Cell Phone Roulette

US government chicken hawks engaging in the never ending War on Terror won’t let the Constitution stand in their way, and simply don’t give a damn if they murder innocent bystanders in their frenzied zeal to get the bad guys.

That’s exactly what happened in Yemen when they went after Anwar al-Awlaki with one of their un-manned drones. They got him alright, blew him to bits, and in the process assassinated his completely innocent 16-year-old son. Due process of law was the last thing on their criminal minds.

Now, with the latest Edward Snowden revelation, we learn that the same chicken hawks are playing cell phone roulette with their mindless drones.

That’s right. The US government is reportedly now ordering drone strikes based on cell phone location alone, without any corroborating evidence. If their hapless target, for example, happens to leave his phone at home with the wife and kids while he pops out to the local 7-11 for a pack of smokes, he might return to find his house reduced to a mound of rubble and his innocent family members vaporized into oblivion.

You see, in this War on Terror, our government just doesn’t care about hitting innocent unintended targets with missiles. If they detect the location of a cell phone they’ll order the strike without confirming the location of the intended target no matter the likely presence of innocent bystanders.

We can thank the NSA for having the ability to locate your cell phone, my cell phone; everybody’s cell phone, including the bad guys as well as the good guys. They can now locate anyone on the planet this way, and if they want to murder you, well … there’s not a lot you can do about it.

The details of this shocking development are included in a report published recently by journalist Glenn Greenwald's journal, The Intercept. Citing an unnamed former drone operator and other sources, it said the NSA uses a "complex analysis of electronic surveillance" to pinpoint drone strike targets. However, the CIA and U.S. military don't always confirm who the target is with informants on the ground.

So, obviously, the flagged phone could be in the hands of someone else -- a friend, a family member, someone who's holding the wrong phone at the wrong time -- when the missile is fired. "It's really like we're targeting a cell phone," the former drone operator was quoted as saying. "We're not going after people -- we're going after their phones."

Naturally our government goons deny their conduct is like playing roulette, and maintain that this kind of thing is perfectly fine. "For obvious reasons we can't discuss the specific sources and methods we use to establish near certainty, but our assessments are not based on a single piece of information," explains a spokesperson. "We gather and scrutinize information from a variety of sources and methods before we draw conclusions."

She declined to say whether strikes are ordered without the use of human intelligence, and both the CIA and NSA declined to comment on the report. Asked about the reports at his daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to comment on the specific case. But said the administration has set a "high threshold" for taking lethal action against any target.

A high threshold indeed; this is cell lethal phone roulette with missiles and drones.

The Camel Clue

In my book: Authority! – Implications of Consciousness and the Reality of Existence, I debunk all conventional moral and political claims to external authority over human beings as deceptions in consciousness, especially the so-called authority of the Holy Bible as the literal word of God, the purported one and only supreme human being, creator of the universe and everything in existence -- the ultimate metaphor for human Authority!

The Abrahamic monotheistic religions, which together include Christianity, Judaism and Islam, based upon reverence for the founding father Abraham, a patriarchal character in the Holy Bible, are the greatest impediments to individual liberty and freedom ever invented by the mind of man.  

The religion of the Holy Bible is anathema to liberty. That’s why I regard it as one of my humble missions in life to prove that all religions and the Bible are not the works of a supernatural God, but entirely human inventions conceived by human beings to shackle the consciousness of other human beings and thereby deprive them of their precious liberties.  

There have been many notable religious debunkers throughout history, (not nearly enough in my opinion, however), but Charles Darwin, the father of modern biology, stands out as the greatest debunker who has ever lived in regard to conclusively proving as a myth the fantasy of creation as set forth in the book of Genesis in the Holy Bible.   

Other intellectual giants before him proved that the Earth is a sphere which orbits the sun; that our solar system is just one of trillions in a universe consisting of many billions of galaxies; that this was not all created in a span of six days, but billions of years; that mankind did not coexist with dinosaurs; and on and on.

