People who cherish their lives are egoists, and therefore normative and good and decent people. But where does the blessing come from? At one time, it came from Jefferson, Madison, and their cohorts who gave us the legal "blessing" to be ourselves and find the best way to honor our own lives and the lives of those we cherished.
Today, the Originalist readers of that wonderful document called the Constitution of the United States are harassed as being behind the times. The only "blessing" we get from the progressive thinkers is the blessing of higher taxes to pay for enlargement of government and in the process for the shrinking of our liberties.
The Founders believed that God had blessed the U.S. and given all mankind a place to peacefully find a place to pursue his or her own happiness. Now, if it was God, he has either forsaken the idea of a place to seek our own happiness; or he has condemned us for choosing leaders who routinely destroy the Tenth Amendment. [For Tenth Amendment references seeAand B.]
"Whereas, The scope of power defined by the Tenth Amendment means that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and
Whereas, Today, in 2009, the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government..."
"In case you didn't hear about it on the mainstream media (which you haven't because they want to keep us asleep), numerous states are currently declaring sovereignty, including: http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message720700/pg1
Here is that portion from the Michigan "Journal of the House of Representatives, 95th Legislature, Regular Session of 2009":
[all emphasis added for the purposes of this blog] Rep. Opsommer offered the following concurrent resolution: House Concurrent Resolution No. 4. A concurrent resolution to affirm Michigan’s sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and to urge the federal government to halt its practice of imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution of the United States. Whereas, The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"; and Whereas, The Tenth Amendment defines the total scope of federal power as being that specifically granted by the Constitution of the United States and no more; and Whereas, The scope of power defined by the Tenth Amendment means that the federal government was created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states; and Whereas, Today, in 2009, the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government; and Whereas, Many federal mandates are directly in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States; and Whereas, The United States Supreme Court has ruled in New York v. United States, 112 S. Ct. 2408 (1992), that Congress may not simply commandeer the legislative and regulatory processes of the states; and Whereas, A number of proposals from previous administrations and some now pending from the present administration and from Congress may further violate the Constitution of the United States; now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That we hereby affirm Michigan’s sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States. We also urge the federal government to halt its practice of imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution of the United States; and be it further Resolved, That copies of this resolution be transmitted to the Office of the President of the United States, the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and the members of the Michigan congressional delegation. The concurrent resolution was referred to the Committee on Government Operations.
"[These States] have seen fit to reaffirm their sovereignty and make various demands to the Federal government in recent months. At the same time, the Federal government saw fit to recall soldiers from Iraq to post them on American soil waiting to be deployed to quell disorder, and are now coming out about their labor camps and forced civilian labor programs.
"Coincidence?
"Seems to me that in tough economic times you can expect to see civil unrest, rioting and even armed resistance. Especially when fascism increases right along side the economic collapse. Perhaps it would be best to draw out the "homegrown terrorists" before the general population is upset enough to be willing to listen to them and even stand beside them. Perhaps the government figures you'd be willing to actively rebel prematurely if you think your state government will support your efforts. Perhaps the government wants to appear weak and unable to cope with you so that they can take you out've the game before they really can't handle you." Circle of 13
It seems to this blogger that States rights as they were designed are finally being recognized once again, in light of the fact that for over a century "the states are demonstrably treated as agents of the federal government," and that "the total scope of federal power [is] that specifically granted by the Constitution of the United States and [was] created by the states specifically to be an agent of the states."
It seems that Originalism in the reading of the Constitution is once again in vogue. Let us hope that, one by one, the States retreat from the fascism of the rule of Washington.
But let us also hope they do not retreat into their own State regimes of collectivism and ignore that the "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
When there are Muslims in America who have publicly spoken out against Jihad, why was Ingrid Mattson chosen for this interfaith prayer service?
Today, Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), will deliver a prayer at the National Prayer Service, invited by President Obama. It is sufficiently problematic that ISNA, the organization of which Ingrid Mattson is president, was designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial (which produced guilty verdicts on 108 counts). Mattson’s words and views beg the question: When there are Muslims in America who have publicly spoken out against Jihad, against shariah law, and against ISNA, why was Ingrid Mattson chosen for this interfaith prayer service?
In her own words:
"[C]onsider the role of American Muslims in the [specific] context of world events following the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I will acknowledge that since Muslim leadership must be responsive to events, this question cannot be answered completely in isolation of specific circumstances. The appropriate response will necessarily depend on the nature of the threat. At the same time, I will stress that any truly appropriate response must be firmly rooted in faith. [ ] People of faith have a certain kind of solidarity with others of their faith community that transcends the basic rights and duties of citizenship."
