Independence Day is tomorrow, and I wonder how many people really get why it matters.
In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”
Zzzzzzzz.
The real principles were more like the following.
(1) No legislation without representation.
The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government. This is what the War for Independence was all about: local self-government.
Yet today, when the Supreme Court says the federal government has no authority over a particular issue and that it is better decided at the state level, instead of being pleased that the decentralized American political order is once again being respected, tens of millions of Americans respond as if Frankenstein’s monster were roaming the land.
2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one. Today we are supposed to consider this unthinkable.
(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality. The Parliament’s view, by contrast, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional.
So the American colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution. Sound familiar?
Who can say with confidence that if the US government were wiped away today, that it would not be replaced with something even worse? Under such circumstances, we must never abandon the important work of laying the foundations first for a revolution in ideas.
It’s difficult to say what most Americans commemorate or celebrate on Independence Day nowadays. Many appear to focus on some vague notion of “America.” Others even take to jingoism equating the United States government with the very notion of “freedom.”
Lost in all of this is the fact that the Declaration of Independence — the document we’re supposed to remember today — is a document that promotes secession, rebellion, and what the British at the time regarded as treason.
On the other hand, those who do recall the radical nature of the Declaration often tend to romanticize the American Revolution in a way that is neither instructive nor helpful today.
So, what should we remember about Independence Day, and what can it teach us? For starters, here are three things about the history and context of this holiday that should continue to inform us today and into the future.
One: If You Can’t Secede, You’re Not Really Free
The very first sentence of the Declaration of Independence lays it out. Sometimes, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…”
The document then goes on to list in detail why 1776’s specific act of secession was justified and necessary for preserving the rights of the colonists.
By the 19th century, this philosophy of self-determination would become a foundational element of the ideology now known internationally as liberalism — or “classical liberalism” in the United States.
Not surprisingly, we find this idea in the later writings of liberals such as Ludwig von Mises who, writing in Vienna in 1927, concluded:
It must always be possible to shift the boundaries of the state if the will of the inhabitants of an area to attach themselves to a state other than the one to which they presently belong has made itself clearly known…
[W]henever the inhabitants of a particular territory … make it known … that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time … their wishes are to be respected and complied with.
Mises, like Jefferson, understood that without this right of self-determination, there is no freedom.
Nevertheless, modern opponents of self-determination and secession will claim that secession cannot be tolerated because it is not “legal.”
This is scarcely relevant. After all, the colonial uprising against the King was not “legal,” and it hardly matters whether political victors consider any breakaway secession movements legal. Times and societies change, and nothing is forever or written in stone.
For Mises, secession must be tolerated for pragmatic reasons. It is “the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.” But For Jefferson, as for his fellow secessionists, it was a moral imperative, whether “treasonous” or not.
Which brings me back to the US goal in Ukraine. It is destruction, and not the creative kind. Ukraine completely destroyed as a free state, to be used as a dead thorn with which to poke Moscow.
US state media – the NYT, WP, NPR, and the main TV news corporations – cautiously broaches topics they refused to touch a year ago. We are learning that Nazi and racist ideologies are popular in Ukraine. We now know the US state department, with German and other EU and NATO assistance, schemed against Russia when they signed on the Minsk agreement in 2014, a noble lie in the neocon fashion. We know, from mainstream media that the so-called Ukraine spring counteroffensive has begun, after much US and NATO urging, and is failing at every turn, at a great cost.
We are now allowed to see glimpses of the dwindling Ukrainian population, and with it, their economy. Indirectly, we understand that there is a growing desperation in Kiev – for money, for weapons, for NATO and EU membership. The actions of the Ukrainian army and its leadership, attacking Moscow with drones, raids into Belarus, attempts to cause nuclear contamination in Eastern Europe though attacks and sabotage of their own Ukrainian nuclear power stations and major dams are being noted. While I believe Seymour Hersh on who did Nordstream, the convenient story of a heroic team of Uke divers doing the job had a valid purpose, to provide the Ukrainian voter with a ray of hope and heroism.