In short, the clear and convincing evidence compiled over centuries of scientific observation is that the Holy Bible is riddled with scientific inaccuracies; that far from being the works of an omnipotent omniscient supernatural supreme being, it was obviously written in its entirety by a collection of crafty but scientifically illiterate ignorant human beings as a means to usurp Authority in the conscious minds of others.

The Holy Bible and the men who conceived and rely upon its purported political and moral Authority have been hugely successful right up to the present day. Most of the people on this planet simply do not accept the intellectual reality of existence as it actually is. They would much rather embrace and live accordingly by their own religious fantasy.

No amount of reasonable, logical and sound Biblical debunking is going to change most minds.

Not even the latest camel clue.

That’s right. Archaeologists from Israel’s top university have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the arrival of domestic camels in the Middle East -- and they say the science directly contradicts the Bible’s version of events.

Camel bones prove more error in the Bible.

Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, Old Testament stories that historians peg to between 2000 and 1500 BC. But scientists at Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures say camels weren’t domesticated in Israel until centuries later, more like 900 BC. 

“This anachronism is direct proof that the [Bible's] text was compiled well after the events it describes,” they explain. “In addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is direct proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes.”

The bones were in archaeological layers dating from the last third of the 10th century BC or later — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the Kingdom of David, according to the Bible.

The few camel bones found in earlier archaeological layers probably belonged to wild camels, which archaeologists think lived there during the Neolithic period or even earlier. All the sites active in the 9th century in the Aravah Valley had camel bones, but none of the sites that were active earlier contained them.

"The introduction of the camel to our region was a very important economic and social development,” they added. “By analyzing archaeological evidence from the copper production sites of the Aravah Valley, we were able to estimate the date of this event in terms of decades rather than centuries."

Add this small new fragment of scientific observation to the towering mountain of evidence debunking religion and the Holy Bible as political and moral human Authority! -- The camel clue.

Compulsory Education Slaves

As a committed libertarian minded American, I take the Bill of Rights and its constitutional guarantees against any government interference with individual liberty seriously. There are no constitutional exceptions to each of those guarantees. As far as I’m concerned then they are written in stone. They might be altered but only buy constitutional amendment which entails a lengthy and cumbersome procedure.

That’s what the founding fathers intended as the way to make the United States of America uniquely different than the governments of most other nations, particularly the nation of Great Britain and its tyrannical king, with whom we rebelled against and fought the Revolutionary War.

But Republicans, Democrats, and other myriad forms of statist thinkers, including many of the supposedly apolitical members of the federal and state judiciaries – yes, and even most Americans for that matter -- don’t exactly see it the same as I do.  They believe it’s perfectly OK for the state to carve out exceptions by fiat to our otherwise most precious guaranteed liberties.

It’s OK, for example, to infringe upon our constitutional rights as long as the infringements are “reasonable” they reckon. Never-mind that there are no constitutional exceptions to the First Amendment, for instance; they simply invent them and then justify the infringements on the grounds that the state has a “reasonable” compelling interest to do so.

In Britain recently there are two parents who face prison time for taking their children out of school for only a week to go on a special holiday vacation abroad. It was the first holiday the family had enjoyed together in five years. Upon their return from the Greek island of Rhodes, school officials dunned them with a fine of £360 (about $600), which they failed to pay, so now it’s jail time.

Regular attendance is paramount to a child’s educational experience and benefits the overall school community, reasons the British government. The benefit to the community outweighs the liberties of individuals; therefore they deem what these parents decided on for the benefit of their family a crime against the state.

Think again if you don’t believe that this kind of mindless government tyranny can’t happen in America where the Bill of Rights supposedly guarantees our individual liberty. Every jurisdiction in the United States of America has long ago passed compulsory education laws requiring parents and children to submit to the state’s “reasonable” interest in compelling attendance at school.