She did not author this in an article titled "Stopping Our Muslim Extremist Brothers." Instead, it was titled Stopping Oppression: an Islamic Obligation. Guess what "oppression" she meant.
In a reasoned "translation" of Mattson's words: the "role" of American Muslims must be judged in a "context" of events that happened after 9/11; cannot be judged "in isolation of specific circumstances; and must be rooted in faith with other Muslims, a faith that takes no note of the rights and duties of being Americans first. Instead, American Muslims "role" must be in solidarity with others of their "faith community."
Forget that American Jews, Catholics, Coptics, Hindus, atheists, Southern Babtists and others came together in a solidarity that specifically transcended their own congregational communities. Instead, they came together in the brotherhood and spirit that comes with having our rights and citizenship guaranteed.
"The true values of America are those which we decide to embrace as our own [because] the American Constitution, like foundational religious texts, can be read in many different ways."
Again, to translate: Muslims can pick and choose which American values to call "true" and then may decided to embrace only those, because they can read anything into the Constitution they wish.
She is wrong when she says the Constitution can be read in many different ways. There are only two ways: Originalism, and non-Originalism which covers everything the Founding Fathers wrote were not the intentions of that document and does not cover most of the things they wrote were the specific intentions of that document. Justifications for following non-Originalism are usually for the purposes of pragmatism, which obviously would serve the Muslim community as it picked-and-chose only the parts of the law they found served the ideas of Sharia, of Shura, of takaful insurance, or of anything else associated with Islam; but specifically nothing that does not serve Allah.
Mattson denies the existence of terrorist cells in the United States: "There's a prejudgment, a collective judgment of Muslims, and a suspicion that well 'you may appear nice, but we know there are sleeper cells of Americans,' which of course is not true. There aren't any sleeper cells.[emphasis added]
Mattson defends Wahhabism. All unbelievers (i.e. Muslims who do not accept the teachings of 'Abd ul-Wahhab, as well as Christians, &c.) were to be put to death. Immediate entrance into Paradise was promised to his soldiers who fell in battle, and it is said that each soldier was provided with a written order from Wahhab to the gate-keeper of heaven to admit him forthwith.Wahhabi
"This is not a sect. It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European protestant reformation." Center for Security Policy (Research Brief)
Forget that shura is cultural practices and sharia is a rigid and merciless practice of Muslim justice.
When there are Muslims in America who have publicly spoken out against Jihad, against shariah law, and against ISNA, why was Ingrid Mattson chosen for this interfaith prayer service?
"We think experience has proved it safer for the mass of individuals composing the society to reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent..." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.
The "mass" of individuals is what the framers of the Constitution called "We, the People," and wrote that the Constitution was "to provide for the common Defense" and to "promote the general Welfare."
Never did the Founders dream that what was "common" among them--their defense, their promotion of security, their lives, their liberties, and their pursuit of happiness--would congeal under the nationalism of Federal laws into something called "the common good."
They could not have conceived it, because they could not conceive that the individualism promoted by securing a nation would be turned on its head, turned into the denial of individualism in order to promote the security of everyone but the individual.
The "common good" is nothing but the result of either democracy by majority in which that majority overwhelms the minority rather than protecting it; or it is the republicanism of our representative government becoming the majority. Once case in point is how Washington ignored the people's wishes in this bail-out mess. Poll after poll demonstrated how Americans were against the bail-out, repeatedly telling Washington to let the free market fix the problems caused by Washington.
The people knew there would be hard times. The people know that harder times are now to come because Washingon ignored their pleas to let the banks fail and to let Detroit fail. Why are the harder times to come?
A senator on live TV was heard to say just yesterday that all this debt that the Federal government has taken on in the name of the economic security of the people, will be paid for by the generation now being born and by the children born of that generation.
But what of the debt we must incur before the first-born generation of indebted children can begin to pay off our debts? That will be at least twenty years, if not forty. In that amount of time there will be literally quadrillions, not just trillions, more dollars spent in the red. Then it will be up to the third, forth, even the fifth generations to come to pay off that debt. How will they do it?
They will not be able to pay it off until it is recognized that the free market, when allowed to fail, will heal itself. That is the purpose of capitalism. No capitalist ever thought he should not "try, try again," except in the case of bureaucratic roadblocks and "progressive" taxes that took from him when he made money the very profits needed to make more money.
"Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted." “The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness; Ayn Rand
Since individuals may do anything whatsoever that does not violate the rights of others, keeping his profits is within his own rights. Proper taxes are those which go to pay for government infrastructure. Improper taxes are the debts incurred by "the people" when government prints even one dollar that is not backed by the security of goods already manufactured. Since Nixon took us off the gold standard, and since the dollar is backed only by the Gross National Product (GNP), and since all the manufactured money for the bailout is credit in the name of the hope of future production that can back up the debt, such credit is immoral of any government to print, and should be illegal if it is not already.
