Tag Archives: Might Makes Right

The Hail Mary pass still would need an Immaculate Reception.

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So, in the spirit of Code Duello, trial by combat, Might Makes Right and all that stupid crap, what happens when Texas Christian U., Southern Methodist University, Brigham Young and Notre Dame square off in a four way winner take all?
Will GOD Almighty choose the leaders of His Creation from a trial by combat amongst colleges representing the seminaries of American Christendom? Would He toss in a “ringer” like the New Orleans Saints? What if He uses the hole in the roof of the Cowboys Stadium to barf on “His” Team?
Sound ridiculous? How much more so the notion that He really cares who wins a football game?
Or that a victory on the battlefield of Real War means that your own country is far more righteous and beloved than The Other Side?

Colorado Springs issues permit to sleep on sidewalk but without tents. Let Them Eat Concrete

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COLO. SPRINGS- I’m not crazy about OCCUPY organizers negotiating with city representatives for a tentative permit to occupy Acacia Park. You don’t need permits for free speech, nor does activism gain by the advice of cops. That said, allowing a protest encampment, even without tents, may grow participation more effectively than outrage over oppressive responses to civil disobedience. So what’s come of this strategy today is the same permission that has been granted to the Wall Street activists in Zuccotti Plaza, sleeping bags but no tents. Doesn’t that seem shamelessly punitive? Shelter is a human right, deprivation of which is a violation of the 14th Amendment. It’s likely the city could be held liable for endangering the health and lives of these activists.

So permits or not? No American citizen needs permission to express himself, and whatever means you have to conspire to shut down Wall Street are not going to be allowed. So should an occupation seek a permit? The physics of military occupation are Might Makes Right, not Simon Says. But military intelligence and diplomats play invaluable roles. Might makes right, but guile and craft save the occupiers manpower and lives. Maybe permits create the beachhead with which the American people get their size 99 shoe in the door.

Holding regular meetups with the police is another dilemma. I know I’m not shrewd enough to go head to head with a police department, its vast intelligence resources, and well practiced dissent-quashing strategies. For me a most significant element of the public demonstration is law enforcement’s incapability of predicting unregulated behavior.

The 14th Amendment forbids the state to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” So we might well pause to consider another news story which emerged today, that the US citizen assassinated by CIA drones in Yemen, wasn’t riding in a convoy as previously claimed, but at a dinner party with a 16-year-old relative and his friends, all of them killed without trial or even legal charges. At its simplest the 14th Amendment says you can’t punish someone before properly found guilty. Forcing inhumane conditions upon a citizen exercising his rights is punitive, cruel and unusual.

In Denver today a similar delegation met with the mayor, who give his permission for protests to continue, as it was his to give, for his subjects to exercise their 1st Amendment Rights, but abridged to exclude at night, in the cold, or in city park. Specifically the Denver mayor said he’d allow them to sleep on sidewalks provided they’re exposed to the elements. No tents. Let them eat concrete.

The Colorado Springs city attorney gave instruction to formalize the handicap with a permit. They can sleep on sidewalks but no shelter allowed. Want a cold or flu? Have at it.

A provocative thought, however sad: will today’s protesters submitting their bodies to rain, cold and snow, submitting their health and spirits to debilitating hardship, streamed live on the internet, will it have a similar effect as images of water hoses on civil rights marchers?

ANZAC

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I was going to do a short teach-in at the EcoFair today, (along with selling my Eco Jewelry) but i’ve got a mucked up arm.
More on that later. Short story, I didn’t go.

But today was also ANZAC Day, sort of an Australian, Canadian and New Zealand version of Veterans Day.

Veterans day here commemorates the end of the war.

ANZAC day is the first engagement by Australian and NZ troops under Aussie and NZ officers (also Canadian and Irish) at a place called Suvla Sud al Bar at Gallipoli… against the Turks.

To put it mildly, it was a straight up fuck-job.

They got mauled.

So did the Turks, because that’s what war is all about.

The British Army had decided to put the “colonials” into the fight right there…

With an amphibious invasion. One which they quickly learned they didn’t know how to run.

That was the guys at the top, like Winston Churchill. He resigned his command and took a field posting.

Remorse, yes, shame, yes… didn’t bring back the kids who were, as the song says

“in five minutes flat, we were all blown to Hell,
Nearly blew us back home
to Australia.

But the band played “Waltzing Matilda”
As we stopped
To bury our slain

We buried ours,
and the Turks buried theirs…
Then we started all over again

and some of them were kids.

The oldest surviving ANZAC died in 2002, while the Liberation Violent Takeover of Afghanistan was going on.

He was 102.

When he joined the Australia-New Zealand Auxilary Corps of the British Army he was 14.
He was 15 when he went to Gallipoli.

Some of our Young Friends who say we unnecessarily pick on the Devilpups and Young Marines and JROTC and Boy Scouts, which ranch-raise the kids to become Cannon Fodder, should contemplate that.

Their leaders will probably wire them up to call us Hate Speech Propagandists for pointing that out.

Screw their leaders.

I was going to sing the songs “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” “Gallipoli” and “Green Fields o’ France” and play the pipes lowly, actually my flute, and sing it too, Flowers o’ the Forest.