And there is a long line of precedent in the state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, upholding compulsory school attendance laws as “reasonable” infringements of otherwise enforceable constitutional rights. “There is no doubt as to the power of a State, having a high responsibility for education of its citizens, to impose reasonable regulations for the control and duration of basic education,” declared SCOTUS unanimously in 1972.

But just how is it that there is no doubt?

The court never answers that question. No court ever has. The justices just blithely take it for granted that the state may compel school attendance in most situations as against individual liberty interests if such infringements are deemed “reasonable” despite the plain fact that there are no such “reasonableness” constitutional exceptions to the clear mandates of the Bill of Rights.

The sad fact is that American statists can legally make all parents and children education slaves by criminalizing non-compliance. These statists insist that a supposedly free people are not truly free, but instead owe certain individual obligations and responsibilities to the state even though the Constitution sets forth no such obligations or responsibilities.

The courts have used exactly the same statist reasoning with regard to many other laws, including compulsory military draft and conscription laws, tax laws, even ObamaCare laws. The state can make you its slave as long as it can convince the judges that it’s “reasonable.”

That’s why in America, as in Britain, and elsewhere, the Bill of Rights does not exist if the government wants to “reasonably” make you a compulsory education, or any other kind of slave. 

Statist Jock Itch

The United Statists of America opened up a Pandora’s treasure chest exactly 101 years ago today on February 3, 1913, when the odious 16^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified finally allowing the government trolls to levy taxes on the income of individuals living in the former land of the free.

Ever since that fateful day more than a century ago all the greedy statists at the federal, state and local levels of government have been literally itching to grab as much loot as they can from every single voluntary transaction between individuals whether large or small.

I liken them to the ugly, stinking, hairy little trolls who reside under bridges and come out with teeth bared, waiving, screaming and shrilly demanding of hapless passersby to show them the money in their pockets, turn it over and give it up.

Not only is everyone expected to fork over a substantial share of their hard earned income to these armed gangs of extortionist trolls, in addition we must all suffer the humiliating indignity of filing a detailed report to the beasts every year signed under penalty of perjury specifying the exact amount and origin of every penny.

This is one of the worst things that have ever happened to the citizens of America in the entire history of the United States. If the founding fathers of our nation were alive today they’d all be sickened to the core over this travesty which they surely never intended when they rebelled against the king of England, fought the Revolutionary War and ultimately ratified the Constitution.

The very idea of a government tax on individual incomes was an unconstitutional anathema before 1913. It took an amendment to the Constitution in order to bring about this horrible plague upon the populace. And that was finally achieved by the statists only because they promised that such a tax would remain trifling and limited solely to the very highest earners and most wealthy citizens among the people.

Today the national income tax cancer has metastasized throughout the whole body of the republic to such an extent that there is no possibility of escaping the sticky tentacles of the statist government trolls who now reside under bridges everywhere; Washington D.C., and every state, city, town and tiny municipality across the land.

Witness, for just one example, the fact that all the football players, coaches, and staff of both the Denver Broncos and Seattle Seahawks, who faced off today in the Super Bowl game at MetLife Stadium in the state of in New Jersey will be required by the tax trolls to fork over a special “jock tax” levied on athletes who earn money during visits the Garden State.

There’s no escaping it. It’s going on in just about every venue in the country where professional sports is played. The statist trolls in these places have been itching for a long time to impose these jock taxes and now it’s a reality.

The state of California devised the tax on out-of-state players when Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls played the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 NBA Finals. Later, the State of Illinois enacted its own jock tax on Lakers players, calling it “Michael Jordan’s Revenge.”

Now all the professional sports franchises must provide their players and other team employees with W2 forms reflecting income, and calculating the taxes owed to each state in which they have competed during the year. It’s an administrative nightmare for the taxpayers and a bonanza for the legions of government trolls, tax lawyers and accountants.