What is missing from the Constitution is a provision such as the one below, a provision that explicitly states the derived nature of "individual sovereignty" in order to prevent our government from acting in the name of the "people" when the "people" is merely the "mass of individuals," not some organic whole made of everyone now living and yet to be born for generations.
"Reserved to each Citizen of the several States, and to each citizen of the United States, the unalienable and rightful powers of said Citizens as defined by Natural Law shall not be abridged except to conform where necessary to the functioning of the common sovereignty of said Citizens. 'Natural Law' shall be defined as the right of action by any and all individuals when those actions do not violate the same right of action of any other individual. 'Common sovereignty' shall be defined as those minimal powers deemed necessary for the maintenance of a democratically operated republican government to establish justice, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. 'General Welfare' shall be defined as the mitigating powers of the common sovereignty over individual sovereignty. 'Liberty' shall be defined as the unalienable and rightful powers of each individual Citizen as is given at birth by the fruits of nature and of nature's god, except where mitigated by the common sovereignty, which mitigation shall constitute the general Welfare."
This provision would do much to restore American law and jurisprudence to the Originalist position. From there, changes could be made to the Constitution where "the mass of individuals" saw a need for it. The "exercise of all rightful powers" is the right of every individual under any doctrine of natural law. "The exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent..." is a matter of prudence and justice under the law of men. We are engaged as a nation in the politics of pragmatism, which is neither prudent, nor just, denying the exercise of any rightful power because to deny one is to deny the principle that makes all of them "rightful."
Note: I am withdrawing my membership in the Center for Inquiry. It's liberalism, it's humanism, and its subjectivity are beyond the pale, when considering such items as this, from CFI Chigago:
The Center For Inquiry/Chicago is pleased to present: Re-Framing the Educational Debate: Teaching and Freedom with Guest Presenter Dr. William Ayers
Not only is this the very same Ayers at the center of controversy in the Obama for President debate, the CFI Chigago, after listing his many academic milestones and failing to mention his domestic terrorism background, has only this comment to make: "He is an inspiration to a generation of young teachers."
The Center for Inquiry seems to have no standards for their behavior or their moral choices for investigation of any subject except that of secularity. Secularity is not a moral choice. It is the division of one's life--or the life of an organization--into the religious and the non-religious, or the outright rejection of religiosity; and it is the separation of church of state.
I reject outright any faith and religiosity in my life; but I also reject the presentation in the name of "secularity" of terrorists as legitimate objects of veneration, respect, and inspiritation.
Last Saturday I wrote that the politics of Original Intent that were practiced by Senator Barry Goldwater in his race for the Republican nomination of 1964, are not the politics of Washington as we know it today. Originalism is not respected by those who see necessity in specific government programs which defy strict Constitutionalism.
The politics of pragmatism has become the standard, practiced by both Republicans and Democrats. Pragmatic politics sees necessity as the trump card, whether or not American supreme law supports it. I do not deny that many things are "necessary," and can be implemented by governments without reverting to any form of collectivism.
But in order to implement necessary policies and programs that are pragmatic rather than Constitutional, the Constitution must be changed. That is what the Founders said. That is the mechanism the Founders gave us in the Law. What is so hard for pragmatists to understand about that mechanism?
Bush the Pragmatic decided an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would be better than a Middle East that remained inclusive of him. He started an unnecessary war, a divisive war, a war based on perfectly incompetent intelligence reports.
Bush the Pragmatic decided that limiting the individual sovereignty of Americans through the coercive, and therefor mis-named "Patriot Act", was a better means of advancing the "common" good rather than the Constitutionally provided-for "individual" good.
("We, the People," meant specifically "We, the Individuals collectively called 'the People.'" Among others of the Founders who wrote or spoke of such individual sovereignty, we have these words of Jefferson:
("We think experience has proved it safer for the mass of individuals composing the society [i.e., all the individuals collectively] to reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent and to delegate those to which they are not competent to deputies named and removable for unfaithful conduct by themselves immediately." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816.)
Bush the Pragmatic decided it was better to save the "Barney Frank Democrats" who led us down this thorn-and-shard-laden housing financing debacle. That debacle led to the "me too" attitude of banks that had been allowed to become "too big to allow to fail"; the hands-out attitude of the Motor City who couldn't keep up with the smarter looking and better selling cars made by the Asians and Europeans. There is a one year waiting list in the U.S. for the Nano Car manufactured by the Indian company the Tata Group.
