Crime is a lie

"The criminal mind is simple" says Roz-al gul to Bruce Wayne in the mountain fortress. This idea, although emanating from the villian, passes unnoticed into our consciousness. It reinforces a very dangerous notion which has been beaten into our brains since we were small: crime and justice are polar opposites. You are either a criminal or a law abiding citizen, choose wisely. Fortunately for me I became a criminal at a very young age so my mind was not pollutted with this false dialectic.

Soviet criminals were far more common than American criminals in the early 1990's. When I lived in the Soviet Union you were a criminal if you held a church service in your apartment, traded rubles for dollars anywhere but a state bank, or allowed a foreigner to make international calls. So at the age of 19 I began to recognize that the labels "crime" and "criminal" were arbitrarily created by those in power. Arbitrary is in fact a misnomer because while these petty crimes may have been arbitrary in relation to moral justice they were not arbitrary at all. The designation of certain activities as crimes always reinforces the existing order. In the Soviet Republics free market capitalism and religion were both a threat to the existing atheist/socialist order. Therefore all activity which related to capitalism or (not officially sanctioned) religion was illegal for individuals. Of course the Soviet Union and its satellite states were free to pursue capitalism without hindrance and the official Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Islamic houses of worship were left intact. So the ideas of religion and capitalism were not necessarily bad under Soviet Law, they were allowed when the state was in control.

In the United States of America in 2012 we have a strangely similar situation now as regards socialism. Although it is still encumbent upon police officers, fire fighters and members of the armed forces to swear that they are not members of any organizations which advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, socialism per se is allowed when practiced by the true power masters of the United States.

Is it not a strange irony that in the U.S. the large capitalist powers, Citibank, GM, JP Morgan Chase etc. are bastions of free-market-only economics but are first to accept socialism when it comes in the form of a government bailout? The marching cry of American corporations should thus be "Capitalism for the individual, Socialism for the corporations, just as in Soviet times the motto was "atheism/communism for the individual, capitalism/religion for the State"!

Thus my friends in Russia and Georgia were all criminals. Some had been in prison for currency trading, convicted of selling trinkets on Red Square, or black balled in their careers for traveling abroad to the decadent west (i.e. driving over the border into Turkey to buy cheap leather goods for resale in Russia/Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijahn at a PROFIT!!!).

Yet none of the "criminals" I ever met were ashamed of having a "criminal" record in the Soviet Union. My first Soviet psychiatrist told me matter of factly that he had been in prison, and had returned to society to have a family and pursue a career in medicine (not sure this is possible in the West, which is why I went to law school). He could not understand the notion that I would attempt suicide over a paltry seven year prison term (which was the penalty at the time for living in Russia without a visa as I'd been doing). In fact the very notion that the law on paper coresponded in any way to something meaningful was (and to some degree still is) laughable in Russia.

Having internalized this notion, that the law is merely a means of perpetuating the rule of those in power, I returned to the U.S. at age 25 and began to see that this was not unique to the Soviet system.

The zombie factories that we attended under compulsion from age 5-18 really have only one lesson which is repeated ad nauseum: "there are two groups, which group will you be a member of?". When I was in elementary school the bad guys were communists, by college the bad guy slot was transitioning to Islamic terrorists. This transition was not seen as problematic even though those same "terrorists" were our allies in Afghanistan from 1979-1989. Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Mohmar Qhadaffi, and Hosni Mubarak would all make the long march from paid U.S. thug to undesirable despot over the next 20 years or so.

The message of your compulsory education is this: "choose the correct group." This gives us the notion that we have a choice which of course we do not. Your grades in school are a reflection of your ability and willingness to parrot back what you have been "taught". The system is not seeking creative thinkers it is seekng cogs in a machine. If you parrot back the right answers and (much more importantly) do not have disicpline issues you have proven yourself fit for the next stage of your conditioning known as the university. And if you are extremely adept at suppressing all questions and apparent lies and falsehoods about what you are being taught you will be given the privilege of not going into crushing debt to obtain your university level conditioning program, you will be given a "scholarship" so that you can feel grateful to your masters and superior to your moronic classmates whose poor working class parents sweated, scrimped and saved all their lives to provide what you are getting for free by "virtue" of your ability to discern what your teachers wanted to hear and give it to them.

