Oath Keepers Show The Way

In the introduction to my first book (see right), I wrote the following:

To sit idly by while the federal government routinely desecrates the Constitution and imperils our lives and our posterity would itself be criminal, and it would require me to deny my adherence to the rule of law; my lawyer’s oath to uphold the Constitution; my respect for the truth; and my very nature as a man.

My goal has always been to uphold the supreme law of the land and thereby keep my oath, which in this day and age demands disobeying the unlawful enactments of a federal government gone rogue. Much to my delight, some kindred spirits have announced their intention to do just this, and in an area of endeavor that the federal government finds much more vital than lawyering -- the application of violence. A group called the Oath Keepers consists of thousands of men trained in the art of violence, but who refuse to employ this art for illegal or immoral objectives. Such is their God-given right and duty, and God bless them for exercising it.

Now this is something that scares the establishment to its foundations, for when all else fails and the people refuse to play along, the establishment can ordinarily resort to force. Not anymore, as there are enough Americans of conscience to resist the commands of a cocktail-swilling political class that cares as little for an oath to the Constitution as it does for an oath of matrimony. Every man is responsible for his own actions in this life and must answer to his creator for them. Bravo, Oath Keepers, for reminding us of this and for showing that the buck stops here, not in Washington, DC.

Standing Insanity

In order to state a valid claim in federal court, the plaintiff must have "standing." In other words, he must demonstrate that he has been injured; that the alleged conduct by the defendant caused or is causing the injury; and that the relief sought will redress the plaintiff's injury. These pleading requirements have been invoked on several recent occasions to dismiss lawsuits by soldiers who allege that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen and therefore lacks lawful authority as commander-in-chief to send these soldiers into harm's way. Even though the danger to these soldiers is direct and palpable, and even though they must obey Obama's orders on pain of criminal penalty, the courts have declared that such lawsuits are baseless or even frivolous on their face.

Despite the merciless application of standing requirements to soldiers whose lives are in peril, our black-robed sentinels have seen fit to allow plaintiffs to sue private companies for GLOBAL WARMING and the damage New Orleans has suffered as an alleged result of it. I am not making this up. Apparently, there is a more direct connection between a company's activities and the planet's climate (and a specific weather event) than there is between a president's orders and a soldier's duty to obey them. So private companies will be called into court and subjected to invasive discovery on the allegation that they can control the weather as if they were Salem witches, while an occupant of the White House will not be called upon to establish his authority to send people to their death.

If this is not an indication that the federal political and legal system is rotten to the core, I don't know what is.

Napolitano Is Fired

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has admonished Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio to cease and desist rounding up individuals who have entered the United States illegally. It so happens that protecting the border is one of the few duties that the federal government is entrusted with, so it seems ironic that the federal government would neglect to perform that duty while carrying on all manner of other activities that are none of its business. But of course there is no irony here, rather a deliberate effort to foster anarcho-tyranny.

Arpaio's refusal to play along is a perfectly appropriate response. If an employee refuses to do his (or in this case, her) job, then it's time for the boss (i.e., we the people) to re-assume control. Given all the firings that citizens have endured of late, it's high time to send Napolitano and her breed some pink slips of their own.

Irish Implosion Necessitates Major Book Edit

In my second book, I did not merely rant about the perils of environmentalism -- I also praised Ireland for refusing to consent to the Lisbon Treaty, which is the most recent attempt by the Eurocrats to consolidate their control over the continent in a manner that Hitler would envy, but was too impatient to accomplish. Proving once again that elections are but red tape for the abuse of power rather than a bulwark against it, the Irish have collapsed and failed to save civilization. As a result, I must revoke the laudatory language regarding the Irish from my second book, and it now appears beyond doubt that the future of humanity lies outside a Western civilization that has embarked on a course of self-immolation, stagnation, and sterility.

More On Environmentalism

I am re-printing more of my chapter on environmentalism from Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony. Unfortunately, I cannot transfer the starkest image from this chapter, which is a graph contrasting the minuscule amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere today versus the massive amount present during the Dinosaur Era, which was several times larger. Keep this in mind the next time you hear "thoughtful" prattle from your peers on the dangers of global warming, which is nothing more than a bogeyman designed to frighten you into surrendering even more self-ownership than you already have.