And of course, there are the "me too hands" held out for Federal funding by the states and cities across America.
Bush the Pragmatic, who never opted for the "redistribution of wealth", opened the door for the wealth redistributing Obama the Pragmatic.
It appears that many local governments are going to get their palms greased.
It is, of course, pragmatic to destroy the capital value upon which this nation was built, and to destroy that very wealth by taking from those who have it and giving it to those who do not--so that those who do not get some of it whether or not they know how to create more wealth with it so it can be redistributed again; or whether they merely know how to spend it before coming looking for more to be redistributed in their direction.
Either way, pragmatic redistribution "stimulates" the economy, like a cattle prod "stimulates" a cow, with a sting worse than Muhammad Ali's fist to your face. The purpose of the sub-prime lending was to make the Democrats look good through the stimulation of the economy by lending. The "sting" was that those to whom sub-prime loans were given could not afford them or they would not have needed sub-prime rates.
Though Obama stated that his team members share his "'pragmatism about the use of power' in foreign policy," Dr. Tara Smith, speaking for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, said Democratics and Republican presidents disagree vehemently about foreign policy and "all manner of moral and political issues, [and] that the way forward is always through moderation and compromise. [But] pragmatism, from either the Left or the Right, is inherently self-destructive and a threat to Americans." [emphasis added] CapMag.Com
What makes for pragmatic politics? In these times when non-Originalism is the order of the day, "anything that goes" and which seems to fill a need is pragmatic. Non-Originalism is the idea that no written Constitution can anticipate all the methods by which government could use--after the law was written--to oppress people, so it is sometimes necessary for judges to make decisions based on other laws with similar intents, and the precedents set by interpretation of those laws.
Judge Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. Bork is a an Originalist. His nomination was scuttled by Democrats who didn't like his former involvement in Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre," nor by some of his controversial opinons.
(Neither do I. But, putting that aside,) his case, in part, for Originalism is solid as rock: "If the Constitution is law, then presumably, like all other law, the meaning the lawmakers intended is as binding upon judges as it is upon legislatures and executives. There is no other sense in which the Constitution can be what article VI proclaims it to be: Law....
"This means, of course, that a judge, no matter on what court he sits, may never create new constitutional rights or destroy old ones." [citation]
"Pragmatism is about how well things work in practice, not how they should work in theory. [But] we present evidence that non-originalist judicial decision making has, in fact, done a good job of enhancing social welfare, as measured by popular ap-proval of the Court’s decisions. " [emphais added]THERE IS NOTHING PRAGMATIC ABOUT ORIGINALISMDavid S. Law & David McGowan
This "good job" measurement is pragmatism defined. But Goldwater, the Conservative's hero of Heros said this in the long, honorable tradition of Originalism:
"I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible." [emphasis added] Barry Goldwater Quotes
This policy is the measurement of someone who believes in a nation of laws, as Bork spoke about, not of a nation of men who proceed to find things that are necessary--as the bailouts may have been, but which are un-Constitutional.
Respecting the Constitutional individual sovereignty of each member of "We, the People" would preclude taking from he who has in order to give to he who has not. Such redistribution is neither in the letter of the law, nor in the spirit of the law. Pragmatism is not about law; it about results irrespective of law.
I just joined--with a donation--a new organization called the Conservative Society for Action. There is only one reason I did this. The site's sidebar contains quotes from none other than, and no one but, Senator Barry Goldwater.
The conservative lineage CSA claims to follow--as demonstrated by the pictures at the top of the page--are Thomas Paine; Thomas Jefferson; Robert Taft, "the first to fight 'New Deal' Socialism"; Goldwater; and Ronald Reagan, the friend and so-called heir of Goldwater's modern ideology of conservativism.
As the CSA's website makes clear, Goldwater was out to protect the Constitition, quoting him with statements such as: "I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible"; and: "It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden."
This is clearly not the conservatism of Washington in the Twenty-First Century. In fact, in was only by the barest standards that Reagan, the "hero" of modern conservativism, can be said to have furthered Goldwater's Originalist politics. He was the best President of the Twentieth Century, but Goldwater had the potential to be a game changer, taking the Constitution back to its originalist roots.
Stephen Flanagan of the National Defense University, founder of the CSA, has it right when he states, "Obama's win means nothing! Capital Hill is the enemy! [ ] As I said before the election, Obama won't really come through on his campaign promises because that would end up hurting HIM. [ ] But here's the REAL danger... The Liberals in this country now control 4 out of the 5 centers of political power. [ ] There's one more item on their checklist and that is the Supreme Court. By the time Obama's presidency is over, they likely will have that too. Five out of Five for the first time in American history."