This is quite effective training for the working world because the terms "yes-man"/"company-man" (good) and "agitator"(bad) are certainly indications that parroting back the Party/company line is extremely beneficial to one's career and challenging power is fatal to advancement.

Thus we exist in a paradigm in which material success is directly connected to our ability to conform to the existing order, accept the moral compass of that order and spew our enthusiasm for it (remember in 'Office Space' when Jennifer Aniston gets in trouble for not haveing enough 'Flair')?

Thus the 'criminal' mind is one which refuses not only to pin on the requisite number of pieces of 'flair' but chooses instead to wear a 'flair' button which says 'stop bombing Iraqi children'. Having never had the pleasure of employment at TGI Fridays I cannot say with certainty that such a piece of flair woud be a problem but will assume for the sake of this argument that such flair would prohibited. When the unfortunate dissident is fired for wearing this flair she is the victim of an ideological crime. The master has determined that her ideology is defective. While her job performnace may be exemplary she is unfit for employment and thus deprived of her means of providing for herself and whoever is financially dependent on her.

It may be safe to assume that Jennifer is working in Fridays because she has already been unable to spew the enthusiasm of the corporate world to the minimum extent required to remain employed. Is it a crime to require Jennifer's ideological assent as a condtion of her employment? Is it a crime that Jennifer cannot bring herself to do so?

Let us imagine that Jennifer was able to effectively take her place in the American capitalist elite as a corporate lawyer for Union Carbide in 1984. Let us further assume that Jennifer was unable to continue working for Union Carbide because her conscience would not allow her to zealously represent her client against their opponents in December of 1984. When the families of the victims of the Bhopal disaster asked for compensation Jennifer was part of legal team whose function it was to "minimize financial exposure by mitigating liability". In other words it was Jennifer's job to deny that Union Carbide had done anything wrong. Jennifer happened to be Indian and have some relatives who worked at the plant, she was intimatley familiar with the details of what the Bhopal disaster had done to the people who worked there but more importantly to those who were dependent on the incomes of those who worked there: children, the elderly, and childcare providers.

Her previous conditioning demanded that she recuse herself from representing Union Carbide but let us imagine for a moment that she was able to resist the Imperial Conditioning and continued to familiarize herself with the intimate details of Union Carbide's practices in the Bhopal plant which were to be changed or covered up in the wake of the disaster.

Jennifer is now a criminal. Even is she finds out that Union Carbide has negligently or intentionally caused the loss of human life she is a criminal. Crime is ideology, ideology is crime.

Hegel got it wrong.

I have been trying to understand the terms "dialectic", "postmodern" and "poststructualist" for at least twenty years now so I thought I could think on paper for a bit. G.W.F. Hegel was THE philosopher who saw everything in terms of two opposing forces, thus dialectic. The dialogue between two opposng forces such as good and evil, sane and insane, war and peace, crime and legitimate activity, labor and capital is rarely simple. in any of the above pairs of opposing forces (dialectics)the conflict is never clear cut. To use a favorite topic of Michel Foucault mental illness (sane/insane dialectic) is culturally determined. Homosexual sex has been considered at differnt points in history the norm (ancient Greece), a sign of mental illness (The United States up to the publication of DSM IV), or a lifestyle choice. But do any of these classifications accurately descibe gay sex? Can it simply be good, bad, evil, normal, abnormal etc.? This we run squarely into the fundamental problem of dialectical reasoning.