The casual observer of this war, 17 months in, notes physical and emotional exhaustion, and political desperation. The orgasmic excitement expressed by US death cult in Washington the last Saturday in June was revealing. Not of their various “goals” in Ukraine, or their fanatical Russia-hate – but that their long dry spell is beginning to make even neocons desperate for a bit of “good news.”
Neocon war is unpopular, ugly, venal. Worst of all, it is unsuccessful – meaning instead of ending in triumph and celebration, it persists as a confusing, contradictory and costly problem multiplier. We’ve seen this before. Neocons are the Dylan Mulvaneys of American politics, albeit with less sincerity and self-awareness. When it’s your influence that has destroyed the effectiveness of and any residual honor in US foreign policy for the past 70 years, as well as bankrupting the nation – the writing is on the wall.
Or it should be. We’d probably be better off having our country led by a beer company. Even Anheuser-Busch’s crippled instincts would not have led to the present situation in eastern Europe.
Biden is planning to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, and yes, they are indiscriminate, horrific, outlawed in 120 countries, and immoral – but – wait for it – the decision to use them is entirely Ukraine’s. Biden and Blinken and Nuland and Sullivan, and half the Senate and half the Congress – well, they don’t have a thing to do with “Ukraine’s decisions.”
Unless Kiev or a European ally, or NATO member wants to see about ending hostilities, making peace, making Ukraine a safe place for Ukrainians to live – well that’s strictly verboten, forbidden by Washington, cannot happen, is not allowed.
We apparently have a shit ton of MK-20s in the Pentagon “warehouse.” Where else are we going to use them?
Biden recently acknowledged the balloon was blown off course and was not intentionally flown over the US
“The pentagram said”!!! The pentagram tells the truth? This must be a PSYOP. Or maybe letting the balloon fly over the entire country, after having seen it early in it’s approach, for political purposes, ws about to backfire.
The Pentagon said Thursday that the Chinese balloon that wound up over the US in February did not collect data while it flew over US territory.
“We believe that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or flying over the United States, and certainly the efforts that we made contributed, I’m sure,” said Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder.
Ryder made the comments when asked about a Wall Street Journal report that said the balloon contained US-made equipment. “I don’t have any specifics to provide as it pertains to the [People’s Republic of China] high altitude balloon and any potential US components,” he said.
For their part, Beijing has said the balloon was a civilian weather research device, while the Biden administration says it was a surveillance device. At this point, it has become clear that China did not intend to fly the balloon over the US, something President Biden recently acknowledged.
“That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course up through Alaska and then down through the United States,” Biden said.
Emboldened by dangerous Supreme Court decision, agents even planting cameras on private property
Note the casual recklessness of that reasoning. The Supreme Court essentially declared that, since some private land is viewable from beyond its boundary — from a road or maybe a plane or hot air balloon — all private land apart from the “curtilage” surrounding a home is fair game for government trespasses and searches.
For many people, a central attraction of owning and living on a multi-acre expanse of land is the opportunity for complete privacy — to include freedom from the prying eyes of government.
While most Americans might understandably believe the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrantless searches covers all their property, a little-known 1924 Supreme Court decision — Hester v United States — says otherwise. The case struck a major blow against privacy rights, and government agents of all stripes have been exploiting the ruling ever since.
Those exploitations have grown increasingly brazen. Just ask Josh Highlander, whose home sits on a wooded, 30-acre spread east of Richmond, Virginia.
In April, Highlander’s wife and 6-year-old son were playing basketball in their yard. When his wife went to retrieve a long rebound, she spotted a man in full camouflage walking among the trees. Alarmed, she and her son darted inside the house.
Josh Highlander’s wife was frightened when she spotted a fully-camouflaged man through this opening in the woods (Institute for Justice)
When Highlander went outside, he couldn’t locate the man, but did discover that a game camera he’d placed in his food plot was gone. When he called police, he learned the man on his property was an agent of Virginia’s Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) — one of three who crossed another piece of private land to enter his property. Worse, the same trio had taken his camera, holding no warrant for that action either.