But as modern conservativism goes, Nixon, not Goldwater, was the next Republican President. Leaving all Nixon's scandals aside, his disastrous (and traitorous) act of taking America off the gold standard eliminates him from rationally conservative status. He unilaterally cancelled the Breton Woods Agreements signed by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations, which adopted the gold standard as the only objective measurement of a nation's wealth. A nation's wealth is now tied only to its "good name," its economic strength, in world market comparisons.
Gerald Ford was a popular centrist in the House of Representatives, but after becoming President when Nixon resigned, he showed none of the strength of that Goldwater lineage. Had he shown any such strengths, he probably still would have lost to Jimmy Carter. Goldwater's radical defense of liberty frightened many Americans who saw him as a hawk who would take us to war against the Communist enemy.
More than likely Goldwater's international policies of strength, and his domestic policies making each American more economically wealthy and thus independent of government charity, thereby enriching the Treasury, would have broken the economic back of the Soviets two decades before Reagan was able to accomplish the same thing when he challenged the Soviets to keep up with our military spending.
Goldwater had objective standards. Reagan had objective goals, but his policies were strictly pragmatic, lowering taxes for the purpose of reaping higher levels of revenue from smaller percentages; America grows wealthy and even lower taxes will have the effect of providing a larger budget. But Reagan also blew the budget, and he left America deeply in debt. Pragmatism is not conservatism, but when used for the purposes of strengthening both our economy and our national defenses, pragmatic Presidents become heroic.
What Ayn Rand wrote about Barry Goldwater could have been written about Reagan, (although she was angered by Reagan's religious conservatism, especially his opposition to abortion based on the idea that the separation of church and state did not apply when in reference to a fertilized egg, a zygote, or a fetus undeveloped enough to live on its own.) She wrote:
"Barry Goldwater is singularly devoid of power lust. Even his antagonists admit it with grudging respect. He is seeking, not to rule, but to liberate a country."
The CSA says its first priorities are these: ACT to Repeal the Community Reinvestment Act! ACT to Impeach Barney Frank! ACT to Defeat Card Check Legislation ACT to Stop the Flow of U.S. Oil Dollars Going to Hostile Countries ACT to Stop Congressional Censorship of the Broadcast Media.
To read the reasons behind each of the ACT links is to understand something of the nature of Goldwater's goals. Unfortunately I see no overall philosophical basis for each ACTion that CSA seeks to perform. They are worthy actions, necessary actions, and yes, conservative actions.
But the problem with conservativism is that it does not lay out a black-and-white philosophical strategy, as Goldwater did. Goldwater frightened many Americans because unlike any other candidate since Abraham Lincoln he had an unwavering plan.
The conservatives cannot allow themselves to appear to have the luxury of a black-and-white, unwavering plan. That it is not a luxury but absolutely necessary to break the back of the growing menace of the overpowering, power-hungry federal machine and its leaders is a fact.
"If a [politician] evades, equivocates and hides his stand under a junk-heap of random concretes, we must add up those concretes and judge him accordingly," Rand wrote. "If his stand is mixed, we must evaluate it by asking: Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?"
Whether or not Flanagan and his staff and the general membership of CSA can ACT with Goldwater-like reserve, and with Jefferson and Paine's committment to individual sovereignty, remains to be seen. Flanagan has the background. Now let's see if he has the vision and the rationality to take on Capital Hill with the balls that are necessary to make him an enemy of the state.
"I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom," Flanagan quotes Goldwater. But Goldwater also said, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." Extremism of any sort is frowned upon now, because the Religious Right is extreme but so are the Islamicists. Goldwater's extremism was his downfall even in 1964.
Flanagan has the credentials to be an extremist. Let's see if he has the credentials to sell the extreme position that the Constitution must be adhered to, and sees to it, with membership help, to destroy Goldwater's idea of "necessary but un-Constitutional" legislation.
We are living in very dangerous times for American freedom. It does not come primarily from overt acts of terrorism, such as 9/11. It comes from "stealth jihad", the practice of getting the federal government to either approve of sharia practices in America, like Takaful insurance, or to ignore the practice of forcing sharia principles in the workplace, as Islamacists did at a meat processing plant.
Christians should be worried because they have not had as much progress as Muslims, in their own endeavor of breaking down the walls of the separation of church and state, to get the government to either approve of, or to ignore, the practice of Christian principles. The U.S. wouldn't want to make the Muslims angry, would it, at this time in history, so the living Constitution, rather than the original Constitution, twists the Supreme Law to accomodate them.
