Click here to view the embedded video.

On the one hand, I am grateful to WikiLeaks for making this available. On the other, I am ashamed, disappointed and frightened that such direct evidence of evil is necessary for people to ascertain its presence and dominion.

“Bushmaster” will never be prosecuted by the system which put him in control. Maybe one or two of the CounterStrike-addled kids who actually did these murders will, and be released after a couple of years, having been “rehabilitated”. The whole goddamned thing will be swept under the rug and forgotten, much like the carpet-bombing and napalming of Vietnamese and Burmese families two generations ago. Much like the firebombing of Dresden. Much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Much like the massacres in the Philippines. Oh, I could go on…

And the machine will grind on. Threatening, extorting, imprisoning, torturing, maiming and murdering, until we put a stop to it. These creatures — I cannot call them “people” — live in your communities. They attend your churches. They dine in your restaurants. They attend PTA meetings at your school. They shop in your grocery store, and, maybe, they occasionally come into contact with your children or grandchildren at the playground. They are monsters, worthy of less than the bottom of a well, and yet they live among you.

And they are forming your culture. They are defining the world we live in. They are honored and revered for their “service” to rival global death machines. And the music swells, the crowd rises, hands go over hearts, and…

They learn to obey mommy and daddy (or whomever the child-rearers are in their lives), and to transfer those patterns of obedience on to and to adopt them from individuals and institutions of all sorts: schools, churches, teams, states, media, politicians, leaders, prophets, bosses, generals, traditions, cultures.

The Bellamy salute, Occupied Hawai'i, 1941

Precious few seem to ever learn the value of questioning everything put to them by these people and institutions, to deconstruct the self-perpetuating mind-viruses they transmit, and to confront the truths of our common reality for themselves. Instead, too many fall into those patterns and enact those little mental programs.

The most successful of these programs ultimately include directives to retransmit them to others — and to shun those who refuse to absorb and adopt them.

“Christmas is the most important holiday of the year” is a proposition many would agree with — despite the fact that “Christmas” and “holiday” are mere social constructs built upon thousands of years of mindless obedience to unfounded tradition. Their value emerges not from any aspect or quality of the world as it is, but rather from the social acceptance gained by going along with and acting according to the proposition.

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” — a mind-control slogan if there ever was one, cloaking the interests of power elites to enslave and exploit their subjects in wars for profit, while invoking “goodness” and “community” in the form of the imaginary construct called “one’s country”. Militarism reached its pinnacle thus far in the 20th century, and one can only hope that the mountains of millions of corpses it generated will be its only legacy into the future. I can’t help but wonder, though, if we as a species, as a global culture, have been at all purged of the tendencies and weaknesses which led to all that slaughter.

Indeed, as I look around, I seriously doubt it.

Mind you, writing your own programs for life in this world we share is hard. Nobody teaches you this in school. In some ways, it is a skill that can’t be taught in traditional fashion, since metaprogramming the human biocomputer is not something which lends itself well to being broken down into the component bits that the Prussian-model education system we are all so many of us are products of requires.

Be born to Muslim parents, and you’re expected to be a Muslim. Grow up in Pittsburgh, and you’re expected to be a Steelers fan. Become a citizen of Norway by accident of birth, and you’re expected to self-identify as “Norwegian” for the rest of your life. Be born to “democracy”, and you’re expected to be a voter. And on and on.

Violate these patterns, and those around you brand you odd.

And this is considered “normal”.

Normal people scare me.

I have a bit of a different outlook on those troops, as many of you know.

A child's life CHANGED forever, thanks to America's brave soldiers. Bala Baluk district, Farah province, Afghanistan, 5 May 2009. Photo via the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, www.rawa.org

I set out today to put forward a Memorial Day post to remember, a real shocker, if you will.

But I found myself surveying endless sets of photos of the horrors of war. Children missing limbs. Hideously mutated stillborn babies, courtesy of “depleted” uranium munitions. Battlefield trauma surgery. Burn victims. Executions. Murder, mutilation, death.