The Truth Persists, All Cries Of “Consensus” To The Contrary

Conceding virtually all of the global-warming catechism has offered scant reason to sacrifice our freedom and prosperity on environmentalism’s altar. If we “come back to Earth” for a moment and acknowledge that man-made global warming remains at best a debatable proposition, the folly of entrusting environmental power to government becomes even more obvious. Yet even this humble acknowledgment of controversy proves impossible to secure from the other side, because like any religion run amok, environmentalism denounces and persecutes non-believers as heretics. One example of this zealotry unfolded during 2007 at “Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis,” a cathartic spectacle worthy of 1930s Munich. During the American leg of this tour, throngs of spiritual orphans listened with rapt attention as political scion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ranted that all environmentally-hesitant politicians should be condemned as “traitors.”

Public pathos and a juggernaut of government-greased “scientific consensus” notwithstanding, true scientific inquiry never ceases and is constantly revealing more about the mechanisms behind global climate change, mechanisms that surpass anything that mankind could hope to accomplish for good or for ill.

First, mankind’s contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts to at most four percent (4%) of the total generated by “natural” sources such as animals, volcanoes, forest fires, plate tectonics, and the oceans. Moreover, all carbon-dioxide sources together comprise only 385 parts per million, or 0.0385%, of the atmosphere. So if we succumbed to the most rabid environmentalist agenda by returning humanity to the Stone Age, ninety-six percent of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere would continue to do so unabated, bringing the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere down to 0.0369%. The decrease would be even less significant if we enacted the liberty-destroying measures that most environmentalists advocate. So much drama, and despite the fact that Earth has experienced carbon-dioxide levels of 1000 to 2000 parts per million, or 0.1% - 0.2%, an order of magnitude greater than anything humans have ever witnessed. Such elevated levels of carbon dioxide likely explain the incredible biodiversity of the dinosaur era, which makes the modern mission to “save the planet” by curtailing carbon dioxide supremely ludicrous, as illustrated on the next page.

NON-TRANSFERABLE GRAPH

Environmentalists demand that we submit to open-ended, global political control in order to shave the first bar of this graph ever so slightly. I think not. Supposing we should or could make a meaningful difference in total carbon-dioxide output – both man-made and “natural” – recent research strongly suggests that this would prove fruitless because carbon dioxide likely does not even cause global warming at all; rather, global warming may very well precede and cause the periodic surges of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In other words, the arrow of causation may run in the opposite direction: as the Earth experiences occasional increases in energy from the Sun and/or other cosmic sources, the Earth’s oceans slowly warm up and, centuries later, expel larger amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. One very articulate proponent of this theory is Dr. Sallie Baliunas, who received her doctorate from Harvard University, and who astutely compares the political rhetoric of today to the frenzied European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – an age when many women were executed on accusations of “weather cooking.”

And again for the sake of perspective, it helps to remember that Earth existed for billions of years before we arrived on the scene, and it has experienced conditions far more radical than the grimmest scenarios painted by today’s prophets of doom. When we consider a pre-historic atmosphere brimming with carbon dioxide; recurring mass extinctions that have wiped out the vast majority of all previous life on Earth; ongoing asteroid impacts that dwarf man-made nuclear weapons (as well as any man-made “climate change”), we can safely conclude that the Earth has seen it all before and will continue to see it long into the future.

Only a mind saturated with self-hatred could conceive that humanity’s infinitesimal blink of activity is so menacing that it must be stopped or severely curtailed by force. Earth is quite capable of taking care of itself, which is more than man can say when he cripples his potential with lies born of idleness and spiritual poverty. That poverty has settled like a dense fog on many hearts and minds in the once-proud West, causing its people to beg for the very deprivations that modern governments are all too happy to supply. Mainstream news sources habitually report on man-made global warming as if it were unquestionable fact, discussing with grim sobriety the varying statist proposals to combat it. Captive audiences of schoolchildren receive lessons portraying this mania as information to be uncritically absorbed along with their multiplication tables (if those are even taught anymore). An emeritus professor at a prestigious Australian university recently went so far as to co-author a book – The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy – that condemns the West’s (dwindling) protections of individual rights as an obstacle to centralized environmental planning by “experts.” A jury in the United Kingdom refused to convict six Greenpeace activists who had destroyed private property at a power station, since their end of combating “global warming” excused their vandalistic means. And in a collective spasm of self-flagellation worthy of the Middle Ages, numerous cities in countries ranging from Thailand, the Philippines, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Greece, and the United States imposed blackouts on their populations in order to “heighten awareness” about man-made global warming.