Because the secularity of the Constitutional rights of America are not being protected by whatever particular authorities have the power to do so, such as the court system or Congress or State Attorneys General, there is a power vacuum between the People, who deserve justice, and the powers-that-be who are not willing--or who claim to be unable--to stop such Constitutional erosion.
The Constitution has eroded measurably since the end of the Civil War, and no one seems willing or able to stand up and say so. Just the opposite is happening: we have Amendments to State's Constitutions that have the sole purpose of denying rights, and we have a new incoming President who is running full-steam-ahead with the Marxist economic football under his arm.
But these are things Americans have lived with for decades or more, watching the Constitution being torn down from inside the country. We deal with it, though obviously not effectively because the erosion is like that on a mountain side with constant rain upon it and little protection from trees and undergrowth. The Constitution is going to landslide if the rain is not stopped.
Stealth jihad, however, is something new, and something the American people will not stand for--once they realize the severity of the situation. In the vacuum of official worry over sharia-compliance under the Constitution, Americans will soon come to find that sharia Muslims have powers which the Constitution can not give to Christians, Jews, atheists, and others, and that is the power to enforce their beliefs on society where ever justice fails society.
"Take special note of the shariah-compliant supervisory board at AIG," warns Act for America. "Muhammed Imran Usmani is the son and disciple of Muhammed Taki Usmani. The elder Usmani is a 'who’s who' in the Islamist world and an outspoken proponent of aggressive jihad. For example, he has issued numerous fatwas (religious rulings) that provide material support for terrorism.
"The danger of American financial institutions getting in bed with well-known advocates of jihad and terrorism should be obvious to anyone who takes even a cursory look. It was Lenin who stated 'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.'"
In this case we are not selling the jihadists the rope; we are condeding that they have a right to make us give them rope at our own expense. We concede their right to the rope because we are unwilling to admit that we need to take an Originalist view of the Constitution. To take such a view would cause irreparable harm to the socialism and the anti-individualism already rampant in this country.
But here is the point of this piece: in the vacuum of official power to uphold the Constitition and the Supreme Court rulings on Originalism, such as the acceptance of Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state," some Americans are going to fill that vacuum with guns and bombs, and they will use them on any Muslim targets they see.
These Americans will be seen as "domestic terrorists," by officialdom, but they will be seen as heros by the Originalists and libertarians and conservatives and others who understand that stealth jihadism is just as insidious and evil as the things we are fighting against in the "war on terror," in our two wars are, in our efforts at Homeland Security.
The problem is, no one in officialdom is securing the homeland against legal attacks on our Constitution from within our own borders. That is partly what is stealthy about this form of jihadism; the sharia-believing Muslims don't have to use bombs against us. They can use against us our own ignorance of how much Constitutional integrity we have already lost, our stupidity, and our compassion to be fair.
Something will have to give, and if officialdom in America does not stop the sharia erosion of the separation of church and state, then some Americans are going to see that guns and bombs will, at the least, stop the jihadists--and possibly the officials--who are converting Americans into virtual Muslims by forcing us to accept that those officials are going to protect sharia Muslims as they have never protected any other form of religious practice in this country.
I would be the first to applaud those who use the guns and bombs against sharia. Those people would be the real heros, not people like me who sit behind a computer screen and tell the rest of America how far we are falling.
But it would be a wasted effort to use guns and bombs, which is why I won't do it myself. It would be wasted because officialdom is hell-bent on twisting the Constitution to their own egalitarian purposes, from the new President on down, and backward for fifteen decades.
A little domestic terrorism is only going to create domestic terrorists. Officialdom will not protect them, and they will be the losers, not the sharia Muslims.
President-elect Obama continuously made "promises" in the early months of his run for the Democratic candidacy that "change" was the operative word. Yet over and over Mr. Obama keeps hiring old-hands in the Washington circle, from his Chief of Staff, to Hillary Clinton, and now this:
"Among the throng of Clinton regime retreads recruited for the Obama administration we find Gregory Craig. Craig served as Obama's advisor on Latin American (sic) during the campaign, and was appointed last week as chief White House Counsel.
"The MSM has mentioned Craig's role as Bill Clinton's impeachment lawyer, but mostly has omitted mention of Craig's role as chief facilitator for Fidel Castro's shanghaiing of Elian Gonzalez.
"In an interview with Tim Russert on June,6, 2000, Gregory Craig explained his motivation for accepting the case: 'What I want to do is to set Juan Miguel free. I want the father to make a decision uncoerced from Havana, uncoerced from Miami, uncoerced by the press, independently and freely to make a decision where and how he wants to raise his family. That's all I'm concerned about.'