And my will faltered. I find I don’t have much to say. Or, perhaps I do, but digging deeply enough to put the words together is hurting me, and so I must back away.

So, instead, I leave you with the photo at right, and with simple linkage to my two pieces from around this time last year: Fuck the troops! and A Memorial Day tribute to police state supporters. And also with a few words from fellow anarcho-blogger Cork, in “A memorial day we can all get behind“:

Some anarchists will tell you that the troops died for nothing. But that’s not exactly true.

They died to butcher women and children. They died to make life miserable and unbearable for people all across the globe. They died to strengthen the police state. They died to take away our liberties. They died to enrich the military industrial complex. They died to make the world safe for US-style corporatist capitalism. They died to strengthen dictators and tyrants. They died to ensure US hegemony over the entire world, and to enslave the innocent. They died to destroy and steal from foreign countries. They died to worsen the economy and harm the poor. They died to end habeas corpus and protect torture.

In a nutshell: they died to make the world a far worse, far more despicable, and far more dangerous place. And they did so knowing exactly what they were doing.

And that’s Web 3.0. Papers, please.

From The Telegraph:

One in five teens engage in ‘tech sex’

One in five teenagers say they have sent naked or partially-clothed images of themselves to someone by email or mobile phone, according to a poll in America.

David Gross of The Picket Line submits an exploration of ethical reductionism in the context of political theory: Does political philosophy reduce to ethical philosophy?

[This] is what makes the liberal political theories and their justifications difficult for me to swallow. They seem to have this backwards. According to them, some behavior at the ethical level switches from unethical to ethical based on the description it is given at the political level, rather than its description at the political level being based on an analysis of it at the ethical level. Whereas it seems to me that whether a particular action is ethical or not should not depend on what political system you’re operating under or what role the people involved play in that system; rather, whether the system is reasonable and coherent should depend on whether the individuals enacting their roles in that system behave ethically in so doing.

With his submission, he says: “Some anarchists and libertarians seem to believe that political philosophy reduces to ethical philosophy, the same way some scientists believe that chemistry ultimately reduces to physics. Is this part of the appeal of anarchism, and does it make sense?” I for one do believe that the political ought to reduce to the ethical, that this does make sense and that it is part of anarchism’s appeal. My own posting on the clown suit defense makes this point, though a bit obliquely.

Mike Billy of Reflections from a Rotting Nation writes of another incident in what seems to be a new trend driven by both advances in technology and some rather insane law in Teen Girl Charged With Sex Offense For Sending Nude Pictures of Herself.

The girl may receive a punishment of several years in a juvenile detention center and forced registration as a sex offender. This new status could prevent her from living within a specified radius of any school, church, or park for the rest of her life. It may also force her to inform all of her neighbors that she is a sex offender when she moves.

So now, not only does she have nude pictures of herself floating around, but she also has the stigma of being labeled a sex offender hanging over her head. But hey, that is the law and ignorance is no excuse.

The ABC News story linked to in the post has comments attached which present both many defenses of the girl’s action as well as a catalogue of what passes for sexual “morality” in America, especially as connected to children: “Satan on the loose”, “She doesn’t need jail, she needs therapy”, “What the hell are kids thinking these days!”

The blog post I never wrote reacting to this incident and to some of the ABC News commenters was going to bear the title, “Shocking news! Teen girls enjoy fucking”.

Mike also brings us The Financial Crisis is Not a Market Failure:

No, the financial crisis is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of fascism. Allowing one unchecked overarching organization known as the Federal Reserve to control the money supply and thus the interest rates has caused the failure.

And how do they propose to fix it? By having that same organization create even more money to bail out these banks.

Like a fly repeatedly striking a glass window, more of the same will not solve our problems. It is time to end the Fed.

The economics lemurs at nostate.com agree wholeheartedly.

