking place.

What's important to Our Rulers are the policies being enacted: tax cuts, regulatory relief, theft of public resources and wealth, wars and aggression against designated and ever changing enemies, that kind of thing.

That's going on at an accelerated pace no matter the dazzling show.

There's much more of course.
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I've started a whole bunch of seeds, and have more to start during the next week or so. My health is better but not fully up to par. Will probably be starting physical therapy soon. Ms Ché is getting her BFA in Creative Writing in May and then starting the MFA program in August. She will not be the oldest graduate, but close to it. And she's having the time of her life!

In the midst of all the hoo-hah, there's always something else again.

I may take another long break over the next several months.

We'll see how things settle out.







Liberty For Whom? To Do What?

Over the years, I've asked that question of libertarians and constitutionalists and gun rights purists and other types of gung-ho Freedom Lovers many times. I've never received an answer of any kind, from anyone.

Given history, however, I proposed the following motto for those self-same Freedom Lovers: "I demand the Liberty to impose my Authority on you."

Yes, well. That's basically what it is all about, which we can see quite clearly in the whole gun rights debate these days.

To many of these rightists, the Second Amendment is not only sacred, it is the only part of the Bill of Rights, and almost the only part of the Constitution itself that matters. The rest being dross in their eyes, the long-winded scribblings of dead white men...

After all, wasn't it Mao who said, "power grows out of the barrel of a gun"? Thus the primacy of the Sacred Second: it is the ability to impose one's authority on others ("power") that is the chief rationale behind the fervent desire of gun rightists to maintain their nearly unfettered access to firearms.

We see it a lot in New Mexico, though I'm sure it's worse in neighboring Texas and Arizona.

Just the other day, there was announced another Coyote Shooting Contest by yet another New Mexico firearms dealer. The Grand Prize for the most coyote heads brought in by the deadline (so to speak) being one of those AR-15s that are so popular for mass murder these days. I have no illusions that these "hunts" are anything more than modern-day posse/vigilante excursions. They used to be focused on Indians and Negroes and various designated Outlaws, but now, of course, the hunters include plenty of the formerly hunted castes, so it's (once again) the turn of the various wild animals to be slaughtered for prizes -- or just because.

Why did Americans slaughter the buffalo in such gargantuan numbers in the 19th Century? Because they could. It felt good to have such power over Nature. I can't find it now, but I saw a magazine article from about 1915, in which "sportsmen" in California showed off their one day's bag of geese shot along the Pacific Flyway. There were hundreds and hundreds of dead geese piled up around them as they posed with their dogs and their guns in the marshes of the San Joaquin Delta, and this one team of hunters said they averaged some 300-500 kills a day. Even then, conservationists and others were questioning such immense slaughter, and the excuse was the same as you hear now: the animals were feeding on or spoiling crops, and we can't have that! Civilization! What's so obviously idiotic about these claims is that there are far more people living in the area today, and there is far more intense farming going on -- and there are far more birds roosting along the flyway because after being mindlessly slaughtered to near extinction, they are now protected in most places and are thriving. And hardly anybody objects to them, not even farmers and ranchers.

Coyote kills (and wolf kills and mountain lion kills and buffalo hunts and so on) these days are said to be justified because of all the damage these animals cause to livestock and crops. "Everyone knows..." Except they don't. And the farmers and ranchers often wildly exaggerate their losses. The real point of these killings is not to protect livestock and crops, it is to assert life and death power over the Other, in this case, the Natural World.

Gun rightists don't care a whit about preventing "tyranny" in any rational sense. By and large they were either silent or actively cheering on the gutting of the rest of the Bill of Rights by Congress and the Executive during recent times, most being "patriots" and all who don't believe in such luxuries as "rights" when it comes to other citizens and terrorists -- who are often one and the same in their view. While a modern form of tyranny was being imposed and consolidated even before the advent of the Glorious Global (and Forever) War on Terror. In other words, throughout the abrogation of what remained of the Bill of Rights, Sacred Second believers either paid no attention (as long as no one tried to grab their guns!) or they were in the vanguard of the cheerleaders, where most of them still are.

They don't want to prevent tyranny, oh no. They just want to be sure they're the ones to impose it.

"I demand the Liberty to impose my Authority on you."

That is the whole of the Law and the Prophets.

In gun rightist cant and rhetoric, it doesn't matter how many people are killed every year by firearms -- never mind all the animals. According to statistics, most of the firearms deaths are suicides  anyway, and who are we to stand in the way of such Liberty? As for the rest, well, too bad for them; most of them probably "needed killing" or just had bad luck, and who are we to stand in the way of such Liberty?

As for all those other abrogated "rights" Americans once had, or thought they had, so?

Most of them were interferences with the public or private and personal imposition of tyranny in any case, annoying restrictions on what could be done to impose public or private authority on others at will.