"Unfortunately for Mr. Craig we have an eyewitness to his definition of 'uncoercion.' [ ] During the taping of Dan Rather's 60 Minutes interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez in April 2000, [ ] Juan Miguel was never completely alone...He never smiled. His eyes kept shifting back and forth. It was obvious [ ] that he was under coercion. He was always surrounded by security agents from the Cuban Interest Section, as they called it. When these agents left him alone for a few seconds, Gregory Craig himself would be hovering over Juan Miguel." American Thinker
On November 14 this blog pointed out that "If Obama is as Marxist as he appears to be when he speaks and [when he] has his positions published, e.g., when he talks of 'windfall profits,' and 'redistributing' profits from the capitalists to the consumers, he has no intention of [Constitutional] Originalism in his political philosophy (except perhaps where it may serve his own policies; we shall have to wait to see.)
This blog also pointed out why "Originalism, or original intent reading, of the Constitution is necessary. It is the only objective means of determining the qualities of the written law and the relationships between those qualities and what the Framers intented." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/11/originalism-and-obama.html
On November 8 I wrote, "But the point is, everything Obama has said he would do with the economy will only make it less free, less capitalistic, and more taxable, speaking in terms of wealth-spreading. (His words.)
"If I understand his ideas of making NAFTA more fair--in other words, removing any incentives government may have previously offered to business who move work out of the U.S.--then I agree whole heartedly. If his idea is to punish businesses who move out, then I disagree."
In several of Obama's campaign ads, and in interviews and debates, did Obama not say in one form or another that businesses who out-source to other nations must pay some form of consequences?
Then there is socialized, nationalized, insurance:
"One of the many challenges President-elect Barack Obama will face is healthcare reform. It was a centerpiece of his campaign, and the American people expect action. Healthcare reform proposals generally fall into two camps: Those that rely on government to expand access and hold prices down, and those that rely on market competition to lower prices and expand consumer choice. Obama resides firmly in the first camp, so government-heavy reform seems inevitable. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said recently the time is right for 'Medicare for All.' But the track record for state-run health care is abysmal." Canadian doctors fled to the U.S. in order to be able to practice freely; where will our doctors go? DC Examiner Op Ed from the Pacific Research Institute
Obama has made plain he even intends to influence the way college football is played.
"Barack Obama has revealed his first major policy initiative: college football reform. In Obama's first televised interview since winning the presidency, he explained what's wrong with the current system, in which computers help determine the two teams that play for the national championship. "I think any sensible person would say that if you've got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses—there's no clear decisive winner—that we should be creating a playoff system," Obama said. "I don't know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I'm gonna throw my weight around a little bit. I think it's the right thing to do."
And I just heard him say on TV in a loud, forceful tone of voice over the roar of adoring crowds before his election, that "We're going to change this country and we're going to change this world."
I hope Mr. Obama does not learn to speak softly; I want every idea he espouses to be transparent, though he seems to keep many things to himself and expresses few details as to what he really intends. His slip-of-the-tongue with "Joe the Plumber" about the redistribution of wealth let more of his plans out of the bag then I think he ever intended. And I hope he does not learn to carry a big stick when it comes to domestic issues. That would only make him out to be, at best, a fascist.
Yet on his slip of the tongue, despite capitalists and Originalists and other political pundits who are to the right of Obama pointing out the Marxist origins of the phrase "redistribution of wealth," his adoring fans refused to think their hero could actually mean what he said.
Either that, or they don't care, or it is exactly what they want. I hope for the sake of our Constitutional guarantee of individual sovereignty that Obama's fans don't get what they, and he, desire.
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Ontology distinguishes between entities, draws distinctions in their qualities that set them apart from other entities, and qualifies the relationships of those qualities to the qualities of other entities. Entities are defined by their qualities, e.g., the primary distinquishing characteristic of "man" is not his opposable thumb, nor his linquistic ability, since chimps have rudimentary language, and elepephant, whales and other species may also have rudimentary language. The distinguishing characteristic of "man" is "rational animal."
So when I read the November 8 edition of American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/americas_third_republic.htmlI knew the subject was drawing the lines of distinction between the Constitution before and after the administration of FDR, and comparing it to the coming administration of Barak Obama:
"Theodore Lowi, a political science eminence at Cornell University, years ago drew a bead on what was wrong with the American polity. In his The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, he claimed that the Founder's constitution of 1787 had been surreptitiously replaced with a new one by the FDR administration, and no one had actually noticed it for seventy-plus years."
The idea that no one had noticed it is so badly wrong I am surprised Lowi's editors didn't stop him from saying it.