The opposite of the Hegelian dialectic is postmodernism. For the purpose of simplicity I will use postmodernism interchangeably with poststructuralism. The "posts" are an attack the idea that the world can be neatly organized into opposing froces. It is thus an attack on Hegel, Marx. Freud, organized religion, the notion of progress. Hegel, Marx and Freud all divided the world into opposing forces. For Marx it was labor and capital, for Freud it was the Id (deep dark animalistric desires) and the superego (your ability to keep those desires in check). Good and bad, good and evil, progress and backwardness, right and wrong, these are notions rejected by postmodernism. Postmodernism is largely an outgrowth of Hitler and the Nazis. The postmodernist philosophers (Sartre, Camu ...) saw the rise of the Third Reich as the ultimate expression of dialectical thinking. Stalin's purges, Hitler's Holocaust, Mao's extermination campaigns, Japanese internment, slavery, the Crusades, the Red Scare (McCarthyism), dropping napalm on civilians in Vietnam, these things have as their fundamental underpinning a dialectic of good and evil. For the Nazi war man=chine to function the Jews ghad to be evil, for the cold war machine to function the communists (or capitalists if you were Russian) had to be evil, for slvery to function blacks and/or "barbarians" had to be evil (or cursed in the Bible).

Every system which would perpetrate a massive crime against humanity must first classify its enemy as evil and itself as good. Postmodernism/poststructuralism rejects this notion.

Does Sean Hannity know when he says "good and evil exist" that he is following Hegel and Marx? Sean Hannity does not believe in postmodernism which in my mind is the antithesis of dialectical materialism. If Sean Hannity rejects it that is my cue to take a good loing look.

Questioning Orthodoxy

In order to understand the world we must first understand ourselves. I have a personal orthodoxy, I'm just not sure what it is. To pin it down I have asked myself these questions in the past. Did Jesus use drugs and/or profanity? should children be taught about the origin of babies? and at what age? was the government of the US involved in 9/11? These are the provocative questions that come to my mind. Is monagamy and marriage natural states for human beings, what is their normal or natural duration? Is there life on other planets? Did alien species visit the earth in pre-history?

Down and Out in Moscow and Cincinnati

As I wandered Moscow in my early twenties I distinctly rember a feeling of melancholy pervading me. I was fascinated by the decaying revolutionary murals which covered entire buildings. I was not cynical enough to scoff, I looked upon these exhortations to collectively build a bright and bold new future for the world as inspiring and valid. The work I was doing seemed to lack purpose, to lack a greater meaning and a connection with my fellow man. I saw the old black and white Soviet films and just as Mikhalkov conveyed later in "Burnt by the Sun" these films were conveyed sincerity. There were subtexts of criticism but there was also belief.

In one of my many real or imagined arguments with my father I said "at least they tried!". Tariq Ali made a similar observation about the Bolsheviks recently but in a different way. Not the defeatist "at least they tried" but a victorious "where in the hell would Europe be without the Bolsheviks?". The United States was preparing for defeat in WWII, sending messages to the British that they should send the remainder of their fleet to the United States. The Soviet Army, Stalingrad, the slash and burn retreat tactics drawing the Germans deeper into the death of Russian winter as they did with Napolean helped to destroy the Third Reich. Without these actions of the Bolsheviks what would the world have looked like?

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

John Cusack, Bin Laden, the CIA and Gary Johnson

As much as I enjoyed John Cusack's interview of Jonathon Turley I was dismayed by the absence of two things. No mention was made of an alternative theory for what happened on 9/11/01. By saying that the attacks could have been prevented Turley tacitly implied that the attack did in fact come exclusively from Bin Laden. And secondly Cusack's exasperation at not being able to vote for either Romney or Obama in good conscience would naturally lead to the conclusion that one should vote for Gary Johnson but no mention was made of his candidacy.