People used to remark that the lights went out over Europe at the start of World War One, but posterity may very well note that the lights went out literally and figuratively over us all today. Such a cultural collapse renders almost futile any discussion of what is happening on the international legal stage in environmentalism’s name, since so many nations have already surrendered the philosophical fight to their domestic governments and thereby empowered them to perpetrate legitimized vandalism on a daily basis. On the other hand, however, environmentalists continue to rage that the “global community” is not doing enough, so perhaps there is some value in analyzing the international picture in the hopes of prolonging or deepening the environmentalists’ frustration.

A Clarification Of The Futility Of Voting

Events continue conspiring to prevent me from posting on a regular basis, but then again, I never claimed to be a good blogger. What I can do is provide some larger perspective in the midst of the flurry of unconstitutional initiatives bombarding us these days. Specifically, I need to do a better job of explaining why voting in federal elections is a pointless, even harmful, activity.

Some people -- notably Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity -- believe that Americans should rise up and unleash a new Reagan Revolution that will sweep both the Democrats and the milquetoast "moderate" Republicans from power. Perhaps this has a chance of success, and perhaps it doesn't. I personally believe that American culture has fractured and deteriorated to the point that nationwide sentiment of this sort will never materialize again, and even if it could, let us remember that Reagan himself couldn't thwart runaway spending or eradicate the misnamed Department of Education. Another Reagan Revolution would accomplish nothing more than a brief era of good feelings, and we would be right back where we find ourselves now.

But there is a more fundamental reason to oppose participating in federal elections, a reason having nothing to do with the chances for political success. It is suicidal and wrong to legitimize a system that allows voters to flout the law and justice whenever they feel like it. For example, imagine that your neighborhood announces a full, free, and fair election to determine whether people with odd-numbered addresses must surrender 50% of their belongings to people with even-numbered addresses. The only sane response is a refusal to participate, since the very proposal is one that the neighborhood has no right to implement. An election does not purify the proposal, but rather taints it with a veneer of legitimacy.

In similar fashion, the fact that voters today feel entitled to elect politicians whose very campaign platforms spit in the Constitution's face -- whether it's through promises of wealth re-distribution or stultifying regulations of private life -- means that participation is consent to lawlessness. Even if I vote for the lawful and moral outcome, I am admitting that the majority has a right to impose its unlawful will -- which it certainly does not. Only an election between legal alternatives is worthy of participating in, and I do not believe there has been a federal election of that sort for quite some time.

On Ted Kennedy's Passing

I have nothing but sympathy for the friends and family of the recently departed Ted Kennedy. The purpose of this post is not to pick the man apart, which would be bad form indeed, but rather to discuss the grandiose spectacle that this man's departure has prompted in the political class and its media courtiers. In other words, I intend to pick apart the living.

According to the narrative surrounding the funereal spectacle, we should admire this man primarily because of his work as a legislator, while disregarding his personal failings as of secondary (or perhaps no) importance. Think for a moment what this means. Commanding others to be good on pain of fine or imprisonment is, it would appear, morally superior to being good in one's own life. This strikes me as a rather cheap and easy way to achieve excellence, which is probably why it has grown so popular -- it is far more difficult to maintain an honest and ethical existence than to demand it of others. Small wonder that people who chant the loudest for government-imposed goodness are often the most profane, obnoxious, and inconsiderate among us. And small wonder that the proliferation of such people in American society has paralleled the unchecked growth of the central government. John Adams had it right when he observed that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. The immoral and the impious cannot constrain themselves to any set of rules, nor can the modern political class, and nor can the media courtiers whose bathos reveals far more about themselves than it does the recently departed.

Environmentalism

The nominal federal government continues grasping for more control under any narrative it can peddle to the American public, whose loss (and perhaps even rejection) of the concept of truth has made the government's job all too easy. One such narrative is "protecting the environment," a crusade that supposedly justifies shelving limited government along with individual rights and responsibilities, and which has accelerated under the present administration. Therefore, I have decided to publish the initial portion of a chapter addressing environmentalism from Unlawful Government: The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony. Unfortunately, the blogging format prevents me from including my footnotes and endnotes. In the future I might post other portions of the chapter -- which are more empirical than philosophical -- if I can ever figure out these formatting quirks.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

~ G.K. Chesterton, 1930

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. . . . This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.