Seahawks and Broncos players visiting New Jersey for the Super Bowl today are taxed at a rate of 8.97% on earnings earned each day they’re in the state. The loot will be considerable as each player on the winning team will be entitled to a bonus of $92,000, while the losing team’s players get $46,000. Some of the higher paid athletes will be dunned as much as $60,000 in taxes for their weeklong stay in New Jersey.

That means players, coaches, trainers, as well as the officiating crews who referee the contest, will be shaken down by the income tax trolls. Even the Super Bowl rings, awarded to the participants, and valued at between $20,000 and $25,000 each, are considered by the grasping statists as a taxable fringe benefit.

The trolls, who put the Italian mafia to shame with their tactics, don’t leave a single stone unturned when it comes to collecting their ill-gotten and extorted loot.

Those who perhaps will suffer the most by this legitimized thieving scheme will be the assistant coaches and trainers who earn the small money but will still have to hire tax accounts to sort out their own individual jock tax liability. “Everyone who travels with the team gets taxed, and they’re the ones who really get hurt,” explains Sean Packard, tax director at Interpublic Group’s (IPG) Octagon Financial Services.  

Look for the consequences of this crippling disease to spread soon to the internet and every voluntary financial transaction between innocent consenting individuals doing business everywhere. 

The government tax trolls are itching for and are going to get their cut by hook or crook.

This is the inevitable result of American government statist jock itch.

Hair Raising Public School Statists in Texas

American Public education statists believe that they have a perfect right to compel by force all human beings between the ages of five and eighteen years to forfeit their precious time, liberty and constitutional rights for seven hours of collective confinement every weekday 280 days every year.

And while they’re at it, these same statists claim the right to force their school-aged victims to conform in all manner of behavior, dress, personal appearance and thought. The children are treated just like inmates in a state penitentiary; penalized for the slightest infractions. It is not enough that they are prisoners; they’re expected to conform like sheep.

Witness the sad case of straight-A student, Devin Gonzalez, a junior at Elysian Fields High School in Ark-La-Tex Texas. She was penalized with suspension because of her hair color. "I got sent home because my hair is red" she explains. 

It had been that same color for more than a year, but now the statist administrators are forcing her to change it. They think it’s distracting and doesn’t meet the school dress code.

"I was allowed to come back Thursday because I attempted to dye my hair a different color, but it didn't work obviously," she said. So she was suspended again. The statist principal insists that student hair must be a natural color. "It can't be two-toned and it has to be a natural color.”

"I do volleyball, softball, I'm in FFA, OAP, I'm in one of the plays, I tutor little kids at the elementary on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I don't feel like I'm a trouble maker. I freak out when I get a B," she added. Now she’s hoping her new hair color won't cause any more trouble or stand in the way of her education again.

Yes, they’ve taught this poor little lamb well.  She’s meekly caving in to their criminal demands which violate her First Amendment right to freedom of expression as though she’s the trouble maker deserving punishment. She’s just another hapless victim of those hair raising public school statists in Texas.

Inequality is a Virtue

When I was ten years old I tried out for the local little league baseball program, got cut from the team and went home crying. The coach told me to be sure to try out again the next year so I did; was cut again, and went home crying.

It was one of the worst setbacks in memory to my childhood self esteem because, while admittedly I was not a great athlete, at least I knew that I was a lot better than some of the younger boys who made the team.

The rotten part about the system was the fact that every year an equal quota of 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 year-old tryouts had to be selected. I was better than all the 8 and 9-year-olds, but too many of the kids my age were better than me so I got cut, not just once but twice. So I never had a chance to play little league baseball.

It wasn’t fair.

Attempting to force equality among unequals isn’t fair.

Later on in my life, as all kids do, I learned that some of my peers had more and better stuff than I had. A few of them had no trouble acquiring the prettiest girls, achieving the best grades, and effortlessly displaying the most pleasing physique and appearance, while the rest of us could only wish for such qualities.