The importance of delving into the alleged events of 9/11/01 can not be overstated. The crisis of freedom which is gripping our country began not with the actual events of that day but with the media portrayal and public consumption of those events. Every new government agency including the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security finds its raison d'etre in those events. Obama's new found powers to indefinitely detain and/or kill American citizens without warrant, charge, trial or legal process of any kind also have their origins in the supposed events of that day. But what if it's all a lie? While I'm confident that a President Paul or Johnson would do much to restore the civil liberties of Americans they would still face the ever present question "but what about the terrorists, how do we protect ourselves against them?"

My theory of what happened that day is (I hope) not unique. Although it involves information I have gleaned from a myriad of sources including Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon and his source material, as well as the recent Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth documentary neither of those sources presents the whole picture.

My father was a combat pilot in Vietnam and later an instructor pilot for the B-52 strategic nuclear bomber. We grew up with aviation. In my twenties while living in Russia I flew Soviet fighter trainers as part of my work for a military tourism company. Planes, military planning and intelligence operations are nothing exotic to me and this is my humble opinion of what happened on the day our republic ended.

This operation required immense planning. Years of training and dry run exercises would be required. For the purposes of my theory I remove Bush and Clinton from any knowledge of the operation because (assuming the outcome of U.S. Presidential elections is not known in advance) neither of them would have been in place long enought to bring the plan to fruition.

By now it is relatively common knowledge that NORAD responded incredibly slowly to the reports of hijacked airliners that day. They had a 100% interception record in the previous few years yet they failed 4 times in 1 day on 9/11/01. This fact along with the demolition of WTC 7 which was not hit by a plane are sufficient evidence to demonstrate the involvement of an entity which had domestic control over U.S. military assets as well as access to the buildings themselves.

Until 9/11/01 Pearl Harbor was our most recent example of the effectiveness on popular sentiment of an outside military attack. There are a number of respected historians who have demonstated that President Roosevelt was well aware of the Japanese intention to attack. Just a few months before the Japanese attack Roosevelt had consolidated the Pacific fleet in the tight confines of Pearl Harbor much to the chagrin of senior U.S. Navy Admirals who could see the peril this placed the fleet in. Furthermore the diplomatic measures the Roosevelt administration had taken against Japan including embargoing oil imports were acts of war that they reasonably knew would require retaliation. Fast forward 60 years. Osama Bin Laden was a protege of Charlie Wilson's war. He had received arms and training at the hands of the CIA from 1979-1989 when he was a mujahadeen fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Recent revelations about an Egyptian terrorist's FBI connection in the Oklahoma City bombing demonstrate the use of foreign recruited terrorists to carry out operations on U.S. soil. Bin Laden had a CIA handler and a long history of trust forged in battle with the Soviets. What if that handler or someone like him got wind of the plans to attack the WTC? The planning for such a complex operation must have begun not long after the Soviets left Afghanistan. In fact Bin Laden's "jihad" (which by the way he had no authority to declare under Islamic law as he is not a Sheikh) against the U.S. was rooted in the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq just two years after the Soviet pullout of Afghanistan. Bin Laden repeatedly stated that the basing of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia was his reason for waging war not only against the U.S. but against Saudi Arabia as well.

As Bin Laden turned his asymmetrical warfare machine from battle with the atheist Soviets to battle with the "infidel" (also a misnomer as "infidel" in the Koran is a reference to pagans while Jews and Christians are most commonly referred to by Mohammed in praiseworthy terms as "people of the book")United States it is unlikely he severed all connections with his CIA handler(s). It is also possible that Bin Laden's CIA hander was not known to him as such. If his "handler", let's call him Ahmed, was a Saudi, Chechen or Dagestani who had been bloody and dirty with Bin Laden in the trenches for 10 years in Afghanistan plus a few in Chechnya there would be no reason Bin Laden would not continue to trust him.