These incidents took place on the first day of turkey season. Before coming to Highlander’s property, DWR agents had also entered two other properties, belonging to his brother and to his father, issuing a citation to his brother for illegally hunting “over bait.” However, the alleged “bait” was seed for his brother’s own food plot, consistent with DWR’s instructions for managing such a plot.
DWR’s violation of Highlander’s liberties didn’t end that day. “For weeks, my son wouldn’t play outside in his own back yard because he was afraid of who might be in the woods,” says Highlander. “My camera was taken two months ago, and I’ve still never received a receipt, a warrant or a ticket.”
Highlander’s camera was seized by Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources agents acting without a search warrant (Institute for Justice)
This unsettling brand of government misconduct springs from the Supreme Court’s Hester decision.
In that 1924 case arising from the alcohol prohibition, revenue agents saw a man, Hester, exit his father’s house and hand another man a bottle. When the two men became aware of the agents’ presence, they both ran, each dropping a bottle on the Hester property. With no warrant, agents entered the property, examined the bottles and found they contained moonshine whisky.
Supreme Court opinions frequently span upwards of 70 pages or more. With Hester, however, the court took just two paragraphs to decimate the Fourth Amendment’s protection of landowners, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declaring “the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields.”
And with that, he burdened his fellow citizens with the “open fields doctrine,” which allows warrantless searches and trespassing on land beyond the “curtilage,” a vague term referring to the outdoor area immediately surrounding a home.
Right-wing populists, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to oppose the establishment’s foreign policy mostly because it consumes tax money they want the government to spend on domestic projects. That’s hardly comforting to anyone who wants the government to do less and thereby consume far fewer scarce resources, which after all are produced privately.
Much more could be said against America First, for example, that the term national interest has long been a cover for collectivism and coercion. America First is no guarantee of nonintervention. What we need is a commitment not to America First but to individual liberty first.
Today’s Trump-inspired “America First” faction cannot be counted on to be consistently noninterventionist and antiwar. That it may lean that way because its chief rival faction is so enthusiastic about foreign adventurism is hardly a firm assurance that it will remain antiwar in the future.
We must beware of the assumption that an interventionist foreign policy is, in contrast to America First, by nature “Any Country But America First.” Admittedly, advocates of U.S. foreign adventurism often defend their policy choices in terms of the benefits to another population. But that’s not all they do. They also typically invoke the security interests of the American people. It’s a small world, after all, they say, and what protects others also protects us. How often have you heard interventionists agitate for war solely on behalf of foreigners? Sure, national self-sacrifice might not be good politics, but that doesn’t mean that people of the interventionist mindset don’t mean what they say.
My point is not that they are right, but only that they, or most of them, are sincere (though misguided). I doubt if George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq was motivated solely by regard for the Iraqis or Israelis. Not was Barack Obama’s bombing and regime change in Libya carried out on behalf of the Libyan people only. In both cases the key policymakers and their supporters believed that these actions were also good for the American people, who had been told for decades that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi threatened them. The same can be said about the people who gave us the war in Vietnam. This is not to dismiss the malign influence of dishonest people who simply enjoy exercising power or who will profit from selling weapons to the government. But I am suspicious of such single-factor explanations.
If I’m right about this, we must ask what today’s America Firsterism is defined in contrast to.
13. You can recognize sociopaths, psychopaths, and other narcissists in your life by paying attention to how much energy they pour into convincing you to believe stories about others, about themselves, and especially about you. Someone who often spends energy trying to get you to believe negative things about yourself is someone you should get out of your life as quickly as possible.
1. It’s easier to understand what’s going on in the world when you mentally “mute” people’s narratives about what’s going on and just look at the material movements of wealth, resources, weapons, and people. That’s how you separate what’s real from the manipulations and empty narrative fluff, how you see who’s doing the taking and hoarding, and how you figure out who the real aggressors are in international conflicts.
2. The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human experience are consciousness, the extent to which conditioned thought patterns dictate our lives, and the influence of propaganda.
