what did you think i would post today?
(Adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776)
The Unanimous Declarationof the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.
He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
Source: The Pennsylvania Packet, July 8, 1776
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
"smell like a sound"; or, how i discovered the fart humor in '80s pop music
it happened this past sunday. Katelyn, my brother Ethan, and I were driving through Hartford on the way to my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary. Katelyn had put in a mix CD with alot of good, old '80s new-wavey stuff on it. One of the tracks was Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf.
As I drove along, listening to the lyrics, i heard it; one verse that stuck as both irritatingly obtuse and yet, at the same time, almost blindingly simple: "smell like a sound".
My mind seized on this image the way it tends to do with most abstract things. Almost instantly, i saw what it meant, what it HAD to mean.
"Smell like a sound" can only mean one thing: a fart.
think about this. a fart is the only thing that is at once a smell and a sound. You can walk into a room and exclaim that it "smells like a fart in here", and yet at the same time you can say that something "sounds like farts". There is nothing else on earth, at least that i can think of, that fitts these criteria.
And i tried to think of other things, believe me. I thought, you can say something smells like fish, like soap, like ass, like dirt; but you cant say that something sounds like any of those things.
Converseley, you can say that something sounds like thunder, like a scream, like a freight train, like a whisper. But if you name one thing that smells like either of those i'll eat my hat.
and yet, the Fart. a smell like a sound. Jesus.
I didn'd get how it fit in with the rest of the lyrics, which seem to be about sexual conquest, until i remembered that the members of Duran Duran were at least probably bisexuals. Im going to leave it at that for the sake of decency, which is something i do very, very rarely.
that is all.
As I drove along, listening to the lyrics, i heard it; one verse that stuck as both irritatingly obtuse and yet, at the same time, almost blindingly simple: "smell like a sound".
My mind seized on this image the way it tends to do with most abstract things. Almost instantly, i saw what it meant, what it HAD to mean.
"Smell like a sound" can only mean one thing: a fart.
think about this. a fart is the only thing that is at once a smell and a sound. You can walk into a room and exclaim that it "smells like a fart in here", and yet at the same time you can say that something "sounds like farts". There is nothing else on earth, at least that i can think of, that fitts these criteria.
And i tried to think of other things, believe me. I thought, you can say something smells like fish, like soap, like ass, like dirt; but you cant say that something sounds like any of those things.
Converseley, you can say that something sounds like thunder, like a scream, like a freight train, like a whisper. But if you name one thing that smells like either of those i'll eat my hat.
and yet, the Fart. a smell like a sound. Jesus.
I didn'd get how it fit in with the rest of the lyrics, which seem to be about sexual conquest, until i remembered that the members of Duran Duran were at least probably bisexuals. Im going to leave it at that for the sake of decency, which is something i do very, very rarely.
that is all.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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