And let's imagine that through Ahmed someone in a position of economic, political or military power gets wind of a planned attack on the WTC in the mid nineties. There is extensive FBI documentation of surveillance on suspected terrorists in flight schools in Florida in the mid 1990's. This person is savvy enough to realize that foiling this plot is not nearly as politically valuable as allowing it to happen. But the devastation of a plane hitting a building just isn't gonna be spectacular enough for his or her purposes.

This mysterious person, let's call him Charlie, also knows that U.S. F-16's are going to blow the shit out of those airliners 7 minutes after they are declared hijacked. So a military training exercise has to be scheduled for that day to buy a few extra minutes. More importantly Charlie knows enough about the way modern skyscrapers are built that they are actually designed to withstand a direct hit form a Boeing 707. So if this attack, conceived and carried out by Bin Laden and his cronies, is going to have the desired effect the buildings are going to have to come down. So Charlie gets somebody who is an expert in controlled demoltition to set that up. The military exercise is planned for 9/11/01, the airliners remarkably run the gauntlet of the most sophisticated and battle tested air superiority forc the world has ever knowm, the buildings are hit, a few mysterious explosions before and after the impact are not noticed, the wrekage is quickly carted away and boom, instant police state. As long as Charlie, for any reason we care to imagine, has much to gain by the expansion of U.S. military power arouund the world and domestic government expenditures this is the most reasonable theory I can see which takes into account all the available evidence. And Charlie knows that war is the best way to both things simultaneously.

Ender's Game, Armour, The Last Starfighter

Ender's Game and 1984, dust them off, no longer the province of nerds and sci-fi geeks, they became the required reading of the martial academies. We first had to understand the psychology of slavery if we were to become free. The classics of literature were studied just as the samurai had studied art, calligraphy, poetry and watercolors. These were studied alongside the disciplines of the sword. Just as the Japanese had taught: the complete warrior had to be a complete human being first. The mechanisms of modern technology were employed for combat training. In the Neo-of-the -Matrix like scenario children studied the arts of artillery, deployment of forces, marshaling of guerrilla tactics using asymmetrical warfare against a stronger opponent.

Asimov was a scientist. And then he decided there was too much beauty in science to leave it to the scientists, it had to be literary and imaginative. Winston Smith used his speakwrite to make history disappear and now I use my Siri equipped iPhone to make literature appear.

The alien invasion was an advanced race who had progressed beyond the human form; something like the brains floating in liquid that moms use to talk about. Because of their advanced telekinetic nature, projectile weapons are nearly useless against them. Projectiles can be diverted with minimal psychokinetic force. The only way to combat them is to slash past the Sentinel droids which protect their tanks in primal, edged-weapon, hand-to-hand combat. And once passed the droids to smash their liquid filled tanks and sliced them open as they quiver on the deck.

This new fact of history had created a renaissance in hand-to-hand combat. An ancient art form that had decayed into an obscure past time once again became a matter of life and death. Mock Renaissance wargames became the training for a mortal struggle as we began train our children at the age of three to be locked in a death strugggle to save the human race by age 13.

Attend your training. It's what was expected. The research had been done to show that 10 years was the period required to become an expert in anything. We were turning our children into killing machines to save the human race much as the cold warriors and medieval knights had done.

The suicide bombers, the jihadists and the imperial powers all came together with their former foes to fight and push back the alien invasion. The suicide bombers of the Afghan struggle in the New York war became the instructors with some training thrown in from a few old Vietcong left over from the Vietnam war.

The zeal for combat was inherent to human nature. It had to be massaged, encouraged and brought to fruition. The martial cultures of the Cold War, the Butlerian Jihad and the Renaissance had to be revived. It was a matter of life and death.

FPV/FPS masters were no longer quirks, they were a matter of life and death. There's a reason that Dungeons & Dragons was so successful. There's a reason that people play first-person shooter video games and go online with headsets and joysticks to have war with their friends on their team. It's a part of human nature that will never go away. DARPA had started their six drones per pilot program just in time. Finally in 2015 there was a foe worthy of worldwide combat.