Sunday, June 22, 2008

none of you will read this, but you really, really should

i talk allot about the Constitution here. there arent many things that i capitalize of punctuate properly, but that is one of them. i never thought of myself as a patriot until i saw the potential of our nation through the lense of the Constitution, and through the contrast of the war-whore she has become.

if i'm going to keep referencing and quoting it, i'd better at least link to it so as to shore up my credibility.

so here it is, in its entirety.

honestly, though? i wouldnt trust this one. i dont trust the internet at all. go to your library and sit there for a half an hour with a coffee or an ice tea and read the thing. all of it. even the boring parts (which is most of it). you will be amazed at what you are supposed to be entitled to, what you are supposed to be allowed to do, by law, which you aren't.

if you dont know where your library is find it here, at least if you live in the commonwealth of massachusetts.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

our bad; or, some people claim that theres a government to blame, but i know its our own damn fault

dark times in los estados perdidos. you've been reading; you know. undeclared (and unsanctioned) martial law in DC. border patrol roadblocks in southern new hampshire (live free or die trying?). and now, the sobering realization that when you boil it down, its our fault. my fault. your fault. oh yes. there is no sense in denying it. because when you turn your back on the meanest kid on the playground, you dont get to complain when your mouth is filled with sand and broken teeth.

you remember back in the 2nd grade when you first heard the phrase "of the people, by the people, and for the people", and you wonder where that went wrong. you think, if the government is of the people, why dont i get a say? i'll tell you. you let it go. you shut the hell up. we all did. so did our parents. it started with cynicism, when people would joke about voting for "the lesser of two evils". it gained strength through fear, and it ripened and began to fester on the vine with legislation that took away the voice you had never heard; your own.

there is a popular bumper sticker that says "take my civil liberties; i wasnt using them anyway". well, shit, people. first off, these things that are now called "civil liberties"? about ten years ago, we called them "our rights". we suposed that they were "god given" and "unalienable". now, they are granted to us ever so condescendingly in packages like free-speech zones, and we forget that this entire country is a free-speech zone, acourding to the First Amendment.

and yes, why the fuck werent we "using them"? why is it that when you start quoting the Constitution, people look at you as if you were babbling on about the end is near, repent now? It isnt enough to say that we werent using them because most of us didnt know about them. they said "shit" on south park, we all remember that, and yeah, wasnt it good to live in a country that had freedom of speech. Oh, by the way, if you need to protest, please do it over here. yes, around the block from where the mayor is speaking. yes, behing this razor wire. oh, the dog? that's just molly. careful, she tends to go for the jugular once she smells tear gas, hippie.

how did i get started on this? oh yeah, it was this quote from my favourite turncoat, senator mccain:

"My friends, I will have an energy policy which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East."

Right there; did you catch that? if you ask me, thats a full-on admission that our current clusterfuck in the Former Republic of Iraq had fuck all to do with WMDs, "Iraqi freedom", "spreading democracy", or even staying the course. it was, and is, about oil. plain and simple.

But Mr. Conklin, you ask, if it was about oil, then why are we paying so much for gas???

Answer: when your boss is the vp of an energy company, and your godamned secretary of state has a motherfucking oil tanker named after her, do you really want "cheap gas"?

bit im off track, as usual. point being, WE FUCKING KNEW IT WAS ABOUT OIL. come on. i mean, a year before the war, Pakistan got the Bomb. we didnt give a fuck. they said they were going to use it on India, friends of ours, and we did nothing. a fe years into the war, the DPRK actually DETONATED A NUCLEAR GODDAMNED MISSLE in the sea of Japan. what did we do? we said it was "provocative". anyone who was paying attention knew that the WMD line was just that, a line.

so heres the problem, and its two-fold.

most of us werent paying attention. because we've got precious little of that shit, because we are so used to 30 second summaries of what is going on. bad fucking news.

so ok, maybe those people are excused. but the rest of us, myself included, the people that pay so much attention that their hair is falling out and their desks are littered with eyelashes, WE FUCKED UP. it was up to us to stop this. it is, or was at the time, a government OF THE PEOPLE.

