Pay Any Price, by Robert Gore
A war on a tactic, terror, can provide the rationale for anything. Terror is ubiquitous, it can be fought anywhere. Anyone who uses or threatens to use violence in furtherance of political or economic ends can be deemed a terrorist. Any “terrorist” who yells, “Death to the United States!” can be deemed a threat to Americans. Terrorism will never be eradicated, so the war against it is perpetual. President George W. Bush even arrogated the right to wage that war preemptively, before terrorists actually struck the US or its citizens. And that’s how the US finds itself in Niger, its “long-standing” and “stalwart” ally that 999,999 out of a million Americans can’t find on an unlabeled map.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
This is an excerpt. For the complete article, please click the above link.
Even doing business with or teaching them to fish for industry and resources, contributing in the world of markets only serves to bolster totalitarian regimes and ultimately making matters in the third world even worse.
What's a Conscious Being to do?
Notice that as NK gets crazy, SK and Japan our now purchasing Advanced Weapons Systems for protection. This is no accident.
Someone always benefits.
we would always do better to ignore most of the attacks, and accept that the world is not safe. But paying a premium to be safe, only encourages bigger atrocities and bigger premiums!
Your essay are a standard of excellence.
BTW , Curious as to your thoughts about
Sen. Tom Cottons immigration reform act
as he described in Imprimus recently. I'll paste the link from blarmans post..
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/immigr...
"Chain migration" is an entitlement to bypass laws governing who should not be allowed into the country, granting a privileged status with an excuse based on increasingly remote family ties as a version of racism and ethnicity as an end in itself, the opposite of the individualism this country is based on and which is required to survive.
If you want to have an impact on changes to law and public policy it's best to do it by first reading and understanding what is being proposed, not waiting until it has "emerged" with unstoppable or harder to stop political momentum or already passed.
Perhaps the best explanation of what I see myself doing is on the Welcome page of SLL:
"How do you see the forest for the trees? The first step is to quit walking through the forest. You can spend twenty-four hours a day reading periodicals and scanning the internet. You would know the latest of everything and you might begin to discern the stories behind the stories. However, you’d be wasting your most important and limited possession–your time–and reinventing the wheel. It makes a lot more sense to get in an airplane with competent pilots and instead fly over the forest."
Some people appreciate this vantage point, some don't. My readership and the number of sites who post my material has steadily grown. I've written 3 novels and they all still sell, though not as much as I'd like. I think after the collapse it may be possible to build defensible enclaves based on liberty and individual rights. I would devote a great deal of time and attention to helping build such an enclave, and would be quite concerned with its details and policies. To do so with present arrangements seems to me, I reiterate, like a waste of time. You see things differently. By all means do what you think is best.
If you think we're all doomed to an inevitable national train wreck and nothing you can say or do will stop it, and the policy changes implementing it make no difference anyway, then why write about it at all?
Whatever happens with the course of the culture and the resulting politics -- which are both headed in the wrong direction -- the end result, the form it takes, and the time to get there are not determined, nor is everyone impacted equally along the way. Whether or not anyone thinks he can make a difference to the end result at some unknown time in the future, we and at least some following generations have lives to live, and government actions and other mobs make a difference to that. Even Europe today is better than reverting to the Dark Ages.
Ayn Rand near the end of her life was less than optimistic about the trend of the nation, too, and said she was glad she was old enough to not have to see what she feared was coming. But she understood the intellectual requirements for reform and never stopped advocating the right ideas, knowing that people have free will and the power to choose the outcome if they understand, adopt and follow the right principles. Her articles were usually critical of current events, but she didn't just report them from a distance with despair; she always had new insights relating new developments with sufficient essential details to the logic of contrasting philosophical premises. She did what she could to explain it, always fighting for her values, knowing that "anyone who fights for the future lives in it today" -- and knowing that the magnificent possibilities for mankind are too great to surrender to the void of evil without a fight for what is good.
She knew that the right concepts and principles are required for a rational society, and rejected the notion that if there is a "collapse" then people will suddenly see the light and miraculously do the right thing without the knowledge of what is right. That includes "enclaves" which would not last for long in a panic of overwhelming savagery of mobs and competing dictators along with the loss of most technology and sophisticated production possible only in civilization. She rejected the hopelessly anti-intellectual scheme of letting society collapse as a means to restoring civilization, let alone a strategy of a revolution or trying to accelerate a collapse in a fit of suicidal nihilism.
It is possible to both advocate for the right ideas and to make a difference in policy changes to buy time through the proper methods (which are not strolling through the forest and scanning the internet, then pontificating about it). Ayn Rand had the unusual intellectual power and knowledge for necessary philosophic advocacy; she did not put her efforts into temporary political battles which may make a difference but which cannot by themselves indefinitely hold out against the trend of statism and collectivism without a broad, fundamental intellectual reform; and she chose her priorities accordingly.
She also knew that it was still "too early" for a broad-based political reform through the likes of party politics without the necessary intellectual base, and not only didn't waste her time on that but urged her supporters not to squander their efforts on such fantasies as a new "Objectivist political party" or "Objectivist candidate for president", let alone the eclectic mish-mash in the fringe Libertarian Party or religious conservative politics. Her motto was to choose your battles carefully; she never thought it rational to 'float above it all', watching the decline after which it would be expected in fantasy to live in an alternate "enclave" reality to escape the disaster in this one (like the goal of the Christian era of the Dark and Middle Ages living for salvation in another world).
Soldiers have always been dupes (I was one once) of the state and their behavior and actions once exemplified by the state are difficult to refute as actions that destroy the liberty of humankind. No one would like to admit that what they have done has had terrible and immoral consequences. As long as soldiers are willing to obey commands no matter what they are no different than any other slave who waits for his master to become moral so that he can have permission to act morally. The slave masters have always understood that in order to have an army that will protect them then the army must not think, all the way to the lowest level of participants. When the leader points to a place and says kill they must obey, if they like their paycheck, the respect of the other soldiers and the applause of the taxpayers back home who tell them they are wonderful and supply them with the tools for their trade.
If a state could function to recognize the sovereignty of the individual and protect him and never devolve into a communist democracy that America has then a state would be a good thing. It hasn't worked yet and Estienne pointed out it may be this way until the race dies out.
As if we freaking can~
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Our national debt is mentioned in the article. Looking at the debt clock, did you notice how that $20 trillion isn't just some stagnant number hanging out there?
Keeps $$$ adding on, adding on, adding on like some lunatic suicidal runaway train.
It won't be all that long before it reaches $30 trillion. Don't know about an empire~but the USA can't afford to police the whole freaking world.
Step One for fixing the USA? Vote all the self-serving professional politicians out of office.
And how come they have a freaking pension plan? Oh, I know they voted for it. Yet still~?
Governments-all appear to be purposed largely for making wars. Would we have all those sacrifices of men and resources without them?
The AR-15 looking 9mm carbine (I call it The Evil Hag) that my son built for his dear old Dad is really just a defensive weapon with the maximum effective rang of a football field. Who do you call without government? 911? Hell no!
You call out with a loud voice, "Lock n' load! Defense! Defense! Defense!"
The Great Global Collapse seems to be the only thing to put the Rulership out of biz.
I am sorry; maybe I missed something, but I
do not know what BRI stands for.