Friday, June 29, 2012

Do We Still Have a Constitution ?

I'm writing another blog about my theory about the Constitution and it's current relevance, but in the meantime...while I was doing a little bit of research I came across this youtube clip of Judge Napolitano which I felt worthy of sharing..




Does the Government work for us, or do we work for the Government..?

What if the Constitution no longer applied..?

What if the whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the government..?

What if Congress' enumerated powers in the Constitution no longer limited congress but were actually used as a justification to extend congress' authority over every realm of human life..?

What if the President, meant to be an equal to Congress, has instead become a democratically-elected, term-limited monarch..?

What if the President assumed that everything he did was legal, just because he's the President..?

What if he could interrupt your regularly scheduled radio and TV programming, for a special message from him..?

What if he could declare war on his own..?

What if he could read your e-mails and your texts without a search warrant..?

What if he could Kill You without warning..?

What if Supreme Court Justices no longer looked to the Constitution to determine the Constitutionality of a law, but rather simply to what Justices who preceded them thought about it..?

What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders..?

What if the 50 States were no longer sovereign entities, equals to each other and parents of the Federal Government they voluntarily Constituted...?

What if the states were mere provinces of a totally nationalized and fully centralized government..?

What if the Constitution was amended stealthily, not by Constitutional amendments duly ratified by the states, but by the constant and persistent expansion of the federal government's role in our lives..?

What if the Federal Government decided if it's own powers were proper and Constitutional..?

What if the Constitution were no longer the supreme law of the land..?

What if you needed a license from the government to speak, to assemble or to protest against the government..?

What if the government didn't like what you planned to say, so it didn't give you the license..?

What if the right to keep and bear arms only applied to the government..?

What if Posse Commatatus (the federal law that prohibits out military from occupying our streets) were no longer in effect..?

What if the government considered the military and adequate dispenser of domestic law enforcement..?

What if Cops looked and acted like troops and you couldn't distinguish the military from the police..?

What if you were not secure in your person, in your papers and in your property..?

What if federal agents could write their own search warrants, in defiance of the Constitution..?

What if the government could decide when you were, or were not entitled to a jury trial..?

What if the government could take your property whenever it wanted..?

What if the government could continue prosecuting you until it got the verdict it wanted..?

What if the government could force you to testify against yourself, simply by labeling you a domestic terrorist..?

What if the government could torture you until you said what the government wanted to hear..?

What if people running for President actually supported torture..?

What if the government tortured your children, to get to you..?

What if government judges and government lawyers intimidated juries into convicting the innocent..?

What if the government could send you to your death and your innocence meant nothing so long as the government's procedures were followed...?

What if America's prison population, the largest in the world, was a cruel and unusual way for a country to be free..?

What if half the prison population never harmed anyone, but themselves..?

What if the people had no rights - except the ones the government chose to let them have..?

What if the states had no rights ecept to do as the federal government commanded..?

What if our elected officials didn't really live among us, but instead all had their hearts and homes in Washington D.C...?

What if the government could strip you of your rights because of where your mother was, when you were born..?

What if the income tax was unconstitutional..?

What if the states were convinced to give up their representation in congress..?

What if the government tried to ban you from using a substance in your body that is older than the government itself..?

What if voting didn't mean anything anymore because both political parties stand for big government..?

What if the government could write any law, regulate any behavior or tax any event - the Constitution be damned..?

What if the government was the reason we don't have a Constitution anymore..?

What if you could love your country, but hate what the government has done to it..?

What if sometimes, to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government..?

What if Jefferson was right..?

What if that government is governs best which governs least..?

What if I'm right..?

What if the government is wrong..?

What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong..?

What if it is better to perish, fighting for freedom; than to live as a slave..?

What if freedom's greatest hour of danger in now..?

 

Saturday, March 31, 2012

You say 'Climate Change' I say 'Tomato'


So a friend posted a link to a Huffington Post article declaring Climate Change MUST BE 'Real' because General Motors pulled it's support from some think tank which routinely dismisses the notion...
I'm not so easily convinced.
If you feel as though you must fill your head with HuffPo drivel, here's the link to the article in question - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/30/general-motors-heartland-institute-climate-change_n_1391217.html
Five people 'liked' her post, complete with her description "GM is In!!!"
Then some fellow we'll simply call 'Steve' posted a comment.. which I probably shouldn't have let get to me.. but it did...  The thread went like this:

  •  Steve - I posted this same article earlier. Now its real.
    It can only be real because a corporation stated it as such.
    This reality is in a new belief category:
    Corporate Consensus Reality

  • Moi - ‎"Decided".. riiight, I'm sure all the bailout money they still haven't paid back had nothing to do with their sudden revelation... At least the 100's of auto dealers who lost their businesses can now breathe a sigh of relief...
     
