It Has Gotten This Bad

In our post-Orwellian times, everyone who resists or even criticizes the US is a criminal. For example, Washington considers Julian Assange and Bradley Manning to be criminals, because they made information available that exposed crimes committed by the US government. Anyone who even disagrees with Washington, is considered to be a “threat,” and Obama can have such “threats” assassinated or arrested as a “terrorist suspect” or as someone “providing aid and comfort to terrorists.” American conservatives and liberals, who once supported the US Constitution, are all in favor of shredding the Constitution in the interest of being “safe from terrorists.” They even accept such intrusions as porno-scans and sexual groping in order to be “safe” on air flights.

The collapse of law is across the board. The Supreme Court decided that it is “free speech” for America to be ruled by corporations, not by law and certainly not by the people. On June 27, the US Supreme Court advanced the fascist state that the “conservative” court is creating with the ruling that Arizona cannot publicly fund election candidates in order to level the playing field currently unbalanced by corporate money. The “conservative” US Supreme Court considers public funding of candidates to be unconstitutional, but not the “free speech” funding by business interests who purchase the government in order to rule the country. The US Supreme Court has become a corporate functionary and legitimizes rule by corporations. Mussolini called this rule, imposed on Americans by the US Supreme Court, fascism.

The Supreme Court also ruled on June 27 that California violated the US Constitution by banning the sale of violent video games to kids, despite evidence that the violent games trained the young to violent behavior. It is fine with the Supreme Court for soldiers, whose lives are on the line, to be prohibited under penalty of law from drinking beer before they are 21, but the idiot Court supports inculcating kids to be murderers, as long as it is in the interest of corporate profits, in the name of “free speech.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that a court so concerned with ‘free speech” has not protected American war protesters from unconstitutional searches and arrests, or protected protesters from being attacked by police or herded into fenced-in areas distant from the object of protest.

As the second decade of the 21st century opens, those who oppose US hegemony and the evil that emanates from Washington risk being declared to be “terrorists.” If they are American citizens, they can be assassinated. If they are foreign leaders, their country can be invaded. When captured, they can be executed, like Saddam Hussein, or sent off to the ICC, like the hapless Serbs, who tried to defend their country from being dismantled by the Americans.

And the American sheeple think that they have “freedom and democracy.”
~ from A World Overwhelmed By Western Hypocrisy by Paul Craig Roberts ~

Over the past year or so, this blog has slanted towards the negative in terms of posts that do not explicitly discuss the philosophic conceptions of Taoism. It is not that I believe that solely the negative defines our routine lives, but that negative forces -- immoral and/or unethical -- more and more shape the world in which we live in.

In order for philosophy to have a substantive meaning in a real sense, we must apply those philosophic ideas to life as it is lived. This is as true for individuals as it for groups, nations and societies.

In many ways, this blog has turned into the juxtaposition of the simple and humble philosophy of Taoism versus the Machiavellian tendencies embedded within the predatory nature of western hypocrisy and global capitalism. The thought and writings of the Taoist sages are set against the machinations of power-hungry leaders -- elected and not -- who weave their increasingly deadly webs through our lives to serve the only god that really matters to them -- the god of short-term profits.

This god has a most myopic perspective. Humans, other life forms and the planet itself are deemed expendable, so long as the few can reap untold material benefit. Any means necessary to achieve these ends is acceptable and the oligarchs are more than willing to subvert national sovereignty, legislatures and the rule of law to get what they crave.