I’ve seen the smilin’
of Fortune beguiling
I’ve witnessed her pleasure
an’ found her decay…

Sweet was it’s blessing
Kind it’s caressing
But now ’tis fled,
tis fled..
Far away…

I’ve seen the forest
adorned in the foremost
wi’ the flowers o’ the forest
most pleasant and gay.

Sae bonnie was their bloomin’
their scent, the air perfumin’

but now they are withered,
an’ a’ wae’ed away…

I’ve seen the mornin’
wi’ gold the hills adornin’

The dread tempest formin’
before parting day…

I’ve seen tweed silver streams
Glitterin’ in the sunny beams.

Grow drownly an’ dark
as they
Rolled on their way.

O, Fickle Fortune!
Why such cruel sportin’

an’ why thus perplex us
poor sons of the day?

Thy frown cannot fear me
Thy smiles cannot cheer me…

For the Flowers o’ the Forest
are all wae’ed away….

At the end of “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”

and the old men
still answer the call…
But as year follows year
more old men disappear…

Someday no one will march there

At all

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzin’ Matilda
you’ll go a-waltzin’ Matilda with me.

An’ their ghosts may still be heard
as ye march by that billabong…

Who’ll go a-waltzin’
Matilda wi’ me…

Waltzing Matilda is the unofficial national anthem of Oz-land.

The title refers to a backpack on a stick called a waltzing Matilda since it jerks about so much as you’re carrying it.

The song is about a homeless guy who stole a sheep (Capital offense in British Subjugated Australia at the time) and when the so-called “authorities” tried to take him prisoner he drowned himself instead.

They taught us part of the song, translated into American-recognizable speech, when I was in fourth grade.

Didn’t tell us what the song was about.

I didn’t get to do my teach-in at the EcoFair so I’m doing it here.

“The Flowers o’ the Forest” is funerary and memorial song.

At Scots and Irish funerals and their Canadian and ANZAC derivatives, they play it.

A lone piper usually.

The original was in Scots Gaelic and refers to Yet Another time the English marched into Scotland and massacred a whole bunch of Scotsmen.

Effectively wiped out a generation of young Scots.

They justify it on the grounds that the Scots weren’t a militarized, centralized, highly organized Fascist State thus it’s ok for the Militarily Superior British to do as they please with them.

Might Makes Right.

Where that connects to Australia is the British would round up Scots and Irish “insurgents” and “unlawful combatants” and ship them to Slave Colonies in Australia.

The homeless guy in Waltzing Matilda was a descendant of the deportees.

The “authorities” wanting to hang him after a “fair and impartial” Kangaroo Court hearing (where did you THINK the term came from?) were British Regulars working for the very rich, as usual.

If you want to do a music search on it or the other songs, they’re worth a listen.

You’ll also get links to the full stories behind them.

I mucked my arm pretty badly in November, had a slight accident involving my bicycle.

and the ground and my elbow making violent contact therewith.

I thought at the time that it wasn’t anything serious but now I have to go around with my arm in a sling until the orthopaedists check it out.

Means I can’t ride the bike, so I had to walk to the grocery store today.

I also use my cane for support, and with one hand on the cane and the other in a sling I go from being badly disabled to being downright helpless. Took a lot longer than it usually would and pretty much wiped me out for the rest of the day.

So I didn’t get to go down to the EcoFair.

Ah, well, more opportunities later.

“That Small Nations Might Be Free”…

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Which was a propaganda line the British, French and Belgian Empires used to justify sending millions of “their” subjects to die in the trenches of World War One… same standard is now being used for Space Technology.

Sure, any nation can participate in the technology… as long as they do it by the Rules Set Forth…

By the Empire…

Much like Irish and Scots and other Subjects of the King were conscripted into the British Army… to fight for the noble cause that even the smallest nation had the same National Rights as the Great Powers.

By a truly equitable application of the standards used by American and British and Israeli “Nationalists”, North Korea or Iran could invade America, kill any who resist, imprison anybody they wished as “Unlawful Combatants”.

But, Ah! (you say) Iran and North Korea don’t have the technology or the Raw Power to do that, and of course, Might Makes Right…

And if they look like they might acquire such powers we should invade them and force them to their knees and force them to beg “our” God-damn forgiveness for thinking themselves our Equals.

Back to the British Standard in WW1, the IRA could have conscripted Englishmen to fight against England.

Or, as the song continues, die “at Subla sud-Al Bar”

To secure more Resources and land and subjects for the Emperor.

Might makes Right, so we ought to Bomb Iran…

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Or so said a Nut-Case on the bus yesterday.

“We have the most powerful country on Earth, so the Iranians better obey us!”

“Oderint dum Metuant, let them Hate us, as long as they Fear us!”

“I get my news and opinions from Rush Limbaugh and Rush would never lie and I’m Stupid Enough to believe that?”

OK so he didn’t say it nearly that clearly or coherently.

He did however say that because America is the most powerful nation on earth that means we have an Absolute Right to run the world the way WE errr… our Leaders see fit…

Sadly, that’s actually the Official Position of the U.S. Government as well.