Commenting on a resurgence of the Taliban and the displacement of the anemic, imperialist-funded state in Afghanistan, Darian Worden, author of Bring a Gun to School Day (worth reading, and promoting!), says, “Revolutionaries, Take Note“:

When desired goods and services are provided in a revolutionary context, the consumers then join entrepreneurs in building revolution. A revolution based on libertarian principles ought to build liberty outside of the system. It is not enough simply to tell people that the free market can do things better. They must be shown that we will make it do things better. Agorism and other left libertarian philosophies provide ideas for such action.

Pity the Taliban aren’t agorists, or anarchists of any stripe.

Francois Tremblay of the Check Your Premises blog submits a controversial article entitled “Why hierarchies are immoral“. He writes:

Anarchy, as a position on social organization, forces us to rethink the purpose of society itself. What is the goal of social action? While mainstream political ideologies disagree on various issues, there is one thing they all agree on: they universally elevate economic and technological progress as an ultimate, unimpeachable goal, and that the only disagreement is how to effect it and how fast. But this goal is driven by hierarchies that concentrate power and seek to expand that power by all means necessary. Anarchists are the only people who pipe up and say “hey, maybe this whole idea of limitless progress at all costs isn’t so great- maybe the costs are greater than we’re ready to accept.”

This post provoked a great deal of response, in my view, some of which can be found here, here, here, here and here, as well as in the comments to all those posts. One needn’t agree with Tremblay’s definition of hierarchy or with what he derives from it in order to find valuable explorations of social theory here.

Francois continues to push boundaries in his second submission, “I know what’s best for people”:

The Anarchist view is that our institutions and rules must be grounded in the individual’s values: that social morality, like everything else in society, must be a bottom-up system. In contrast, the ruling class imposes the concept of “law” in order to justify its coercive control over society.

An extremely important point, and one which ought to be shouted constantly at those who would seize control of whatever illegitimate coercive apparatus is at hand in order to try to impose their own vision of a “shining city on a hill” upon the rest of us. Looking at this from an agorist perspective, we might say that there is a tendency where if the values forced upon people do not comport with those of the individuals subjected to them, then the power of black and gray markets will increase. Or, as Princess Leia told the Governor: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Hosting the carnival gives me a little bit of power, which of course begs to be abused. In that spirit, I present also two things that I wrote this past month: Agorism and ancap panarchy – a response to an Obama voter, and The Golden Rule is insufficient.

Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

Hat tip to Wally Conger, who has a second part posted that I refuse to look at.

From the name Abraham we get the term “Abrahamic religion“, a catch-all for all those faiths which trace their historicity to Abraham. Abrahamic religion is one of the cornerstones of the dominant social and psychological paradigm across great expanses of the globe and among billions of human beings today.

The story of Abraham and Isaac always really bothered me. Let’s take a look at Genesis 22 (yes, all of it, from the New American Bible translation):

Some time after these events, God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, “Abraham!”

“Ready!” he replied.

Then God said: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.”

Early the next morning Abraham saddled his donkey, took with him his son Isaac, and two of his servants as well, and with the wood that he had cut for the holocaust, set out for the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham got sight of the place from afar. Then he said to his servants: “Both of you stay here with the donkey, while the boy and I go on over yonder. We will worship and then come back to you.” Thereupon Abraham took the wood for the holocaust and laid it on his son Isaac’s shoulders, while he himself carried the fire and the knife.

As the two walked on together, Isaac spoke to his father Abraham. “Father!” he said.

“Yes, son,” he replied.

Isaac continued, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?”

“Son,” Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.” Then the two continued going forward.

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. Next he tied up his son Isaac, and put him on top of the wood on the altar. Then he reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the LORD’S messenger called to him from heaven, “Abraham, Abraham!”

“Yes, Lord,” he answered.