~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to the Harvard graduating class of 1978

CHAPTER 4: ENVIRONMENTALISM’S POETIC LIE

No matter how superior modern man fancies himself over his ancestors, he still displays the overriding urge to believe an all-encompassing story of his place in the cosmos, to believe in myths. There is no shame in this need, for myths are not lies – myths are poetic truths. Shame should emerge only when a poetic lie overpowers the truth, as it did with the twentieth-century scourges of fascism, Nazism, and communism. Those lies gained ground because mankind had discarded the hereafter for the here, yearning to transport the kingdom of heaven to Earth. The defeat of those particular lies did not, unfortunately, defeat modern man’s ongoing hunger for a worldly religion that will save his body rather than his soul. Environmentalism feeds that hunger and counts as the poetic lie of the moment, reaching its zenith (or nadir) of late with the coronation of former Vice-President Al Gore as Nobel laureate for his malum opus, An Inconvenient Truth. As always, shame will have to wait until the moment has passed.

“Environmentalism” does not, of course, connote people who enjoy the countryside; who scrupulously avoid polluting; who disdain cruelty to animals; or who shun meat in favor of vegetables. Much more than a personal lifestyle choice, “environmentalism” prophesies the Earth’s death or irreversible degradation at mankind’s hands, an apocalyptic faith claiming dominion over other people’s lives and overshadowing all competing concerns for individual rights and justice. If this obsession with our material surroundings counts as modern man’s religion, then government undeniably counts as modern man’s church, possessing as it does authority over the things of this world. One catechism in the environmentalist creed has assumed primary status: government must reduce mankind’s carbon-dioxide footprint so as to combat climate change. Because the global climate is at issue, this catechism has proved most receptive to global governmental control, handing the political class an incredibly effective mechanism for crushing national sovereignty and individual freedom. Wagging his finger recently, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed that global warming is undeniable and that “only urgent, global action will do.” So the cynical government and the spiritually-starved governed find common cause here, even more so than with “democracy” or “human rights,” thus rendering any attempt at reasoned discussion supremely futile if not outright dangerous. For what it’s worth, I will present an opposing view on the global-warming hysteria, a view grounded on the universal reason available to anyone willing to use it.

The Philosophical Quicksand Beneath The Global-Warming Hysteria

Perhaps the surest method for exposing the flaws in a proposition is to assume its truth. So let us assume that what environmentalism preaches is true, namely that human activity contributes too much carbon dioxide to the amounts already flooding into the atmosphere “naturally”; that our carbon dioxide indeed causes global warming; and that government is therefore justified in dictating the types and amounts of energy we use in our daily lives. How much atmospheric carbon dioxide, then, constitutes an acceptable amount? No credible source proposes outlawing our entire contribution; the U.N. Kyoto Protocol (discussed below) aims to take us back to the approximate emissions levels of 1990. But there’s the rub: the 1990 emissions themselves were once portrayed by the U.N. as excessive, meaning that full Kyoto compliance would see us continuing to pump supposedly toxic amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and imperiling the environment – only this time, at the price of our liberty as well.

Let us concede even more ground by assuming that Kyoto is only a “first step,” meaning that government – in all its disinterested and selfless wisdom – knows exactly how much carbon dioxide the Earth can tolerate from us and will implement policies that target the proper output. What then, pray tell, is the correct temperature that we should nurse the Earth back to? We know that the Earth was both far cooler and far warmer in the past, long before mankind graduated into the industrial age: the most recent Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago, and global temperatures some 6,000 years ago (the “Holocene Maximum”) were higher than they are today. Temperatures were also higher during the Medieval Warming Period from roughly A.D. 1000 to 1300, again long before the Industrial Revolution. Last but not least, temperatures tended to oscillate up and down much more rapidly before civilization even developed, and we have occupied an unusually stable interlude in the Earth’s temperature. So just where do we set the global thermostat? How do we know when our “harmful” influence is fully remedied, given that a “healthy” Earth will continue to experience drastic climate changes all its own? It appears that there is no end in sight, somewhat similar to the United States’ unending crusade of affirmative action – racial disparities and climate anomalies are twin facts of life that will never disappear, thus perpetually justifying governmental interference to “fix the problem.” For example, environmentalist prophet Al Gore seized on the deadly Myanmar cyclone as proof of his religion, while likeminded others have gone so far as to blame everything from kidney stones to shark attacks on mankind’s environmental sins as well. Just as primitive peoples might conduct human sacrifice upon the occurrence of a solar eclipse, the high priests of modernity will re-enact that sorry spectacle on a massive scale during every environmental novelty that befuddles the public mind.