3. We live in a civilization that’s so pervasively steeped in lies and manipulations that the only way to have a truth-based relationship with reality is to drop all your assumptions and premises about what’s true and begin examining everything from the very beginning with fresh eyes.
4. The phenomenon known as spiritual enlightenment is a real thing which we are all capable of realizing, and the fact that this potential exists within our species has many far-reaching implications for what we are capable of attaining as a civilization.
5. Everything is beautiful. Not seeing the beauty in something is always the failure of the perceiver, not the thing being perceived.
6. Happiness is the natural default position of human consciousness. It’s only through egoic delusions that we trick ourselves into unhappiness.
7. There are strange untapped potentials within our species which our philosophies don’t touch on, our religions don’t anticipate, our academia doesn’t acknowledge, and our common worldviews don’t account for.
8. Reality is nondual. There’s no real separation between the perceiver and that which is perceived, or between any of the objects in sense perception. All is indivisible.
9. The self is an illusion held together by believed mental narratives and fear-based energetic fixations. This illusion can be seen through and transcended.
10. It’s possible for two people to keep falling more and more deeply in love with each other for their entire lives, as long as they’re both intensely curious about each other and both keep growing and discovering new parts of themselves to love.
11. The feeling of guilt is useless and can safely be dropped entirely. The only people who might benefit from feeling some guilt are the sociopaths and psychopaths among us who never experience it anyway. For those among us with healthy empathy centers, guilt is unnecessary to motivate good behavior and often becomes a tool that manipulators use to control us.
12. Antisocial personality disorder, more commonly known as sociopathy and psychopathy, is one of the greatest obstacles to human thriving. That there really are creatures among us who don’t think or feel like the rest of us do and frequently use their lack of empathy to climb the ladders of wealth and power sounds made up (and even sounds like the basis of many racist belief systems), but it is a fact. Not until our species becomes so emotionally intelligent and awake that sociopaths and psychopaths are unable to thrive in it or go unseen will this problem disappear.
13. You can recognize sociopaths, psychopaths, and other narcissists in your life by paying attention to how much energy they pour into convincing you to believe stories about others, about themselves, and especially about you. Someone who often spends energy trying to get you to believe negative things about yourself is someone you should get out of your life as quickly as possible.
14. There really is a struggle in our world between light and darkness, though it doesn’t look how the movies tell us to expect it. Those in power seek to keep their dark deeds hidden in darkness by maintaining government secrecy, propaganda and censorship. The manipulators in our own lives seek to keep their manipulations and misdeeds hidden in the same way. Even within our own personal psychology there are dysfunctional structures which seek to remain hidden in the unconscious. Humanity’s struggle is to bring that all into the light.
15. A sincere devotion to knowing the truth is the path toward happiness, health and harmony, for humans as individuals and for humanity as a collective. Knowing what’s true about ourselves uncovers our inner dysfunctionality and leads to healing and enlightenment. Knowing what’s true about our world leads to an understanding of the abusive nature of our power structures and societal systems. Continually striving toward the light of truth will bring us all home.
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The deal is for 25 planes and is estimated to cost $3 billion
The Israeli arms industry will also benefit from the deal. The Israeli Defense Ministry said that as part of the agreement, Lockheed Martin and the engine manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney, have “committed to involving Israeli defense industries in the production of aircraft components sold.”
The Israeli Defense Ministry said Sunday that Israel will acquire a third fleet of Lockheed Martin-made F-35 fighter jets using US military aid funds.
The deal for 25 F-35 fighter jets is estimated to cost about $3 billion and will be purchased through Foreign Military Financing (FMF), a US State Department program that gives foreign governments money to buy US arms.
The Israeli arms industry will also benefit from the deal. The Israeli Defense Ministry said that as part of the agreement, Lockheed Martin and the engine manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney, have “committed to involving Israeli defense industries in the production of aircraft components sold.”
“This new agreement will ensure the continuation of cooperation between American companies and Israeli defense industries in the production of aircraft parts,” the Israeli Defense Ministry added.