“Do not lay your hand on the boy,” said the messenger. “Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son.“

As Abraham looked about, he spied a ram caught by its horns in the thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it up as a holocaust in place of his son. Abraham named the site Yahweh-yireh; hence people now say, “On the mountain the LORD will see.”

Again the LORD’S messenger called to Abraham from heaven and said: “I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you acted as you did in not withholding from me your beloved son, I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing–all this because you obeyed my command.”

Abraham then returned to his servants, and they set out together for Beer-sheba, where Abraham made his home. Some time afterward, the news came to Abraham: “Milcah too has borne sons, to your brother Nahor: Uz, his first-born, his brother Buz, Kemuel (the father of Aram), Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel.” Bethuel became the father of Rebekah. These eight Milcah bore to Abraham’s brother Nahor. His concubine, whose name was Reumah, also bore children: Tebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Maacah.

What lessons shall the child absorb and internalize, hearing this story retold in solemn tones by those he trusts, loves or depends on?

Invisible ghost speaks addresses man, and man responds “Ready!” — thou shalt obey the invisible

Invisible ghost commands man to commit atrocity against his own family, to violate not only Isaac’s nature but his own. Does Abraham question? Hardly. Abraham speaks nary a word, but sets out meekly in compliance with his invisible master’s order. — submit

Abraham lies to his servants by allowing the collective pronoun “we” was in “we will come back to you”, nevermind the horrors implicit in the idea that a man shall have servants. — servitude is fine for some

Next, Abraham lies to his trusting child, and points to an invisible ghost as the solution to his questioning. — lying for your invisible ghosts is okay

Next, Isaac submits to being bound by his father and condemned to death. A clearer expression of the horror contained in the commandment “honor thy father and thy mother” would be difficult to find. — ’nuff said

Then the invisible ghost comes along and says: “Just kidding!” Does Abraham object or rebel? Hardly, he waits for the next command. Does Isaac, the sacrificial lamb, say anything? Nary a word. — honor thy masters even when they deceive you

Invisible ghost, now playing good cop, praises Abraham for his blind obedience, and REWARDS him! — the ends justify the means?

Never mind its ahistoricity, anyone of conscience ought to burn their Bible after finishing Genesis 22, and condemn the behavior found therein.

Continuing on some themes I’ve set out before: Damn your holy books, damn your obedience, damn your culture. And fuck Jehovah.

And we haven’t even mentioned how this sick fucker sent his own son to be killed by his own agents to prove a point… maybe we’ll come back to that later.

In the spirit of doing only the best things possible for mothers and babies, ACOG and the AMA are now pushing to eliminate a terrible danger to babies and mothers alike: home birth.

Eamon greets the world, at home. Image from chrisandjenni @ flickr.com

Now, babies have been born at home, or in fields or forests or any number of other places for millions of years. I even had the pleasure recently of meeting a young woman who was born on a train in Russia. The distinction between “hospital, medical” birth and anything else is a rather modern invention. Just a hundred years ago in the West, and even today across huge portions of the planet, children were always born at home. Birthing carries risks for both mother and child, and sometimes medical intervention is needed to save lives. In many parts of the world, the expertise and facilities aren’t always there.

From ABC News:

Are Home Births Dangerous?

AMA Says Women Should Use a Hospital — Some Doctors Disagree

The American Medical Association has agreed to support proposed legislation that, some physicians say, could make make having a planned birth in one’s home difficult, to virtually impossible.

As of now, no actual legislation has been drawn up, but the AMA has agreed to back a measure called “Resolution 205,” a request to support the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) position that home births are not safe.

“We are against home births, period,” said Gregory Phillips, an ACOG spokesman.

What does Resolution 205 say?