Let us disregard all these qualms and assume that: 1) mankind introduces too much carbon dioxide into the environment; 2) mankind’s carbon dioxide is to blame for excessive global warming; 3) government can calculate how much carbon dioxide the Earth can tolerate; 4) government can calculate the “natural” global temperature; and 5) any “natural” changes in climate will honestly and successfully be distinguished from changes that mankind has caused. Even yielding each one of these very dubious points fails to produce the environmentalist conclusion that governmental interference will rescue us from the brink of destruction. Only wealthy countries are capable of adopting “green” policies, since the wealthy can best afford to humor environmentalist agitation: people in poor countries are more preoccupied with daily survival than with the atmosphere, often making their treatment of the environment far worse. The Kyoto Protocol itself acknowledges this by imposing its most onerous obligations on the nations that can best afford them. Rather than safeguard and spread the free-market principles underlying this wealth, environmentalists propose quite the opposite: to cripple the engine of wealth where it exists. Private property, freedom of contract, and profit motive all make environmentalism possible, yet environmentalism has declared war on its parents and seeks to curtail or abolish them. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, proudly admitted this fact when agitating at a U.N. conference concerning biofuels: “If we want to save our planet Earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system.” An honest effort to remedy the supposed menace of man-made global warming would reject this noxious ideology of central planning as a proven failure at generating the wealth and technology needed to accomplish environmentalism’s own ambitious program. Since environmentalism’s methods are self-defeating, they hardly merit serious consideration.

One final concession drives the point home: even if mankind’s technological progress is somehow shortening the Earth’s hospitable lifespan, mankind represents the only hope of transporting life away from this mortal planet that will eventually be scorched and/or swallowed as the Sun balloons into a red giant. Even long before that inevitable demise takes place, we face the high probability of an asteroid impact that will terminate human life and much of the sacred biodiversity. To the extent that environmentalists succeed in hobbling mankind’s progress with their schoolboy socialism, they will have condemned to death what they claim to hold dear, and Earth’s life will remain trapped to perish as if it never were. One can honestly say that mankind represents the Earth’s seeds, and that mankind is very much part of nature’s effort to spread life as far and wide as possible. From this macro-perspective, environmentalists represent the Earth’s deadliest foes.

Modest Proposal

The more I hear about the debate over health-care "reform" (despite my best efforts to ignore it), the more convinced I am that America has lost all sense of transcendental values such as truth, righteousness, and individual liberty, opting instead for a crass materialism that distills all questions to a brute calculation of costs and benefits. I refuse to get drawn into a debate over whether Obamacare will "work," since the grotesque invasion of rights and destruction of law that Obamacare represents makes any such discussion unworthy of serious consideration. Those who participate in the debate unwittingly legitimize this transgression, just as those who persist in debating how to "reform" the federal government despite its irretrievable descent into unconstitutional perfidy.

Since these concerns apparently have no purchase in the popular mind, let me offer my own modest proposal for health-care reform, in the grand tradition of Jonathan Swift. All healthy persons should be detained, and their organs harvested, for the purpose of rescuing the long list of suffering individuals in need of organ transplants. Since the organs of one healthy person could save the lives of multiple other persons, there is no basis under our modern moral calculus upon which the healthy person may refuse to submit. Any protest based on the so-called rights of the healthy person are cold abstractions that must not be allowed to stand in the way of saving the lives of living, breathing sufferers whose needs are anything but abstract, but rather concrete and immediate.

What's that you say? My proposal is ridiculous because everyone has a right to self-ownership, and no one may be forced to lay down his life to help others in need? Be careful, because if you keep thinking like that, you might be labeled "un-American" as well.

Domestic Terrorism

I heard that Janet Napolitano, secretary of "homeland security" and alumna of my law school, is admonishing Americans to pitch in and join the fight against domestic terrorism. I couldn't agree more, Janet.