Friday, December 19, 2008 “Question 46,” Revisited Policing the world, from the outside in: A US soldier deployed under UN command in Bosnia frisks a civilian at a weapons confiscation checkpoint. Military personnel are now taking part as “observers” at sobriety/driver’s license checkpoints here in the US; could firearms checkpoints be in our future as […]

Wednesday, December 24, 2008 Rubicon in the Rear-View, Part III: En Route to Military Rule (Updated, 12/27) The military occupation of New Orleans, post-Katrina. Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of […]

Leviathan’s Web The most critical disclosure offered by the Washington Post’s report on the “OneDOJ” database being built by the Department of “Justice” is found buried near the end of the piece – as we’ll see anon.Although the Post refers to the database as OneDOJ, it is also known as the National Data Exchange, or […]

Snapshots of a Sadean State One of Sean Hannity’s “great Americans” in action.On two occasions I can recall, a book has disgusted me so thoroughly that rather than setting it aside lightly, I threw it away with great force. The first volume to go airborne in that fashion was the Satyricon of Petronius Aribter; the […]

Torture and the “Goodness of America” Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… [I]n periods when millions are slaughtered, when […]

“This Time For Sure!” “Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence […]

The Earth is the State’s, and the Fullness Thereof Armed revenue farmers harvest a crop at a DUI checkpoint.When George W. Bush signed the death warrant for the habeas corpus guarantee last October, he was consummating a process that has been underway for decades in our law enforcement and “justice” system. Bush’s destruction of habeas […]

The Christian Right and the “Fatal Embrace” No, these aren’t out-takes from a “Tommy Boy” sequel; they’re snapshots of tomorrow’s Christian conservative GOP leaders. (Tip of the sombrero to The Gaelic Starover.)It’s ironic that Vladimir Lenin, notorious for the length and tedium of his pronouncements, coined what may be the world’s briefest and most potent […]

How the War will “Follow Us Home” Every other rationale for continuing the occupation of Iraq having failed, supporters of the war have taken refuge in what they believe to be an invincible thought-stopper: Iraq differs from Vietnam, because this time the enemy will “follow us home.” “After the war in Vietnam, we came home […]