In the blog "No Exit," Fitz Brundage wrote in Opposition to the New Deal that, "the policies of [FDR's] administration inevitably aroused opposition. The evolution of Roosevelt’s New Deal cannot be understood apart from the opposition that it aroused. [A] coalition of conservative opponents emerged and systematically curtailed the most ambitious plans of the New Deal. [ ] By early 1935, the New Deal legislation of the previous two years had aroused growing voices of criticism on the left and right of the political spectrum, and by several important Supreme Court rulings." http://david-sullivan.blogspot.com/2007/09/opposition-to-fdr-and-new-deal.html
Yet it seems as if we have done just that. Harold Kildow argues in the American Thinker about the differences between post-FDR, and the incoming administration of Barak Obama. Kildow says the Constitution post FDR was "Constitution 2.0" and now we may be in for "Constitution 3.0" without anyone ever voting to change the Constitution.
As a matter of fact, it has been an accepted fact of American politics since the publication of Emmerich de Vattel's text, "The Law of Nations" that the legislature does not have the power to change a constitution:
"American writers quoted {The Law of Nations} on constitutional law, almost immediately after the book's publication. [ ] Boston revolutionary leader Samuel Adams wrote in 1772, 'Vattel tells us plainly and without hesitation, that "the supreme legislative cannot change the constitution," that "their authority does not extend so far," and "that they ought to consider the fundamental laws as sacred, if the nation has not, in very express terms, given them power to change them." " http://east_west_dialogue.tripod.com/vattel/id4.html
This is the reason that Originalism, or original intent reading, of the Constitution is necessary. It is the only objective means of determining the qualities of the written law and the relationships between those qualities and what the Framers intented.
The coming administration of Obama will do nothing toward Originalism, and may reverse the the idea, depending on whom Obama is able to nominate to the Supreme Court and get approved in the Democrat-controlled Congress.
Modern liberals and many conservatives believe the contrary of Originalsm. It is called the Living Constitution, and is a concept which proposes the Constitution should be interpreted to evolve with the society that implements it.
The very fact that Originalism is disavowed by American liberals, democrats and others, as the proper method of interpreting the Constitution, and their reasons for that disavowal, is proof positive that we are indeed headed for Constitution 3.0, and the only people taking note of it are Originalists. The rest of the nation sees nothing wrong in impressing our own ideas "between the lines," as it were, of a document meant to be taken literally: Change it if you don't like it. The Founders never said ignore it and do what you will by pretending we meant something we didn't mean at all and wouldn't approve of if we were asked.
But "Originalism does not in any way prevent it from being applied to American law in any decade or any century. The original intent can--and ought--to be applied because that was the intent of those who wrote it. They provided us with the means to change their intentions, and that means was not to ignore their intentions. That means was not to place any meaning on their words that fit our purposes. That means which they provided was to either nullify by Amendment where necessary, or alter by legislation where allowed, the intention of their words." http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/free-assemblage-of-metaphysical.html
If Obama is as Marxist as he appears to be when he speaks and has his positions published, e.g., when he talks of "windfall profits," and "redistributing" profits from the capitalists to the consumers, he has no intention of Originalism in his political philosophy (except perhaps where it may serve his own policies; we shall have to wait to see.)
Neither Obama nor the Democrats are liberals in the originalist meaning of the word. The drafters and signers of the Declaration were such liberals, formed from Renaisssaince thinking, because the original meaning if not definition of "liberal" was "secular liberation of reason."
Liberating reason from the constrictions of secular law as written, in order to corrupt and destroy it, rather than changing it by the methods built in to it in order not to destroy it, is not liberalism; it is at time collectivist, at times fascist, and at times anti-reason.
But ontologically it is not Originalism, the integrity of changing the Constitution by the means provided within that document. Any other means is sabotage. It is the breaking of the oath taken by every public servant to uphold the Constitution, and it should be punishable by law. The fact that liberals scoffed--even laughed, as Joe Biden did--at the idea of the Marxism of Obama's rhetoric tells us that we are indeed getting ready for the Constitution 3.0, through subterfuge, through reading it as "living", and through previous abuses of it that were gotten away with.
The fact that Obama is an accomplished Constitutional law professor only makes the outcome of his administration darker for the liberty given us by the Minutemen and others who gave their lives in the war for freedom, the war they afterward declared was to "secure the Blessings of Liberty upon ourselves and our Posterity."
Their posterity have let them down.
Congress Shall Make No Law...Prohibiting the Free Exercise of Religion: First Amendment
But it also may make no law establishing a religion, and giving to Muslims what is not given to Christians, Jews, and the faithful of other religions --including to Atheists who are protected under precedents set in courts http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/atheism-is-protected-by-law-austin.html --is the establishment of the rites of religion. Click on the blue sentence for more.
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC. The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM, The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:
