Category: MK

Before I begin, I want to mention that my only experience with Idaho (unfortunately), was driving through the southeastern part of the state during my six-week cross country road trip in 2010. It was some of the most majestic and peaceful scenery I had ever seen, and I’d love to return and explore more of the state in the future. I’ve also heard Boise is a pretty cool city. It’s unfortunate that a state with so much potential passed the anti-freedom legislation described below, but I have faith the people will figure it out and reverse course.

Much of my recent writing has been focused on the need for political decentralization, meaning that states and local communities need to start experimenting more and making decisions for themselves on a wider range of important policy questions. This naturally will lead to some really good outcomes, but also some genuine disasters. Idaho’s noncompete law falls into the latter category.

Many of you may not be familiar with what I’m talking about, so I’ll start with some excerpts from a very good New York Times article on the subject, and then get into some detailed commentary at the end.

Here’s a brief overview of the situation from the piece, Noncompete Pacts, Under Siege, Find Haven in Idaho:

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Civil asset forfeiture has been a key topic here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the years for one very obvious reason. The practice has absolutely no place in any halfway humane and decent civilization. The fact that this barbaric, authoritarian practice somehow has legal protection in these United States says so much about the state of the nation and the level of thuggishness we’re willing to put up with as a people.

For new readers who aren’t familiar with the subject, here’s a quick refresher:

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You don’t need to be a genius to see that the Democratic Party doesn’t really stand for anything when it comes to the issues that matter most to U.S. voters. This is a topic I’ve written about incessantly since last year’s embarrassing loss by status quo, corporate media, donor-favorite Hillary Clinton, and it was highlighted once again in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll with the response to the following question.

Despite the dire implications of the above, the brain-surgeons leading the party remain committed to running on “Trump works for Putin, let’s start a war with Russia” while ignoring the multitude of very important issues people really care about — you know, like oligarchy and increasing economic insecurity.

To give you a sense of the degree of cluelessness, read the following excerpts from a CBS News article titled, Democrats Split Over Core Message to Voters as 2018 Midterms Loom:

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I get that any corporate media poll needs to be taken with a giant grain of salt, but upon looking at some of the questions and answers from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, I founds some interesting nuggets that help explain a lot of what’s going on in our increasingly demented political environment. Let’s begin with the Trump stuff.

First, the poll found that 36% of Americans approve of Trump, which seems consistent with where things have stood for a while now. What I found far more interesting were the reasons given by the larger group of people who expressed disapproval.

Here’s some of what we learned:

Americans who disapprove of Trump — 58 percent in the Post-ABC poll — offered a different range of responses focusing more heavily on his personal and character traits. Topping the list of non-policy criticism is the way Trump talks and acts (13 percent), laments about him not being informed or knowledgeable (12 percent), while an additional 12 percent mentioned concerns about lies, false statements or general dishonesty. Among disapprovers who named issues as their biggest criticism, the most common were immigration (8 percent) and health care (7 percent), the travel ban at 3 percent and others at 2 percent or less.

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If you appreciate my work and want to contribute to independent media, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page.

Must Reads

Pentagon Secretly Tested Chemical Weapons on US troops. Vets Demand to Know the Cost (I have no words to describe how despicable this is, McClatchy DC)

US and UK Acting Above the Law to Support the Saudi War in Yemen (Total lawlessness, Middle East Eye)

Begala: We Should ‘Debate Whether We Should Blow Up’ Russia (If this is “the resistance” count me out, The Daily Beast)

Trump Seen Replacing Yellen at Fed with NEC’s Cohn (Goldman Sachs positioning itself for the next bailout, Reuters)

The Return of Monopoly (Another great one by Matt Stoller, The New Republic)

Don’t Fall for Amazon’s ‘Prime Day’ (The Nation)

Mark Zuckerberg Hits the Road to Meet Regular Folks—With a Few Conditions (He definitely wants to be President, The Wall Street Journal)

Visa Trying to Bribe Merchants to Stop Taking Cash (Naked Capitalism)

Twitter Guy Wants You To Think He Was This Close To Bringing Down The Trump Regime (Fame chasing fraudsters are everywhere, Deadspin)

U.S. Politics

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Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.

– Albert Camus

The first three parts of this series largely focused on how decentralization is necessary in the political realm and should be applied more aggressively to governing structures. I believe moving to such a model is no longer just a quaint option, but absolutely required if we want to expand human liberty and build more voluntary, ethical and sane communities. That being said, decentralization can and should be applied to as many aspects of life as possible.

Most humans live completely unfree lives. Whether its parents, schools, religion or ultimately employers, far too many of us are told from birth what to think and what we can and cannot say. Interestingly enough, the older we get, the more restricted our speech seems to become. Ironically, while we have more mediums for expression than every before with the internet and social media, increasing numbers of people are too afraid that their bosses might see what they wrote to actually express themselves publicly. This is one reason why anonymity is so incredibly important online, and must be preserved at all costs, but that’s another topic.

I am of the view that we are enriched as a society if people are empowered to speak their minds freely in the public square without fear of dire consequences, such as being fired and not being able to feed your family. If you’ve been reading me over the past couple of weeks, you’ll be familiar with my push to move Liberty Blitzkrieg into a reader-supported project in the coming years, but I want to explain my thought process a bit more and how it relates to decentralization.

From day one, I was very hesitant about launching a donation drive on this website. In fact, it wasn’t until three and a half years of writing (at the very end of 2015), that I officially sent out a post detailing contribution options and created a support page. There are many reasons for this, but at the root of it were my own hangups. I consider myself a fortunate person and am far from being in dire straights, so the idea that someone would sacrifice money they might really need to support my work made me feel very uncomfortable. Nevertheless, in the past year and a half, hundreds of you have voluntarily donated to the site, which led to a direct shift in my attitude and impacted the direction of my work in many important and, in my view, beneficial ways.

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The first two posts in this series focused on what the current political environment looks like, and why it provides a perfect opportunity for experimentation and decentralization. Today’s post will examine what it will take to get there. While I think the future can be a very bright one, this is by no means written in stone and will take a herculean effort by millions of globally enlightened and motivated humans to achieve it.

In order to properly frame today’s post, I will be relying heavily on information discussed in my five-part series on Spiral Dynamics published back in February. While I will try to provide context, it might be helpful to check out those older posts before continuing if things start to get confusing.

Let’s begin by me quoting Ken Wilber in the post, What is Spiral Dynamics and Why Have I Become So Interested in It?

So it is that the leading edge of consciousness evolution stands today on the brink of an integral millennium—or at least the possibility of an integral millennium, where the sum total of extant human knowledge, wisdom, and technology is available to all. But there are several obstacles to that integral embrace, even in the most developed populations. Moreover, there is the more typical or average mode of consciousness, which is far from integral anything, and is in desperate need of its own tending. 

I have, in numerous previous publications (especially Integral Psychology) given the details of many of those researchers. Here I will simply use one of them as an example. The model is called Spiral Dynamics, based on the pioneering work of Clare Graves. Graves proposed a profound and elegant system of human development, which subsequent research has refined and validated, not refuted. “Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as an individual’s existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or level of existence is a state through which people pass on their way to other states of being. When the human is centralized in one state of existence” —as I would put it, when the self’s center of gravity hovers around a particular wave of consciousness— “he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning system, belief systems, conception of mental health, ideas as to what mental illness is and how it should be treated, conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, and political theory and practice are all appropriate to that state.”

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And when we mark the progress already accomplished in that direction, in spite of and against the State, which tries by all means to maintain its supremacy of recent origin; when we see how voluntary societies invade everything and are only impeded in their development by the State, we are forced to recognize a powerful tendency, a latent force in modern society.

– Peter Kropotkin

Before I get started, I want to emphasize that while the ideas in this three-part series focus on the U.S. and its particular structure of governance, the basic concepts can and should be applied throughout the world. If I believe in anything at all, it’s the idea that concentrations of power, whether government or corporate, represent the greatest threat to human freedom and liberty and this must be understood and resisted by all of us. Ok, so let’s get started.

Although many crucial functions are centralized, the U.S. still provides its citizens with various ways to exercise local power and we’ve already started to see a resurgence of such efforts across the nation. Whether or not we agree with the various state proposals out there trying to shake things up, we should all encourage the efforts. We all win from local populations experimenting with different ideas. Some will fail spectacularly, while others will pave the way for more reasonable policies across the nation.

Perhaps the greatest success of localized action in my lifetime was initiated by my adopted home state of Colorado, as its residents led the way with cannabis legalization in 2012, following the passage of Amendment 64. If we had continued to wait for the feds to do something we would have ended up waiting forever. Instead, Coloradans put the measure on the ballot and the public overwhelmingly supported it (it passed with a wider margin than Obama won against Romney). The enormous success of the initiative led to a cascade of other states adopting similar measures. Local action led to national change and will result in far more humane drug polices across massive swaths of the country, as D.C. fossils like Jeff Sessions continue to spew clownish and failed drug war narratives.

The success of Amendment 64 should be repeated on a variety of issues across the nation. We can then see what works and what doesn’t. People end up responding more rationally when they’re allowed to try things out for themselves.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

Today’s release of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails with Rob Goldstone could very well represent a crucial turning point in American history. Not because I think they will lead to Trump’s impeachment, or because they represent some sort of treasonous offense, but because I think from this point forward an increasing number of us will come to the conclusion that America may no longer work as the largely centralized, semi-cohesive unit it has been for our entire lives.

In order to understand the long-term implications of these emails on the future of the nation, you need a good understanding of the primary warring factions in American politics today. We have Donald Trump supporters/voters, Hillary Clinton supporters/voters, and a resurgent left inspired and energized by the principles and ideals espoused by Bernie Sanders. The first two have absolutely zero overlap and pretty much hate each other, while the third group can sometimes identify with either camp depending on the issue, but pretty much think they’re both crazy and dangerous. The key point I’m trying to make is that there is no “center” in American politics anymore, and any discussion of this is pure fantasy. Moreover, any remaining center that still exists, is unlikely to exists at all in a year or so as more and more people feel forced to choose sides. When you create an environment as charged as this one where everyone is accusing their political opponents of treason, this is what you get; and it’s only going to get worse. A lot worse.

The reason it’s going to get worse, is because the charged environment that’s been created in which everyone is suspicious of everyone else can only lead to awful outcomes. Let’s start with Hillary supporters/voters. They will honestly see the Don Jr. emails and expect impeachment proceedings to begin tomorrow. Since they were already convinced of treason, they will see treason here. Most importantly, because they believe so passionately that Trump is the root of all evil as opposed to a symptom of a rotten, oligarch-owned empire in decline, they will expect other people to see things the same way. They will genuinely believe that America will unite against Trump’s “treason” and boot him out of office. This is not going to happen.

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Late last week, I came across a fascinating article published at Mondoweiss highlighting a recent study positing that Hilary Clinton may have lost the election to Donald Trump partly as a result of her well documented lust for imperial war and aggression.

Here are a few excerpts from the piece:

An important new study has come out showing that Clinton paid for this arrogance: professors argue that Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year’s presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.

By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars.

The study is titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?” Authors Francis Shen, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a populist note.

And here are the authors themselves on the moral hazard at work here. The people who decide are not suffering as much.

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