I've repeatedly pointed out that the Sacred Second is ultimately derived from the gun rights provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the point of which was to ensure that one British faction was armed while another was disarmed (in the case of the Glorious Revolution, the objective was the disarmament and political neutering of British Catholics). So it has been throughout the history of gun rights advocacy. In America, of course, the objective of the Sacred Second was the private arming of the (white, male) militias, and the disarming of Negroes, Indians, and whatever designated Outlaws were being persecuted at the moment.

It is ever thus.

Liberty for whom? To do what?

As it is, the American firearms casualty numbers are close to those one would expect from an ongoing civil war, and in some sense, that is what has been taking place in this country for many a long year, with periodic spikes and lulls to be sure, but more or less constant over the long term. Arms merchants profit from it, of course, and they are eager to keep it going by any means necessary. It is the nature of their business. They need and want the public fear and suffering, the drama of the many gun incidents, the clamor both for control and unfettered access to firearms. All of it leads to more sales, more profits, more death and destruction. It's a vicious cycle.

Government is right on board with it, too.

Bringing an end to the ongoing civil war Americans are immersed in will be the key to curbing or ending the gun culture. But in order to do that, power will have to be re-distributed from a tiny minority of killers and exploiters to the rest of us. That can be done once the rest of us refuse to be cowed by the handful of killers and exploiters who rule.

So far, there is no common understanding of how to do it, and it may be generations before anyone figures out how. But history shows it can be done.

Liberty for whom? To do what?

On Guns And Slaves And Indians and Militias And Oh My!

The Gun Rights issue is getting very heated in parts of New Mexico, and much of it is getting stupider by the minute. There was someone on the teevee the other day pontificating about how horrid the tyrannical Obama background check will be -- because it'll keep the "good people" from getting guns, you see, and then only the "bad people" will have them, eek. We're doomed. Again.

The Single Action Shooting Society people are pressing the locals to let them run their Shooting Ranch year round and open to the public instead of just members and guests, and the locals are up in arms about it (in a manner of speaking) given that the shooting events they hold at the Ranch as it is have raised something of a ruckus what with the constant pow-pow-pow of gunfire and the traffic and the costumed Wild West Characters and all the rest of it. It's a big deal, this Gun Thing.

In fact, on the way into town (Abq) yesterday on the highway, I spotted a billboard I'd never seen before demanding that local, state and federal governments protect rather than curtail rights to free speech, religion ...and guns.

What a country.

Yes, and guns are a big deal around here. It's genuine cowboy country (well, there are some poseurs, but mostly the cowboys in these parts are real cowboys, not the ersatz you see in the City), and the Code of the West still lives proud and strong. I've never seen any problem with the SASS and their costuming and play acting and shoot-em-ups, because from what I can tell, they're self-aware and honest enough to know that what they do at the Ranch is in the nature of a show and a hobby. They aren't going out shooting up one another or the countryside.

Some of our neighbors are active game hunters, others have been in the habit of varmint hunting, for varmints can be a real problem around here (ask me about the skunks sometime). But as I've said before, most of the people around here are highly conscientious and responsible. There are probably some crazy gun-nuts among them, but if there are, they keep their profiles low.

I'm not into guns personally. But I don't begrudge most people who keep and fire arms -- so long as they are conscientious and responsible. Unfortunately not everyone is or can be, and it only takes one man (rarely a woman) with bad intent and a gun to cause utter mayhem.

Thom Hartmann raised quite a ruckus himself the other day with his piece at Truthout asserting that the Sacred Second's purpose was to preserve slavery by prohibiting the federal government from interfering with slave revolt suppressing militias. He's been called every name in the book for making this outrageous assertion, even though most of those expressing outrage and calling him "dishonest" acknowledge that he's "partially right."

Of course he is. But it goes a little farther than the preservation of the peculiar institution. Militias were also charged with running down the Indians and slaughtering them.

I've written before that the Sacred Second is derived from the English Bill of Rights imposed on William and Mary in 1689. In the English Bill of Rights it is specifically stated that the King's subjects "that are Protestant" shall have the right to keep and bear arms appropriate to their status. What is left unsaid is that the King's subjects that are Catholic are to be disarmed -- regardless of their status. Just so, the Sacred Second itself did not apply to slaves, to Indians not taxed, or to anyone else so deemed unworthy to keep and bear by the states. The armed militias were organized to suppress -- to murder if need be -- these groups, after all.

And in some ways, that's the reason why the Second is so Sacred. The right to keep and bear arms is the emblem of those with the ability and sometimes the authority to oppress, or in the USofA, the right of the Free Citizen, and taking it away, or even limiting it in any sensible way, is seen as reducing the status of the Citizen to that of subject or outcast or worse.

In other words, there the Rule of the Second requires that someone be disarmed.

The right to keep and bear arms was denied to large numbers of Americans from the beginning, and even now, it is not by any means a universal right (nor should it be in my view.)

But restricting it is a terrifying thing to many of those who believe their ability to have and keep firearms is a mark of their humanity and citizenship.

Take away their guns, or make it more difficult for them to get armaments, and you have reduced them to the status of subjects -- or slaves.