osan
Member

https://freedomisobvious.blogspot.com/2020/07/free-culture-is-warrior-culture.html "When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil" -Thomas Jefferson For better than thirty years I have been telling this to people, at times with nodding heads in response, at others with glazed stares. On far more occasions than I care to recall, people of a certain bent would launch into a diatribe at me about how violence is never the solution, even though I never mention the dreaded "v-word". That's not to say I feel that violence is a universal evil as some do, because I don't. As with all things, violence has its place. However, it must also be noted that as with hatred, a little goes a very long way, but let me not digress so early on. The American republic has problems. Some will say our troubles root in the faults of our architecture. This is certainly a valid point, for our Constitution carries with it the DNA for the death of the republic for which it stands as blueprint. The power to tax is perhaps the greatest of these faults of design, but such flaws cannot bear the full measure of blame for the ways in which we have devolved as a people over the past two hundred years. By far the great proportion of culpability lies with we, the glorious people.

Today we speak briefly and in broad strokes for the sake of something upon which to cognitively chew. The quality of our material lives is largely determined by ratios. This is especially so in all things economic, where affordability is a key factor. The ability of someone to purchase a given product or service rests primarily with his ability to afford, all else equal. The ability to afford is primarily a question of the ratio of one's disposable reserves to price. In recent decades, that ratio has fallen, at times sharply as a consequence of economic "events" of a decidedly non-organic nature, the latest having been the disruption of economic supply chains caused by the nearly universal global responses of "governments" to the so-called "pandemic". By the way, I view such unwavering uniformity with deep suspicion. Few things human take on this character. As the ratio of reserves to price falls, the ability to afford even basics for daily life becomes ever more deeply strained. Many people do not see this simple relationship, largely due to a dangerous lack of education in basic economics†, and also in part to the vast oceans of noise with which the average man is now bombarded on a minute-by-minute basis. The signal to noise RATIO (<-- there's that word again) is now dangerously low. People on the average are now so beset with problems, most of each of which may be low in intensity, but with numbers of them legion, that they are overwhelmed such that basic living has become an overbearing burden with stresses in every nook and cranny of their daily lives. And of course, none of this is natural. Nearly every shred of it is artificially imposed upon us by those in power. The currently prevailing conditions of stress serve to keep vast proportions (another reference to ratios) of people off-balance as they struggle to move from one moment to the next in even the simplest of life's endeavors. Keeping people's eyes focused on the ground between their feet keeps those eyes off the so-called "elite" enough to allow the latter to continue their ultimately destructive machinations. To all appearances, these endeavors of power are intended to enrich those in power in one manner or another at the expense of the rest. It is so because the political class want it all for themselves, and therefore choose to see the circumstance of humanity on the whole as a zero-sum game. For Themme (those in material power), there is no other way to view things, and the attitude and decision to take the world as a zero-sum affair arises generally not of naive ignorance, but of informed (though perhaps tacit) awareness and the deliberate will to make things so, often under their purposeful subscription to delusional notions of the "greater good" to which they attach themselves, that they may proceed under the psychotic belief that they are doing good for all. It is further instructive to note the damning nature of the fact that such people never include themselves on the list of those to get the short shrift. Somehow, and however tacitly, they always find themselves on the beneficiary side of the dividing line.