oh well. we sure screwed the pooch on that one. im gonna go distract myself and pray for forgiveness. my apologies to the dead. on both sides.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

i can has fundamental human right of habeas corpus? kthnxbye.


well, well, well. things didnt go so well today for the people who are running this nation into the ground. remember me raving about the Military Comissions Act of 2006?

you know, when they suspended the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, eliminating in one fell swoop the fundamental human right of due process prommised not just in the US Constitution (No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. and also The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it. {we can quibble about this, and i'd actually love to, but 9/11 was neither a rebelion nor an invasion}), but perhaps more notably in the motherfucking MAGNA CARTA of 1215? and yeah, thats the motherfucking YEAR 1215.

in case you missed it, that pic at the top is that shit going down. protection, indeed. protection from the oldest recognized human right, that even serfs in medieval england got to have.

anyway, its time to roll out the barrels, because salvation has come from the strangest of places; the Supreme Court of the United States, who yesterday reached a decision in the case of Boumediene vs. Bush.

I suggest you read it. Otherwise, just google that shit and learn all about how your children have been saved from concentration camp-style imprisonment without charge or trial.

im not exaggerating, either.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

1984 comes 24 years late, give or take 7 years

in the latest outrageous, flagrant act of disregard for the Constitution or the Rights of the Citizenry, the washington dc police have announced plans to restrict access to parts of their city. by "restrict access", they aparently mean setting up monitored checkpoints, and ejecting under threat of arrest any person who is not a resident of the area. no, really.

http://www.examiner.com/a-1423820~Lanier_plans_to_seal_off_rough__hoods_in_latest_effort_to_stop_wave_of_violence.html


where have we heard this kind of thing before? police Chief Cathy L. Lanier claims it has been "done in other cities", and therefore she is "not worried about constiturionality". she's right, of course. it has been done in other cities. just, not in the united states. mostly in former soviet bloc countries. in cities like warsaw, stalingrad, belgrade, and of course east berlin. also, in south africa under apartheid. and more recently, good old bagdad. so yeah, thats a safe precedent, right? jesus fucking christ.

now, i understand that there are some pretty fuckin scary parts of dc. and yeah, something should probably be done about that. clearly, if people dont feel safe on the streets, thats not an acceptable state of affairs, and they should do something about it. but this kind of martial-law style tactic is insane, and its fucking terrifying.

if this kind of thing is going on in our nations capitol, then my friends, its the end of the line. there is no more america as we knew it. the land of the free is officially no longer free. and most of us probably never would have heard about how it began in the ghettos of dc.

i saw my first real proof of this trend on memorial day weekend, when i was driving back from the annual camping trip in the white mountain national forest. for some reason, the united states border patrol had set up a blockade / checkpoint on the southbound lane of interstate 93, in between exits 31 and 30. all traffic was forced to stop. american citizens were seized, in the deffinitive sense of the word. some cars were searched, with dogs.

it is this seizure in the definitive sense that absolutely floored me. the border patrol was acting not only out of it's jurisdiction (about 250 miles out), but was acting in direct violation of the fourth amendment to the Constitution (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment04/).

so i ask you, friends, what is happening here? I want anyone who reads this to think about what this means. nothing is being done about this stuff. its happening all around us, and we dont like to think about it so we shrug it off and go about our business like good citizens.

except that we are not being good citizens. if we were we wouldnt allow this kind of thing. the constitution doesnt stand up for itself. its the responsibility of the citizenry to make sure that it is adhered to. this is done partially through electing people to office whom we trust with it's care, but also through standing up and stopping it's abuse like we would stop the abuse of our own family.

i'll admit, i didnt do that. i hid my knife (which i always bring camping), put gum in my mouth (i had three beers the morning before we left the site), and stopped my car. i felt exactly the same way i did in grammar school when i pretended i didnt notice the bully throwing dirt at me. i felt self loathing and a rage that i could feel looking inside me for a place to hide and fester and eventually explode. i should have said something, asked for an explanation, even though it would surely result in my car being searched and possibly in my arrest, even though i wasnt doing anything illegal.

i dont know whats to be done about it. i need ideas.

any thoughts?