  •   I especially enjoyed this passage, "Greenpeace has pressured companies to stop funding Heartland, said Kert Davies, Greenpeace's research director."
    Yep cause when I see the word "pressured" my first thought is "oh Yay!!!, They Decided, using all that free will n'stuff..."

    .......kinda like when a bookie sends a couple goons out to smack you in the kneecaps, you 'Decide' to empty your pockets...

  •  Steve - "Heartland has been spreading misinformation to confuse people."
  • Steve - Who can decode Corporate Consensus Reality?
                       Do we rely on it for assurance? Should we?

  • Moi - Seems to me, there's been plenty of misinformation from both sides. And not much in the way of factual evidence.
    I choose not to rely on any consensus opinon... I form my own. Occassionally I'm wrong, usually I'm not. This feels more like t
    he latter. A lot of hot air designed to make richer a handfull of individuals under the guise of a 'cause' which is neither provable or unprovable based on the amount of  time relevant information has been collected.
    Perhaps designed soley to drive manufacturing industry from this country to force volumes of people to become more and more dependent on the state.. or merely to improve stock portfolios by enlarging companies which exist outside of our borders, where none of the regulations we have are even recognized.
    The way I see it, the climate has always been changing, sometimes it's warm at odd times of the year. Sometimes it's unseasonably cold... sometimes similar patterns repeat a couple years in a row and then change dramatically the next...
    Seems just as likely that the calendar we use is 'off'...Last I heard there were no markers in space, no points to verify precisely how long it takes the earth to travel around the sun.. could it be that the path is different each time..? ever tried drawing a cicle fifty times without a compass..? it's not easy to follow the same line, can be quite time consuming... sometimes your circles look more like eggs... isn't it just as likely the earth's path changes, even if only slightly, with each revolution..? a slight wobble here, a deviation there... a few thousand years later and suddenly people start noticing inconsistencies...
    Seems to me, distance from the sun could just as easily explain the so-called 'ice age'... just as much as droughts, Seems to me, there are any number of reasonable, rational.. if not logical, theories... but that's all they are.. theories. None yet, more provable than another....
    So, no... I'm not sold on any consensus.


  • ....As of the time of this posting, there have been no further comments or repudiations. No challenges to my comments.. no disagreements to my offerings... Let's see if that changes overnight, shall we..?

    Monday, February 6, 2012

    Still Don't Understand What Ron Paul is Trying to Say...

    So Ron Paul's on Greta earlier.. Three times she asked him the same question - three times he went off on one of his typical monlogues about what he would have done in 1953... Which had absolutely NOTHING to do with the question asked... Finally she tried to rephrase it.. and still he couldn't comprehend the question - or perhaps he really is as obtuse as it seems...

    This is why I can't host a talk show.

    The question was simple even in the hypothetical: "you're the president, and immediately you're faced with three developing situations; Israel is on the verge of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities; The US Embassy in Syria has been evacuated; and Egypt is holding several US Citizens captive - what do you do?"

    Three times he rolled out his version of historical references from the US involvement in Iran in the 1950's to the US "propping up" a dictator in Egypt, blah blah blah - none of which is relevent, right now.  In this moment there are three things about to happen or happening, What Do You Do NOW???

    After he failed to answer Three times - and the reason I couldn't be a host - I would be compelled to rephaze the question, something like this..

    "Dr. Paul.. You are a doctor... a patient comes to you with an STD. Do you stand in front of that patient for 20 minutes listing all of the things they shouldn't have done?? Do you go on and on about how you wouldn't have gone to that club, how you wouldn't have worn that outfit, how you wouldn't have had sex with the other individual... Or do you shut up and write the prescription for penicilin..???... Well Doctor, the Planet has an STD - it's called 'Radical Islam' - what is your prescription?"

    Answer the Question!

    Friday, January 20, 2012

    New For Me

    So I did it.. I created a blog.. yay.

    This is probably where I'll post my random thoughts on a multitude of interests, whether it be personal experiences, politics or music.. probably some car stuff as well...

    I had a blog on MySpace - but who uses myspace anymore..?  I certainly don't. It used to be pretty cool, but then my account became over-run with friends who were only friends because we all played the Mobsters app.. which got old, pretty quick, for me.

    I'll probably transfer some of those blogs into this one, if I can remember my password - yes it's been that long since I've even logged in.

    The "other" reasons for wanting a blog of my own, is a result of spending a reasonable amount of time responding to various posts on facebook or newsgroup threads - Only to have the posts deleted and my thoughts lost, because (in my humble pinion) they created an indefensible position for the original poster... Or, having only the first couple lines read, the rest ignored, then being charged with saying many different things which I didn't - sometimes being accused of not considering certain information, even though I cite the exact same examples, after the first paragraph...

    I decided, I'd rather catalog my thoughts, here, if only because I really hate having to repeat myself, LOL

    Perhaps someone will come along who finds these things interesting.. we shall see...