But it never occurred to me that some God or the government ought to step in and try to force a system of equality so that every kid could have the same stuff, the prettiest girls, the best grades and looks. Even as a kid I knew that such a thing would be quite impossible, and that even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be right.

One of the best lessons of life is learning that inequality is a fact of life. Inequality is what enhances life and makes life worth living. Inequality is good. Inequality is a virtue. The satisfaction with life is learning how to play the hand that nature dealt you. Poverty can be overcome. Physical appearance can be improved. Success can be achieved by anyone willing to put forth the time and effort.

While the plain facts of nature guarantee inequality among all organisms, as human beings we can still rightly aspire to guarantee each person to equality under the law. There is a big difference between equality of status and equality under law. The former is simply not possible and not desirable, yet the latter is not only possible but necessary to a fair system of human societal organization.

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution guarantee equality under the law. That means that the laws are supposed to treat every person equally; justice is supposed to be blind; and no one is supposed to be above the law. Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way in practice but the idea is right. It’s an idea worth fighting for.

But one thing the Constitution does not guarantee is equality of status. There has always been inequality, and there always will be inequality of status. Some from among us are just naturally smarter, more talented, well endowed and better looking than the rest. That is as it should be.

Try to imagine a scenario in which everyone was actually equal to everyone else in every way. That is an unimaginably bleak and foreboding thought to my mind. The nearest I can come to contemplating the concept is imagining what it is like to live in North Korea, the worst hellhole existing on planet Earth.

But that fact doesn’t keep your average committed statist politician like Barack Obama from trying to force his socialist utopian system of equality of status on all Americans. Income inequality is the “defining challenge of our time,” the President will exclaim in his State of the Union speech this week.

He thinks that forcing employers to pay a higher minimum wage will help solve the “problem” of income inequality. He thinks that low entry level and low skilled employees ought to earn a higher proportion of a business’ earnings compared to the owners and managers. He believes that “workplace fairness” means that everyone must be compensated exactly the same. And he thinks that the government ought to use force to make it that way.

When will the statists of this world ever learn that their socialist ideas won’t work? There is a good reason for inequality of status; a good reason for inequality of income; and a good reason to believe that:

Inequality is a virtue.

Unequal Protection

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution together provide that American citizens are entitled by right to equal protection of the laws, both federal and state, but many politicians think they have the right to ignore that mandate and grant by the force of law special privileges and advantages to some to the disadvantage of others.

Case in point: President Obama believes that he can arbitrarily and by fiat create so-called anti-poverty “Promise Zones” which will grant special privileges and advantages to people living within them while denying the same benefits of the law to people living outside such zones.

Invoking his own personal story, the President aims to combat poverty, declaring recently that: “this is going to be a year of action.” He’s expected to elaborate that plan during his upcoming State of the Union address by announcing five communities that will be targeted for tax incentives and federal grants under a government Promise Zone program -- all to be accomplished without the necessity of any congressional action.

He’s simply going to order it by Presidential decree. “We’ve got to make sure this recovery — which is real — leaves nobody behind,” he said. “And that’s going to be my focus throughout the year.”

“There was a period of time in my life where I was goofing off,” Obama explained, “I was raised by a single mom; I didn’t know my dad…” This is his justification for violating the Constitution -- granting some people special privileges and advantages while denying equal benefits to others. He didn't know his dad. 

The first 5 of an expected 20 anti-poverty Promise Zones which the President intends to announce over the next three years are located in San Antonio, Texas, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, California, southeastern Kentucky and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Communities within these zones will have a higher priority when applying for federal grants; will benefit from more coordinated government assistance, and be singled out for possible Congressional approved tax incentives.

But why should people who live in southeastern Kentucky be allowed special benefits provided by the law which are denied to similarly situated folks living just outside that arbitrary zone?

It’s just like the President declaring by fiat that people who live in Los Angeles will now be taxed at a lower federal rate on their incomes than taxpayers who live in San Francisco simply because they live in Los Angeles.

I call that unequal protection.