(1) For expressing ideas, my Huguenot and Quaker ancestors were tortured in European dungeons. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, they fled the dungeons for the New World - on fire - with the cause of freedom and equality. They helped found Penn's Colony, waged a centuries-long, political struggle against human enslavement, and - during the Revolution, a few were convicted of sedition against the Crown. (By numerous sources, it was reported that they sneered at the hangmen - as they were hanged.) Looking back objectively at their deeds and writings - after the dungeons and the tortures, my ancestors were bat-shit crazy - but in a noble way. Torture is a nastily efficient means of radicalizing its victims. But for the persecution of European heretics, dissidents, dreamers and utopians, there'd be no America - no reason for those who invented it to have quit Europe. My ancestors were dungeon-people, activists and seditionists. They referred to themselves as such - and they were always proud of these facts.
I'm a genetic (and a philosophical) descendant of the dungeon-people, the activists and the seditionists - who sacrificed themselves to mid-wife America into being, and I'm immensely proud of them - too.
(2) You switch on the TV set, listen to a pellet-head behind an anchor-desk blather gibberish - but you do not shut the TV off. Not only do you listen, you seize-on every word, receiving and adopting the blather - as though it were the deliverance of an oracle. The anchor desk is a potent symbol - much like the throne once was. 34 centuries ago, a 9 year old boy sat on a throne, barked-out orders and his orders were obeyed. His name was King Tut (nbkhprwr3) - possibly pronounced in Ancient Egypt as nap-khafur-YOU-reeah. Tut was, also, widely rumored to have been the son of the Sun. Today - if a nine year old kid squatted on a piece of cheap scenery and belted-out orders, he would be punished or chuckled at. Perhaps, it's time to conceive of and approach the anchor-desk squatters - identically - as misbehaved children.
Bill O'Reilly (who was not in a combat situation during the Falklands war): "Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash."
Brian Williams (The news anchor who was not in a helicopter forced down in Iraq): "The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG."
(The preceding message was brought to you by The Partnership for a Mass-Media Free America.)
(3) Recently, a friend of mine was the victim of an attempted frame-up by local, Pennsylvania cops. (These days - in PA municipalities, police frame-ups are as common as trees in a forest or water in an ocean.) My friend quipped (Jay Smith-like): "I wish someone would drop a nuclear bomb on Pennsylvania!". I retorted: "If a nuclear bomb were dropped on Pennsylvania, would Pennsylvania be contaminated by radio-activity or would poor, helpless, defenseless radio-activity be contaminated by being in contact with lawless Pennsylvania? That's a real conundrum!".
(4) Nursery rhymes and US foreign policy -
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed,
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Is it coherent to ask this question: "Did a cow really jump over the moon?". Nursery rhymes stand in no need of verification; that is, what's referred to in them need not correlate to events, occurring in the world for them to provide entertainment. Likewise, did it make sense to inquire in 2003: "Does Iraq really possess weapons of mass destruction?". The tales of American politicians and their media-stooges stand in no need of verification; that is, their tales - too - often give rise to lurid "entertainment".
(5) By way of a stark, historical contrast, American activists of the 17th and 18th centuries had as their objectives: the abolition of slavery (1688), freedom of the press, the right of religious conscience, independence from British occupation and the recognition of labor rights (1775). Today, American destructivists advocate and engineer: aggressive warfare, the suspension of habeas corpus, torture, extra-legal drone executions, mass warrantless surveillance and the mass incarceration of the US population.
Human progress drove the activist movements of the 17th and 18th centuries - and human regression (or worse) drives these 21st century destructivists.
(6) A critique of pure equality. To be an American is to be swallowed-up in inconsistencies. To be an American is to revel in being swallowed-up in inconsistencies. To be the devil is to puncture and dissect these thinking-cramps, revealing them for precisely what they are - rubbish-notions. The legal, double-standards, applying to cops, DAs, judges and politicians - relative to common-run Americans - are too glaring for most to acknowledge (or even bear).
The counter-logical sequence - below - is the concept, animating the day-to-day operation of the US legal system.
1. All violators of the law should be arrested.
2. X, a governmental actor, is a violator of the law. (war crimes, extra-legal drone assassination, torture, mishandling classified information, unlawful searches, unlawful arrests, etc.)
3. X should not be arrested.
4. 3 does not follow from 1 and 2.
Given 1-4, what's a very obvious prediction on how the US will continue to (de)evolve legally?
When equality under the law is not enforced, there is no law. What prevails is a lawlessness state of affairs. Either the law applies to everyone, or there is no law.
In the US - for over the course of the last 5 decades, the trend has been to immunize (by law or by privilege) those in power from the law and to mass-incarcerate those not in power. Should you have the good fortune to "visit" a US prison, be sure to remark (at the top of your lungs): "Why are there no cops, DAs, judges and politicians, rotting away in here?".
(7) In regions of Europe - during the 15th century, persons convicted of "witchcraft" were burned at the stake. The practice of witch-burning may not have been (entirely) a behavioral trait of a people, locked into a brutish and benighted culture. Executing those who maintain that: "With word-spells alone, we can make the world behave as we wish it to behave!" is (arguably) more rational - than reflexively signing-onto the mind-rot, which passes for conventional political thought in the US, i.e. "Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.", "A civilian who fails to comply with a cop's lawful order deserves to die.", "The 4th Amendment should be made null and void.", "Inequality under the law is equality under the law.", etc. Where witch-burners in the 15th century were terrified of absurdity-spewing idiots and incinerated them, we elect and bow-down to closely related absurdity-spewing idiots.
(8) Richard Feynman:
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
In science, experiment is the authority. In politics, there's no analogous authority. Regarding the political hijinks polluting America, all of its politicking should be suspended until such time as an objective authority emerges, or - excluding that, Americans should finally admit to themselves that their cherished, political beliefs/delusions are potentially (if not actually) goof-ball.
(9) Thus speaketh the Attorney General of the USA, Jeff Sessions:
I reject the idea that America will be a better place if marijuana is sold in every corner store. And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana - so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that's only slightly less awful.
Incoherently squealing that pot pharmacologically induces a "life-wrecking dependency" that's "only slightly less awful" than smack's are ideas which do not correspond to reality. Those who entertain ideas which do not correspond to reality have no business writing legislation or executing governmental policies.
Let's extrapolate Plato's theory - which predicts that democracies wind-up lawless and the people who inhabit them adopt cowardice and irrationality.
Suppose that there's a population of humans, A, and that the humans of A entertain ideas which correspond to reality. But - at T1, the democratic process is applied on that population. Over time (T2, T3, T4, etc.) - when the democratic process is iterated in A, the humans of A inevitably cease entertaining ideas which correspond to reality (or the frequency of ideas not corresponding to reality radically increases in A). Can appealing to Plato's theory plausibly account for our current crop of cognitive maladies?
If there's one, base-line intellectual human obligation, it's for us to embrace ideas which correspond to reality, not deliberately (or otherwise) eruct ideas which are - prima facie - unhinged.
(10) Richard Feynman:
"Reality is that which goes on after you stop thinking about it."
Following Mr. Feynman, reality consists of mind-independent states of affairs. It cannot be legislated away. It cannot be drowned-out by a smear campaign. Reality is that which persists - when the legislature is out of session and when the anchor-desk druids go on holiday.