Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

One of the most disturbing things about our current state of affairs is the degree to which blatant dishonesty has become expected, accepted, and even encouraged. It has certainly become more rewarding than honesty and personal integrity.

by Kort E Patterson

Copyrights should have been a good idea - and arguably were during parts of their varied history. However, after centuries of incremental distortions, copyrights have mutated into a clear and present danger to the basic rights of citizens.

The limitations of communications technology, and the resulting restrictions on the availability of knowledge, have historically made appeals to authority a necessary if flawed accommodation. Access to information was previously extremely restricted, and only a tiny percentage of the population had access to original sources. Even if the average peasant somehow happened to encounter a scrap of papyrus or a clay tablet, it was unlikely he possessed the literacy to read it.

I have absolutely no doubt that "my" government and the main stream media are lying to me about the state of the economy, the real causes of the "credit crisis", the effects of government interventions in the economy, and the real objectives of those who are exploiting the current crisis to gain political power. I believe that the intention in fomenting public hysteria and social unrest is to advance agendas that would be unthinkable without the camouflage of an artificially created crisis.

What I find most disturbing about the disaster in New Orleans is the pervasive lack of self-reliance. It isn't like floods along the Mississippi River are a rare occurrence. But in past floods, the traditional first response of the threatened local population has been to grab shovels, buckets, building debris, arm loads of rocks, whatever was at hand, and head for the breach in the levee. The first priority was recognized to be the need to stop further flooding and damage as quickly as possible.

A disturbingly predictable response to the WTC attacks has been the rush to exploit the mass media driven hysteria to vastly expand the power and scope of intrusive government. Congress has abandoned even its usual pretense of purpose with its passage of the massive new "anti-terrorism" bill.

Magicians have long known how useful it can be to distract the attention of the audience away from what they're really doing. Unfortunately, so have politicians and propagandists. The magnitude of real crimes that the American public is willing to overlook when distracted by a sordid sex scandal, or a soap opera spun around a doe-eyed child, is simply amazing.

Earlier in this century the light of freedom was extinguished over much of Europe and Asia, and only flickered tenuously in much of the rest of the world. Fortunately for us who came later, those living at the time were willing to risk a heavy price to restore the light of freedom. Many of those who believed in freedom paid the ultimate price of sacrificing their lives in the struggle to defeat tyrants and restore the freedom they'd destroyed.

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
Thomas Jefferson

Fifty years after their last major effort to destroy freedom in the United States, the Japanese have launched another aggressive assault on the constitutional rights of American citizens. This time the danger of the Japanese assault has been enhanced by the active support, or at least the complicity of shared interests, of the many national governments around the world who have already succeeded in stripping their citizens of their individual rights.