RESOLVED, That our AMA develop model legislation in support of the concept that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex, that meets standards jointly outlined by the AAP and ACOG, or in a freestanding birthing center that meets the standards of the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, The Joint Commission, or the American Association of Birth Centers.” (Directive to Take Action)

Jennifer Block, writing for the LA Times, rightly questions what’s going on here:

The AMA’s statement calls for legislation that could be used against women who choose home birth, possibly resulting in criminal child-abuse or neglect charges. The group says this is about safety, but with no credible research to back up its claim, this argument falls flat. Women are simply caught in a turf war over the maternity market, and it would appear that the physicians’ groups are perfectly willing to trample the modern medical ethic of patient autonomy — grounded in our legal rights to self-determination, to liberty and to privacy — in their grab for control.

Block’s op-ed makes a lot of good points, and asks a very cogent question: “Why do U.S. doctors strong-arm women into our standard maternity care system?”

ACOG, the AMA and other organizations like them are, effectively guilds in the medieval sense. Guild membership or approval is required to practice the guildsmen’s trade, manifest in all sort of licensing and education requirements that these groups have managed to write into law with the “objective” criteria for inclusion or exclusion of any given would-be practitioner being left up to those who have already passed whatever arbitrary bar for inclusion they have set, and backed up by the unlimited violence that is the state. That organizations such as these serve to limit the supply of medical services and thereby increase costs to patients while enriching their members has been analyzed in great detail elsewhere.

Born free, born at home. Everett with mom. lobo235 @ flickr.com

Quibbling a bit about how the mechanics of guild exclusionism get written into US law, I doubt that mothers would be penalized for choosing to give birth at home. No, what AMA and ACOG are really after here is the criminalization of midwives, and especially those who aren’t members of the various AMA-approved midwifery guilds or who haven’t passed stringent certification requirements. The guilds don’t give a damn about unlicensed midwives’ patients. What they care about is limiting the supply of childbirth-assistance services, to the benefit of their members’ profits.

ABC’s headline, “Are Home Births Dangerous?”, really might be better written as “What Penalty Should Home-Birthing Mothers and Midwives Face?” AMA/ACOG are calling for legislation. There will be fines and disincentives, penalties and prison terms, police raids and prosecutions, all against midwives practicing a skilled trade that has existed for thousands of years.

But the penalty for violating statist law is always death. Deconstructed, what we see is the physicians’ and obstetricians’ guilds calling for non-guild midwives to be killed for practicing their trade.

Now how is that good for mothers or babies?

From the New York Times:

To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring

[...]

Instead of juvenile detention, Jaime was selected by a judge to be enrolled in a pilot program at Bryan Adams in which chronically truant students are monitored electronically. Since Jaime started carrying the Global Positioning System unit April 1, he has had perfect attendance.

“I’m just glad they didn’t take him to jail,” said Jaime’s grandmother Diana Mendez, who raised him. “He’s a good kid. He was just on a crooked path.”

[...]

Truancy experts say the results in Texas are promising.

“It’s far better than locking a kid up,” and is cheaper, said Joanna Heilbrunn, a senior researcher for the National Center for School Engagement.

[...]

Dave Leis, a spokesman for NovaTracker, which makes the system used in Dallas, said electronic monitoring did not have to be punitive. “You can paint this thing as either Big Brother, or this is a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate.”

UPDATE:

Happening in Maryland as well. From the Washington Post:

[...]

During the same session, some lawmakers in Prince George’s proposed strapping ankle bracelets on students to electronically monitor the whereabouts of those who constantly skip school. That bill did not advance.

BZZZZ!

(In Slovak)

Me: Yes?

They: Good day, sir, this is the police, may we come in?

Me: Why?

They: We are looking for so-and-so, may we come in?

Me: I don’t know so-and-so.

They: Well, could you open the door so that we could come in and look for him?

Me: No, I think not.

They: Thank you, good day.

And then in the hallway, from the apartment next to mine: BZZZZ!

Now, the Slovak police are no saints, but coming as I do from the land of Rodney King, the no-knock raid/search and routine subjection of children to electro-shock torture, the level of politeness and relative lack of insistence was refreshing.